QUESTION: WHY an antiwar protest at elder statesman George McGovern’s appearance at Colorado College? (Cornerstone Arts Center, South Theater, 5PM) He supports unions, health care, progressive causes; he has been against US interventions in the Middle East, Africa and Central America, and he’s very outspoken against the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
ANSWER: YES, but what about YOU?
The Rock Creek Free Press is available online, but if you want it in print, the DC monthly is available in Colorado Springs at the Bookman, 3163 W. Colorado. The September issue features a speech given by legendary Australian journalist John Pilger on July 4th in San Francisco.
Here’s the RCFP transcript:
Two years ago I spoke at “Socialism in Chicago” about an invisible government which is a term used by Edward Bernays, one the founders of modern propaganda. It was Bernays, who in the 1920s invented public relations as a euphemism for propaganda. And it was Bernays, deploying the ideas of his uncle Sigmund Freud, who campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry for women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation calling cigarettes “tortures of freedom”. At the same time he was involved in the disinformation which was critical in overthrowing the Arbenz government in Guatemala. So you have the association of cigarettes and regime change. The invisible government that Bernays had in mind brought together all media: PR, the press, broadcasting, advertising and their power of branding and image making. In other words, disinformation.
And I suppose I would like to talk today about this invisible government’s most recent achievement, the rise of Barrack Obama and the silencing of much of the left. But all of this has a history, of course and I’d like to go back, take you back some forty years to a sultry and, for me, very memorable day in Viet Nam.
I was a young war correspondent who had just arrived in a village in the Central Highlands called Tuylon. My assignment was to write about a unit of US Marines who had been sent to the village to win hearts and minds. “My orders,” said the Marine Sergeant, “are to sell the American way of liberty, as stated in the Pacification Handbook, this is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks as stated on page 86.” Now, page 86 was headed in capital letters: WHAM (winning hearts and minds). The Marine Unit was a combined action company which explained the Sergeant, meant, “We attack these folks on Mondays and we win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays.” He was joking, of course, but not quite.
The Sergeant, who didn’t speak Vietnamese, had arrived in the village, stood up on a Jeep and said through a bullhorn: “Come on out everybody we’ve got rice and candies and toothbrushes to give you.” This was greeted by silence. “Now listen, either you gooks come on out or we’re going to come right in there and get you!” Now the people of Tuylon finally came out and they stood in line to receive packets of Uncle Ben’s Miracle Rice, Hershey Bars, party balloons, and several thousand toothbrushes. Three portable, battery operated, yellow, flush lavatories were held back for the arrival of the colonel.
And when the colonel arrived that evening, the district chief was summoned and the yellow, flush lavatories unveiled. The colonel cleared his throat and took out a handwritten speech,
“Mr. District Chief and all you nice people,” said the colonel, “what these gifts represent is more than the sum of their parts, they carry the spirit of America. Ladies and gentlemen there’s no place on Earth like America, it’s the land where miracles happen, it’s a guiding light for me and for you. In America, you see, we count ourselves as real lucky as having the greatest democracy the world has ever known and we want you nice people to share in our good fortune.”
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, even John Winthrope sitting upon a hill got a mention. All that was missing was the Star Bangled Banner playing softly in the background. Of course the villagers had no idea what the colonel was talking about, but when the Marines clapped, they clapped. And when the colonel waved, the children waved. And when he departed the colonel shook the Sergeant’s hand and said: “We’ve got plenty of hearts and minds here, carry on Sergeant.” “Yes Sir.” In Viet Nam I witnessed many scenes like that.
I’d grown up in faraway Australia on a cinematic diet of John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Walt Disney, and Ronald Reagan. The American way of liberty they portrayed might well have been lifted from the WHAM handbook. I’d learned that the United States had won World War II on its own and now led the free world as the chosen society. It was only later when I read Walter Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion, a manual of the invisible government, that I began to understand the power of emotions attached to false ideas and bad histories on a grand scale.
Now, historians call this exceptionalism, the notion that the United States has a divine right to bring what it calls “liberty” to the rest of humanity. Of course this is a very old refrain. The French and British created and celebrated their own civilizing missions while imposing colonial regimes that denied basic civil liberties. However, the power of the American message was, and remains, different. Whereas the Europeans were proud imperialists, Americans are trained to deny their imperialism. As Mexico was conquered and the Marines sent to Nicaragua, American textbooks referred to an Age of Innocence. American motives were always well meaning, moral, exceptional, as the colonel said, “There was no ideology” and that’s still the case.
Americanism is an ideology that is unique because its main feature is its denial that it is an ideology. It’s both conservative and it’s liberal. And it’s right and it’s left. And Barack Obama is its embodiment. Since Obama was elected leading liberals have talked about America returning to its true status as, “a nation of moral ideals”. Those are the words of Paul Krugman, the liberal columnist of The New York Times. In the San Francisco Chronicle, columnist Mark Morford wrote,
“Spiritually advanced people regard the new president as a light worker who can help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”
Tell that to an Afghan child whose family has been blown away by Obama’s bombs. Or a Pakistani child whose house has been visited by one of Obama’s drones. Or a Palestinian child surveying the carnage in Gaza caused by American “smart” weapons, which, disclosed Seymour Hersh, were re-supplied to Israel for use in the slaughter, and I quote; “Only after the Obama team let if be known, it would not object.” The man who stayed silent on Gaza is the man who now condemns Iran.
In a sense, Obama is the myth that is America’s last taboo. His most consistent theme was never “change”, it was power. “The United States,” he said, “leads the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. We must lead by building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And there is this remarkable statement, “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world; that we stood and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond our borders.” Words like these remind me of the colonel in the village in Viet Nam, as he spun much the same nonsense.
Since 1945, by deed and by example, to use Obama’s words, America has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements and bombed countless men, women, and children to death. I’m grateful to Bill Blum for his cataloging of that. And yet, here is the 45th (sic) president of the United States having stacked his government with war mongers and corporate fraudsters and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, promising, not only more of the same, but a whole new war in Pakistan. Justified by the murderous clichés of Hilary Clinton, clichés like, “high value targets”. Within three days of his inauguration, Obama was ordering the death of people in faraway countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan. And yet, the peace movement, it seems, is prepared to look the other way and believe that the cool Obama will restore, as Krugman wrote, “the nation of moral ideals.”
Not long ago, I visited the American Museum of History in the celebrated Smithsonian Institute in Washington. One of the most popular exhibitions was called “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War”. It was holiday time and lines of happy people, including many children, shuffled through a Santa’s grotto of war and conquest. When messages about their nation’s great mission were lit up; these included tributes to the; “…exceptional Americans who saved a million lives…” in Viet Nam; where they were, “…determined to stop Communist expansion.” In Iraq other brave Americans, “employed air-strikes of unprecedented precision.” What was shocking was not so much the revisionism of two of the epic crimes of modern times, but the shear scale of omission.
Like all US presidents, Bush and Obama have very much in common. The wars of both presidents and the wars of Clinton and Reagan, Carter and Ford, Nixon and Kennedy are justified by the enduring myth of exceptional America. A myth the late Harold Pinter described as, “a brilliant, witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist; partly because it is indeed extraordinary to see an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century and race together with gender, and even class, can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what is so often overlooked and what matters, I believe above all, is the class one serves. George Bush’s inner circle from the State Department to the Supreme Court was perhaps the most multi-racial in presidential history. It was PC par excellence. Think Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. It was also the most reactionary. Obama’s very presence in the White House appears to reaffirm the moral nation. He’s a marketing dream. But like Calvin Klein or Benetton, he’s a brand that promises something special, something exciting, almost risqué. As if he might be radical. As if he might enact change. He makes people feel good; he’s a post-modern man with no political baggage. And all that’s fake.
In his book, Dreams From My Father, Obama refers to the job he took after he graduated from Columbia in 1983; he describes his employer as, “…a consulting house to multi-national corporations.” For some reason he doesn’t say who his employer was or what he did there. The employer was Business International Corporation; which has a long history of providing cover for the CIA with covert action and infiltrating unions from the left. I know this because it was especially active in my own country, Australia. Obama doesn’t say what he did at Business International and they may be absolutely nothing sinister. But it seems worthy of inquiry, and debate, as a clue to, perhaps, who the man is.
During his brief period in the senate, Obama voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He voted for the Patriot Act. He refused to support a bill for single payer health care. He supported the death penalty. As a presidential candidate he received more corporate backing than John McCain. He promised to close Guantanamo as a priority, but instead he has excused torture, reinstated military commissions, kept the Bush gulag intact, and opposed habeas corpus.
Daniel Ellsberg, the great whistleblower, was right, I believe, when he said, that under Bush a military coup had taken place in the United States giving the Pentagon unprecedented powers. These powers have been reinforced by the presence of Robert Gates – a Bush family crony and George W. Bush’s powerful Secretary of Defense. And by all the Bush Pentagon officials and generals who have kept their jobs under Obama.
In the middle of a recession, with millions of Americans losing their jobs and homes, Obama has increased the military budget. In Colombia he is planning to spend 46 million dollars on a new military base that will support a regime backed by death squads and further the tragic history of Washington’s intervention in that region.
In a pseudo-event in Prague, Obama promised a world without nuclear weapons to a global audience, mostly unaware that America is building new tactical nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. Like George Bush, he used the absurdity of Europe threatened by Iran to justify building a missile system aimed at Russia and China. In another pseudo-event, at the Annapolis Naval Academy, decked with flags and uniforms, Obama lied that America had gone to Iraq to bring freedom to that country. He announced that the troops were coming home. This was another deception. The head of the army, General George Casey says, with some authority, that America will be in Iraq for up to a decade. Other generals say fifteen years.
Chris Hedges, the very fine author of Empire of Illusion, puts it very well; “President Obama,” he wrote, “does one thing and brand Obama gets you to believe another.” This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they make you feel. And so you are kept in a perpetual state of childishness. He calls this “junk politics”.
But I think the real tragedy is that Obama, the brand, appears to have crippled or absorbed much of the anti-war movement – the peace movement. Out of 256 Democrats in Congress; 30, just 30, are willing to stand up against Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s war party. On June the 16th they voted for 106 billion dollars for more war.
The “Out of Iraq” caucus is out of action. Its member can’t even come up with a form of words of why they are silent. On March the 21st, a demonstration at the Pentagon by the once mighty United for Peace and Justice drew only a few thousand. The out-going president of UFPJ, Lesley Kagen, says her people aren’t turning up because, “It’s enough for many of them that Obama has a plan to end the war and that things are moving in the right direction.” And where is the mighty Move On, these days? Where is its campaign against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what, exactly, was said when Move On’s executive director, Jason Ruben, met Barack Obama at the White House in February?
Yes, a lot of good people mobilized for Obama. But what did they demand of him? Working to elect the Democratic presidential candidate may seem like activism, but it isn’t. Activism doesn’t give up. Activism doesn’t fall silent. Activism doesn’t rely on the opiate of hope. Woody Allen once said, “I felt a lot better when I gave up hope.” Real activism has little time for identity politics which like exceptionalism, can be fake. These are distractions that confuse and sucker good people. And not only in the United States, I can assure you.
I write for the Italian socialist newspaper, Il Manifesto, or rather I used to write for it. In February I sent the editor an article which raised questions about Obama as a progressive force. The article was rejected. Why, I asked? “For the moment,” wrote the editor, “we prefer to maintain a more positive approach to the novelty presented by Obama. We will take on specific issues, but we would not like to say that he will make no difference.” In other words, an American president drafted to promote the most rapacious system in history, is ordained and depoliticized by important sections of the left. It’s a remarkable situation. Remarkable, because those on the, so called, Radical Left have never been more aware, more conscious of the inequities of power. The Green Movement, for example, has raised the consciousness of millions, so that almost every child knows something about global warming. And yet, there seems to be a resistance, within the Green Movement, to the notion of power as a military force, a military project. And perhaps similar observations can also be made about sections of the Feminist Movement and the Gay Movement and certainly the Union Movement.
One of my favorite quotations is from Milan Kundera,
“The struggle of people against power is [the] struggle of memory against forgetting.”
We should never forget that the primary goal of great power is to distract and limit our natural desire for social justice and equity and real democracy.
Long ago Edward Bernays’ invisible government of propaganda elevated big business from its unpopular status as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic driving force. The “American way of life” began as an advertising slogan. The modern image of Santa Claus was an invention of Coca Cola.
Today we are presented with an extraordinary opportunity. Thanks to the crash of Wall Street and the revelation, for many ordinary people, that the free market has nothing to do with freedom. The opportunity, within our grasp, is to recognize that something is stirring in America that is unfamiliar, perhaps, to many of us on the left, but is related to a great popular movement that’s growing all over the world. Look down at Latin America, less than twenty years ago there was the usual despair, the usual divisions of poverty and freedom, the usual thugs in uniforms running unspeakable regimes. Today for the first time perhaps in 500 years there’s a people’s movement based on the revival of indigenous cultures and language, a genuine populism. The recent amazing achievements in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay represent a struggle for community and political rights that is truly historic, with implications for all of us. The successes in Latin America are expressed perversely in the recent overthrow of the government of Honduras, because the smaller the country, the greater is the threat of a good example that the disease of emancipation will spread.
Indeed, right across the world social movements and grass roots organization have emerged to fight free market dogma. They’ve educated governments in the south that food for export is a problem, rather than a solution to global poverty. They’ve politicized ordinary people to stand up for their rights, as in the Philippines and South Africa. Look at the remarkable boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaign, BDS, for short, aimed at Israel that’s sweeping the world. Israeli ships have been turned away from South Africa and Western Australia. A French company has been forced to abandon plans to build a railway connecting Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli sporting bodies find themselves isolated. Universities in the United Kingdom have begun to sever ties with Israel. This is how apartheid South Africa was defeated. And this is how the great wind of the 1960s began to blow. And this is how every gain has been won: the end of slavery, universal suffrage, workers rights, civil rights, environmental protection, the list goes on and on.
And that brings us back, here, to the United States, because I believe something is stirring in this country. Are we aware, that in the last eight months millions of angry e-mails, sent by ordinary Americans, have flooded Washington. And I mean millions. People are outright outraged that their lives are attacked; they bear no resemblance to the passive mass presented by the media. Look at the polls; more than 2/3 of Americans say the government should care for those who cannot care for themselves, sixty-four percent would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone, sixty percent are favorable towards Unions, seventy percent want nuclear disarmament, seventy-two percent want the US completely out of Iraq and so on and so on. But where is much of the left? Where is the social justice movement? Where is the peace movement? Where is the civil rights movement? Ordinary Americans, for too long, have been misrepresented by stereotypes that are contemptuous. James Madison referred to his compatriots in the public as ignorant and meddlesome outsiders. And this contempt is probably as strong today, among the elite, as it was back then. That’s why the progressive attitudes of the public are seldom reported in the media, because they’re not ignorant, they’re subversive, they’re informed and they’re even anti-American. I once asked a friend, the great American war correspondent and humanitarian, Martha Gellhorn, to explain the term “anti-American” to me. “I’ll tell you what anti-American is,” she said in her forceful way, “its what governments and their vested interests call those who honor America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity. There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States, they are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms though they would call it common decency. They are not vain; they are the people with a waitful conscience, the best of America’s citizens. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional.” Truly exceptional, I like that.
My own guess is that a populism is growing, once again in America evoking a powerful force beneath the surface which has a proud history. From such authentic grass roots Americanism came women suffrage, the eight hour day, graduated income tax, public ownership of railways and communications, the breaking of the power of corporate lobbyists and much more. In other words, real democracy. The American populists were far from perfect, but they often spoke for ordinary people and they were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and merge with the Democratic Party. That was long ago, but how familiar it sounds. My guess is that something is coming again. The signs are there. Noam Chomsky is right when he says that, “Mere sparks can ignite a popular movement that may seem dormant.” No one predicted 1968, no one predicted the fall of apartheid, or the Berlin Wall, or the civil rights movement, or the great Latino rising of a few years ago.
I suggest that we take Woody Allen’s advice and give up on hope and listen, instead, to voices from below. What Obama and the bankers and the generals and the IMF and the CIA and CNN and BBC fear, is ordinary people coming together and acting together. It’s a fear as old as democracy, a fear that suddenly people convert their anger to action as they’ve done so often throughout history.
“At a time of universal deceit,” wrote George Orwell, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Thank you.
While pundits pit Professor Gates against Police Sergeant Crowley, I recommend a white man’s refresher course in Black v. Cop. The above photograph depicts the officers of the law who came from all over Alabama in 1965 to prevent the SNCC civil rights marchers from leaving Selma. Most of the images we recognize from this day were taken seconds after this one, as the southern gentlemen eagerly bludgeoned the kneeling marchers. It took the interference of the President of the United States to send Federal troops to defend the peaceful protesters from the police. Have things changed?
Now they use tasers?
If you are not African-American, ask an African-American.
President Obama’s interference, tiptoeing with niceties for the boys in blue, couching his criticism as if his words carried no more authority than Uncle Tom, falls well short of representing the complaints about still overwhelming racism which black Americans face from law enforcement. Still Obama’s opinion has not been welcomed by the police department which arrested Professor Gates for being uncooperative in his own home.
Policeman Crowley and his superior and his buddies on the force and police unions across the country are telling the president he should not butt in? And they’re assuring us that they’re not racist? Let’s poll the LAPD on the matter, or any of the squads who’ve been caught on video tape beating their charges, (double-entendre intended) usually black.
We need to give equal time to the majority of our prison population. Or the people of New Orleans.
Sergeant Crowly et al are positive they are not racist. They’ve taken the courses, they’ve given the cross-racial CPR. They do not believe they are racist, and I believe them. I don’t believe I am racist either, although clearly I am. I am uncomfortable about being racist, and I’m not sure what to think about the degree of comfort I take as well.
And now the insolent bastards are second guessing the president for second guessing them.
This is that what comes of the post-9/11 theme of deifying First Responders. They’re big galoots –brave, no question– who rush up high-rise stairwells with no premonition the steel structure would be coming down, and next thing patriots are hawking chatchkes of firemen and policemen raising the Stars and Stripes over the rubble, as if they’re under fire in Iwo Jima. So now they’re qualified to tell the president he’s unqualified to make a judgment?
I can criticize the president because he’s not delivering what he promised. What basis do his employees have for grievance?
Crowley and ilk are none too bright, obviously, and they’re racist. They offer their own proof. What would a dutiful policeman’s reaction have been when a white president deigned to weigh in on a matter. I’m guessing deference. To the Commander in Chief.
I did my duty as I knew best, I am open to criticism, and welcome certainly anything the highest executive office holder might offer by way of suggestion, I am most humbled that he might have granted his attention to my personal case, which to guess from the offense people have taken was evidently a lapse in judgment on my part.
Deference. And that’s not what’s being shown their Boy in the White House.
The major grocery store chains here in Colorado are planning to attack their workers next week by forcing a strike. At issue is that they want to destroy the pensions of these workers so don’t break their strike by crossing the picket lines and into the stores to shop. All workers deserve a decent retirement!
You can even help out on the picket line for a bit and show some solidarity with these people in their efforts to stop company cutbacks forced against them. You can also go do your own shopping for groceries at some of the ethnic grocery companies in Colorado and help save some of your own money in the meantime. Give yourself and union workers a break!
Here is what this strike will be about…
By Laura Chapin – UFCW Local 7 – For Immediate Release – 5/2/2009
The federal government has extended the deadline for the green – or fully funded – status for the major grocers’ pension fund from April 30 to June 30, giving the companies a second chance to do the right thing by their workers. The union has already agreed to the extension, so it’s up to the companies to meet the workers halfway.
Under the Worker Retiree and Employer Relief Act of 2008, trustees of a pension plans – both the union and the companies – have the option of extending their green status, or adequately funded status, for one year. If the company trustees fail to agree to extend the green status by the new deadline of June 30, the pension fund will go into a red status, meaning there will be insufficient funding to maintain the workers’ pension plan.
The union pension trustees have agreed to the one-year extension, but the company trustees have refused and instead proposed dramatic cuts to worker’s pension benefits. The benefits to be cut include eliminating the Golden Rule of 80, which raise the retirement eligibility from age 50 to age 62, eliminating the disability pension, and eliminating a $200 a month supplement between ages 60 and 62 years of age.
“We agreed to the extension because we want to give the economy time to recover,” said UFCW Associate Counsel Crisanta Duran. “Instead of meeting the workers halfway on the agreement, which would not have cost them a penny, the companies are choosing to use the under funded status as a bargaining chip and ask for almost 50% in cuts. This is not fair to the workers who are counting on the retirement they have earned.”
According to Safeway worker Arlys Carlson, “All we’re asking is that the companies take care of us the same way we’ve taken care customers all these years.”
UFCW Local #7 represents approximately 17,000 Colorado grocery workers at Safeway, King Soopers/City Market, and Albertsons. Negotiations began April 9 and will continue daily through the current contracts’ expiration on May 9.
For More Information:
Laura K. Chapin, (303) 425-0897 ext 302 ofc
(303) 885 – 1402 cell
The major companies simply want to destroy the unions with a strike. They have begun putting help wanted ads in the papers looking for scab workers to replace union workers. Sadly enough there are many who will try to grab these jobs and to Hell With Those Guys will be their attitude, since this is America, Land of the Screw the Others. Many are actually proud of themselves for being ‘smart’ when they do so. Wrong.
Which is really the “right to fire you if you get injured on the job or if you seek fair compensation for your labor or if you form (or join an existing) an organization which represents the workers to ensure the Equal Protection Under the Law and right to petition the Government for redress of grievances” law.
Since both Springs Utilities and the Corporate Welfare Council are married to the Coal corporations, and they both apparently sponsored the “White” wash of the Ludlow Massacre“incident”
I felt it politic to post this again.
When I was in the hospital after my ankle fusion surgery two years ago there was this young dude in the next bed, who had been in an accident while working for Springs Utilities.
He had been working “under the crane” which is a strict no-no in Union work, because the hooks and or the cable and or the chains attached to the crane have a distressing tendency to snap and to send the load which they were bearing straight down.
Which is what happened in this case, the crane dropped a 2 1/2 ton steel fitting onto his foot.
His mom was visiting him, and a gentleman I think was his brother
His doctor came in, one of the surgeons from Front Range Orthopædics. Who is considered to be one of the Premier surgeons in the country.
He had spent the past three days trying to save the kid’s foot.
But the foot had to be amputated, and he was breaking the news to him and his family that they wouldn’t be able to save it.
After he left, his brother and his mom were telling him he needed to hire an attorney, he told them “No, (one of his friends from work) was talking about it with me and he said to just trust the company, they’ll take care of me”.
I almost bit my tongue in two keeping from interjecting on that score.
Then the Corporate Whore company representative came in, she was telling him what the settlement was the company was offering, his mom said ‘should we hire an attorney to review it?” and the Corporate Whore told her “no need, we’ll take care of him TRUST US
Then proceeded to tell the kid that they were going to assign a doctor to him, one “approved by the Corporation” his mom interjected with the fact that he had one of the best surgeons in America already as his doctor and the Corporate Whore said “yes, we know, he’s an excellent doctor but He Doesn’t Keep Up With The Paperwork”
Which is bullsh ee It of such a high order it deserves a third syllable.
The doctors at Front Range don’t do the paperwork, they have a very competent staff who do that.
Efficient enough that all the major insurers including CHAMPVA, TriCare, Medicare, Medicaid, Just a start on the Government insurers, accept their billing and procedures without question.
She was slick-dicking this kid who was in severe pain, on a morphine drip, and cowing him into obedience to The Company Line.
Politely browbeating him but doing it in a way that Establishes The Dominance of Her Corporate Masters, “Thou Shalt Not Question Our Orders”.
Then she said something truly stunning… she said the company would “generously” allow him two years of disability pay, until he
GETS BACK ON HIS FEET and they realized there would be “cosmetic damage” but it shouldn’t affect his ability to Perform his “duties”.
The bitch hadn’t even consulted with his doctor.
But according to the Right Wing Anti-Union “right to work” Fascists,
It’s supposedly the UNIONS who are victimizing us poor stupid workers.
The kid was still opposed to getting his own attorney.
I hope he wised up and realized that the Company was going to screw him repeatedly and often, as long as he allows them to do it.
If he wants to, he can still change his mind, and I’ll testify for him.
The “settlement” was offered to him while he was under extreme duress, in extreme pain and on enough morphine to keep an elephant high.
Illegal as all Hell, but… without Union representation, the Corporate BigPigs can get away with it often enough to make their obscene profit margins.
People who are invested in that corporation, you gotta realize where your money is coming from.
COLORADO COLLEGE- CC is holding a symposium on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. Actually, it’s only called the Ludlow Symposium. True to Colorado Springs form, several among the audience want to call it an “incidence,” instead of a “massacre.” One of the participants, author Scott Martelle, is willing to oblige, explaining that if the militia hadn’t known that women and children were taking shelter beneath the tents which they were putting to the torch, then the soldiers were guilty only of criminally negligent homicide.
(*Note 4/12/09: this article has been revised in light of helpful comments offered by symposium participants. Also: Differences of opinion aside, I am remiss if I do not praise the scholars who were very generous with their time and encyclopedic memories to enrich this symposium.
1. CC’s own Professor David Mason authored an evocative narrative of lives caught up in the 1914 events, written in verse, entitled Ludlow.
2. Journalist Scott Thomas researched the most recent definitive account to date, the 2007 Blood Passion: the Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West.
3. Thomas Andrews, Associate Professor at CU Denver, enlarged the context in 2008 with his award winning Killing For Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War.
4. Zeese Papanikolas represented his authorative Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre, written in 1984.)
Does it matter what it’s called, or with what certainty? The symposium is filled with public school system educators looking for an angle with which to approach Ludlow with their kids. One of them expresses her doubt about teaching about Mother Jones, having just heard from the panelists a probably too-nuanced assessment of the labor hero’s tactics. The political climate of our age can’t find any purchase with moral nuance.
I’m stuck thinking that in recording social history, scholars cannot avoid writing the victor’s narrative. In particular as regards the history of labor, because neither academics nor even middle class hobbyists in the symposium’s audience can look at the events from the perspective of the working class.
Even the scholar’s objectivity is middle class. The opinion was expressed by the panel that the Ludlow aftermath was one of the few occasions when the story was spun to the benefit of labor interests. But this does not account for why authors and educators find themselves having to resurrect the tale of Ludlow these many years later. When it occurred, Americans may have swallowed the hyperbole, but since that time they’ve internalized its internment, effaced by a corporate culture so as to have disappeared from even our school textbooks.
I think this may have been something of the question posed by symposium organizer Jaime Stevensen to the panel, when she asked how the authors insulated themselves from the fictions woven into their own perspectives of history. She didn’t get any takers.
The very concept that history adds up to only so much trivial pursuit, is inherently a view from the ivory tower. 
Do the Ludlow scholars not recognize that common people today face the same foes as did the miners of Ludlow? With the added impediment of a corporate PR system erasing its malevolent deeds. Have not American unions been maligned to the point of extinction? Yet at the same time, capitalists have thoroughly reprised their Machiavellian ways. History can be a tool, not only for statecraft, but for the common American to protect his hard-fought democratic gains.
The United Mine Workers of America having successfully spun the deaths of the striking miner families as a “massacre” may have made an unmerited impact on the public’s sympathies, but likewise, deciding to call Ludlow “not a massacre” will be falsely charged as well. Is there a valuable lesson in unlearning that unbridled corporate greed can be unthinkably inhumane?
Historians can fancy themselves objective to ambivalence, but is that a luxury their readers and in particular the schoolchildren can afford? As we witness today the gloves coming off of the globalisation taskmasters?
How I prefer the emotional truth of earlier chroniclers like Barron Beshoar, author of OUT OF THE DEPTHS, a 1942 account of Ludlow, whose preface included this gem:
“If the mine guards and detectives, the mercenaries who served as the Gestapo and the coal districts appear to be scoundrels who sold themselves and their fellowmen for a few corporation dollars, the author will consider them adequately presented.”
At Colorado College the consensus of contemporary historical synthesis, embodied by CU Denver’s Thomas Andrews‘ excellent book KILLING FOR COAL, seems to conclude about Ludlow, “we may never know exactly what happened.” This may reflect the Factual Truth, but it does so at the expense of unrecorded oral accounts, by depreciating their traditional path to us through of folklore.
Another author made pains to debunk the lyrics “Sixteen tons, and what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt,” a cultural indictment of the “company store,” which was one of the grievances of the Ludlow strikers. He postulated that modern readers could be prone to let folklore color a predisposition against the company store. Perhaps a company store was in fact a convenience, derided because it was an arbitrary restriction against which human nature bucked. Trying to be helpful, another panelist suggested: “Imagine if the company store was 7-11, and you were told you could only shop there.” I believe both of these gentlemen are overlooking the much grosser complaint which the miners were protesting, that of insurmountable debt, systematically forced on them by their employers. That’s a phenomena on the rise today, if maybe not among college professors. Around the world, indentured servitude has never abated.
In our ivory tower we can debate which side, the union or the militia, fired the first shots on April 20. Who was at fault, seemed to be what that question would decide. At least panelist Anne Hyde had the presence of mind to lay some of the responsibility on the mine owners, who weren’t there of course, but whose stubborn greed played a not unsubstantial part in what the other panelists were attributing to “macho intransigence.”
That expression was in vogue to describe Cowboy presidencies. What an effete put down of militant activism. Are we to blame the striking miners for holding firm to their demands?
Thank goodness someone in the audience brought up recent efforts to deny the Sand Creek Massacre, which two panelists quickly weighed in to say “that was a real massacre,” discrediting Ludlow, obviously, and failing to grasp her point that indeed some Colorado Springs locals are rewriting Sand Creek as a battle, and not a massacre.
Another isolationist luxury has become to judge every action as it compares to a nonviolent ideal. It was noted that UMWA union leader John Lawson always recused himself from violent tactics. During the symposium’s opening reception, someone performed a song dedicated to the Ludlow martyr Louis Tikas, which lauded him for choosing to fight with words not guns, as if guns would discredit him.
I’ll play devil’s advocate and suggest that the miners fired the first shots. They saw Louis Tikas bludgeoned in the back of the head and then executed as he lay on the ground unconscious, they saw the National Guard move a machine gun into position above their tent city, and they probably began to fire at the soldiers lest a rain of bullets descend on miners’ wives and children before they had a chance to flee the camp.
The miners were asking that their union be recognized, that the Colorado eight hour work day be enforced, that the scales which determined their pay be verified, that their full hours be compensated, etc. The mine owners clung to their profits, and ordered the miners’ tent city, their only shelter and all their worldly possessions burned to the ground. Women and children were hiding in underground pits dug to escape the sniper fire which the mine guards sporadically aimed at the tents. The guards drove an armored car around the perimeter of the union camp, at all hours, for that purpose.
Ultimately this climate erupted into the violent clash on April 20, 1914, in which the miners battled with the far better equipped soldiers. The casualties were 25 to 1. I call that a massacre.
ADDENDUM: Photographs from visit to the Ludlow Memorial.
LUDLOW MEMORIAL, COLORADO- Day three of the Colorado College Ludlow Symposium featured a bus ride to the site of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, then on to Trinidad to the grave of Union leader Louis Tikas. A reporter for Colorado Public Radio interviewed the symposium panelists at the U.M.W.A. memorial grounds.
David Mason is interviewed by a freelance reporter for Colorado Public Radio.
Scott Martelle and Thomas Andrews are interviewed above the fatal cellar.
TRINIDAD, COLORADO- Masonic Cemetary.
Zeese Papanikolas spoke about his protagonist’s gravestone and its reference to Tikas as a “Patriot.”
The Democrats pledged today to keep the Republican implementation of ‘No Child Left Behind’ intact, and as a result the nation’s corporate media is aglow celebrating the supposed great wisdom of Barack’s not so new Education Dunce Plan. Key points of Obama’s speech outlined that he would continue the previous efforts of the Republican dismantling of the public education system in our country, and continue the privatization of schools. Let’s take a look at what was encouraged in Obama’s speech…
1) More charter schools, less public ones. This is the key element of the previous run Republican plans to privatize education for young kids. It means less secular education, and more religious. It means money will go to make public schools nastier so that parents then feel obligated to move their kids into the religious and/or corporate ‘charter’ ones.
2) More testing of teachers to see if they are onboard this privatization program. If not, they get the axe under the guise of personally not meeting standards. They call this a ‘merit standard’ where teachers teaching in more difficult circumstances will get increased pressure, less administrative support than the already negligible support they are receiving, and more pressure from the top to perform (read conform). This is a measure by Barack to break the teacher’s unions, who are and would continue to be the strongest bloc opposed to further privatization of US education.
3) Yet more nonsensical ‘testing’ time for kids in place of actually educating them. More CSAP (as the Fed Mandated standardized testing is called here in Colorado) for the parent saps that think that Barack is doing something different now. Note*** each state has their own name for these Fed mandated tests, though they are basically all the exact same. Scientifically, one can measure and see that this mandatory testing has solved none of the US educational problems since its implementation by the Bush Klan, but there is no science behind this mandatory testing anyway. Still Barack wants to do more of it on your kids.
As usual, there is a lot of prettification of this reactionary agenda by the Democratic Party, most of it with $$$$$ signs attached to some promised trinkets ahead. We’d be donkeys with dollar signs hanging in front of our snouts to buy this stuff, wouldn’t we? Unfortunately, the Democratic party voters often are literal dumb donkeys when it comes to getting on board this sort of dressing up of Republican ideas done for them by their DP polis.
To see an example of the corporate daily press sell of this further privatization plan of Barack Obama for public education, go to Canada’s most important paper and read their editorial cheerleading- Obama’s revolutionary reform of U.S. education. And for some ‘read it and weep’ commentary, go see how even supposed American commies are even pushing for this Republican reaction posing itself as now Barack’s new reform… Read the People’s Weekly World opinion piece stupidly celebrating what is being proposed by the Democratic Party for America’s exploited kids- Obama admin. tackles comprehensive education reform
Of course these ‘commies’ are people who many of them for decades were subjected to standardized testing by Supreme Comrades, Joseph Stalin et al. What can one really expect from such nitwit supporters of the Democratic Party as the minuscule American Communist Party membership is? ..lol
GAZA PROTESTS PROLIFERATE! Demonstrators are occupying Israeli consulates, storming embassies, harassing pro-Israeli rallies, and spilling blood on Zionist memorials. Not that anything is working so far. Meanwhile, in non-stories for the press, the usual non-confrontational passivists are lighting candles in memory of the slain. Are they anticipating, in their non-violent wisdom, the eminent extinction of the Palestinians of Gaza? Pacifists seem more comfortable to commemorate the ideological sacrifice of martyrs sooner than advocate for the survival of the endangered.
Others are not content to mourn Zionism’s ultimate triumph. Here’s the best analysis yet I’ve encountered for antiwar strategists.
In Caracas, the protests have the support of the state. Venezuelan president Chavez expelled the Israeli Ambassador and called his nation’s Jews to repudiate Israel’s inhumanity in Gaza:
“Now I hope that the Venezuelan Jewish community speaks out against this barbarism. Do it. Don’t you strongly reject all acts of persecution?”
Here is the Free Palestine Alliance statement released January 9, 2008:
The Massacre Intensifies:
As we prepare this thirteenth FPA statement, the Zionist army was continuing what it does best the wholesale slaughter of children and unarmed civilians. As would be expected of the current state of affairs of the US-controlled international scene, the massacre of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip is continuing despite yesterday’s feeble UN Security Council resolution that calls for Israel to immediately stop its attack. Actually, the US-Zionist leadership went the other way — more and more attacks. The Israeli Zionist army was given additional orders to escalate the conquest as it enters into a third phase of obliteration. Simultaneously as the Israeli cabinet was giving orders for a higher kill and destruction ratio, the US Senate was not going to be outdone by Zionists. It had to add to its long and shameful record. So it secretly issued a fast-tracked resolution fully supporting the ongoing massacre and giving Israel the needed cover. We ask, is this Senate resolution in the best interest of the people of the US?
But is it not the legacy and norm of the US-Israeli alliance to discard the will of the people of the US and the world. Is it not their norm to discard any and all UN resolutions that may remotely disagree with their strategic plans? The examples are far too many to list, including both UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions dating as far back as 1947.
Yesterday’s UN resolution was approved by 14 of the 15 nations that currently sit on the Security Council, with the US abstaining. As would be expected, the resolution did not address the deadly siege that has been imposed on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, nor did it condemn outright the fascistic actions of the Zionist polity.
Sadly, Palestinian victims have now reached at least 800 murdered and more than 3,300 injured. And these numbers are certain to climb substantially. Yesterday alone, fifty Palestinians were found murdered under their destroyed homes, some with their bodies already beginning to decompose. The Red Cross reported finding 4 near-death children slumped near and over their decomposing dead mothers. These children, like many others, were reported by the Red Cross to have been left without rescue in starvation and thirst for four full days around their killed mothers due to attacks on rescue workers.
On the very same day the UN Security Council resolution was issued, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that serves approximately 800,000 Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip decided that it was forced to fully halt its services. This decision came following the killing of one of UNRWA’s truck drivers, and due to the extreme conditions imposed by the Zionist army on relief workers. The UNRWA also strongly condemned the Israeli cover-up used to justify the bombardment of the Al-Fakhoura school that murdered and injured over 100 children and their parents.
Come Out in Force Tomorrow:
The people of the US have a moral obligation to turn out in massive numbers tomorrow, Saturday, from Washington, DC to San Francisco, Los Angeles and in between, to send a clear message that this campaign of murder must stop at once. In DC, we will be right there to send a message to the Bush administration, the incoming Barak administration, and to the entire US Congress. In San Francisco, where the United Nations took its first founding steps, we can highlight the charade of UN resolutions and international diplomacy, pointing to the double standards and outright racist behavior of the US and its allies. In Los Angeles and all other cities and towns, we can and must mobilize to join in protest in the largest possible numbers. This is the time to stand for what is moral and just. We cannot continue funding Israel while the people of the US are in dire need for funds right here to rescue homes and towns from collapse.
Rather than pay for the destruction of the Gaza Strip, let us pay for the construction of roadways, parks, and schools.
Rather than destroy thousands of Palestinian homes, let us fix the collapsing housing market and keep people in their own homes.
Rather than send more people homeless, let us protect folks from evictions and foreclosures.
Rather than kill doctors, nurses, and relief workers, let us build hospitals and provide health care to the millions without it.
This is our time to let Obama know that he could very easily stimulate both the economy and the morality of the US by stopping all funds used to kill babies and their mothers. Instead, we can invest these same funds in the education and upbringing of millions of impoverished children, right here in the US.
This is indeed our time, folks, and we must come out to lead the US Congress and administrations to the moral high ground. The interest of the US and its people is best served by supporting the construction of US infrastructure, housing, schools, hospitals, and by creating jobs at a living wage. Rather than kill Arab unionists, let us support strengthening unions and their demand for a respectable life and wages.
This is our time to show that Palestine is but a symbol for ALL just struggles. Struggles we all wage every day in various forms. The massacre against the Palestinian people should focus a very bright spotlight on what is wrong with US policies: US tax dollars are being sent to the Israeli army under US diplomatic cover, and are being used to boost corporations that manufacture military hardware, to conquer and destroy countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than rescuing a failing nation from its impending economic depression.
Signs of Defeat:
We regard the UN Security Council Resolution as a fig leaf void of legitimacy. For one thing, it came 13 days following the massacre, and after more than 4,100 Palestinian casualties between killed and injured. It appears that key power-brokers at the UN had hoped that by waiting long enough (13 days) without action, the Zionists could in fact secure a political and military victory.
While the resolution attempts to provide a diplomatic cover for the Israelis and the US as a way out of their unattainable goals, it is nonetheless a clear indication that the ongoing conquest is unable to achieve any Zionist political gain. In fact, politically speaking, the US-Zionist-Arab regime tripartite axis is only achieving the very opposite of what they had intended through this massacre: (1) the Palestinians have achieved massive international, Arab, and Palestinian support; (2) the possibility for appointing a client regime in the Gaza Strip is non-existent; (3) the sustenance of the Abbas PA in its current formation has become very uncertain; and (4) the little legitimacy some Arab regimes have is that much more diminished.
To the extreme dismay of the US and Zionist leaders, the UN resolution demands an immediate stop to the attacks and the opening of all crossings; and it opens the gates for humanitarian aid. Hence, rejected by the Zionist leadership at once. Due to the weight of the pressure on US Arab allies, who could not under any circumstance return home empty-handed, the US had no choice but to abstain rather than give its usual veto — a way to give the US-supported despots a piece of paper to wave in the face of a sea of millions and millions in protest everywhere. Ironically, the gravity of the massacre made a full circle, compromising the stability of the alliance that is responsible for its implementation. The more violent the attack, the more stubborn the resistance, the more widespread the support, and the weaker the grip of despotic regimes.
Let us join the millions who have taken to the streets thus far, including today, in thousands of towns and cities in the world. There are those who are volunteering as doctors, nurses, and rescue workers, with many already killed and injured; there are those who are giving blood to hospitals and to the Red Cross and Red Crescent; those who are protesting; many are writing, painting, dancing and singing for freedom and liberation; and there are those who are holding sit-ins, and those who are giving flowers of appreciation to the Venezuelan government for their principled stance. All are out, and all are outraged.
Come and join!
Take your stand and come out tomorrow. Make it known that this massacre cannot continue!
All Out in Solidarity with the Palestinian People!
The Free Palestine Alliance
January 9, 2009
And this report from A.N.S.W.E.R. about Sunday’s march on DC:
From Washington, DC to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Worldwide–Hundreds of Thousands March to Let Gaza Live!
On Sat., Jan. 10, hundreds of cities, and hundreds of thousands of people, responded to the call for an International Day of Emergency Action to support the people of Gaza. Outside the United States, marches took place in London, Edinburgh, Cairo, Athens, Kuala Lumpur, Beirut, Seoul, Mexico City, Jakarta, Montreal, Paris, Barcelona, Marseilles, Lyon, Oslo, Berlin, Bern, Karachi, Nablus, New Delhi, Amman, Sarajevo, Ramallah, Stockholm, and Tokyo. The protests continue to grow — today, another 250,000 took to the streets in Spain and more than 100,000 in Algeria.
In the U.S., the Day of Action was initiated on just one week’s notice by a call from the ANSWER Coalition, Muslim American Society Freedom, Free Palestine Alliance, National Council of Arab Americans, and Al-Awda – International Palestine Right to Return Coalition. In Washington DC, over 20,000 took to the streets in the freezing rain to demand, “Let Gaza Live!” The streets were so backed up that thousands of people in buses and cars were still arriving after the march had left Lafayette Park.
The demonstration began with a rally at the White House. Featured speakers included former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who was just on a humanitarian relief mission attempting to bring supplies to Gaza when the boat she was on was intentionally struck by an Israeli military vessel; Mahdi Bray, Executive Director, Muslim American Society Freedom; Rev. Graylan Hagler, National President of Ministers for Racial, Social and Economic Justice; Mounzer Sleiman, Vice Chairman, National Council of Arab Americans; Ralph Nader; Paul Zulkowitz, Jews Against the Occupation; Brian Becker, National Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition; Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, attorney and co-founder, Partnership for Civil Justice; and others.
The spirited march then led to the Washington Post, where demonstrators denounced the paper for its biased pro-Israeli coverage of the massacre and its complete blackout of protest activities in the United States.
In San Francisco, 10,000 took part in the march and rally. The rally included a huge outpouring from the local Arab community, and energetic participation from Bay Area youth.
A crowd of 2000 demonstrators confronted a heavy police presence in downtown Orlando for the “Let Gaza Live: Florida Statewide March for Palestine” called by Act Now to Stop War and End Racism Coalition/Florida—just six days prior. The demonstration is the largest anti-war demonstration in Florida in more than a decade and certainly the largest ever protest in Florida calling for a free Palestine. Police tried to intimidate marchers by initially searching all bags, forcing protesters to remove sticks from signs, and denying the use of amplified sound. Organizers and protesters challenged and pushed back their unwarranted scare tactics, and the protest turned out to be a powerful success.
In Los Angeles, 10,000 people participated in a regional mass march and rally to “Let Gaza Live” at the Westwood Federal Building. Hundreds of Palestinian flags and signs reading “Stop bombing Gaza!” and “The real terrorists: U.S./Israel war machine!” lined all sides of the street and the lawn in front of the federal government headquarters. It was the largest protest and the first major march in Southern California since the Israeli bombing campaign and invasion began.
A funeral procession led the march with makeshift coffins draped with Palestinian flags, representing the hundreds of people killed by Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza. Hundreds of children followed, along with a huge, hand-made Palestinian flag, in a contingent organized by the Palestinian American Women’s Association.
The worldwide movement is continuing to grow with more protests today, Jan. 11. There will be countless other actions in the days to come. Today in New York City, the police carried out a violent assault against those marching in mid-town Manhattan in support of the people of Palestine. A number of people were injured and arrested.
With the support of the United States, the Israeli military machine has expanded its invasion into urban areas of Gaza. The death toll among Palestinians is now nearly 900, with many thousands wounded. The injured and hungry of Gaza have no relief. We must do everything in our power to deepen and broaden this movement in the coming days.
The US government and its talking head corporate media clowns are real good at not ever admitting anything about anything. Smile, Smile, Smile! However, this is what the French press group Reuters has to say about the American economy and they do not use or put much faith in the standard US government slide rule to measure unemployment. Great Depression jobs parallel may not be far flung Notice how the statistics and data are now altered by the government. The US government has slid the data right on down from what its previous more honest accounting measured, to give all of us a falser sense of security.
How much unemployment will be seen in the next years ahead? The government and both capitalist parties want everybody to believe that throwing money at the rich who own the big enterprises will ‘stimulate’ the economy. Things don’t work that way though, since to revive the economy the ordinary people themselves are needed and not just the top governing and owning hacks of our society. It is not about ‘investment’ but work and the workers who do it. Work is what makes society move, not investment.
Capitalist society does not value work or workers though, and the elites consider those who work morons. Unfortunately many workers imitate the elites and consider themselves and those around them to be morons, too, for not being part of the owning class elite. Many workers actually begin to believe that they are worthless elements of society, and not the backbone of it!
There is certainly all kinds of work that needs to be done, but capitalist society does not pay for most necessary work but instead keeps it from happening. The only work that gets done mainly is work that can make profit for the owning elite, and not the work that should be done. Workers simply get turned away when they want to work, need to work, and could work if allowed to do so. Owners usually do not allow that unless forced to do so by the workers themselves to allow it to happen. That is always a nasty battle since this is a society run by capitalist owners, and not one that counters them.
Sadly most workers today do not think they have any power or could ever have such power, and their first reaction to increased unemployment is most likely be despair, depression, and increased self disrespect. Many families will begin to disintegrate and abuse will arise all around. Add to that the lies of the elites about what is really happening, and many will turn to violence and against all the wrong targets. The Left has a tough road ahead to try to counter the trend to come.
The US Union Movement is in total disarray and retreat and must be rebuilt from ground up. Everywhere the battle will be to get the Democratic Party lovers out of their positions where they brake rebellion, and then channel it into useless and unresponsive channels. We are in a period where it will not be the Republican Right that are the major enemies of organization, but instead the Democratic Party liberal centrists who are everywhere in positions funded from the top. There is a lot of work ahead, and it will be done only through dedicated and tough volunteers often working against paid staffers of supposedly do-good organizations that in fact do no good at all. This is true nowhere more than in the established but now utterly dysfunctional unions that exist.
Unemployment will go up, and capitalism does not automatically right itself like a sturdy boat in a strong sea might. Capitalism is more like a rotten vessel that will sink all onboard without a struggle to keep it from happening. These are just a few thoughts to measure against the corporate efforts to put a happy face on the current realities, when really there is little to be happy about.
In 1969, the Radical Youth Movement (RYM) within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) expelled the passive participants to reconfigure the SDS to Bring the War Home. At left, Bernardine Dohrn uninvites the Progressive Labor Party (PL) and the Worker Student Alliance (WSA) from the Chicago conference. Below is the founding document after which the RYM was renamed.
You Don’t Need A Weatherman
To Know Which Way The Wind Blows
June 18, 1969Submitted by Karin Asbley, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Gerry Long, Home Machtinger, Jim Mellen, Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd and Steve Tappis.
I. International Revolution
The contradiction between the revolutionary peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America and the imperialists headed by the United States is the principal contradiction in the contemporary world. The development of this contradiction is promoting the struggle of the people of the whole world against US imperialism and its lackeys.
Lin Piao, Long Live the Victory of People’s War!
People ask, what is the nature of the revolution that we talk about- Who will it be made by, and for, and what are its goals and strategy-
The overriding consideration in answering these questions is that the main struggle going on in the world today is between US imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it. This is essential in defining political matters in the whole world: because it is by far the most powerful, every other empire and petty dictator is in the long run dependent on US imperialism, which has unified, allied with, and defended all of the reactionary forces of the whole world. Thus, in considering every other force or phenomenon, from Soviet imperialism or Israeli imperialism to “workers struggle” in France or Czechoslovakia, we determine who are our friends and who are our enemies according to whether they help US imperialism or fight to defeat it.
So the very first question people in this country must ask in considering the question of revolution is where they stand in relation to the United States as an oppressor nation, and where they stand in relation to the masses of people throughout the world whom US imperialism is oppressing.
The primary task of revolutionary struggle is to solve this principal contradiction on the side of the people of the world. It is the oppressed peoples of the world who have created the wealth of this empire and it is to them that it belongs; the goal of the revolutionary struggle must be the control and use of this wealth in the interests of the oppressed peoples of the world.
It is in this context that we must examine the revolutionary struggles in the United States. We are within the heartland of a worldwide monster, a country so rich from its worldwide plunder that even the crumbs doled out to the enslaved masses within its borders provide for material existence very much above the conditions of the masses of people of the world. The US empire, as a worldwide system, channels wealth, based upon the labor and resources of the rest of the world, into the United States. The relative affluence existing in the United States is directly dependent upon the labor and natural resources of the Vietnamese, the Angolans, the Bolivians and the rest of the peoples of the Third World. All of the United Airlines Astrojets, all of the Holiday Inns, all of Hertz’s automobiles, your television set, car and wardrobe already belong, to a large degree to the people of the rest of the world.
Therefore, any conception of “socialist revolution” simply in terms of the working people of the United States, failing to recognize the full scope of interests of the most oppressed peoples of the world, is a conception of a fight for a particular privileged interest, and is a very dangerous ideology. While the control and use of the wealth of the Empire for the people of the whole world is also in the interests of the vast majority of the people in this country, if the goal is not clear from the start we will further the preservation of class society, oppression, war, genocide, and the complete emiseration of everyone, including the people of the US.
The goal is the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism. Winning state power in the US will occur as a result of the military forces of the US overextending themselves around the world and being defeated piecemeal; struggle within the US will be a vital part of this process, but when the revolution triumphs in the US it will have been made by the people of the whole world. For socialism to be defined in national terms within so extreme and historical an oppressor nation as this is only imperialist national chauvinism on the part of the “movement.”
II. What Is The Black Colony-
Not every colony of people oppressed by imperialism lies outside the boundaries of the US. Black people within North America, brought here 400 years ago as slaves and whose labor, as slaves, built this country, are an internal colony within the confines of the oppressor nation. What this means is that black people are oppressed as a whole people, in the institutions and social relations of the country, apart from simply the consideration of their class position, income, skill, etc., as individuals- What does this colony look like- What is the basis for its common oppression and why is it important-
One historically important position has been that the black colony only consists of the black belt nation in the South, whose fight for national liberation is based on a common land, culture, history and economic life. The corollary of this position is that black people in the rest of the country are a national minority but not actually part of the colony themselves; so the struggle for national liberation is for the black belt, and not all blacks; black people in the north, not actually part of the colony, are part of the working class of the white oppressor nation. In this formulation northern black workers have a “dual role”—one an interest in supporting the struggle in the South, and opposing racism, as members of the national minority; and as northern “white nation” workers whose class interest is in integrated socialism in the north. The consistent version of this line actually calls for integrated organizing of black and white workers in the north along what it calls “class” lines.
This position is wrong; in reality, the black colony does not exist simply as the “black belt nation,” but exists in the country as a whole. The common oppression of black people and the common culture growing out of that history are not based historically or currently on their relation to the territory of the black belt, even though that has been a place of population concentration and has some very different characteristics than the north, particularly around the land question.
Rather, the common features of oppression, history and culture which unify black people as a colony (although originating historically in a common territory apart from the colonizers, i.e., Africa, not the South) have been based historically on their common position as slaves, which since the nominal abolition of slavery has taken the form of caste oppression, and oppression of black people as a people everywhere that they exist. A new black nation, different from the nations of Africa from which it came, has been forged by the common historical experience of importation and slavery and caste oppression; to claim that to be a nation it must of necessity now be based on a common national territory apart from the colonizing nation is a mechanical application of criteria which were and are applicable to different situations.
What is specifically meant by the term caste is that all black people, on the basis of their common slave history, common culture and skin color are systematically denied access to particular job categories (or positions within job categories), social position, etc., regardless of individual skills, talents, money or education. Within the working class, they are the most oppressed section; in the petit bourgeoisie, they are even more strictly confined to the lowest levels. Token exceptions aside, the specific content of this caste oppression is to maintain black people in the most exploitative and oppressive jobs and conditions. Therefore, since the lowest class is the working class, the black caste is almost entirely a caste of the working class, or [holds] positions as oppressed as the lower working-class positions (poor black petit bourgeoisie and farmers); it is a colonial labor caste,, a colony whose common national character itself is defined by their common class position.
Thus, northern blacks do not have a “dual interest”—as blacks on the one hand and “US-nation workers” on the other. They have a single class interest, along with all other black people in the US, as members of the Black Proletarian Colony.
III. The Struggle For Socialist Self-Determination
The struggle of black people—as a colony—is for self-determination, freedom, and liberation from US imperialism. Because blacks have been oppressed and held in an inferior social position as a people, they have a right to decide, organize and act on their common destiny as a people apart from white interference. Black self-determination does not simply apply to determination of their collective political destiny at some future time. It is directly tied to the fact that because all blacks experience oppression in a form that no whites do, no whites are in a position to fully understand and test from their own practice the real situation black people face and the necessary response to it. This is why it is necessary for black people to organize separately and determine their actions separately at each stage of the struggle.
It is important to understand the implications of this. It is not legitimate for whites to organizationally intervene in differences among revolutionary black nationalists. It would be arrogant for us to attack any black organization that defends black people and opposes imperialism in practice. But it is necessary to develop a correct understanding of the Black Liberation struggle within our own organization, where an incorrect one will further racist practice in our relations with the black movement.
In the history of some external colonies, such as China and Vietnam, the struggle for self-determination has had two stages: (1) a united front against imperialism and for New Democracy (which is a joint dictatorship of anti-colonial classes led by the proletariat, the content of which is a compromise between the interests of the proletariat and nationalist peasants, petit bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie); and (2) developing out of the new democratic stage, socialism.
However, the black liberation struggle in this country will have only one “stage”; the struggle for self-determination will embody within it the struggle for socialism.
As Huey P. Newton has said, “In order to be a revolutionary nationalist, you would of necessity have to be a socialist.” This is because—given the caste quality of oppression-as-a-people-through-a-common-degree-of-exploitation—self-determination requires being free from white capitalist exploitation in the form of inferior (lower caste) jobs, housing, schools, hospitals, prices. In addition, only what was or became in practice a socialist program for self-determination—one which addressed itself to reversing this exploitation—could win the necessary active mass support in the “proletarian colony.”
The program of a united front for new democracy, on the other hand, would not be as thorough, and so would not win as active and determined support from the black masses. The only reason for having such a front would be where the independent petit bourgeois forces which it would bring in would add enough strength to balance the weakening of proletarian backing. This is not the case: first, because much of the black petit bourgeoisie is actually a “comprador” petit bourgeoisie (like so-called black capitalists who are promoted by the power structure to seem independent but are really agents of white monopoly capital), who would never fight as a class for any real self-determination; and secondly, because many black petit bourgeoisie, perhaps most, while not having a class interest in socialist self-determination, are close enough to the black masses in the oppression and limitations on their conditions that they will support many kinds of self-determination issues, and, especially when the movement is winning, can be won to support full (socialist) self-determination. For the black movement to work to maximize this support from the petit bourgeoisie is correct; but it is in no way a united front where it is clear that the Black Liberation Movement should not and does not modify the revolutionary socialist content of its stand to win that support.
From /New Left Notes/, June 18, 1969
IV. Black Liberation Means Revolution
What is the relationship of the struggle for black self-determination to the whole worldwide revolution to defeat US imperialism and internationalize its resources toward the goal of creating a classless world-
No black self-determination could be won which would not result in a victory for the international revolution as a whole. The black proletarian colony, being dispersed as such a large and exploited section of the work force, is essential to the survival of imperialism. Thus, even if the black liberation movement chose to try to attain self-determination in the form of a separate country (a legitimate part of the right to self-determination), existing side by side with the US, imperialism could not survive if they won it—and so would never give up without being defeated. Thus, a revolutionary nationalist movement could not win without destroying the state power of the imperialists; and it is for this reason that the black liberation movement, as a revolutionary nationalist movement for self-determination, is automatically in and of itself an inseparable part of the whole revolutionary struggle against US imperialism and for international socialism.
However, the fact that black liberation depends on winning the whole revolution does not mean that it depends on waiting for and joining with a mass white movement to do it. The genocidal oppression of black people must be ended, and does not allow any leisure time to wait; if necessary, black people could win self-determination, abolishing the whole imperialist system and seizing state power to do it, without this white movement, although the cost among whites and blacks both would be high.
Blacks could do it alone if necessary because of their centralness to the system, economically and geo-militarily, and because of the level of unity, commitment, and initiative which will be developed in waging a people’s war for survival and national liberation. However, we do not expect that they will have to do it alone, not only because of the international situation, but also because the real interests of masses of oppressed whites in this country lie with the Black Liberation struggle, and the conditions for understanding and fighting for these interests grow with the deepening of the crises. Already, the black liberation movement has carried with it an upsurge of revolutionary consciousness among white youth; and while there are no guarantees, we can expect that this will extend and deepen among all oppressed whites.
To put aside the possibility of blacks winning alone leads to the racist position that blacks should wait for whites and are dependent on whites acting for them to win. Yet the possibility of blacks winning alone cannot in the least be a justification for whites failing to shoulder the burden of developing a revolutionary movement among whites. If the first error is racism by holding back black liberation, this would be equally racist by leaving blacks isolated to take on the whole fight—and the whole cost—for everyone.
It is necessary to defeat both racist tendencies: (1) that blacks shouldn’t go ahead with making the revolution, and (2) that blacks should go ahead alone with making it. The only third path is to build a white movement which will support the blacks in moving as fast as they have to and are able to, and still itself keep up with that black movement enough so that white revolutionaries share the cost and the blacks don’t have to do the whole thing alone. Any white who does not follow this third path is objectively following one of the other two (or both) and is objectively racist.
V. Anti-Imperialist Revolution And The United Front
Since the strategy for defeating imperialism in semi-feudal colonies has two stages, the new democratic stage of a united front to throw out imperialism and then the socialist stage, some people suggest two stages for the US too—one to stop imperialism, the anti-imperialist stage, and another to achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat, the socialist stage. It is no accident that even the proponents of this idea can’t tell you what it means. In reality, imperialism is a predatory international stage of capitalism. Defeating imperialism within the US couldn’t possibly have the content, which it could in a semi-feudal country, of replacing imperialism with capitalism or new democracy; when imperialism is defeated in the US, it will be replaced by socialism—nothing else. One revolution, one replacement process, one seizure of state power—the anti-imperialist revolution and the socialist revolution, one and the same stage. To talk of this as two separate stages, the struggle to overthrow imperialism and the struggle for socialist revolution, is as crazy as if Marx had talked about the proletarian socialist revolution as a revolution of two stages, one the overthrow of capitalist state power, and second the establishment of socialist state power.
Along with no two stages, there is no united front with the petit bourgeoisie, because its interests as a class aren’t for replacing imperialism with socialism. As far as people within this country are concerned, the international war against imperialism is the same task as the socialist revolution, for one overthrow of power here. There is no “united front” for socialism here.
One reason people have considered the “united front” idea is the fear that if we were talking about a one-stage socialist revolution we would fail to organize maximum possible support among people, like some petit bourgeoisie, who would fight imperialism on a particular issue, but weren’t for revolution. When the petit bourgeoisie’s interest is for fighting imperialism on a particular issue, but not for overthrowing it and replacing it with socialism, it is still contributing to revolution to that extent—not to some intermediate thing which is not imperialism and not socialism. Someone not for revolution is not for actually defeating imperialism either, but we still can and should unite with them on particular issues. But this is not a united front (and we should not put forth some joint “united front” line with them to the exclusion of our own politics), because their class position isn’t against imperialism as a system. In China, or Vietnam, the petit bourgeoisie’s class interests could be for actually winning against imperialism; this was because their task was driving it out, not overthrowing its whole existence. For us here, “throwing it out” means not from one colony, but all of them, throwing it out of the world, the same thing as overthrowing it.
VI. International Strategy
What is the strategy of this international revolutionary movement- What are the strategic weaknesses of the imperialists which make it possible for us to win- Revolutionaries around the world are in general agreement on the answer, which Lin Piao describes in the following way:
US imperialism is stronger, but also more vulnerable, than any imperialism of the past. It sets itself against the people of the whole world, including the people of the United States. Its human, military, material and financial resources are far from sufficient for the realization of its ambition of domination over the whole world. US imperialism has further weakened itself by occupying so many places in the world, overreaching itself, stretching its fingers out wide and dispersing its strength, with its rear so far away and its supply lines so long.
—/Long Live the Victory of People’s War/
The strategy which flows from this is what Ché called “creating two, three, many Vietnams”—to mobilize the struggle so sharply in so many places that the imperialists cannot possibly deal with it all. Since it is essential to their interests, they will try to deal with it all, and will be defeated and destroyed in the process.
In defining and implementing this strategy, it is clear that the vanguard (that is, the section of the people who are in the forefront of the struggle and whose class interests and needs define the terms and tasks of the revolution) of the “American Revolution” is the workers and oppressed peoples of the colonies of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Because of the level of special oppression of black people as a colony, they reflect the interests of the oppressed people of the world from within the borders of the United States; they are part of the Third World and part of the international revolutionary vanguard.
The vanguard role of the Vietnamese and other Third World countries in defeating US imperialism has been clear to our movement for some time. What has not been so clear is the vanguard role black people have played, and continue to play, in the development of revolutionary consciousness and struggle within the United States. Criticisms of the black liberation struggle as being “reactionary” or of black organizations on campus as being conservative or “racist” very often express this lack of understanding. These ideas are incorrect and must be defeated if a revolutionary movement is going to be built among whites.
The black colony, due to its particular nature as a slave colony, never adopted a chauvinist identification with America as an imperialist power, either politically or culturally. Moreover, the history of black people in America has consistently been one of the greatest overall repudiations of and struggle against the state. From the slave ships from Africa to the slave revolts, the Civil War, etc., black people have been waging a struggle for survival and liberation. In the history of our own movement this has also been the case: the civil rights struggles, initiated and led by blacks in the South; the rebellions beginning with Harlem in 1964 and Watts in 1965 through Detroit and Newark in 1967; the campus struggles at all-black schools in the South and struggles led by blacks on campuses all across the country. As it is the blacks—along with the Vietnamese and other Third World people—who are most oppressed by US imperialism, their class interests are most solidly and resolutely committed to waging revolutionary struggle through to its completion. Therefore it is no surprise that time and again, in both political content and level of consciousness and militancy, it has been the black liberation movement which has upped the ante and defined the terms of the struggle.
What is the relationship of this “black vanguard” to the “many Vietnams” around the world- Obviously this is an example of our strategy that different fronts reinforce each other. The fact that the Vietnamese are winning weakens the enemy, advancing the possibilities for the black struggle, etc. But it is important for us to understand that the interrelationship is more than this. Black people do not simply “choose” to intensify their struggle because they want to help the Vietnamese, or because they see that Vietnam heightens the possibilities for struggle here. The existence of any one Vietnam, especially a winning one, spurs on others not only through consciousness and choice, but through need, because it is a political and economic, as well as military, weakening of capitalism, and this means that to compensate, the imperialists are forced to intensify their oppression of other people.
Thus the loss of China and Cuba and the loss now of Vietnam not only encourages other oppressed peoples (such as the blacks) by showing what the alternative is and that it can be won, but also costs the imperialists billions of dollars which they then have to take out of the oppression of these other peoples. Within this country increased oppression falls heavier on the most oppressed sections of the population, so that the condition of all workers is worsened through rising taxes, inflation and the fall of real wages, and speedup. But this increased oppression falls heaviest on the most oppressed, such as poor white workers and, especially, the blacks, for example through the collapse of state services like schools, hospitals and welfare, which naturally hits the hardest at those most dependent on them.
This deterioration pushes people to fight harder to even try to maintain their present level. The more the ruling class is hurt in Vietnam, the harder people will be pushed to rebel and to fight for reforms. Because there exist successful models of revolution in Cuba, Vietnam, etc., these reform struggles will provide a continually larger and stronger base for revolutionary ideas. Because it needs to maximize profits by denying the reforms, and is aware that these conditions and reform struggles will therefore lead to revolutionary consciousness, the ruling class will see it more and more necessary to come down on any motion at all, even where it is not yet highly organized or conscious. It will come down faster on black people, because their oppression is increasing fastest, and this makes their rebellion most thorough and most dangerous, and fastest growing. It is because of this that the vanguard character and role of the black liberation struggle will be increased and intensified, rather than being increasingly equal to and merged into the situation and rebellion of oppressed white working people and youth. The crises of imperialism (the existence of Vietnam and especially that it’s winning) will therefore create a “Black Vietnam” within the US.
Given that black self-determination would mean fully crushing the power of the imperialists, this “Vietnam” has certain different characteristics than the external colonial wars. The imperialists will never “get out of the US” until their total strength and every resource they can bring to bear has been smashed; so the Black Vietnam cannot win without bringing the whole thing down and winning for everyone. This means that this war of liberation will be the most protracted and hardest fought of all.
It is in this context that the question of the South must be dealt with again, not as a question of whether or not the black nation, black colony, exists there, as opposed to in the North as well, but rather as a practical question of strategy and tactics: Can the black liberation struggle—the struggle of all blacks in the country—gain advantage in the actual war of liberation by concentrating on building base areas in the South in territory with a concentration of black population-
This is very clearly a different question than that of “where the colony is,” and to this question the “yes” answer is an important possibility. If the best potential for struggle in the South were realized, it is fully conceivable and legitimate that the struggle there could take on the character of a fight for separation; and any victories won in that direction would be important gains for the national liberation of the colony as a whole. However, because the colony is dispersed over the whole country, and not just located in the black belt, winning still means the power and liberation of blacks in the whole country.
Thus, even the winning of separate independence in the South would still be one step toward self-determination, and not equivalent to winning it; which, because of the economic position of the colony as a whole, would still require overthrowing the state power of the imperialists, taking over production and the whole economy and power, etc.
VII. The Revolutionary Youth Movement: Class Analysis
The revolutionary youth movement program was hailed as a transition strategy, which explained a lot of our past work and pointed to new directions for our movement. But as a transition to what- What was our overall strategy- Was the youth movement strategy just an organizational strategy because SDS is an organization of youth and we can move best with other young people-
We have pointed to the vanguard nature of the black struggle in this country as part of the international struggle against American imperialism, and the impossibility of anything but an international strategy for winning. Any attempt to put forth a strategy which, despite internationalist rhetoric, assumes a purely internal development to the class struggle in this country, is incorrect. The Vietnamese (and the Uruguayans and the Rhodesians) and the blacks and Third World peoples in this country will continue to set the terms for class struggle in America.
In this context, why an emphasis on youth- Why should young people be willing to fight on the side of Third World peoples- Before dealing with this question about youth, however, there follows a brief sketch of the main class categories in the white mother country which we think are important, and [which] indicate our present estimation of their respective class interests (bearing in mind that the potential for various sections to understand and fight for the revolution will vary according to more than just their real class interests).
Most of the population is of the working class, by which we mean not simply industrial or production workers, nor those who are actually working, but the whole section of the population which doesn’t own productive property and so lives off of the sale of its labor power. This is not a metaphysical category either in terms of its interests, the role it plays, or even who is in it, which very often is difficult to determine.
As a whole, the long-range interests of the non-colonial sections of the working class lie with overthrowing imperialism, with supporting self-determination for the oppressed nations (including the black colony), with supporting and fighting for international socialism. However, virtually all of the white working class also has short-range privileges from imperialism, which are not false privileges but very real ones which give them an edge of vested interest and tie them to a certain extent to the imperialists, especially when the latter are in a relatively prosperous phase. When the imperialists are losing their empire, on the other hand, these short-range privileged interests are seen to be temporary (even though the privileges may be relatively greater over the faster-increasing emiseration of the oppressed peoples). The long-range interests of workers in siding with the oppressed peoples are seen more clearly in the light of imperialism’s impending defeat. Within the whole working class, the balance of anti-imperialist class interests with white mother country short-term privilege varies greatly.
First, the most oppressed sections of the mother country working class have interests most clearly and strongly anti-imperialist. Who are the most oppressed sections of the working class- Millions of whites who have as oppressive material conditions as the blacks, or almost so: especially poor southern white workers; the unemployed or semi-employed, or those employed at very low wages for long hours and bad conditions, who are non-unionized or have weak unions; and extending up to include much of unionized labor which has it a little better off but still is heavily oppressed and exploited. This category covers a wide range and includes the most oppressed sections not only of production and service workers but also some secretaries, clerks, etc. Much of this category gets some relative privileges (i.e. benefits) from imperialism, which constitute some material basis for being racist or pro-imperialist; but overall it is itself directly and heavily oppressed, so that in addition to its long-range class interest on the side of the people of the world, its immediate situation also constitutes a strong basis for sharpening the struggle against the state and fighting through to revolution.
Secondly, there is the upper strata of the working class. This is also an extremely broad category, including the upper strata of unionized skilled workers and also most of the “new working class” of proletarianized or semi-proletarianized “intellect workers.” There is no clearly marked dividing line between the previous section and this one; our conclusions in dealing with “questionable” strata will in any event have to come from more thorough analysis of particular situations. The long-range class interests of this strata, like the previous section of more oppressed workers, are for the revolution and against imperialism. However, it is characterized by a higher level of privilege relative to the oppressed colonies, including the blacks, and relative to more oppressed workers in the mother country; so that there is a strong material basis for racism and loyalty to the system. In a revolutionary situation, where the people’s forces were on the offensive and the ruling class was clearly losing, most of this upper strata of the working class will be winnable to the revolution, while at least some sections of it will probably identify their interests with imperialism till the end and oppose the revolution (which parts do which will have to do with more variables than just the particular level of privilege). The further development of the situation will clarify where this section will go, although it is clear that either way we do not put any emphasis on reaching older employed workers from this strata at this time. The exception is where they are important to the black liberation struggle, the Third World, or the youth movement in particular situations, such as with teachers, hospital technicians, etc., in which cases we must fight particularly hard to organize them around a revolutionary line of full support for black liberation and the international revolution against US imperialism. This is crucial because the privilege of this section of the working class has provided and will provide a strong material basis for national chauvinist and social democratic ideology within the movement, such as anti-internationalist concepts of “student power” and “workers control.” Another consideration in understanding the interests of this segment is that, because of the way it developed and how its skills and its privileges were “earned over time,” the differential between the position of youth and older workers is in many ways greater for this section than any other in the population. We should continue to see it as important to build the revolutionary youth movement among the youth of this strata.
Thirdly, there are “middle strata” who are not petit bourgeoisie, who may even technically be upper working class, but who are so privileged and tightly tied to imperialism through their job roles that they are agents of imperialism. This section includes management personnel, corporate lawyers, higher civil servants, and other government agents, army officers, etc. Because their job categories require and promote a close identification with the interests of the ruling class, these strata are enemies of the revolution.
Fourthly, and last among the categories we’re going to deal with, is the petit bourgeoisie. This class is different from the middle level described above in that it has the independent class interest which is opposed to both monopoly power and to socialism. The petit bourgeoisie consists of small capital—both business and farms—and self-employed tradesmen and professionals (many professionals work for monopoly capital, and are either the upper level of the working class or in the dent class interests-anti-monopoly capital, but for capitalism rather than socialism—gives it a political character of some opposition to “big government,” like its increased spending and taxes and its totalitarian extension of its control into every aspect of life, and to “big labor,” which is at this time itself part of the monopoly capitalist power structure. The direction which this opposition takes can be reactionary or reformist. At this time the reformist side of it is very much mitigated by the extent to which the independence of the petit bourgeoisie is being undermined. Increasingly, small businesses are becoming extensions of big ones, while professionals and self-employed tradesmen less and less sell their skills on their own terms and become regular employees of big firms. This tendency does not mean that the reformist aspect is not still present; it is, and there are various issues, like withdrawing from a losing imperialist war, where we could get support from them. On the question of imperialism as a system, however, their class interests are generally more for it than for overthrowing it, and it will be the deserters from their class who stay with us.
VIII. Why A Revolutionary Youth Movement-
In terms of the above analysis, most young people in the US are part of the working class. Although not yet employed, young people whose parents sell their labor power for wages, and more important who themselves expect to do the same in the future—or go into the army or be unemployed—are undeniably members of the working class. Most kids are well aware of what class they are in, even though they may not be very scientific about it. So our analysis assumes from the beginning that youth struggles are, by and large, working-class struggles. But why the focus now on the struggles of working-class youth rather than on the working class as a whole-
The potential for revolutionary consciousness does not always correspond to ultimate class interest, particularly when imperialism is relatively prosperous and the movement is in an early stage. At this stage, we see working-class youth as those most open to a revolutionary movement which sides with the struggles of Third World people; the following is an attempt to explain a strategic focus on youth for SDS.
In general, young people have less stake in a society (no family, fewer debts, etc.), are more open to new ideas (they have not been brainwashed for so long or so well), and are therefore more able and willing to move in a revolutionary direction. Specifically in America, young people have grown up experiencing the crises in imperialism. They have grown up along with a developing black liberation movement, with the liberation of Cuba, the fights for independence in Africa and the war in Vietnam. Older people grew up during the fight against fascism, during the Cold War, the smashing of the trade unions, McCarthy, and a period during which real wages consistently rose—since 1965 disposable real income has decreased slightly, particularly in urban areas where inflation and increased taxation have bitten heavily into wages. This crisis in imperialism affects all parts of the society. America has had to militarize to protect and expand its empire; hence the high draft calls and the creation of a standing army of three and a half million, an army which still has been unable to win in Vietnam. Further, the huge defense expenditures—required for the defense of the empire and at the same time a way of making increasing profits for the defense industries—have gone hand in hand with the urban crisis around welfare, the hospitals, the schools, housing, air and water pollution. The State cannot provide the services it has been forced to assume responsibility for, and needs to increase taxes and to pay its growing debts while it cuts services and uses the pigs to repress protest. The private sector of the economy can’t provide jobs, particularly unskilled jobs. The expansion of the defense and education industries by the State since World War II is in part an attempt to pick up the slack, though the inability to provide decent wages and working conditions for “public” jobs is more and more a problem.
As imperialism struggles to hold together this decaying social fabric, it inevitably resorts to brute force and authoritarian ideology. People, especially young people, more and more find themselves in the iron grip of authoritarian institutions. Reaction against the pigs or teachers in the schools, welfare pigs or the army, is generalizable and extends beyond the particular repressive institution to the society and the State as a whole. The legitimacy of the State is called into question for the first time in at least 30 years, and the anti-authoritarianism which characterizes the youth rebellion turns into rejection of the State, a refusal to be socialized into American society. Kids used to try to beat the system from inside the army or from inside the schools; now they desert from the army and burn down the schools.
The crisis in imperialism has brought about a breakdown in bourgeois social forms, culture and ideology. The family falls apart, kids leave home, women begin to break out of traditional “female” and “mother” roles. There develops a “generation gap” and a “youth problem.” Our heroes are no longer struggling businessmen, and we also begin to reject the ideal career of the professional and look to Mao, Chef, the Panthers, the Third World, for our models, for motion. We reject the elitist, technocratic bullshit that tells us only experts can rule, and look instead to leadership from the people’s war of the Vietnamese. Chuck Berry, Elvis, the Temptations brought us closer to the “people’s culture” of Black America. The racist response to the civil rights movement revealed the depth of racism in America, as well as the impossibility of real change through American institutions. And the war against Vietnam is not “the heroic war against the Nazis”; it’s the big lie, with napalm burning through everything we had heard this country stood for. Kids begin to ask questions: Where is the Free World- And who do the pigs protect at home-
The breakdown in bourgeois culture and concomitant anti-authoritarianism is fed by the crisis in imperialism, but also in turn feeds that crisis, exacerbates it so that people no longer merely want the plastic ’50s restored, but glimpse an alternative (like inside the Columbia buildings) and begin to fight for it. We don’t want teachers to be more kindly cops; we want to smash cops, and build a new life.
The contradictions of decaying imperialism fall hardest on youth in four distinct areas—the schools, jobs, the draft and the army, and the pigs and the courts. (A) In jail-like schools, kids are fed a mish-mash of racist, male chauvinist, anti-working class, anti-communist lies while being channeled into job and career paths set up according to the priorities of monopoly capital. At the same time, the State is becoming increasingly incapable of providing enough money to keep the schools going at all. (B) Youth unemployment is three times average unemployment. As more jobs are threatened by automation or the collapse of specific industries, unions act to secure jobs for those already employed. New people in the labor market can’t find jobs, job stability is undermined (also because of increasing speed-up and more intolerable safety conditions) and people are less and less going to work in the same shop for 40 years. And, of course, when they do find jobs, young people get the worst ones and have the least seniority. (C) There are now two and a half million soldiers under thirty who are forced to police the world, kill and be killed in wars of imperialist domination. And (D) as a “youth problem” develops out of all this, the pigs and courts enforce curfews, set up pot busts, keep people off the streets, and repress any youth motion whatsoever.
In all of this, it is not that life in America is toughest for youth or that they are the most oppressed. Rather, it is that young people are hurt directly—and severely—by imperialism. And, in being less tightly tied to the system, they are more “pushed” to join the black liberation struggle against US imperialism. Among young people there is less of a material base for racism—they have no seniority, have not spent 20 years securing a skilled job (the white monopoly of which is increasingly challenged by the black liberation movement), and aren’t just about to pay off a 25-year mortgage on a house which is valuable because it’s located in a white neighborhood.
While these contradictions of imperialism fall hard on all youth, they fall hardest on the youth of the most oppressed (least privileged) sections of the working class. Clearly these youth have the greatest material base for struggle. They are the ones who most often get drafted, who get the worst jobs if they get any, who are most abused by the various institutions of social control, from the army to decaying schools, to the pigs and the courts. And their day-to-day existence indicates a potential for militancy and toughness. They are the people whom we can reach who at this stage are most ready to engage in militant revolutionary struggle.
The point of the revolutionary youth movement strategy is to move from a predominant student elite base to more oppressed (less privileged) working-class youth as a way of deepening and expanding the revolutionary youth movement—not of giving up what we have gained, not giving up our old car for a new Dodge. This is part of a strategy to reach the entire working class to engage in struggle against imperialism; moving from more privileged sections of white working-class youth to more oppressed sections to the entire working class as a whole, including importantly what has classically been called the industrial proletariat. But this should not be taken to mean that there is a magic moment, after we reach a certain percentage of the working class, when all of a sudden we become a working-class movement. We are already that if we put forward internationalist proletarian politics. We also don’t have to wait to become a revolutionary force. We must be a self-conscious revolutionary force from the beginning, not be a movement which takes issues to some mystical group—”THE PEOPLE”—who will make the revolution. We must be a revolutionary movement of people understanding the necessity to reach more people, all working people, as we make the revolution.
The above arguments make it clear that it is both important and possible to reach young people wherever they are—not only in the shops, but also in the schools, in the army and in the streets—so as to recruit them to fight on the side of the oppressed peoples of the world. Young people will be part of the International Liberation Army. The necessity to build this International Liberation Army in America leads to certain priorities in practice for the revolutionary youth movement which we should begin to apply this summer. …
IX. Imperialism Is The Issue
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletariat of different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working-class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.”
—Communist Manifesto
How do we reach youth; what kinds of struggles do we build; how do we make a revolution- What we have tried to lay out so far is the political content of the consciousness which we want to extend and develop as a mass consciousness: the necessity to build our power as part of the whole international revolution to smash the state power of the imperialists and build socialism. Besides consciousness of this task, we must involve masses of people in accomplishing it. Yet we are faced with a situation in which almost all of the people whose interests are served by these goals, and who should be, or even are, sympathetic to revolution, neither understand the specific tasks involved in making a revolution nor participate in accomplishing them. On the whole, people don’t join revolutions just because revolutionaries tell them to. The oppression of the system affects people in particular ways, and the development of political consciousness and participation begins with particular problems, which turn into issues and struggles. We must transform people’s everyday problems, and the issues and struggles growing out of them, into revolutionary consciousness, active and conscious opposition to racism and imperialism.
This is directly counterposed to assuming that struggles around immediate issues will lead naturally over time to struggle against imperialism. It has been argued that since people’s oppression is due to imperialism and racism, then any struggle against immediate oppression is “objectively anti-imperialist,” and the development of the fight against imperialism is a succession of fights for reforms. This error is classical economism.
A variant of this argument admits that this position is often wrong, but suggests that since imperialism is collapsing at this time, fights for reforms become “objectively anti-imperialist.” At this stage of imperialism there obviously will be more and more struggles for the improvement of material conditions, but that is no guarantee of increasing internationalist proletarian consciousness.
On the one hand, if we, as revolutionaries, are capable of understanding the necessity to smash imperialism and build socialism, then the masses of people who we want to fight along with us are capable of that understanding. On the other hand, people are brainwashed and at present don’t understand it; if revolution is not raised at every opportunity, then how can we expect people to see it in their interests, or to undertake the burdens of revolution- We need to make it clear from the very beginning that we are about revolution. But if we are so careful to avoid the dangers of reformism, how do we relate to particular reform struggles- We have to develop some sense of how to relate each particular issue to the revolution.
In every case, our aim is to raise anti-imperialist and anti-racist consciousness and tie the struggles of working-class youth (and all working people) to the struggles of Third World people, rather than merely joining fights to improve material conditions, even though these fights are certainly justified. This is not to say that we don’t take immediate fights seriously, or fight hard in them, but that we are always up front with our politics, knowing that people in the course of struggle are open to a class line, ready to move beyond narrow self-interest.
It is in this sense that we point out that the particular issue is not the issue, is important insofar as it points to imperialism as an enemy that has to be destroyed. Imperialism is always the issue. Obviously, the issue cannot be a good illustration, or a powerful symbol, if it is not real to people, if it doesn’t relate to the concrete oppression that imperialism causes. People have to be (and are being) hurt in some material way to understand the evils of imperialism, but what we must stress is the systematic nature of oppression and the way in which a single manifestation of imperialism makes clear its fundamental nature. At Columbia it was not the gym, in particular, which was important in the struggle, but the way in which the gym represented, to the people of Harlem and Columbia, Columbia’s imperialist invasion of the black colony. Or at Berkeley, though people no doubt needed a park (as much, however, as many other things-), what made the struggle so important was that people, at all levels of militancy, consciously saw themselves attacking private property and the power of the State. And the Richmond Oil Strike was exciting because the militant fight for improvement of material conditions was part and parcel of an attack on international monopoly capital. The numbers and militancy of people mobilized for these struggles has consistently surprised the left, and pointed to the potential power of a class-conscious mass movement.
The masses will fight for socialism when they understand that reform fights, fights for improvement of material conditions, cannot be won under imperialism. With this understanding, revolutionaries should never put forth a line which fosters the illusion that imperialism will grant significant reforms. We must engage in struggles forthrightly as revolutionaries, so that it will be clear to anyone we help to win gains that the revolution rather than imperialism is responsible for them. This is one of the strengths of the Black Panther Party Breakfast for Children Program. It is “socialism in practice” by revolutionaries with the “practice” of armed self-defense and a “line” which stresses the necessity of overthrowing imperialism and seizing state power. Probably the American Friends Service Committee serves more children breakfast, but it is the symbolic value of the program in demonstrating what socialism will do for people which makes the Black Panther Program worthwhile.
What does it mean to organize around racism and imperialism in specific struggles- In the high schools (and colleges) at this time, it means putting forth a mass line to close down the schools, rather than to reform them, so that they can serve the people. The reason for this line is not that under capitalism the schools cannot serve the people, and therefore it is silly or illusory to demand that. Rather, it is that kids are ready for the full scope of militant struggle, and already demonstrate a consciousness of imperialism, such that struggles for a people-serving school would not raise the level of their struggle to its highest possible point. Thus, to tell a kid in New York that imperialism tracks him and thereby oppresses him is often small potatoes compared to his consciousness that imperialism oppresses him by jailing him, pigs and all, and the only thing to do is break out and tear up the jail. And even where high school kids are not yet engaged in such sharp struggle, it is crucial not to build consciousness only around specific issues such as tracking or ROTC or racist teachers, but to use these issues to build toward the general consciousness that the schools should be shut down. It may be important to present a conception of what schools should or could be like (this would include the abolition of the distinction between mental and physical work), but not offer this total conception as really possible to fight for in any way but through revolution.
A mass line to close down the schools or colleges does not contradict demands for open admissions to college or any other good reform demand. Agitational demands for impossible, but reasonable, reforms are a good way to make a revolutionary point. The demand for open admissions by asserting the alternative to the present (school) system exposes its fundamental nature—that it is racist, class-based, and closed—pointing to the only possible solution to the present situation: “Shut it down!” The impossibility of real open admissions—all black and brown people admitted, no flunk-out, full scholarship, under present conditions—is the best reason (that the schools show no possibility for real reform) to shut the schools down. We should not throw away the pieces of victories we gain from these struggles, for any kind of more open admissions means that the school is closer to closing down (it costs the schools more, there are more militant blacks and browns making more and more fundamental demands on the schools, and so on). Thus our line in the schools, in terms of pushing any good reforms, should be, Open them up and shut them down!”
The spread of black caucuses in the shops and other workplaces throughout the country is an extension of the black liberation struggle. These groups have raised and will continue to raise anti-racist issues to white workers in a sharper fashion than any whites ever have or could raise them. Blacks leading struggles against racism made the issue unavoidable, as the black student movement leadership did for white students. At the same time these black groups have led fights which traditional trade-union leaders have consistently refused to lead—fights against speed-up and for safety (issues which have become considerably more serious in the last few years), forcing white workers, particularly the more oppressed, to choose in another way between allegiance to the white mother country and black leadership. As white mother country radicals we should try to be in shops, hospitals, and companies where there are black caucuses, perhaps organizing solidarity groups, but at any rate pushing the importance of the black liberation struggle to whites, handing out Free Huey literature, bringing guys out to Panther rallies, and so on. Just one white guy could play a crucial role in countering UAW counter-insurgency.
We also need to relate to workplaces where there is no black motion but where there are still many young white workers. In the shops the crisis in imperialism has come down around speed-up, safety, and wage squeeze—due to higher taxes and increased inflation, with the possibility of wage-price controls being instituted.
We must relate this exploitation back to imperialism. The best way to do this is probably not caucuses in the shops, but to take guys to citywide demonstrations, Newsreels, even the latest administration building, to make the Movement concrete to them and involve them in it. Further, we can effect consciousness and pick up people through agitational work at plants, train stops, etc., selling Movements, handing out leaflets about the war, the Panthers, the companies’ holdings overseas or relations to defense industry, etc.
After the Richmond strike, people leafleted about demonstrations in support of the Curaçao Oil workers, Free Huey May Day, and People’s Park.
SDS has not dealt in any adequate way with the women question; the resolution passed at Ann Arbor did not lead to much practice, nor has the need to fight male supremacy been given any programmatic direction within the RYM. As a result, we have a very limited understanding of the tie-up between imperialism and the women question, although we know that since World War II the differential between men’s and women’s wages has increased, and guess that the breakdown of the family is crucial to the woman question. How do we organize women against racism and imperialism without submerging the principled revolutionary question of women’s liberation- We have no real answer, but we recognize the real reactionary danger of women’s groups that are not self-consciously revolutionary and anti-imperialist.
To become more relevant to the growing women’s movement, SDS women should begin to see as a primary responsibility the self-conscious organizing of women. We will not be able to organize women unless we speak directly to their own oppression. This will become more and more critical as we work with more oppressed women. Women who are working and women who have families face male supremacy continuously in their day-to-day lives; that will have to be the starting point in their politicization. Women will never be able to undertake a full revolutionary role unless they break out of their woman’s role. So a crucial task for revolutionaries is the creation of forms of organization in which women will be able to take on new and independent roles. Women’s self-defense groups will be a step toward these organizational forms, as an effort to overcome women’s isolation and build revolutionary self-reliance.
The cultural revolt of women against their “role” in imperialism (which is just beginning to happen in a mass way) should have the same sort of revolutionary potential that the RYM claimed for “youth culture.” The role of the “wife-mother” is reactionary in most modern societies, and the disintegration of that role under imperialism should make women more sympathetic to revolution.
In all of our work we should try to formulate demands that not only reach out to more oppressed women, but ones which tie us to other ongoing struggles, in the way that a daycare center at U of C [University of Chicago] enabled us to tie the women’s liberation struggle to the Black Liberation struggle.
There must be a strong revolutionary women’s movement, for without one it will be impossible for women’s liberation to be an important part of the revolution. Revolutionaries must be made to understand the full scope of women’s oppression, and the necessity to smash male supremacy.
X. Neighborhood-Based Citywide Youth Movement
One way to make clear the nature of the system and our tasks working off of separate struggles is to tie them together with each other: to show that we’re one “multi-issue” movement, not an alliance of high school and college students, or students and GIs, or youth and workers, or students and the black community. The way to do this is to build organic regional or sub-regional and citywide movements, by regularly bringing people in one institution or area to fights going on on other fronts.
This works on two levels. Within a neighborhood, by bringing kids to different fights and relating these fights to each other—high school stuff, colleges, housing, welfare, shops—we begin to build one neighborhood-based multi-issue movement off of them. Besides actions and demonstrations, we also pull different people together in day-to-day film showings, rallies, for speakers and study groups, etc. On a second level, we combine neighborhood “bases” into a citywide or region-wide movement by doing the same kind of thing; concentrating our forces at whatever important struggles are going on and building more ongoing interrelationships off of that.
The importance of specifically neighborhood-based organizing is illustrated by our greatest failing in RYM practice so far—high school organizing. In most cities we don’t know the kids who have been tearing up and burning down the schools. Our approach has been elitist, relating to often baseless citywide groups by bringing them our line, or picking up kids with a false understanding of “politics” rather than those whose practice demonstrates their concrete anti-imperialist consciousness that schools are prisons. We’ve been unwilling to work continuously with high school kids as we did in building up college chapters. We will only reach the high school kids who are in motion by being in the schoolyards, hangouts and on the streets on an everyday basis. From a neighborhood base, high school kids could be effectively tied in to struggles around other institutions and issues, and to the anti-imperialist movement as a whole.
We will try to involve neighborhood kids who aren’t in high schools too; take them to anti-war or anti-racism fights, stuff in the schools, etc.; and at the same time reach out more broadly through newspapers, films, storefronts. Activists and cadres who are recruited in this work will help expand and deepen the Movement in new neighborhoods and high schools. Mostly we will still be tied in to the college-based movement in the same area, be influencing its direction away from campus-oriented provincialism, be recruiting high school kids into it where it is real enough and be recruiting organizers out of it. In its most developed form, this neighborhood-based movement would be a kind of sub-region. In places where the Movement wasn’t so strong, this would be an important form for being close to kids in a day-to-day way and yet be relating heavily to a lot of issues and political fronts which the same kids are involved with.
The second level is combining these neighborhoods into citywide and regional movements. This would mean doing the same thing—bringing people to other fights going on—only on a larger scale, relating to various blow-ups and regional mobilizations. An example is how a lot of people from different places went to San Francisco State, the Richmond Oil Strike, and now Berkeley. The existence of this kind of cross-motion makes ongoing organizing in other places go faster and stronger, first by creating a pervasive politicization, and second by relating everything to the most militant and advanced struggles going on so that they influence and set the pace for a lot more people. Further, cities are a basic unit of organization of the whole society in a way that neighborhoods aren’t. For example, one front where we should be doing stuff is the courts; they are mostly organized citywide, not by smaller areas. The same for the city government itself. Schools where kids go are in different neighborhoods from where they live, especially colleges; the same for hospitals people go to, and where they work. As a practical question of staying with people we pick up, the need for a citywide or area-wide kind of orientation is already felt in our movement.
Another failure of this year was making clear what the RYM meant for chapter members and students who weren’t organizers about to leave their campus for a community college, high school, GI organizing, shops or neighborhoods. One thing it means for them is relating heavily to off-campus activities and struggles, as part of the citywide motion. Not leaving the campus movement like people did for ERAP [Education Research Action Project] stuff; rather, people still organized on the campus in off-campus struggles, the way they have in the past for national actions. Like the national actions, the citywide ones will build the on-campus movement, not compete with it.
Because the Movement will be defining itself in relation to many issues and groups, not just schools (and the war and racism as they hit at the schools), it will create a political context that non-students can relate to better, and be more useful to organizing among high school students, neighborhood kids, the mass of people. In the process, it will change the consciousness of the students too; if the issues are right and the Movement fights them, people will develop a commitment to the struggle as a whole, and an understanding of the need to be revolutionaries rather than a “student movement.” Building a revolutionary youth movement will depend on organizing in a lot of places where we haven’t been, and just tying the student movement to other issues and struggles isn’t a substitute for that. But given our limited resources we must also lead the on-campus motion into a RYM direction, and we can make great gains toward citywide youth movements by doing it.
Three principles underlie this multi-issue, “cross-institutional” movement, on the neighborhood and citywide levels, as to why it creates greater revolutionary consciousness and active participation in the revolution:
(1) Mixing different issues, struggles and groups demonstrates our analysis to people in a material way. We claim there is one system and so all these different problems have the same solution, revolution. If they are the same struggle in the end, we should make that clear from the beginning. On this basis we must aggressively smash the notion that there can be outside agitators on a question pertaining to the imperialists.
(2) “Relating to Motion”: the struggle activity, the action, of the Movement demonstrates our existence and strength to people in a material way. Seeing it happen, people give it more weight in their thinking. For the participants, involvement in struggle is the best education about the Movement, the enemy and the class struggle. In a neighborhood or whole city the existence of some struggle is a catalyst for other struggles—it pushes people to see the Movement as more important and urgent, and as an example and precedent makes it easier for them to follow. If the participants in a struggle are based in different institutions or parts of the city, these effects are multiplied. Varied participation helps the Movement be seen as political (wholly subversive) rather than as separate grievance fights. As people in one section of the Movement fight beside and identify closer with other sections, the mutual catalytic effect of their struggles will be greater.
(3) We must build a Movement oriented toward power. Revolution is a power struggle, and we must develop that understanding among people from the beginning. Pooling our resources area-wide and citywide really does increase our power in particular fights, as-well as push a mutual-aid-in-struggle consciousness.
XI. The RYM And The Pigs
A major focus in our neighborhood and citywide work is the pigs, because they tie together the various struggles around the State as the enemy, and thus point to the need for a Movement oriented toward power to defeat it.
The pigs are the capitalist state, and as such define the limits of all political struggles; to the extent that a revolutionary struggle shows signs of success, they come in and mark the point it can’t go beyond. In the early stages of struggle, the ruling class lets parents come down on high school kids, or jocks attack college chapters. When the struggle escalates the pigs come in; at Columbia, the left was afraid its struggle would be co-opted to anti-police brutality, cops off campus, and said pigs weren’t the issue. But pigs really are the issue and people will understand this, one way or another. They can have a liberal understanding that pigs are sweaty working-class barbarians who over-react and commit “police brutality” and so shouldn’t be on campus. Or they can understand pigs as the repressive imperialist State doing its job. Our job is not to avoid the issue of the pigs as “diverting” from anti-imperialist struggle, but to emphasize that they are our real enemy if we fight that struggle to win.
Even when there is no organized political struggle, the pigs come down on people in everyday life in enforcing capitalist property relations, bourgeois laws and bourgeois morality; they guard stores and factories and the rich and enforce credit and rent against the poor. The overwhelming majority of arrests in America are for crimes against property. The pigs will be coming down on the kids we’re working with in the schools, on the streets, around dope; we should focus on them, point them out all the time, like the Panthers do. We should relate the daily oppression by the pig to their role in political repression, and develop a class understanding of political power and armed force among the kids we’re with.
As we develop a base these two aspects of the pig role increasingly come together. In the schools, pig is part of daily oppression—keeping order in halls and lunch rooms, controlling smoking—while at the same time pigs prevent kids from handing out leaflets, and bust “outside agitators.” The presence of youth, or youth with long hair, becomes defined as organized political struggle and the pigs react to it as such. More and more everyday activity is politically threatening, so pigs are suddenly more in evidence; this in turn generates political organization and opposition, and so on. Our task will be to catalyze this development, pushing out the conflict with the pig so as to define every struggle—schools (pigs out, pig institutes out), welfare (invading pig-protected office), the streets (curfew and turf fights)—as a struggle against the needs of capitalism and the force of the State.
Pigs don’t represent State power as an abstract principle; they are a power that we will have to overcome in the course of struggle or become irrelevant, revisionist, or dead. We must prepare concretely to meet their power because our job is to defeat the pigs and the army, and organize on that basis. Our beginnings should stress self-defense—building defense groups around karate classes, learning how to move on the street and around the neighborhood, medical training, popularizing and moving toward (according to necessity) armed self-defense, all the time honoring and putting forth the principle that “political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.” These self-defense groups would initiate pig surveillance patrols, visits to the pig station and courts when someone is busted, etc.
Obviously the issues around the pig will not come down by neighborhood alone; it will take at least citywide groups able to coordinate activities against a unified enemy—in the early stages, for legal and bail resources and turning people out for demonstrations, adding the power of the citywide movement to what may be initially only a tenuous base in a neighborhood. Struggles in one part of the city will not only provide lessons for but [will] materially aid similar motion in the rest of it.
Thus the pigs are ultimately the glue—the necessity—that holds the neighborhood-based and citywide movement together; all of our concrete needs lead to pushing the pigs to the fore as a political focus:
(1) making institutionally oriented reform struggles deal with State power, by pushing our struggle till either winning or getting pigged;
(2) using the citywide inter-relation of fights to raise the level of struggle and further large-scale anti-pig movement-power consciousness;
(3) developing spontaneous anti-pig consciousness in our neighborhoods to an understanding of imperialism, class struggle and the State;
(4) and using the citywide movement as a platform for reinforcing and extending this politicization work, like by talking about getting together a citywide neighborhood-based mutual aid anti-pig self-defense network.
All of this can be done through citywide agitation and propaganda and picking certain issues—to have as the central regional focus for the whole Movement.
XII. Repression And Revolution
As institutional fights and anti-pig self-defense off of them intensify, so will the ruling class’s repression. Their escalation of repression will inevitably continue according to how threatening the Movement is to their power. Our task is not to avoid or end repression; that can always be done by pulling back, so we’re not dangerous enough to require crushing. Sometimes it is correct to do that as a tactical retreat, to survive to fight again.
To defeat repression, however, is not to stop it but to go on building the Movement to be more dangerous to them; in which case, defeated at one level, repression will escalate even more. To succeed in defending the Movement, and not just ourselves at its expense, we will have to successively meet and overcome these greater and greater levels of repression.
To be winning will thus necessarily, as imperialism’s lesser efforts fail, bring about a phase of all-out military repression. To survive and grow in the face of that will require more than a larger base of supporters; it will require the invincible strength of a mass base at a high level of active participation and consciousness, and can only come from mobilizing the self-conscious creativity, will and determination of the people.
Each new escalation of the struggle in response to new levels of repression, each protracted struggle around self-defense which becomes a material fighting force, is part of the international strategy of solidarity with Vietnam and the blacks, through opening up other fronts. They are anti-war, anti-imperialist and pro-black liberation. If they involve fighting the enemy, then these struggles are part of the revolution.
Therefore, clearly the organization and active, conscious, participating mass base needed to survive repression are also the same needed for winning the revolution. The Revolutionary Youth Movement speaks to the need for this kind of active mass-based Movement by tying citywide motion back to community youth bases, because this brings us close enough to kids in their day-to-day lives to organize their “maximum active participation” around enough different kinds of fights to push the “highest level of consciousness” about imperialism, the black vanguard, the State and the need for armed struggle.
III. The Need For A Revolutionary Party
The RYM must also lead to the effective organization needed to survive and to create another battlefield of the revolution. A revolution is a war; when the Movement in this country can defend itself militarily against total repression it will be part of the revolutionary war.
This will require a cadre organization, effective secrecy, self-reliance among the cadres, and an integrated relationship with the active mass-based Movement. To win a war with an enemy as highly organized and centralized as the imperialists will require a (clandestine) organization of revolutionaries, having also a unified “general staff”; that is, combined at some point with discipline under one centralized leadership. Because war is political, political tasks—the international communist revolution—must guide it. Therefore the centralized organization of revolutionaries must be a political organization as well as military, what is generally called a “Marxist-Leninist” party.
How will we accomplish the building of this kind of organization- It is clear that we couldn’t somehow form such a party at this time, because the conditions for it do not exist in this country outside the Black nation. What are these conditions-
One is that to have a unified centralized organization it is necessary to have a common revolutionary theory which explains, at least generally, the nature of our revolutionary tasks and how to accomplish them. It must be a set of ideas which have been tested and developed in the practice of resolving the important contradictions in our work.
A second condition is the existence of revolutionary leadership tested in practice. To have a centralized party under illegal and repressive conditions requires a centralized leadership, specific individuals with the understanding and the ability to unify and guide the Movement in the face of new problems and be right most of the time.
Thirdly, and most important, there must be the same revolutionary mass base mentioned earlier, or (better) revolutionary mass movement. It is clear that without this there can’t be the practical experience to know whether or not a theory, or a leader, is any good at all. Without practical revolutionary activity on a mass scale the party could not test and develop new ideas and draw conclusions with enough surety behind them to consistently base its survival on them. Especially, no revolutionary party could possibly survive Without relying on the active support and participation of masses of people.
These conditions for the development of a revolutionary party in this country are the main “conditions” for winning. There are two kinds of tasks for us.
One is the organization of revolutionary collectives within the Movement. Our theory must come from practice, but it can’t be developed in isolation. Only a collective pooling of our experiences can develop a thorough understanding of the complex conditions in this country. In the same way, only our collective efforts toward a common plan can adequately test the ideas we develop. The development of revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collective formations which undertake this concrete evaluation and application of the lessons of our work is not just the task of specialists or leaders, but the responsibility of every revolutionary. Just as a collective is necessary to sum up experiences and apply them locally, equally the collective interrelationship of groups all over the country is necessary to get an accurate view of the whole movement and to apply that in the whole country. Over time, those collectives which prove themselves in practice to have the correct understanding (by the results they get) will contribute toward the creation of a unified revolutionary party.
The most important task for us toward making the revolution, and the work our collectives should engage in, is the creation of a mass revolutionary movement, without which a clandestine revolutionary party will be impossible. A revolutionary mass movement is different from the traditional revisionist mass base of “sympathizers.” Rather it is akin to the Red Guard in China, based on the full participation and involvement of masses of people in the practice of making revolution; a movement with a full willingness to participate in the violent and illegal struggle. It is a movement diametrically opposed to the elitist idea that only leaders are smart enough or interested enough to accept full revolutionary conclusions. It is a movement built on the basis of faith in the masses of people.
The task of collectives is to create this kind of movement. (The party is not a substitute for it. and in fact is totally dependent on it.) This will be done at this stage principally among youth, through implementing the Revolutionary Youth Movement strategy discussed in this paper. It is practice at this, and not political “teachings” in the abstract, which will determine the relevance of the political collectives which are formed.
The strategy of the RYM for developing an active mass base, tying the citywide fights to community and citywide anti-pig movement, and for building a party eventually out of this motion, fits with the world strategy for winning the revolution, builds a movement oriented toward power, and will become one division of the International Liberation Army, while its battlefields are added to the many Vietnams which will dismember and dispose of US imperialism. Long Live the Victory of People’s War!
Alternative energy ventures, through the efforts of their lobbyists, can’t find the workforce they need in Ohio. While the area boasts one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates, many of those workers are from the decimated steel industry. NPR Morning Edition reported yesterday that would-be wind turbine manufacturer Rotek Inc, for example, doesn’t agree that United Steel Workers Union members are right for the job.
Unions assert that the jobs aren’t offering sufficient wages. NPR uncritically countered that “The starting salary with benefits at many wind turbine plants in Ohio can range to $30,000 a year.”
The NPR report left the impression that manufacturers wanted to move into the alternative energy field, but were being thwarted by the unreasonable expectations of US labor. This may be true. But an industry promising new poor jobs is no gift horse. Shouldn’t workers look it in the mouth before entrusting futures, communities and livelihoods to it?
NPR’s Julie Grant summarized the manufacturer objections with, thankfully, a some-people-say type attribution:
“the new companies, the ones already making part for wind turbines, say they don’t want burned out workers with low morale. What they need are workers open to spending a couple of years in training, who can think on their feet, and are excited to be part of the new economy they’ re helping to create.”
The “new economy they’re helping to create?” Would that be the new economy placing the employee as being working poor? What would a radio reporter herself think of a job that requires two years of training, at the employee’s expense, to yield a $30K salary? The workforce in question are already experienced steelworkers. The wind turbine jobs are steel manufacturing jobs. They’re not looking for high tech design positions.
Lobbyist group the Apollo Alliance, which NPR labeled a Clean Energy think tank, suggests the government should subsidize the training period.
So here I believe is the crux of what alternative energy investors are after. We can’t argue that low wages are here to stay. America’s new economy will no longer support the upward middle class American Dream of the Baby Boomers. So factory workers are going to work for half the pay, if they want work at all. But do they need to be trained to do it?
The wind turbine manufacturing industry is suggesting that its labor force needs two years of training, paid for by the US taxpayer. Does that make sense to you? You get the bill, the workers get subsistence wages, and the factory owners get free labor. For two years. Likely employees are not going to stick around for the promise of $30K/yr, so the two year transitions will last as long as the government subsidies allow.
Industrialists are always looking for low wage workers, even slave labor, when they can.
NPR cited the example of Rotek Inc. “Rotek one of 75 companies here that have started making parts for wind turbines.” The report mentions an $80 million investment, but implies that Rotek is a startup that requires subsidies, tax credits and willing partner-employees. NPR didn’t mention that Rotek is a subsidiary of Rothe Erde, of Dortmund, Germany ($15.3 billion, 55,000 employees), which is a subsidiary of the ThyssenKrupp Group, Essen, Germany ($68.7 billion, 191,000 employees) of Krupp infamy. Founder Alfred Krupp was tried in Nuremberg for using concentration camp labor in his factories during the war, some of them even prisoners of war.
Krupp was the chief architect of the Nazi armaments machine. Hitler even passed a law which established the Krupp family as a monopolist dynasty immune from inheritance tax. After Krupp’s conviction, a New York Banker succeeded in lobbying for a pardon for Alfred Krupp, and reversing the sentence that his industrial holdings be forfeited.
COLORADO- The unions mounted a very visible opposition to the proposed Colorado Amendments 47, 49 and 54. Vote NO, their posters and stickers urged, in support of Colorado’s firefighters, police and teachers. I might have agreed more if they’d mentioned better reasons.
I was accosted in Pueblo by someone asking people to wear stickers which said NO ON 47, 49 & 54 for the sake of the firefighters. I told him that I had nothing against firefighters, but don’t they get plenty of recognition already? I would wear the sticker in support of UNIONS in general. That’s who the ballot amendments are targeting, and that’s who need our support. His face lit up appreciatively.
It’s too bad that the Colorado public can’t be trusted with the real argument about what’s at stake. Especially coming from such strong unions as protect the firefighters, police and teachers. What about the other unionized vocations? Especially those not yet, or no longer, protected by unions? I would have liked to see labor use this opportunity to bring the issue of collective bargaining into the public discourse. That would mean the stronger unions looking out for their weaker comrades.
I’m reminded of friends I had at UPS, who apologized for belonging to the Teamsters. What’s wrong with that picture? Or how about the USPS workers, paid good wages owed entirely to a strong union, who otherwise vote as anti-labor conservatives?
I would also like to have seen the NO ON 47, 49 & 54 group throw another number on their clipboard. Why not oppose Amendment 46, which attacked Affirmative Action? That’s a jobs related issue that would show solidarity with minority workers.
Can American voters be expected only to look out for themselves? Each of the presidential candidates seemed to campaign like they were buying votes. Did Obama have to promise he wouldn’t tax 95% of the populace? Did McCain have to argue for the reverse? Is there no room for altruism in American politics? Maybe the pundits are right to have talked about “socialism” like it was a dirty word.
They’re calling it persecution and retaliation for standing up and basically Lying His Ass Off for McCain…
But there is a closed investigation by the Ohio welfare officials. The only way there could be an investigation by the agency is the Not-Plumber, who says he makes more than three times Minimum Wage, $40K per year… was getting public assistance of some type.
And still not being able to pay his taxes.
The nature of the investigation is sealed, “privacy issues”, but the fact remains, if he hadn’t gotten Welfare the welfare officers couldn’t investigate.
Protective Services, say you? Not so, says I.
That would be something started by the Police, not the welfare folks.
Now, I know, somewhere deep in his nasty little heart, John McCain actually does care as much for the people who only earn Minimum Wage, as he does for somebody making what should be a comfortable living.
Just, you know, voting against raising Minimum Wage every time it comes up for a vote, spends more in a DAY to run the Straight Talk Express Bus than a minimum wage worker makes in ten months.
Never disagrees with the Repuke-lickin’ position that “Working Poor” is a contradiction in terms.
And that deregulation, lots of it, breaking unions, Tax breaks for the rich, all the goodies that would supposedly make a non-union non-certified non-plumber probably would, according to Repuke Propaganda, make him a successful businessman, right…
But he apparently not only couldn’t pay his very low taxes he also took Welfare.
Now, it’s not unusual for Republicans to lie.
In fact, they make a habit of it and they seem to be proud of how effectively they Lie.
Kind of like, a Young, healthy Not-Joe the Not-Plumber supposedly supports the war but ain’t over there fighting in it.
The Personal Cowardice inherent in it is deeply ingrained in the Republican Experience.
But if anything, the fact that Sam the Non-Plumber couldn’t make it in what the Repukes feel is the Ideal Business Environment, then blames it on somebody who was not in power and policies that are not even in place… and have never actually been in place in America.
That’s equally as Hypocritical as their positions on the war.
I think it’s time to colorize The Grapes of Wrath. And I don’t mean the Turner Classics process exactly. It may help to dumb down the artistic contrast of the black & white for a contemporary audience palate of splashy Disneycolor, but how about trying to make Steinbeck’s theme more accessible to today’s spoon-fed viewers? Let’s colorize the skin of the poor migrant workers to reflect the inhumanly-treated populations of today’s displaced im-migrants of color.
I can’t remember where I come down on colorizing the old movies. No one’s insisted on infusing CMYK into Ansel Adams or Picasso’s sketchbook, why are masterpieces filmed in black and white supposed to be pigment deficient? We don’t presume to dub dialog over the silent movies made before the age of the talkies. As yet. Of course, Ted Turner was concerned for reviving interest in old intellectual properties, many of which were already in-artful. And perhaps his salesmanship maneuver has been proven effective. When my family sat down to watch Grapes of Wrath, the grey image tuned a number of youthful eyes away.
Like Dorothea Lange’s famous photographs, John Ford’s film depicted disadvantaged Okies with whom the American audience could identify. We may not know what it feels like to be forced off our homes, but how the families cope with the hardship, we all can recognize. I’m curious how the film was received by Californians in 1940, coming less than ten years after the original plague of destitute Oklahoma refugees. How would the characters have faired with our sympathies if they had been played as coarse hillbilly Crackers with guns and a poor person’s chip-on-the-shoulder desperation?
The poor protagonists of The Grapes of Wrath were weakened skinny po-folk, who staked their relief on the strength of a single hopeful job listing flyer, who protested their oppression without resorting to violence, and who accepted hardship as their lot. Seeing into their daily lives, viewers were shown a dignified, earnest people who treated others with respect and compassion. Antagonist characters in the film were less charitable, taking advantage of the hard-luck migrants with guile, violence and authority. People into which the Oklahoma refugees traveled, New Mexico, Arizona and California, treated the migrants like vermin. Even as onlookers might express admiration for the Okies’ determination to cross Death Valley, the better fed Californians held them in disdain for not knowing enough to be in such a predicament. The Okies were blamed for their own poverty. They threatened to burden everyone’s already depleting resources. Only the viewers understood the unfair actions which had landed the otherwise self-sufficient sharecroppers to have to leave their livelihoods.
The circumstances of the Dust Bowl cum great depression era forced removal of the small Oklahoma farmers is eerily familiar to today’s economy and its foreclosures. Homesteaders find themselves made homeless, as a consequence of business decisions between corporations, banks and regulators. The Oklahoma farmers wanted to point their shotguns to warn the financial disruptors from their land, but found the conduits of the dirty work were their own neighbors and relatives. Everyone was merely following orders from someone higher up. That the system could be at fault, left the victims with no clear recourse.
Here’s the classic eviction exchange.
THE MAN
I can’t help that. All I know is I got my orders.
They told me to tell you you got to get off,
and that’s what I’m telling you.MULEY
You mean get off my own land?THE MAN
Now don’t go blaming me. It ain’t *my* fault.SON
Whose fault is it?THE MAN
You know who owns the land–the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.MULEY
Who’s the Shawnee Land and Cattle Comp’ny?THE MAN
It ain’t nobody. It’s a company.SON
They got a pres’dent, ain’t they?
They got somebody that knows what a shotgun’s for, ain’t they?THE MAN
But it ain’t *his* fault, because the *bank* tells him what to do.SON
All right. Where’s the bank?THE MAN
Tulsa. But what’s the use of picking on him?
He ain’t anything but the manager, and half crazy hisself,
trying to keep up with his orders from the east!MULEY
Then who *do* we shoot?THE MAN
Brother, I don’t know. If I did I’d tell you.
But I just don’t know *who’s* to blame!
There was a lot more in The Grapes of Wrath which could inform a modern world view. The dreaded “Cats” for example. These were the Caterpillar tractors which were shown ravaging the land like locusts, arriving to demolish the houses of the reluctant dispossessed. Bulldozers are still used for that function today. In fact, Caterpillar manufactures armored versions to deploy in war zones for the destruction of houses. Palestinians have shown to be less reluctant than the poor Okies about trying to shoot the bulldozer drivers who are taking aim at their homes. Israel is expanding its settlements in Palestine with the aid of Caterpillar tractors which clear the land of its recalcitrant invadees.
Likewise, the union busting strategies portrayed in Grapes of Wrath are the same used today. Police officers are called in when work supervisors encounter workers who show too much skepticism for the employer’s scam. Troublemakers are arrested lest the workforce succeed in organizing itself. Instigators are paid to infiltrate a social event and start a fight, to give law enforcement the excuse to break in and make its calculated arrests. Casual viewers may think the famous 1939 film depicts a bygone age. Not at all.
Director John Ford made sure that the Okie migrants were deathly skinny, while everyone else, from gas station attendants to deputized union-busters, was immaculately dressed and well fed. But the audience could identify with both sides, because both were white. Imagine if the displaced peoples were not the same color.
Today’s migrant workers are hispanic. They are illegal immigrants, just like Okies passing through the Arizona checkpoint in Steinbeck’s novel.
GUARD
Where you going?TOM
California.GUARD
How long you plan to be in Arizona?TOM
No longer’n we can get acrost her.GUARD
Got any plants?TOM
No plants.GUARD
Okay. Go ahead, but you better keep movin’.
Could a modern audience appreciate the travails of a Mexican family in an exact same predicament? Mexican farmers have been forced from their land in an even less polite manner today. They have similar claim to their homesteads, some of them even have indigenous claims. But American and Mexican corporate interests have been forcing the Mexicans to flee. The migration north is not about seeking fortune; picking lettuce it most certainly is not. The work our illegal immigrants are willing to do is out of desperation and subsistence. Corporate America reserves our agricultural work for migrants because it’s cheaper. Otherwise American citizens have devised unions to ensure that workers are paid an honorable wage. Exploitation of the illegal immigrant is simply a bypass of decent labor practices meant to protect everyone.
In selfish, protectionist terms, hiring illegal immigrants undermines the strength of unionized labor. Ultimately the exploitation of others dehumanizes us all.
I wish Americans could see The Grapes of Wrath as a projection of the ongoing injustices suffered by all exploited migrants. As well-fed American citizens leading prosperous lives, wouldn’t it be our responsibility to help the victims of our system? Instead, we are those cold-hearted leather-jacketed Californians herding them into lives of slow death by hard labor and starvation.
The Grapes of Wrath offered a strong Socialist message, disguised in a protagonist who did not yet have all the answers. Before setting out to light the way, Henry Fonda’s character says this to his mom:
TOM
…maybe I can do sump’n. Maybe I can jus’ fin’ out sump’n.
Jus’ scrounge aroun’ an’ try to fin’ out what it is that’s wrong,
an then see if they ain’t sump’n could be done about it.
But I ain’t thought it out clear, Ma. I can’t.
I don’t know enough.MA
How’m I gonna know ’bout you?
They might kill you an’ I wouldn’t know.
They might hurt you. How’m I gonna know?TOM
Well, maybe it’s like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul
of his own, but on’y a piece of a big soul–the one big soul
that belongs to ever’body–an’ then…
Then it don’t matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark.
I’ll be ever’where–wherever you look. Wherever there’s
a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.
Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.
I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad
–an’ I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re
hungry an’ they know supper’s ready.
An’ when our people eat the stuff they raise,
an’ live in the houses they build, why, I’ll be there too.
I had to see The Grapes of Wrath in high school. It was required. Are schools today trying to infuse students with social wisdom? How about a Grapes Redux starring people of color? Imagine this closing line, spoken by a dark skinned mother, about the hardship that is her people’s fate:
MA
…Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good, an’ they die out. But we keep a-comin’. We’re the people that live. Can’t nobody wipe us out. Can’t nobody lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa. We’re the people.
(Editor’s note: Jonah posted this account yesterday on Alfrankenweb, which reached the Rec List on Daily Kos. Now I’m fielding emails and calls inquiring whether Jonah is real. Here are the Alfrankenweb posts, until Jonah can give us an update.)
OK, so this is the story as I finally got straight.
I was out scrounging scrap metal today, to get enough food money to last us through the weekend.
I came home and Miss Johnnie, my landlady, was crying and showing me a table full of food.
I thought one of our friends or my relatives had come over and bought for us.
But it was bought, according to the lady who owns the restaurant, by Barack Obama over the phone.
After the Obama Campaign Workers came to the door, and were listening to Miss Johnnie describe why she, a registered republican, was voting for Obama.
She showed a picture of her daughter Michelle the Marine who had been deployed to Iraq twice, and is still pending discharge because of the Stop Loss.
All her kids in fact.
And her late husband, who had died of Agent Orange from his service in VietNam.
About that time the campaign workers started making phone calls and she got to talk to Obama.
She was in tears while telling me all this so I got the story wrong at first.
She talked about the War, about the health care bill that got turned down because it was “too expensive” but the Rich Thieves got to take 16 times as much just because they had broken the economy with their wild schemes.
About the VA messing around with the repayment of the medical expenses she had borne by herself over the 12 years since her husband died, over nitpicky paperwork errors on Their Part.
About me being out against doctor’s orders scrounging scrap metal just to make it through til monday.
One of the volunteers was a Marine and a Nam Vet, so much for the notion that Veterans are all voting for McCain, (despite his continued votes to screw the veterans the same way the VA is messing up Miss Johnnie’s paperwork and payments)
Miss Johnnie, understandably, doesn’t talk without a great deal of emotion on those subjects.
So after the Volunteers left, about 20 minutes later a very large order of Chinese food charged to Obama came to the door.
The Delivery man is a recent immigrant and doesn’t speak English, so he called his boss, who confirmed it but said it was supposed to be a surprise.
Enough food to last until Monday.
I came in with this really pitiful half gallon of milk and about a meal worth of food and some cat food.. and she was crying and showing me all the food.
And said that Obama had bought it for us.
I didn’t get the story quite right the first time, so I thought he had been there in person.
Not quite, but you know how in the Churches people say “I’ll be there in spirit”?
He was there in a way that really counts.
McCain has a fake falsified made-up “Joe the Plumber” who turns out to be a white-collar person named Sam and not even a plumber…
Obama now has Miss Johnnie the Viet-Nam Widow and a Real Joe the Ex-Roofer with Busted Feet.
That’s why Obama wins.
He’s Real, his concern for the people is Real, and the people who supporting him, WE’RE real too.
…
Hell, I don’t know where to research it myself.
There’s been a flood of out-of-state volunteers past two days, because Ms Sarah was doing her Schtick at the baseball park to a tame crowd.
Tame as in no Nasty Obama Supporters being let through to ask all kinds of icky-poo questions.
I went in yesterday and mentioned at the welcome desk at Obama HQ about the FreakSquad chalking the death-threat or death-wish either one on the sidewalk essentially directly across the street from them.
The restaurant is “Coal Mine Dragon” at 1720 W Uintah, the Springs. The lady who runs it is Second Generation Chinese. She told Miss Johnnie that it was Obama paying the tab, and that it was supposed to have been secret.
If it was merely the Volunteers calling in the order, and the restaurant owner not getting it out clearly distinguished, that’s still great.
as to was he the one who spoke to her, he identified himself as such.
If he was a clever impostor doing a good imitation that’s more improbable.
Not much reason anybody would, especially as Obama wouldn’t tolerate it.
if he confirms it himself is the best proof I could think of.
…
Who has that kind of pull to hotline direct to Obama during a rally?
Congressman Mark Udall, that’s who.
He told Miss Johnnie about being a Marine himself, I had thought “damn, that sounds a lot like Mark Udall…”
And, sure enough…
…
Run the pack of clowns out of office.
There’s some tidying up to do, seems like a herd of Elephants has gone through the national living room, pooping on the floors, breaking stuff and drinking out of the toilet.
If I’m not mistaken, some poor clerk at the VA in Denver is going to have a rude surprise Monday morning.
Mark Udall is running on Workers Rights, and Veterans Affairs… very large issues here in Colorado.
The “Terror Connection” they’ve been trying to tar Obama with, with Udall it’s “the Department of Peace” and Labor Unions.
His opponent is making big talk from those same National Attack Ads just like with the “Daschle Democrats” Ads with the bobble heads…
Well, Daschle was proven RIGHT about Iraq.
Trying to paint Udall as a hippie-dippy doper (seriously, they’ve been using that angle) when he’s a Marine and a Nam Vet, I think they bit off a chunk of the wrong sandwich.
I don’t know what all the names of the meals are, one involved a lot of chicken and broccoli, mushrooms… oh man..
Another same recipe, stir fried, with steak in it.
Cabbage rolls and rice with more chicken in it…
I think I like this restaurant and plan to give them my patronage.
The bill came to just under $40 bux.
If you’re in Colorado, vote no on 47 and there’s two more Blatantly union busting amendments there.
Oh, there’s an attack ad on right now….
These freaks need to be slapped repeatedly, in fact I’ll start a thread about that…
…
I had to reboot the puter, knocked my keyboard connection loose.
We have one cat, Keenan, neutered male.
She built him cat-runs at three of the windows, we can’t let him outside because our next-door neighbor is a Confirmed Cat-Kicker.
Last summer she contracted Leishmaniasis, which is also called the Baghdad Boil, in Mesopotamia it’s spread by the bite of a flea…
They gave her Antibiotics for it, and for the Mycelin Resistant Staph Aureole that goes with it.
This has affected her inner ear, because the antibiotics were so strong.
At the time we thought it was her lymphatic cancer coming out of remission.
After her husband died, she was waiting on getting her Widow’s Pension, the VA wasn’t even acknowledging that her husband had died of Agent Orange.
It took a few years for that. That’s when she had the lymphoma.
She was out on the street while taking chemo.
Last year she started to try for her CHAMPVA benefits, so she could get meaningful health care.
The ones who come to the forum to blast “Socialized Medicine” don’t know the least part of what the hell they’re putting out, or putting down.
We had the paperwork and forms from the VA to take to the Air Force to get her Widowed Spouse ID card, to get the CHAMPVA started.
We rode the bus across town to Peterson AFB, they allowed her onto the base, but not me, made me get off the bus and wait outside.
Which I prefer anyway, when I left the Air Force, I LEFT.
The guards at the gate, they weren’t Air Force, didn’t have any insignia or rank or name tags, but I knew they weren’t SPs because the SPs are stone freaky about maintaining a spit-shined appearance.
Turns out they’re mercenaries, I thought at first Blackwater but it seems it’s a different group of Mercs.
All the same to me.
At the Admin building another Mercenary, not Air Force personnel, clerk told her that the VA was full of shit, everything changed with nine eleven, don’t you know there’s a war on yadda yadda and threatened to have her arrested.
This year we finally got her ID card, got her CHAMPVA started.
Any Vets reading this, be-the-hell-ware because this is what they’re fixin’ to do to YOU next if McInasane gets in power.
So she’s owed 11 years worth of reimbursement for all the medical care she had to pay for out of pocket, even with the next to worthless Colorado Indigent Care Program insurance (Look up “worthless” in the dictionary and right next to it will be a picture of CICP) one of those “Massive Entitlement Programs For Bums” that McCain bitches about.
She got some reimbursement but is owed about 5 times as much more.
They keep bouncing her claims back, saying the forms are “incomplete”.
Utter bullshit, because I went over their claim as to what information was missing, and it was all right there in the papers.
That’s why I believe somebody from Mark Udall’s office is going to give them a Nasty Note Monday.
That’s the status so far.
The Health Care meltdown in Colorado is almost as bad as it was in Texas when I left.
Privatized everything. Well, I can testify, it didn’t work in Texas, and it surely ain’t working in Colorado either.
…
I get SSI and Medicaid. Miss Johnnie gets a Widows pension and CHAMPVA.
I supplement it by repairing computers and selling them, and the Scrap Metal.
I’ve been making more money off the scrap metal than the computers though.
The internet is part of our Cable package.
And, it’s necessary for the repairs I do to the computers, otherwise we would have ditched that part and just used dial-up.
The past month I haven’t been able to scrap, doctor’s orders.
That drop in income brought us near the edge.
We have for vehicles three bicycles, two of them mine, and she can’t ride hers anymore because of some of her injuries.
And ride the bus for further transportation.
I don’t drive anyway, never learned because it would be too dangerous.
Trust me on that.
But I’ve been getting on fairly well using the bicycles.
Until last month.
On top of that, scrap prices are down, way down… and there’s more competition for what scrap there is.
This is what’s happening across America.
I find out on November 5th what exact kind of surgery is going to be needed, for the foot I thought was uninjured 16 years ago.
I do know part of it is going to involve removal of a bone, the Cuboid.
I won’t have a leg to stand on.
It would be really really cool, you know, if this situation were anywhere near being unique.
Fact is, it ain’t.
That’s why there’s this:
I’m not dancing with joy that McCain is going to lose…
I’m rejoicing that America now has a chance to WIN.
…
Thanks, but we’re getting there. You might need it yourself soon anyway.
Stocks are tanking like mad.
Gas prices are down to 3 a gallon but that’s mostly because so much business, small and large, has crashed that there’s a huge drop in actual consumption.
First law of economics, supply and demand.
There’s going to be money coming in, just a question of when.
We both know how to make money, just we aren’t going to try doing anything on credit, build from a cash-only base.
Johnnie used to be a business owner, she and her husband did custom printing. Before his illness got to him they had over a million in the bank.
That’s how quick a catastrophic illness can do you down.
“difficult” and “impossible” are two separate equations, if something is difficult that just means it’s possible.
It’s a challenge more than anything. I hope.
I’ve got good skills I can adapt, like these computer skills.
This one I’m using now I built up from parts I salvaged, part of the scrap metal deal.
Here in town there WAS a steady supply of one-off computers, like, HP would come out with the newest mainboard and all the HP employees would get a discount on the new one, and either sell the older ones cheap or donate them to the ARC or Goodwill. Here’s a really good business tip, something you might want to invest yourself into, a new mainboard combination comes out roughly every 6 months and the older one, the one that’s King of the Jungle today, is going to be only worth half of what it is today.
Same with all the parts.And for all practical purposes, the best there is today, in 6 months will still be able to run any software package there is. Not much point in buying a brand new computer, unless you’re developing software specifically for the newest chipset. so I’m developing a base of people who will want to buy good computers, that’ll do whatever they want, just at an amazingly lower price than they would pay to HP or Dell.
it’s more a matter of timing your purchases than anything else.Now HP is closing down most of their local operations here, moving some to Albuquerque and some to iirc Little Rock.
But I’ll adapt. Part of it is that I don’t have a huge monetary investment in anything, mostly my investment has been in skills.
At least we have a plan, and are getting, slowly to be sure, but it is building up, the means to implement the plan.
Dire straits are familiar territory for me. At least I know my way around.
There’s good coming onto the horizon.
There wasn’t any conversation to speak of on the drive to school today, so I turned on the news. From the back a teen immediately interjected “Is that completely necessary?”
I muted the sound and turned around, completely incredulous. “What?”
“Is that completely necessary?” she repeated without a hint of what I hoped to have been mischievous insolence.
“Not really.” Is all I could muster as I turned the volume back up and refocused my attention. I can’t say that listening to corporate propaganda is necessary, or even a good idea. But I am at an equal loss for how else to stay tuned to what’s happening around us. It’s a good thing my honest ambivalence tripped up the teaching moment I might have offered.
There are probably far too many ways to get entangled in current affairs, but for children with school, sports, video games, television, play, music and the odd meal, there is no break for non-academic reality. One might argue that kids could be spared the complications of the world outside. I can hardly see the merit to that school of unthought. Especially as domestic politics have certainly invaded their education, the piss-poor vocational experience few are willing to admit that American schools have become.
This drive-time comment came after an evening spent not being forced to attend a journalist’s lecture last night. It was off-putting enough to have to wait in the atrium apparently. Although, as dense as the economic principles might have been, I sorely regretted that all of the kids, especially the girls, had not witnessed Naomi Klein, about as apt a role model as any young woman could dream.
So what if much would be above their head? Won’t they grow into it? Are there realities too shocking for children? Shouldn’t our challenge be to address those horrors, sooner than shield ourselves by pretending they do not exist? What a luxury that our children have even the choice to know how they are impacted.
It’s one thing to expose kids to pictures of highway accidents, or television programs about serial killers, quite another in my opinion to complicate their understanding of societal malevolence. Can they not gleam from parental example that such obstacles do not render life hopeless? We cope. We blot out certain realities to pamper our own delusions. Is that a difficulty level beyond young people?
There’s no doubt a fine line about forcing experiences on children, the morning news for example, but isn’t that to pretend that almost all their indoctrination isn’t involuntary? Can you think of any accomplished person who wasn’t pushed?
We can be thankful our children aren’t experiencing household raids, aerial bombings, and marketplace bombers which take the lives of their friends and relatives. How sheltered do children need to be? Even if their Social Studies will eventually teach them Zinn or Chomsky, aren’t the lessons sabotaged by the context of isolation? How are children really to learn that they aren’t working in factories but for blood spilled by labor unions; that their grandparents aren’t destitute or dead owing to collective efforts which demanded more from their government? Pop culture has already lulled kids to the politics of nothing matters. Is there any wrong time to try to right that lie? Or do YOU believe that individuals have no power to participate in the global community?
DENVER- Sunday DNC day zero, Civic Center Park, agent provocateurs
I made it a sideline to take photos of potential police instigators at the DNC protests. What excuse can law enforcement make for planting undercover agitators in a peaceful assembly? Encouraging lawlessness is how Pinkerton thugs used to bust up efforts to organize unions.
They stand out like black-clad thumbs. And they’re making the crowd nervous. I’m still not sure these thug cops aren’t planted to be noticed on purpose. They serve as sheep dogs, moving the flock along with just the faintest of aggressive postures to trigger fear responses.
Now would you say they’ve been joined by a female officer of similar demeanor?
Isn’t this fun? Can you detect another TRIO moving along the same walkway? Hint, they’re closer to forty something.
It is rare for a presidential candidate to even notice the tactics and strategy of the labor unions in America, except to perhaps go after their endorsement. But Ralph Nader recently wrote a commentary about the struggle to get decent Health Care for all Americans, and analyzed the battle between 2 unions that are key components of that struggle.
The SEIU and CNA are the 2 largest unions that have organized nursing service workers in the US, workers that are certainly key one ons the road to getting us all decent medical care coverage. Check out Ralph Nader as he writes about the differences between the 2 unions.
He got it right on, too. Single-Payer Health Care in an Age of Two-Party Politics Sad, but I just don’t see a good future ahead for nurses if the SEIU business unionism gang wins this battle.
Each year in the US, the labor unions get smaller and weaker. What is the cause of this since life is certainly not getting easier for the working class of our country?
Will the unions finally just evaporate into thin air? At this time they are providing about ZERO protection for the population from the corporations and their corporate run government.
In this blog we have talked at some length about the problems of ‘Peace’ organizations run as small businesses rather than as democratic community organizations opposed to war. We have the same phenomena in the Labor Movement and with the same results which are the demobilization of people rather than their mobilization. Organizations with small paid office staffs that separate themselves from the people they supposedly are serving lead to organizations that do not inspire people to move themselves. Why should they? They have no control over the organizations they are in. Apathy, disinterest, and demobilization results.
We also have to factor in the corporate control over trade unions themselves, which is achieved through the Democratic Party. Once again, this process parallels what happens with the “peace’ groups run by paid office types. In both types of organizations, trade union and ‘Peace’, the Conservatives office milieu that is cultivated by business models of organization see themselves a lobbyists, and lobbyists to the politicians. That becomes their principle focus. These types often talk about ‘speaking truth to power’, but what they mean is that they should spend all their time in some form of lobbying of Democratic Party politicians.
As a result, demonstrations and independent organizing are deliberately kept from happening, and excess value is given to hobnobbing with the corporate press currying ‘reporting’ and visiting the offices of political insiders with pleas in hand. This is activity that is seen as needing paid organizers separate from community control, whose folk are only seen as potentially messing up this lobbying effort.
This method of using business models inside community organizations has paralyzed the antiwar movement, and has beaten down the Labor Movement into non-existence. Ads a result, unions can hardly be found any where actually engaging in organizing. In fact, they can hardly be found in actually hanging on to the membership that is left. What it will take is a completely different model of organization to ever be able to rebuild these organizations. That is not presently on the scene and it will not occur in an easy manner, but will require much sacrifice and effort.
BTW, that foto of workers at the head of this column is taken from a day labor company site. These are some of the many workers abandoned by business unionism’s failed model of unionism.
Why protest the G8 Summit July 7-9? Those hoodlums always look so determined. Here’s the rationale by the Emergency Exit Collective:
The 2008 G8 on Hokkaido, a Strategic Assessment
Emergency Exit Collective
Bristol, Mayday, 2008The authors of this document are a collection of activists, scholars, and writers currently based in the United States and Western Europe who have gotten to know and work with each other in the movement against capitalist globalization. We’re writing this at the request of some members of No! G8 Action Japan, who asked us for a broad strategic analysis of the state of struggle as we see it, and particularly, of the role of the G8, what it represents, the dangers and opportunities that may lie hidden in the moment. It is in no sense programmatic. Mainly, it is an attempt to develop tools that we hope will be helpful for organizers, or for anyone engaged in the struggle against global capital.
I
It is our condition as human beings that we produce our lives in common.II
Let us then try to see the world from the perspective of the planet’s commoners, taking the word in that sense: those whose most essential tradition is cooperation in the making and maintenance of human social life, yet who have had to do so under conditions of suffering and separation; deprived, ignored, devalued, divided into hierarchies, pitted against each other for our very physical survival. In one sense we are all commoners. But it’s equally true that just about everyone, at least in some ways, at some points, plays the role of the rulers—of those who expropriate, devalue and divide—or at the very least benefits from such divisions.Obviously some do more than others. It is at the peak of this pyramid that we encounter groups like the G8.
III
The G8’s perspective is that of the aristocrats, the rulers: those who command and maintain that global machinery of violence that defends existing borders and lines of separation: whether national borders with their detention camps for migrants, or property regimes, with their prisons for the poor. They live by constantly claiming title to the products of others collective creativity and labour, and in thus doing they create the poor; they create scarcity in the midst of plenty, and divide us on a daily basis; they create financial districts that loot resources from across the world, and in thus doing they turn the spirit of human creativity into a spiritual desert; close or privatize parks, public water taps and libraries, hospitals, youth centers, universities, schools, public swimming pools, and instead endlessly build shopping malls that channels convivial life into a means of commodity circulation; work toward turning global ecological catastrophe into business opportunities.These are the people who presume to speak in the name of the “international community” even as they hide in their gated communities or meet protected by phalanxes of riot cops. It is critical to bear in mind that the ultimate aim of their policies is never to create community but to introduce and maintain divisions that set common people at each other’s throats. The neoliberal project, which has been their main instrument for doing so for the last three decades, is premised on a constant effort either to uproot or destroy any communal or democratic system whereby ordinary people govern their own affairs or maintain common resources for the common good, or, to reorganize each tiny remaining commons as an isolated node in a market system in which livelihood is never guaranteed, where the gain of one community must necessarily be at the expense of others. Insofar as they are willing to appeal to high-minded principles of common humanity, and encourage global cooperation, only and exactly to the extent that is required to maintain this system of universal competition.
IV
At the present time, the G8—the annual summit of the leaders of “industrial democracies”—is the key coordinative institution charged with the task of maintaining this neoliberal project, or of reforming it, revising it, adapting it to the changing condition of planetary class relations. The role of the G8 has always been to define the broad strategic horizons through which the next wave of planetary capital accumulation can occur. This means that its main task is to answer the question of how 3?4 in the present conditions of multiple crises and struggles 3?4 to subordinate social relations among the producing commoners of the planet to capital’s supreme value: profit.V
Originally founded as the G7 in 1975 as a means of coordinating financial strategies for dealing with the ‘70s energy crisis, then expanded after the end of the Cold War to include Russia, its currently face a moment of profound impasse in the governance of planetary class relations: the greatest since the ‘70s energy crisis itself.VI
The ‘70s energy crisis represented the final death-pangs of what might be termed the Cold War settlement, shattered by a quarter century of popular struggle. It’s worth returning briefly to this history.The geopolitical arrangements put in place after World War II were above all designed to forestall the threat of revolution. In the immediate wake of the war, not only did much of the world lie in ruins, most of world’s population had abandoned any assumption about the inevitability of existing social arrangements. The advent of the Cold War had the effect of boxing movements for social change into a bipolar straightjacket. On the one hand, the former Allied and Axis powers that were later to unite in the G7 (the US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Japan)—the “industrialized democracies”, as they like to call themselves—engaged in a massive project of co-optation. Their governments continued the process, begun in the ‘30s, of taking over social welfare institutions that had originally been created by popular movements (from insurance schemes to public libraries), even to expand them, on condition that they now be managed by state-appointed bureaucracies rather than by those who used them, buying off unions and the working classes more generally with policies meant to guarantee high wages, job security and the promise of educational advance—all in exchange for political loyalty, productivity increases and wage divisions within national and planetary working class itself. The Sino-Soviet bloc—which effectively became a kind of junior partner within the overall power structure, and its allies remained to trap revolutionary energies into the task of reproducing similar bureaucracies elsewhere. Both the US and USSR secured their dominance after the war by refusing to demobilize, instead locking the planet in a permanent threat of nuclear annihilation, a terrible vision of absolute cosmic power.
VII
Almost immediately, though, this arrangement was challenged by a series of revolts from those whose work was required to maintain the system, but who were, effectively, left outside the deal: first, peasants and the urban poor in the colonies and former colonies of the Global South, next, disenfranchised minorities in the home countries (in the US, the Civil Rights movement, then Black Power), and finally and most significantly, by the explosion of the women’s movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—the revolt of that majority of humanity whose largely unremunerated labor made the very existence “the economy” possible. This appears to have been the tipping point.VIII
The problem was that the Cold War settlement was never meant to include everyone. It by definition couldn’t. Once matters reached tipping point, then, the rulers scotched the settlement. All deals were off. The oil shock was first edge of the counter-offensive, breaking the back of existing working class organizations, driving home the message that there was nothing guaranteed about prosperity. Under the aegis of the newly hatched G7, this counter-offensive involved a series of interwoven strategies that were later to give rise to what is known as neoliberalism.IX
These strategies resulted in what came to be known as “Structural Adjustment” both in the North and in the South, accompanied by trade and financial liberalization. This, in turn, made possible crucial structural changes in our planetary production in common extending the role of the market to discipline our lives and divide us into more and more polarized wage hierarchy. This involved:· In the immediate wake of ‘70s oil shock, petrodollars were recycled from OPEC into Northern banks that then lent them, at extortionate rates of interest, to developing countries of the Global South. This was the origin of the famous “Third World Debt Crisis.” The existence of this debt allowed institutions like the IMF to impose its monetarist orthodoxy on most of the planet for roughly twenty years, in the process, stripping away most of even those modest social protections that had been won by the world’s poor—large numbers of whom were plunged into a situation of absolute desperation.
· It also opened a period of new enclosures through the capitalist imposition of structural adjustment policies, manipulation of environmental and social catastrophes like war, or for that matter through the authoritarian dictates of “socialist” regimes. Through such means, large sections of the world’s population have over the past thirty years been dispossessed from resources previously held in common, either by dint of long traditions, or as the fruits of past struggles and past settlements.
· Through financial deregulation and trade liberalization, neoliberal capital, which emerged from the G7 strategies to deal with the 1970s crisis aimed thus at turning the “class war” in communities, factories, offices, streets and fields against the engine of competition, into a planetary “civil war”, pitting each community of commoners against every other community of commoners.
· Neoliberal capital has done this by imposing an ethos of “efficiency” and rhetoric of “lowering the costs of production” applied so broadly that mechanisms of competition have come to pervade every sphere of life. In fact these terms are euphemisms, for a more fundamental demand: that capital be exempt from taking any reduction in profit to finance the costs of reproduction of human bodies and their social and natural environments (which it does not count as costs) and which are, effectively, “exernalized” onto communities and nature.
· The enclosure of resources and entitlements won in previous generations of struggles both in the North and the South, in turn, created the conditions for increasing the wage hierarchies (both global and local), by which commoners work for capital—wage hierarchies reproduced economically through pervasive competition, but culturally, through male dominance, xenophobia and racism. These wage gaps, in turn, made it possible to reduce the value of Northern workers’ labour power, by introducing commodities that enter in their wage basket at a fraction of what their cost might otherwise have been. The planetary expansion of sweatshops means that American workers (for example) can buy cargo pants or lawn-mowers made in Cambodia at Walmart, or buy tomatoes grown by undocumented Mexican workers in California, or even, in many cases, hire Jamaican or Filipina nurses to take care of children and aged grandparents at such low prices, that their employers have been able to lower real wages without pushing most of them into penury. In the South, meanwhile, this situation has made it possible to discipline new masses of workers into factories and assembly lines, fields and offices, thus extending enormously capital’s reach in defining the terms—the what, the how, the how much—of social production.
· These different forms of enclosures, both North and South, mean that commoners have become increasingly dependent on the market to reproduce their livelihoods, with less power to resist the violence and arrogance of those whose priorities is only to seek profit, less power to set a limit to the market discipline running their lives, more prone to turn against one another in wars with other commoners who share the same pressures of having to run the same competitive race, but not the same rights and the same access to the wage. All this has meant a generalized state of precarity, where nothing can be taken for granted.
X
In turn, this manipulation of currency and commodity flows constituting neoliberal globalization became the basis for the creation of the planet’s first genuine global bureaucracy.· This was multi-tiered, with finance capital at the peak, then the ever-expanding trade bureaucracies (IMF, WTO, EU, World Bank, etc), then transnational corporations, and finally, the endless varieties of NGOs that proliferated throughout the period—almost all of which shared the same neoliberal orthodoxy, even as they substituted themselves for social welfare functions once reserved for states.
· The existence of this overarching apparatus, in turn, allowed poorer countries previously under the control of authoritarian regimes beholden to one or another side in the Cold War to adopt “democratic” forms of government. This did allow a restoration of formal civil liberties, but very little that could really merit the name of democracy (the rule of the “demos”, i.e., of the commoners). They were in fact constitutional republics, and the overwhelming trend during the period was to strip legislatures, that branch of government most open to popular pressure, of most of their powers, which were increasingly shifted to the executive and judicial branches, even as these latter, in turn, largely ended up enacting policies developed overseas, by global bureaucrats.
· This entire bureaucratic arrangement was justified, paradoxically enough, by an ideology of extreme individualism. On the level of ideas, neoliberalism relied on a systematic cooptation of the themes of popular struggle of the ‘60s: autonomy, pleasure, personal liberation, the rejection of all forms of bureaucratic control and authority. All these were repackaged as the very essence of capitalism, and the market reframed as a revolutionary force of liberation.
· The entire arrangement, in turn, was made possible by a preemptive attitude towards popular struggle. The breaking of unions and retreat of mass social movements from the late ‘70s onwards was only made possible by a massive shift of state resources into the machinery of violence: armies, prisons and police (secret and otherwise) and an endless variety of private “security services”, all with their attendant propaganda machines, which tended to increase even as other forms of social spending were cut back, among other things absorbing increasing portions of the former proletariat, making the security apparatus an increasingly large proportion of total social spending. This approach has been very successful in holding back mass opposition to capital in much of the world (especially West Europe and North America), and above all, in making it possible to argue there are no viable alternatives. But in doing so, has created strains on the system so profound it threatens to undermine it entirely.
XI
The latter point deserves elaboration. The element of force is, on any number of levels, the weak point of the system. This is not only on the constitutional level, where the question of how to integrate the emerging global bureaucratic apparatus, and existing military arrangements, has never been resolved. It is above all an economic problem. It is quite clear that the maintenance of elaborate security machinery is an absolute imperative of neoliberalism. One need only observe what happened with the collapse of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe: where one might have expected the Cold War victors to demand the dismantling of the army, secret police and secret prisons, and to maintain and develop the existing industrial base, in fact, what they did was absolutely the opposite: in fact, the only part of the industrial base that has managed fully to maintain itself has been the parts required to maintained the security apparatus itself! Critical too is the element of preemption: the governing classes in North America, for example, are willing to go to almost unimaginable lengths to ensure social movements never feel they are accomplishing anything. The current Gulf War is an excellent example: US military operations appear to be organized first and foremost to be protest-proof, to ensure that what happened in Vietnam (mass mobilization at home, widespread revolt within the army overseas) could never be repeated. This means above all that US casualties must always be kept to a minimum. The result are rules of engagement, and practices like the use of air power within cities ostensibly already controlled by occupation forces, so obviously guaranteed to maximize the killing of innocents and galvanizing hatred against the occupiers that they ensure the war itself cannot be won. Yet this approach can be taken as the very paradigm for neoliberal security regimes. Consider security arrangements around trade summits, where police are so determined prevent protestors from achieving tactical victories that they are often willing to effectively shut down the summits themselves. So too in overall strategy. In North America, such enormous resources are poured into the apparatus of repression, militarization, and propaganda that class struggle, labor action, mass movements seem to disappear entirely. It is thus possible to claim we have entered a new age where old conflicts are irrelevant. This is tremendously demoralizing of course for opponents of the system; but those running the system seem to find that demoralization so essential they don’t seem to care that the resultant apparatus (police, prisons, military, etc) is, effectively, sinking the entire US economy under its dead weight.XII
The current crisis is not primarily geopolitical in nature. It is a crisis of neoliberalism itself. But it takes place against the backdrop of profound geopolitical realignments. The decline of North American power, both economic and geopolitical has been accompanied by the rise of Northeast Asia (and to a increasing extent, South Asia as well). While the Northeast Asian region is still divided by painful Cold War cleavages—the fortified lines across the Taiwan straits and at the 38th parallel in Korea…—the sheer realities of economic entanglement can be expected to lead to a gradual easing of tensions and a rise to global hegemony, as the region becomes the new center of gravity of the global economy, of the creation of new science and technology, ultimately, of political and military power. This may, quite likely, be a gradual and lengthy process. But in the meantime, very old patterns are rapidly reemerging: China reestablishing relations with ancient tributary states from Korea to Vietnam, radical Islamists attempting to reestablish their ancient role as the guardians of finance and piety at the in the Central Asian caravan routes and across Indian Ocean, every sort of Medieval trade diaspora reemerging… In the process, old political models remerge as well: the Chinese principle of the state transcending law, the Islamic principle of a legal order transcending any state. Everywhere, we see the revival too of ancient forms of exploitation—feudalism, slavery, debt peonage—often entangled in the newest forms of technology, but still echoing all the worst abuses of the Middle Ages. A scramble for resources has begun, with US occupation of Iraq and saber-rattling throughout the surrounding region clearly meant (at least in part) to place a potential stranglehold the energy supply of China; Chinese attempts to outflank with its own scramble for Africa, with increasing forays into South America and even Eastern Europe. The Chinese invasion into Africa (not as of yet at least a military invasion, but already involving the movement of hundreds of thousands of people), is changing the world in ways that will probably be felt for centuries. Meanwhile, the nations of South America, the first victims of the “Washington consensus” have managed to largely wriggle free from the US colonial orbit, while the US, its forces tied down in the Middle East, has for the moment at least abandoned it, is desperately struggling to keep its grip Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean—its own “near abroad”.XIII
In another age all this might have led to war—that is, not just colonial occupations, police actions, or proxy wars (which are obviously already taking place), but direct military confrontations between the armies of major powers. It still could; accidents happen; but there is reason to believe that, when it comes to moments of critical decision, the loyalties of the global elites are increasingly to each other, and not to the national entities for whom they claim to speak. There is some compelling evidence for this.Take for example when the US elites panicked at the prospect of the massive budget surpluses of the late 1990s. As Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve at the time warned, if these were allowed to stand they would have flooded government coffers with so many trillions of dollars that it could only have lead to some form of creeping socialism, even, he predicted, to the government acquiring “equity stakes” in key US corporations. The more excitable of capitalism’s managers actually began contemplating scenarios where the capitalist system itself would be imperiled. The only possible solution was massive tax cuts; these were duly enacted, and did indeed manage to turn surpluses into enormous deficits, financed by the sale of treasury bonds to Japan and China. Conditions have thus now reached a point where it is beginning to look as if the most likely long term outcome for the US (its technological and industrial base decaying, sinking under the burden of its enormous security spending) will be to end up serve as junior partner and military enforcer for East Asia capital. Its rulers, or at least a significant proportion of them, would prefer to hand global hegemony to the rulers of China (provided the latter abandon Communism) than to return to any sort of New Deal compromise with their “own” working classes.
A second example lies in the origins of what has been called the current “Bretton Woods II” system of currency arrangements, which underline a close working together of some “surplus” and “deficit” countries within global circuits. The macroeconomic manifestation of the planetary restructuring outlined in XIX underlines both the huge US trade deficit that so much seem to worry many commentators, and the possibility to continually generate new debt instruments like the one that has recently resulted in the sub-prime crisis. The ongoing recycling of accumulated surplus of countries exporting to the USA such as China and oil producing countries is what has allowed financiers to create new credit instruments in the USA. Hence, the “deal” offered by the masters in the United States to its commoners has been this: ‘you, give us a relative social peace and accept capitalist markets as the main means through which you reproduce your own livelihoods, and we will give you access to cheaper consumption goods, access to credit for buying cars and homes, and access to education, health, pensions and social security through the speculative means of stock markets and housing prices.’ Similar compromises were reached in all the G8 countries.
Meanwhile, there is the problem of maintaining any sort of social peace with the hundreds of millions of unemployed, underemployed, dispossessed commoners currently swelling the shanty-towns of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as a result of ongoing enclosures (which have speeded up within China and India in particular, even as “structural adjustment policies” in Africa and Latin America have been derailed). Any prospect of maintaining peace in these circumstances would ordinarily require either extremely high rates of economic growth—which globally have not been forthcoming, since outside of China, growth rates in the developing world have been much lower than they were in the ‘50s, ‘60s, or even ‘70s—or extremely high levels of repression, lest matters descend into rebellion or generalized civil war. The latter has of course occurred in many parts of the world currently neglected by capital, but in favored regions, such as the coastal provinces of China, or “free trade” zones of India, Egypt, or Mexico, commoners are being offered a different sort of deal: industrial employment at wages that, while very low by international standards, are still substantially higher than anything currently obtainable in the impoverished countryside; and above all the promise, through the intervention of Western markets and (privatized) knowledge, of gradually improving conditions of living. While over the least few years wages in many such areas seem to be growing, thanks to the intensification of popular struggles, such gains are inherently vulnerable: the effect of recent food inflation has been to cut real wages back dramatically—and threaten millions with starvation.
What we really want to stress here, though, is that the long-term promise being offered to the South is just as untenable as the idea that US or European consumers can indefinitely expand their conditions of life through the use of mortgages and credit cards.
What’s being offered the new dispossessed is a transposition of the American dream. The idea is that the lifestyle and consumption patterns of existing Chinese, Indian, or Brazilian or Zambian urban middle classes (already modeled on Northern ones) will eventually become available to the children of today’s miners, maquila or plantation laborers, until, ultimately, everyone on earth is brought up to roughly the same level of consumption. Put in these terms, the argument is absurd. The idea that all six billion of us can become “middle class” is obviously impossible. First of all there is a simple problem of resources. It doesn’t matter how many bottles we recycle or how energy efficient are the light bulbs we use, there’s just no way the earth’s ecosystem can accommodate six billion people driving in private cars to work in air-conditioned cubicles before periodically flying off to vacation in Acapulco or Tahiti. To maintain the style of living and producing in common we now identify with “middle classness” on a planetary scale would require several additional planets.
This much has been pointed out repeatedly. But the second point is no less important. What this vision of betterment ultimately proposes is that it would be possible to build universal prosperity and human dignity on a system of wage labor. This is fantasy. Historically, wages are always the contractual face for system of command and degradation, and a means of disguising exploitation: expressing value for work only on condition of stealing value without work— and there is no reason to believe they could ever be anything else. This is why, as history has also shown, human beings will always avoid working for wages if they have any other viable option. For a system based on wage labor to come into being, such options must therefore be made unavailable. This in turn means that such systems are always premised on structures of exclusion: on the prior existence of borders and property regimes maintained by violence. Finally, historically, it has always proved impossible to maintain any sizeable class of wage-earners in relative prosperity without basing that prosperity, directly or indirectly, on the unwaged labor of others—on slave-labor, women’s domestic labor, the forced labor of colonial subjects, the work of women and men in peasant communities halfway around the world—by people who are even more systematically exploited, degraded, and immiserated. For that reason, such systems have always depended not only on setting wage-earners against each other by inciting bigotry, prejudice, hostility, resentment, violence, but also by inciting the same between men and women, between the people of different continents (“race”), between the generations.
From the perspective of the whole, then, the dream of universal middle class “betterment” must necessarily be an illusion constructed in between the Scylla of ecological disaster, and the Charybdis of poverty, detritus, and hatred: precisely, the two pillars of today’s strategic impasse faced by the G8.
XIV
How then do we describe the current impasse of capitalist governance?To a large degree, it is the effect of a sudden and extremely effective upswing of popular resistance—one all the more extraordinary considering the huge resources that had been invested in preventing such movements from breaking out.
On the one hand, the turn of the millennium saw a vast and sudden flowering of new anti-capitalist movements, a veritable planetary uprising against neoliberalism by commoners in Latin America, India, Africa, Asia, across the North Atlantic world’s former colonies and ultimately, within the cities of the former colonial powers themselves. As a result, the neoliberal project lies shattered. What came to be called the “anti-globalization” movement took aim at the trade bureaucracies—the obvious weak link in the emerging institutions of global administration—but it was merely the most visible aspect of this uprising. It was however an extraordinarily successful one. Not only was the WTO halted in its tracks, but all major trade initiatives (MAI, FTAA…) scuttled. The World Bank was hobbled and the power of the IMF over most of the world’s population, effectively, destroyed. The latter, once the terror of the Global South, is now a shattered remnant of its former self, reduced to selling off its gold reserves and desperately searching for a new global mission.
In many ways though spectacular street actions were merely the most visible aspects of much broader changes: the resurgence of labor unions, in certain parts of the world, the flowering of economic and social alternatives on the grassroots levels in every part of the world, from new forms of direct democracy of indigenous communities like El Alto in Bolivia or self-managed factories in Paraguay, to township movements in South Africa, farming cooperatives in India, squatters’ movements in Korea, experiments in permaculture in Europe or “Islamic economics” among the urban poor in the Middle East. We have seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid association, most of which have not even made it onto the radar of the global media, often have almost no ideological unity and which may not even be aware of each other’s existence, but nonetheless share a common desire to mark a practical break with capitalism, and which, most importantly, hold out the prospect of creating new forms of planetary commons that can—and in some cases are—beginning to knit together to provide the outlines of genuine alternative vision of what a non-capitalist future might look like.
The reaction of the world’s rulers was predictable. The planetary uprising had occurred during a time when the global security apparatus was beginning to look like it lacked a purpose, when the world threatened to return to a state of peace. The response—aided of course, by the intervention of some of the US’ former Cold War allies, reorganized now under the name of Al Qaeda—was a return to global warfare. But this too failed. The “war on terror”—as an attempt to impose US military power as the ultimate enforcer of the neoliberal model—has collapsed as well in the face of almost universal popular resistance. This is the nature of their “impasse”.
At the same time, the top-heavy, inefficient US model of military capitalism—a model created in large part to prevent the dangers of social movements, but which the US has also sought to export to some degree simply because of its profligacy and inefficiency, to prevent the rest of the world from too rapidly overtaking them—has proved so wasteful of resources that it threatens to plunge the entire planet into ecological and social crisis. Drought, disaster, famines, combine with endless campaigns of enclosure, foreclosure, to cast the very means of survival—food, water, shelter—into question for the bulk of the world’s population.
XV
In the rulers’ language the crisis understood, first and foremost, as a problem of regulating cash flows, of reestablishing, as they like to put it, a new “financial architecture”. Obviously they are aware of the broader problems. Their promotional literature has always been full of it. From the earliest days of the G7, through to the days after the Cold War, when Russia was added as a reward for embracing capitalism, they have always claimed that their chief concerns include· the reduction of global poverty
· sustainable environmental policies
· sustainable global energy policies
· stable financial institutions governing global trade and currency transactions
If one were to take such claims seriously, it’s hard to see their overall performance as anything but a catastrophic failure. At the present moment, all of these are in crisis mode: there are food riots, global warming, peak oil, and the threat of financial meltdown, bursting of credit bubbles, currency crises, a global credit crunch. [**Failure on this scale however, opens opportunities for the G8 themselves, as summit of the global bureaucracy, to reconfigure the strategic horizon. Therefore, it’s always with the last of these that they are especially concerned. ]The real problem, from the perspective of the G8, is one of reinvestment: particularly, of the profits of the energy sector, but also, now, of emerging industrial powers outside the circle of the G8 itself. The neoliberal solution in the ‘70s had been to recycle OPEC’s petrodollars into banks that would use it much of the world into debt bondage, imposing regimes of fiscal austerity that, for the most part, stopped development (and hence, the emergence potential rivals) in its tracks. By the ‘90s, however, much East Asia in particular had broken free of this regime. Attempts to reimpose IMF-style discipline during the Asian financial crisis of 1997 largely backfired. So a new compromise was found, the so-called Bretton Woods II: to recycle the profits from the rapidly expanding industrial economies of East Asia into US treasury debt, artificially supporting the value of the dollar and allowing a continual stream of cheap exports that, aided by the US housing bubble, kept North Atlantic economies afloat and buy off workers there with cheap oil and even cheaper consumer goods even as real wages shrank. This solution however soon proved a temporary expedient. Bush regime’s attempt to lock it in by the invasion of Iraq, which was meant to lead to the forced privatization of Iraqi oil fields, and, ultimately, of the global oil industry as a whole, collapsed in the face of massive popular resistance (just as Saddam Hussein’s attempt to introduce neoliberal reforms in Iraq had failed when he was still acting as American deputy in the ‘90s). Instead, the simultaneous demand for petroleum for both Chinese manufacturers and American consumers caused a dramatic spike in the price of oil. What’s more, rents from oil and gas production are now being used to pay off the old debts from the ‘80s (especially in Asia and Latin America, which have by now paid back their IMF debts entirely), and—increasingly—to create state-managed Sovereign Wealth Funds that have largely replaced institutions like the IMF as the institutions capable of making long-term strategic investments. The IMF, purposeless, tottering on the brink of insolvency, has been reduced to trying to come up with “best practices” guidelines for fund managers working for governments in Singapore, Seoul, and Abu Dhabi.
There can be no question this time around of freezing out countries like China, India, or even Brazil. The question for capital’s planners, rather, is how to channel these new concentrations of capital in such a way that they reinforce the logic of the system instead of undermining it.
XVI
How can this be done? This is where appeals to universal human values, to common membership in an “international community” come in to play. “We all must pull together for the good of the planet,” we will be told. The money must be reinvested “to save the earth.”To some degree this was always the G8 line: this is a group has been making an issue of climate change since 1983. Doing so was in one sense a response to the environmental movements of the ‘70s and ‘80s. The resultant emphasis on biofuels and “green energy” was from their point of view, the perfect strategy, seizing on an issue that seemed to transcend class, appropriating ideas and issues that emerged from social movements (and hence coopting and undermining especially their radical wings), and finally, ensuring such initiatives are pursued not through any form of democratic self-organization but “market mechanisms”—to effective make the sense of public interest productive for capitalism.
What we can expect now is a two-pronged attack. On the one hand, they will use the crisis to attempt to reverse the gains of past social movements: to put nuclear energy back on the table to deal with the energy crisis and global warming, or genetically modified foods to deal with the food crisis. Prime Minister Fukuda, the host of the current summit, for example, is already proposing the nuclear power is the “solution” to the global warming crisis, even as the German delegation resists. On the other, and even more insidiously, they will try once again to co-opt the ideas and solutions that have emerged from our struggles as a way of ultimately undermining them. Appropriating such ideas is simply what rulers do: the bosses brain is always under the workers’ hat. But the ultimate aim is to answer the intensification of class struggle, of the danger of new forms of democracy, with another wave of enclosures, to restore a situation where commoners’ attempts to create broader regimes of cooperation are stymied, and people are plunged back into mutual competition.
We can already see the outlines of how this might be done. There are already suggestions that Sovereign Wealth Funds put aside a certain (miniscule) proportion of their money for food aid, but only as tied to a larger project of global financial restructuring. The World Bank, largely bereft of its earlier role organizing dams and pipe-lines across the world, has been funding development in China’s poorer provinces, freeing the Chinese government to carry out similar projects in Southeast Asia, Africa, and even Latin America (where, of course, they cannot effectively be held to any sort of labor or environmental standards). There is the possibility of a new class deal in China itself, whose workers can be allowed higher standards of living if new low wage zones are created elsewhere—for instance, Africa (the continent where struggles over maintaining the commons have been most intense in current decades)—with the help of Chinese infrastructural projects. Above of all, money will be channeled into addressing climate change, into the development of alternative energy, which will require enormous investments, in such a way as to ensure that whatever energy resources do become important in this millennium, they can never be democratized—that the emerging notion of a petroleum commons, that energy resources are to some degree a common patrimony meant primarily to serve the community as a whole, that is beginning to develop in parts of the Middle East and South America—not be reproduced in whatever comes next.
Since this will ultimately have to be backed up by the threat of violence, the G8 will inevitably have to struggle with how to (yet again) rethink enforcement mechanisms. The latest move , now that the US “war on terror” paradigm has obviously failed, would appear to be a return to NATO, part of a reinvention of the “European security architecture” being proposed at the upcoming G8 meetings in Italy in 2009 on the 60th anniversary of NATO’s foundation—but part of a much broader movement of the militarization of social conflict, projecting potential resource wars, demographic upheavals resulting from climate change, and radical social movements as potential military problems to be resolved by military means. Opposition to this new project is already shaping up as the major new European mobilization for the year following the current G-8.
XVII
While the G-8 sit at the pinnacle of a system of violence, their preferred idiom is monetary. Their impulse whenever possible is to translate all problems into money, financial structures, currency flows—a substance whose movements they carefully monitor and control.Money, on might say, is their poetry—a poetry whose letters are written in our blood. It is their highest and most abstract form of expression, their way of making statements about the ultimate truth of the world, even if it operates in large part by making things disappear. How else could it be possible to argue—no, to assume as a matter of common sense—that the love, care, and concern of a person who tends to the needs of children, teaching, minding, helping them to become decent , thoughtful, human beings, or who grows and prepares food, is worth ten thousand times less than someone who spends the same time designing a brand logo, moving abstract blips across a globe, or denying others health care.
The role of money however has changed profoundly since 1971 when the dollar was delinked from gold. This has created a profound realignment of temporal horizons. Once money could be said to be primarily congealed results of past profit and exploitation. As capital, it was dead labor. Millions of indigenous Americans and Africans had their lives pillaged and destroyed in the gold mines in order to be rendered into value. The logic of finance capital, of credit structures, certainly always existed as well (it is at least as old as industrial capital; possibly older), but in recent decades these logic of financial capital has come to echo and re-echo on every level of our lives. In the UK 97% of money in circulation is debt, in the US, 98%. Governments run on deficit financing, wealthy economies on consumer debt, the poor are enticed with microcredit schemes, debts are packaged and repackaged in complex financial derivatives and traded back and forth. Debt however is simply a promise, the expectation of future profit; capital thus increasingly brings the future into the present—a future that, it insists, must always be the same in nature, even if must also be greater in magnitude, since of course the entire system is premised on continual growth. Where once financiers calculated and traded in the precise measure of our degradation, having taken everything from us and turned it into money, now money has flipped, to become the measure of our future degradation—at the same time as it binds us to endlessly working in the present.
The result is a strange moral paradox. Love, loyalty, honor, commitment—to our families, for example, which means to our shared homes, which means to the payment of monthly mortgage debts—becomes a matter of maintaining loyalty to a system which ultimately tells us that such commitments are not a value in themselves. This organization of imaginative horizons, which ultimately come down to a colonization of the very principle of hope, has come to supplement the traditional evocation of fear (of penury, homelessness, joblessness, disease and death). This colonization paralyzes any thought of opposition to a system that almost everyone ultimately knows is not only an insult to everything they really cherish, but a travesty of genuine hope, since, because no system can really expand forever on a finite planet, everyone is aware on some level that in the final analysis they are dealing with a kind of global pyramid scheme, what we are ultimately buying and selling is the real promise of global social and environmental apocalypse.
XVIII
Finally then we come to the really difficult, strategic questions. Where are the vulnerabilities? Where is hope? Obviously we have no certain answers here. No one could. But perhaps the proceeding analysis opens up some possibilities that anti-capitalist organizers might find useful to explore.One thing that might be helpful is to rethink our initial terms. Consider communism. We are used to thinking of it as a total system that perhaps existed long ago, and to the desire to bring about an analogous system at some point in the future—usually, at whatever cost. It seems to us that dreams of communist futures were never purely fantasies; they were simply projections of existing forms of cooperation, of commoning, by which we already make the world in the present. Communism in this sense is already the basis of almost everything, what brings people and societies into being, what maintains them, the elemental ground of all human thought and action. There is absolutely nothing utopian here. What is utopian, really, is the notion that any form of social organization, especially capitalism, could ever exist that was not entirely premised on the prior existence of communism. If this is true, the most pressing question is simply how to make that power visible, to burst forth, to become the basis for strategic visions, in the face of a tremendous and antagonistic power committed to destroying it—but at the same time, ensuring that despite the challenge they face, they never again become entangled with forms of violence of their own that make them the basis for yet another tawdry elite. After all, the solidarity we extend to one another, is it not itself a form of communism? And is it not so above because it is not coerced?
Another thing that might be helpful is to rethink our notion of crisis. There was a time when simply describing the fact that capitalism was in a state of crisis, driven by irreconcilable contradictions, was taken to suggest that it was heading for a cliff. By now, it seems abundantly clear that this is not the case. Capitalism is always in a crisis. The crisis never goes away. Financial markets are always producing bubbles of one sort or another; those bubbles always burst, sometimes catastrophically; often entire national economies collapse, sometimes the global markets system itself begins to come apart. But every time the structure is reassembled. Slowly, painfully, dutifully, the pieces always end up being put back together once again.
Perhaps we should be asking: why?
In searching for an answer, it seems to us, we might also do well to put aside another familiar habit of radical thought: the tendency to sort the world into separate levels—material realities, the domain of ideas or “consciousness”, the level of technologies and organizations of violence—treating these as if these were separate domains that each work according to separate logics, and then arguing which “determines” which. In fact they cannot be disentangled. A factory may be a physical thing, but the ownership of a factory is a social relation, a legal fantasy that is based partly on the belief that law exists, and partly on the existence of armies and police. Armies and police on the other hand exist partly because of factories providing them with guns, vehicles, and equipment, but also, because those carrying the guns and riding in the vehicles believe they are working for an abstract entity they call “the government”, which they love, fear, and ultimately, whose existence they take for granted by a kind of faith, since historically, those armed organizations tend to melt away immediately the moment they lose faith that the government actually exists. Obviously exactly the same can be said of money. It’s value is constantly being produced by eminently material practices involving time clocks, bank machines, mints, and transatlantic computer cables, not to mention love, greed, and fear, but at the same time, all this too rests on a kind of faith that all these things will continue to interact in more or less the same way. It is all very material, but it also reflects a certain assumption of eternity: the reason that the machine can always be placed back together is, simply, because everyone assumes it must. This is because they cannot realistically imagine plausible alternatives; they cannot imagine plausible alternatives because of the extraordinarily sophisticated machinery of preemptive violence that ensure any such alternatives are uprooted or contained (even if that violence is itself organized around a fear that itself rests on a similar form of faith.) One cannot even say it’s circular. It’s more a kind of endless, unstable spiral. To subvert the system is then, to intervene in such a way that the whole apparatus begins to spin apart.
XIX
It appears to us that one key element here—one often neglected in revolutionary strategy—is the role of the global middle classes. This is a class that, much though it varies from country (in places like the US and Japan, overwhelming majorities consider themselves middle class; in, say, Cambodia or Zambia, only very small percentages), almost everywhere provides the key constituency of the G8 outside of the ruling elite themselves. It has become a truism, an article of faith in itself in global policy circles, that national middle class is everywhere the necessary basis for democracy. In fact, middle classes are rarely much interested in democracy in any meaningful sense of that word (that is, of the self-organization or self-governance of communities). They tend to be quite suspicious of it. Historically, middle classes have tended to encourage the establishment of constitutional republics with only limited democratic elements (sometimes, none at all). This is because their real passion is for a “betterment”, for the prosperity and advance of conditions of life for their children—and this betterment, since it is as noted above entirely premised on structures of exclusion, requires “security”. Actually the middle classes depend on security on every level: personal security, social security (various forms of government support, which even when it is withdrawn from the poor tends to be maintained for the middle classes), security against any sudden or dramatic changes in the nature of existing institutions. Thus, politically, the middle classes are attached not to democracy (which, especially in its radical forms, might disrupt all this), but to the rule of law. In the political sense, then, being “middle class” means existing outside the notorious “state of exception” to which the majority of the world’s people are relegated. It means being able to see a policeman and feel safer, not even more insecure. This would help explain why within the richest countries, the overwhelming majority of the population will claim to be “middle class” when speaking in the abstract, even if most will also instantly switch back to calling themselves “working class” when talking about their relation to their boss.That rule of law, in turn, allows them to live in that temporal horizon where the market and other existing institutions (schools, governments, law firms, real estate brokerages…) can be imagined as lasting forever in more or less the same form. The middle classes can thus be defined as those who live in the eternity of capitalism. (The elites don’t; they live in history, they don’t assume things will always be the same. The disenfranchized don’t; they don’t have the luxury; they live in a state of precarity where little or nothing can safely be assumed.) Their entire lives are based on assuming that the institutional forms they are accustomed to will always be the same, for themselves and their grandchildren, and their “betterment” will be proportional to the increase in the level of monetary wealth and consumption. This is why every time global capital enters one of its periodic crises, every time banks collapse, factories close, and markets prove unworkable, or even, when the world collapses in war, the managers and dentists will tend to support any program that guarantees the fragments will be dutifully pieced back together in roughly the same form—even if all are, at the same time, burdened by at least a vague sense that the whole system is unfair and probably heading for catastrophe.
XIX
The strategic question then is, how to shatter this sense of inevitability? History provides one obvious suggestion. The last time the system really neared self-destruction was in the 1930s, when what might have otherwise been an ordinary turn of the boom-bust cycle turned into a depression so profound that it took a world war to pull out of it. What was different? The existence of an alternative: a Soviet economy that, whatever its obvious brutalities, was expanding at breakneck pace at the very moment market systems were undergoing collapse. Alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form; this is why it becomes an absolute imperative of global governance that even small viable experiments in other ways of organizing communities be wiped out, or, if that is not possible, that no one knows about them.If nothing else, this explains the extraordinary importance attached to the security services and preemption of popular struggle. Commoning, where it already exists, must be made invisible. Alternatives— Zapatistas in Chiapas, APPO in Oaxaca, worker-managed factories in Argentina or Paraguay, community-run water systems in South Africa or Bolivia, living alternatives of farming or fishing communities in India or Indonesia, or a thousand other examples—must be made to disappear, if not squelched or destroyed, then marginalized to the point they seem irrelevant, ridiculous. If the managers of the global system are so determined to do this they are willing to invest such enormous resources into security apparatus that it threatens to sink the system entirely, it is because they are aware that they are working with a house of cards. That the principle of hope and expectation on which capitalism rests would evaporate instantly if almost any other principle of hope or expectation seemed viable.
The knowledge of alternatives, then, is itself a material force.
Without them, of course, the shattering of any sense of certainty has exactly the opposite effect. It becomes pure precarity, an insecurity so profound that it becomes impossible to project oneself in history in any form, so that the one-time certainties of middle class life itself becomes a kind of utopian horizon, a desperate dream, the only possible principle of hope beyond which one cannot really imagine anything. At the moment, this seems the favorite weapon of neoliberalism: whether promulgated through economic violence, or the more direct, traditional kind.
One form of resistance that might prove quite useful here – and is already being discussed in some quarters – are campaigns against debt itself. Not demands for debt forgiveness, but campaigns of debt resistance.
XX
In this sense the great slogan of the global justice movement, “another world is possible”, represents the ultimate threat to existing power structures. But in another sense we can even say we have already begun to move beyond that. Another world is not merely possible. It is inevitable. On the one hand, as we have pointed out, such a world is already in existence in the innumerable circuits of social cooperation and production in common based on different values than those of profit and accumulation through which we already create our lives, and without which capitalism itself would be impossible. On the other, a different world is inevitable because capitalism—a system based on infinite material expansion—simply cannot continue forever on a finite world. At some point, if humanity is to survive at all, we will be living in a system that is not based on infinite material expansion. That is, something other than capitalism.The problem is there is no absolute guarantee that ‘something’ will be any better. It’s pretty easy to imagine “other worlds” that would be even worse. We really don’t have any idea what might happen. To what extent will the new world still organized around commoditization of life, profit, and pervasive competition? Or a reemergence of even older forms of hierarchy and degradation? How, if we do overcome capitalism directly, by the building and interweaving of new forms of global commons, do we protect ourselves against the reemergence of new forms of hierarchy and division that we might not now even be able to imagine?
It seems to us that the decisive battles that will decide the contours of this new world will necessarily be battles around values. First and foremost are values of solidarity among commoners. Since after all, every rape of a woman by a man or the racist murder of an African immigrant by a European worker is worth a division in capital’s army.
Similarly, imagining our struggles as value struggles might allow us to see current struggles over global energy policies and over the role of money and finance today as just an opening salvo of an even larger social conflict to come. For instance, there’s no need to demonize petroleum, for example, as a thing in itself. Energy products have always tended to play the role of a “basic good”, in the sense that their production and distribution becomes the physical basis for all other forms of human cooperation, at the same time as its control tends to organize social and even international relations. Forests and wood played such a role from the time of the Magna Carta to the American Revolution, sugar did so during the rise of European colonial empires in the 17th and 18th centuries, fossil fuels do so today. There is nothing intrinsically good or bad about fossil fuel. Oil is simply solar radiation, once processed by living beings, now stored in fossil form. The question is of control and distribution. This is the real flaw in the rhetoric over “peak oil”: the entire argument is premised on the assumption that, for the next century at least, global markets will be the only means of distribution. Otherwise the use of oil would depend on needs, which would be impossible to predict precisely because they depend on the form of production in common we adopt. The question thus should be: how does the anti-capitalist movement peak the oil? How does it become the crisis for a system of unlimited expansion?
It is the view of the authors of this text that the most radical planetary movements that have emerged to challenge the G8 are those that direct us towards exactly these kind of questions. Those which go beyond merely asking how to explode the role money plays in framing our horizons, or even challenging the assumption of the endless expansion of “the economy”, to ask why we assume something called “the economy” even exists, and what other ways we can begin imagining our material relations with one another. The planetary women’s movement, in its many manifestations, has and continues to play perhaps the most important role of all here, in calling for us to reimagine our most basic assumptions about work, to remember that the basic business of human life is not actually the production of communities but the production, the mutual shaping of human beings. The most inspiring of these movements are those that call for us to move beyond a mere challenge to the role of money to reimagine value: to ask ourselves how can we best create a situation where everyone is secure enough in their basic needs to be able to pursue those forms of value they decide are ultimately important to them. To move beyond a mere challenge to the tyranny of debt to ask ourselves what we ultimately owe to one another and to our environment. That recognize that none this needs to invented from whole cloth. It’s all already there, immanent in the way everyone, as commoners, create the world together on a daily basis. And that asking these questions is never, and can never be, an abstract exercise, but is necessarily part of a process by which we are already beginning to knit these forms of commons together into new forms of global commons that will allow entirely new conceptions of our place in history.
It is to those already engaged in such a project that we offer these initial thoughts on our current strategic situation.
Some things come around every four years like leap years. The Olympics, US presidential elections, and the Gay Marriage wedge issue bugger-boo.
I remember in the deluge of election 2004, feeling a nagging frustration that the preoccupation of gay and lesbian Americans over the right to wed might have contributed to George W. Bush gaining his second term. As a heterosexual white male it was easy for me to consider their sexual equality struggle ill-timed. Was I right? Of course not. The quest to legitimize gay unions is doubtless as old as [gay] man and has been gathering steam in modern times just as its foes are running out of excuses. In America religious bigots against gay unions, abetted by insurance companies who don’t want to pay partner benerfits, catch their wind ON ELECTION YEARS apparently, and stage their outcry before November elections, whether the candidates at hand are divided on the issue or not.
Below, we reprint 2 speeches made in Mexico City Friday, just yesterday, April 4, 2008. The speech Greed … by Cindy Sheehan, and another speech by Cynthia McKinney that is without title.
Cynthia McKinney
Segundo Encuentro Continental de los Trabajadores
Mexico City, Mexico, April 4, 2008
Brothers and Sisters in the Movement
I am happy to be here in Mexico City where the people all over Latin
America are on the move:On the move for justice, self-determination, and peace.
I love that you have created a Power to the People movement with your
votes that is stronger than the mightiest military force on the
planet!With the power of your vote you have taken your countries back.
Now, all we have to do is to count all the votes in the United States
and Mexico!In the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, an estimated six million
people went to the polls and voted, but their votes weren’t counted.In 2000, and again in 2004, Democrats helped to install Republicans
into power rather than fight for the victory that the voters had
given them.As a result of this kind of collusion, the Democratic majority in our
Congress has failed to impeach Bush. They have failed to institute a
livable wage, stop the multiple wars the U.S. is fighting right now,
and they have failed to protect human rights anywhere in the world,
including even at home.That’s why I left the Democratic Party.
I refused to become complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity,
crimes against the peace, spying on the American people, and ripping
our Bill of Rights to shreds.And so I declared my independence from the U.S. leadership that gave
us tax cuts for the wealthy and a country 53 trillion dollars in debt
and Hurricane Katrina.To my brothers and sisters at this Conference and in the United
States, I say:Hands off Haiti!
Hands off Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Argentina now making a claim for
the Falklands!Hands off Venezuela and Ecuador!
No to Plan Mexico; No to Plan Colombia! Hands off Pemex!
And finally, it was on this date, 40 years ago, that Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was murdered.We now know that Dr. King was murdered as part of a conspiracy that
included his own government. Hatched in the bowels of the Pentagon,
where so many other regime change operations have been hatched, the
government of the United States launched regime change at home on
Black America. We blacks in the United States have long known the
pain and the consequences of having authentic leadership snatched
from us; of having someone else pick our leaders before we pick them
ourselves.I am proud to join this international movement for
self-determination; for justice and for peace. Despite today’s
difficulties, we must never let our dream be deferred. We in the U.S.
gain inspiration from your successes here so we can carry the
struggle to every nook and cranny of the United States.Que vivan los pueblos de america!
Cindy Sheehan -Key Note Speech “GREED”
Segundo Encuentro Continental de los Trabajadores
Mexico City, Mexico, April 4, 2008
First of all I would like to thank the International Labor Council and the Electrician’s Union for such a warm welcome and I would like to assure you all, my brothers and sisters that I represent millions of North Americans who are in solidarity with you, because we are also plagued with an illegitimate President!
Once, a couple of years ago, I was getting a pedicure in the deep south in the USA, of all places, and my pedicurist was a Latina from Mexico. She lived two hours from where she and her husband owned the shop and she left her young son home with her mother-in-law for six days a week, while she and her husband toiled at the shop. She was very sweet and sympathetic to my situation as a mother whose son was killed in Iraq, but she looked up from my feet at one point and asked me: “Why do you Americans have to have everything. If you all weren’t so greedy, I could still live in my country with my family.” Greedy? Hmm? Her earnest and passionate comment gave me much to think about.
Dictionary.com defines greed as the rapacious desire, especially for wealth or possessions
Greed is also one of the seven deadly sins and I know more than most Americans that the same twisted drive for, not just a fair share of prosperity, but ALL the prosperity is what caused my son’s death and, similarly, my nail persons’ need to have to leave the beloved country of her birth.
Greed is not what drives Latin Americans to try and cross the border to go north, existential necessity is; but corporate-capitalist greed is what makes the dangerous journey necessary. Building walls on the border is not the way to solve the immigration “problem” just as invading two countries and killing innocent civilians was not the way to solve the terrorism problem. Healing the systems of oppression that cause immigration is the way to solve the “problem.” People in Latin America want the right to not have to emigrate. Like my pedicurist, they want to be able to make a good living in their own countries.
In a study done by the Economic Policy Institute in 2004, it was found that 5% of the US population owns 58% of the wealth and only 1.2% of the wealth is owned by 40% of our citizenry. I am sure if a similar study were done, this disparity would be much wider in these days of irresponsible corporate bailouts while Americans are losing their homes at the rate of 250,000 a month and the war economy has made the fat cats astronomical profits while robbing our communities of essential services and needed infrastructure improvements. The Milton Friedman model of disaster capitalism, which Naomi Klein exposes so well in her book, Shock Doctrine, is responsible for economic disaster from New Orleans to Baghdad and the basic underlying root sickness of this is greed.
Statistics can be easily manipulated as we know the statistics reporting the “success” of free trade agreements such as NAFTA are. Facts, numbers and experiential data cannot be so easily manipulated, though. In the years since the Clinton administration (with the support of my Congressional opponent, Nancy Pelosi) foisted NAFTA on our continent, both Mexico and the US have lost farmland and good paying jobs. Many of our manufacturing jobs have gone overseas to Indonesia or China and the Wal Martization of our cultures creeps up on us unchecked and corporations such as Wal Mart have been the main beneficiaries of NAFTA to the detriment of working class people in both countries.
What can we do to improve the situation and reclaim our prosperity from the control of the 21st Century Robber Barons and slave-traders?
First of all, “free” trade treaties should be replaced with fair trade agreements. Small business owners and workers should be protected from being crushed under the heels of multi-national corporations. Any agreement should have protection for workers. A worker who makes shoes, computers, cars, or grows crops should make the same livable wage in Mexico or China, as they would in America. There would be no incentive for off-shoring jobs or relocating manufacturing plants if workers in China made the same wages as workers in America.
All workers should be guaranteed the basic human right of being able to belong to a union. Unions elevate the conditions of workers and families and should remain a strong political force for good and not allow them selves to be beaten into submission or weakness by governmental or corporate pressure. (But aren’t the corporations and governments so intimately linked these days in their fascistic oppression of us average citizens?)
The fragile ecology of our planet must be protected in these agreements and the same standard of sustainability and environmental protections should be uniformly recognized and practiced globally.
Small farmers should be protected from the encroachment of “agri-giants” and their lands protected from the eminent domain of greed.
I know there are many more solutions and a comprehensive platform of “No human left behind” would guarantee the rights of all humans to safe and plentiful food and drinking water; shelter; good and free education; sustainable employment; security and safety from US corporate-militarism; and the basic rights that were guaranteed of: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
For far too long, the United States of America has greedily gobbled up too much of global wealth and resources and our chickens of greed and violence are coming home to roost. As alarming as these trends are, we North Americans are only slightly beginning to feel the ravages of what we have been manufacturing and exporting for years: death and destruction. A new paradigm of global sharing and caring must be implemented and today is the beginning.
Today, as we commemorate and mourn the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr who was assassinated 40 years ago in Memphis, Tn; and as I mourn the murder by the war machine of my son Casey, who was killed in Sadr City, Baghdad 4 years ago today—we must renew our commitment to peace and justice to honor their sacrifices and the sacrifices of others who have also gone before us. We just celebrated the birthday of Cesar Chavez who dedicated his life to the most marginalized and exploited of workers and I am constantly inspired by the devotion of people like Dr. King, Casey and Cesar Chavez andI hope that we all take inspiration to rededicate our lives to peace and justice.
We must build upon the coalition that we have gathered here in this beautiful and historic place to include every group that we are a part of. We can no longer say that we have to focus on “one” issue, because all the issues are the same. My country is waging deadly and lost-cause occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and so many groups in my country say that we have to focus on bringing our troops home and not become “distracted” by other issues. Profound economic inequality and unchecked greed is the root cause of these occupations as it is the root cause of the occupation of Palestine by Israel and all the violence in the world’s hot-spots today.
In our coalition, we must educate our brothers and sisters that equalizing prosperity and neutralizing greed are the solutions to these acute problems.
I also stand here in solidarity with my brothers and sisters who are working in the Legitimate Government of Mexico to prevent the illegitimate government from privatizing PEMEX. The oil of Mexico belongs to the people of Mexico, and if I can’t be here with you all to block the crimes with my body then I will definitely be with you in spirit.
Thank you for allowing me to speak. It has been an honor to be here.
As crowds collected to see the parade yesterday, vultures circled Acacia Park to collect signatures for their RIGHT-TO-WORK [FOR LESS] BALLOT INITIATIVE. Sure enough, they were describing it as a proposal to give employees the right to decide if they want a union. As opposed to a law which would further hamper the ability to organize unions, backed nationally by corporate interests, and backed locally by American Furniture Warehouse slime-ball Jake Jabs. The two petitioners I saw were young men, who spoke glibly when I interjected that their proposal would do the opposite of what they claimed. The UFCW hopes you can call their FRAUD WATCH HOTLINE if you witness this kind of misrepresentation. Call 303.936.0766 to report fraudulent petitioners. I would snap a cellphone pic of the miscreants and threaten to post it if they do not amend their sales pitch.
All around America there are bleeding hearted liberals running small businesses… small social service businesses. As a general rule, too, liberals don’t run businesses very well. They’re too damn dumbly soft and sweet, that’s why. So we can begin to understand why all these ‘reform groups’ (like the local area’s Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission.. for just one example) don’t make much profit for the people they claim to be serving (even as they keep them out in droves from their social advocacy groups, run as small ‘businesses’).
Here is the type of thing I am talking about,
…from an article appearing in The Nation…
‘Check off the boxes, copy the paragraph from two years ago, mail it in. As an election year approaches, I again face the piles of questionnaires that progressive organizations use to evaluate public officials. Environmentalists, feminists, campaign finance reformers, housing advocates and labor unions have all come to rely on these lists of our positions–often on issues that never even come up for a vote. It should come as no surprise that, for the most part, all we get out of this cumbersome process is a long line of “checklist liberals” who answer correctly but do little to advance the progressive causes that underlie the questionnaires.’
The rest of this article can be found on the liberal’s very own Nation Magazine at Transforming the Liberal Checklist
OK, OK! So the rest of the article is not very good, much like the liberal organizations themselves, and The Nation Magazine is not very good, either. It was still a good and insightful first paragraph of an article at least!
And the commentary reminded me of all those fund raising letters, free stamps with animal pictures on them, and ‘surveys’ to find out my learned opinions, etc. Reminds me of all the wasted time sitting in meetings where bleeding hearted liberals talk about running THEIR small businesses. You see? The bleeding hearted liberals are most always the ‘owners’ of small socially aware businesses calling themselves community’ groups, which these groups having small office staffs then try to run the group like it was a church or tiny corner store of some sort.
Yes, the small office staff always begin to behave as if they were real owners of the store, much in the same way that some convenience store minimum wage workers will try to stop a robber of some sort or other, by risking their own lives over pennies that supposedly belong to the stock owners instead. These small would be owners can snarl and bite quite hard if given an opportunity to do so. They often overpower the petty ‘robbers’ of their unit with their forceful indignations than can border on madness of sorts. Some times they get popped for being so dimwitted, too.
So what to do about all the PEACE and GREEN and SOCIAL JUSTICE groups’ ‘leaders’ acting in our name? They operate much as the Democratic Party does, which is to impede rather than progress the people forward.
The runners of these small businesses calling themselves ‘peace and justice’ outfits, most often see themselves not as an elected group of leaders for exploited workers struggling for justice and peace, but as a group of independent networkers and business operators, forcefully headed for making more profit for their own personal businesses, the social groups. They spend more time being angry at any of the lower levels of the ‘co-ops’ managed by themselves than at the power elites that cause the social injustice they are supposedly fighting against. When angered by the lower elements, their faces can become quite bulldog-like.
Recently a certain word has come into great popularity with this sort of manager owner of social cause… that word being the word SUSTAINABILITY. Why so popular this word, and with these people? It is because it strikes a chord with the small manager/owner and his small manager/owner mindset. They want to know if their small business is SUSTAINABLE and if their position as head of the operation is SUSTAINABLE most of all? SUSTAINABILITY is their biggest goal of them all. And now of course, corporate America wants to help them become SUSTAINABLE.
This sort of group run as a small business with paid staff who think themselves owners is a very huge impediment to any real social action taking place. The main technique of ‘the owners’ who are salaried is simply to eat up other people’s time. They know that they can out last them in energy by simply doing this, and can come out on top when actual decisions are to be made. In other words, they are well positioned to stifle.
Like owners of any corporation, ‘the owners’ of supposed social groups get paid real money for their time while the volunteers do not. Is this the model of a social action group that will get things done? Most certainly not. Unfortunately though, it is the model structure for liberals and their do-nothing liberalism everywhere today in America…. small groups with a paid ‘leader’ or two, spouting ‘good things’, and doing next to nothing besides appearing to be seeminglygood people.
At the recent meeting of the executive board of the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission, it was totally noticeable that nobody there had anything of a working class background. In fact, the idea of justice for workers is totally absent from this group with ‘justice’ in its name. Being so church-like, this group throws the word in as if it were a bone to the lower classes so next to being sweet dogs in the eyes of these nice people. They were about as working class in composition as the ACLU is!… to give an idea of what the meeting was actually like. Nobody was ‘angry’, just sad. Or happy when seemingly a crumb from real power is thrown in their direction. And at this meeting it had been.
The City of Colorado Springs was going to let the group march in the St Pat’s Day Parade! All Hallelujah, Jesus! But that is about more than this little essay can talk about for the time being. Just let it be said, that liberals running small businesses that should be action groups make my heart bleed. Bleeding hearted liberals make poor businessmen and the conservative business men will tear them to part. Antiwar groups should not be run like they are small businesses. Probably enough said at this point.
Socialism does not equal tyranny, unlike the claims and demagoguery of the capitalists. A true democratic Socialism and fair market system is a natural course for human society. It is free of predatory and parasitic capitalist schemes to dominate and exploit everyone and everything. It is decentralization of power distributed to citizens, as opposed to the fascist model that benefits from centralization and concentration of power. It can disperse wealth and enrich citizens if they can be de-programmed of their false worship and idolization of wealth as success and exploitation as the norm.
And it doesn’t have to be an exact model of Marx or Engels or Trotsky or Lenin. But it should include the takeover of production from the fascists with community worker councils in control. And the shift away from enslavement of the worlds workers by the bankers and through globalisation. And control of currency back to the citizens. The capitalists are middlemen who get in our way of a just fair society that we have the ability to create. It is they who have created all of the false propaganda about Socialism. They who choke by way of embargoes, sanctions, and political disruption, any countries attempt toward a just socialist society. Their domination as a minority over the majority cannot and should not stand any longer.
Here’s a good read. Dated but still valid. Enjoy. Also enjoy the many thorough and insightful articles on www.wsws.org
Socialism and Democracy
James P. Cannon gave the following talk to a meeting at the Socialist Workers Party’s West Coast Vacation School, September 1, 1957. It was first published in the Fall 1957 International Socialist Review.
Comrades, I am glad to be here with you today, and to accept your invitation to speak on socialism and democracy. Before we can make real headway in the discussion of other important parts of the program, we have to find agreement on what we mean by socialism and what we mean by democracy, and how they are related to each other, and what we are going to say to the American workers about them.
Strange as it may seem, an agreement on these two simple, elementary points, as experience has already demonstrated, will not be arrived at easily. The confusion and demoralization created by Stalinism, and the successful exploitation of this confusion by the ruling capitalists of this country and all their agents and apologists, still hang heavily over all sections of the workers’ movement.
Shakespeare’s Mark Antony reminded us that evil quite often outlives its authors. That is true in the present case also. Stalin is dead; but the crippling influence of Stalinism on the minds of a whole generation of people who considered themselves socialists or communists lives after Stalin.
Now, of course, the Stalinists and their apologists have not created all the confusion in this country about the meaning of socialism, at least not directly. At every step the Stalinist work of befuddlement and demoralization, of debasing words into their opposite meanings, has been supported by reciprocal action of the same kind by the ruling capitalists and their apologists. They have never failed to take the Stalinists at their word, and to point to the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, with all of its horrors, and to say: “That is socialism. The American way of life is better.”
They have cynically accepted the Stalinist definition and have obligingly advertised the Soviet Union, with its grinding poverty and glaring inequality, with its ubiquitous police terror, frame-ups, mass murders and slave-labour camps, as a “socialist” order of society. They have utilized the crimes of Stalinism to prejudice the American workers against the very name of socialism. And worst of all, comrades, we have to recognise that this campaign has been widely successful, and that we have to pay for it. We cannot build a strong socialist movement in this country until we overcome this confusion in the minds of the American workers about the real meaning of socialism.
After all that has happened in the past quarter of a century, the American workers have become more acutely sensitive than ever before to the value and importance of democratic rights. That, in my opinion, is the progressive side of their reaction, which we should fully share. The horrors of fascism, as they were revealed in the ’30s, and which were never dreamed of by the socialists in the old days, and the no less monstrous crimes of Stalinism, which became public knowledge later—all this has inspired a fear and hatred of any kind of dictatorship in the minds of the American working class. And to the extent that the Stalinist dictatorship in Russia has been identified with the name of socialism, and that this identification has been taken as a matter of course, the American workers have been prejudiced against socialism. That’s the bitter truth, and it must be looked straight in the face.
The socialist movement in America will not advance again significantly until it regains the initiative and takes the offensive against capitalism and all its agents in the labour movement precisely on the issue of democracy.
The authentic socialist movement, as it was conceived by its founders and as it has developed over the past century, has been the most democratic movement in all history. No formulation of this question can improve on the classic statement of the Communist Manifesto, with which modern scientific socialism was proclaimed to the world in 1848. The Communist Manifesto said:
““All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”
The authors of the Communist Manifesto linked socialism and democracy together as end and means. The “self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority” cannot be anything else but democratic, if we understand by “democracy” the rule of the people, the majority. The Stalinist claim—that the task of reconstructing society on a socialist basis can be farmed out to a privileged and uncontrolled bureaucracy, while the workers remain without voice or vote in the process—is just as foreign to the thoughts of Marx and Engels, and of all their true disciples, as the reformist idea that socialism can be handed down to the workers by degrees by the capitalists who exploit them.
All such fantastic conceptions were answered in advance by the reiterated statement of Marx and Engels that “the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves.” That is the language of Marx and Engels—“the task of the workers themselves”. That was just another way of saying—as they said explicitly many times—that the socialist reorganization of society requires a workers’ revolution. Such a revolution is unthinkable without the active participation of the majority of the working class, which is itself the big majority of the population. Nothing could be more democratic than that.
Moreover, the great teachers did not limit the democratic action of the working class to the overthrow of bourgeois supremacy. They defined democracy as the form of governmental rule in the transition period between capitalism and socialism. It is explicitly stated in the Communist Manifesto—and I wonder how many people have forgotten this in recent years—“The first step”, said the Manifesto, “in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”
That is the way Marx and Engels formulated the first aim of the revolution—to make the workers the ruling class, to establish democracy, which, in their view, is the same thing. From this precise formulation it is clear that Marx and Engels did not consider the limited, formal democracy under capitalism, which screens the exploitation and the rule of the great majority by the few, as real democracy.
They never taught that the simple nationalization of the forces of production signified the establishment of socialism. That’s not stated by Marx and Engels anywhere. Nationalization only lays the economic foundations for the transition to socialism. Still less could they have sanctioned, even if they had been able to imagine, the monstrous idea that socialism could be realized without freedom and without equality; that nationalized production and planned economy, controlled by a ruthless police dictatorship, complete with prisons, torture chambers and forced-labour camps, could be designated as a “socialist” society. That unspeakable perversion and contradiction of terms belongs to the Stalinists and their apologists.
All the great Marxists defined socialism as a classless society—with abundance, freedom and equality for all; a society in which there would be no state, not even a democratic workers’ state, to say nothing of a state in the monstrous form of a bureaucratic dictatorship of a privileged minority.
The Soviet Union today is a transitional order of society, in which the bureaucratic dictatorship of a privileged minority, far from serving as the agency to bridge the transition to socialism, stands as an obstacle to harmonious development in that direction. In the view of Marx and Engels, and of Lenin and Trotsky who came after them, the transition from capitalism to the classless society of socialism could only be carried out by an ever-expanding democracy, involving the masses of the workers more and more in all phases of social life, by direct participation and control.
Forecasting the socialist future, the Communist Manifesto said: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association.” Mark that: “an association”, not a state—“an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.
I say we will not put the socialist movement of this country on the right track and restore its rightful appeal to the best sentiments of the working class of this country and above all to the young, until we begin to call socialism by its right name as the great teachers did. Until we make it clear that we stand for an ever-expanding workers’ democracy as the only road to socialism. Until we root out every vestige of Stalinist perversion and corruption of the meaning of socialism and democracy, and restate the thoughts and formulations of the authentic Marxist teachers.
But the Stalinist definitions of socialism and democracy are not the only perversions that have to be rejected before we can find a sound basis for the regroupment of socialist forces in the United States. The definitions of the social democrats of all hues and gradations are just as false. And in this country they are a still more formidable obstacle because they have deeper roots, and they are nourished by the ruling class itself.
The liberals, the social democrats and the bureaucratic bosses of the American trade unions are red-hot supporters of “democracy”. At least, that is what they say. And they strive to herd the workers into the imperialist war camp under the general slogan of “democracy versus dictatorship”. They speak of democracy as something that stands by itself above the classes and the class struggle, and not as the form of rule of one class over another.
Capitalism, under any kind of government—whether bourgeois democracy or fascism or a military police state—is a system of minority rule, and the principal beneficiaries of capitalist democracy are the small minority of exploiting capitalists; scarcely less so than the slaveowners of ancient times were the actual rulers and the real beneficiaries of the Athenian democracy.
To be sure, the workers in the United States have a right to vote periodically for one of two sets of candidates selected for them by the two capitalist parties. And if they can dodge the witch-hunters, they can exercise the right of free speech and free press. But this formal right of free speech and free press is outweighed rather heavily by the inconvenient circumstance that the small capitalist minority happens to enjoy a complete monopoly of ownership and control of all the big presses, and of television and radio, and of all other means of communication and information.
But even so, with all that, a little democracy is better than none. We socialists have never denied that. And after the experiences of fascism and McCarthyism, and of military and police dictatorships in many parts of the world, and of the horrors of Stalinism, we have all the more reason to value every democratic provision for the protection of human rights and human dignity; to fight for more democracy, not less.
Socialists should not argue with the American worker when he says he wants democracy and doesn’t want to be ruled by a dictatorship. Rather, we should recognise that his demand for human rights and democratic guarantees, now and in the future, is in itself progressive. The socialist task is not to deny democracy, but to expand it and make it more complete. That is the true socialist tradition. The Marxists, throughout the century-long history of our movement, have always valued and defended bourgeois democratic rights, restricted as they were; and have utilized them for the education and organization of the workers in the struggle to establish full democracy by abolishing the capitalist rule altogether.
The right of union organization is a precious right, a democratic right, but it was not “given” to the workers in the United States. It took the mighty and irresistible labour upheaval of the ’30s, culminating in the great sit-down strikes—a semi-revolution of the American workers—to establish in reality the right of union organization in mass-production industry.
When it comes to the administration of workers’ organizations under their control, the social democrats and the reformist labour leaders pay very little respect to their own professed democratic principles. The trade unions in the United States today, as you all know, are administered and controlled by little cliques of richly privileged bureaucrats, who use the union machinery, and the union funds, and a private army of goon squads, and—whenever necessary—the help of the employers and the government, to keep their own “party” in control of the unions, and to suppress and beat down any attempt of the rank and file to form an opposition “party” to put up an opposition slate.
In practice, the American labour bureaucrats, who piously demand democracy in the one-party totalitarian domain of Stalinism, come as close as they can to maintaining a total one-party rule in their own domain. The Stalinist bureaucrats in Russia and the trade-union bureaucrats in the United States are not sisters, but they are much more alike than different. They are essentially of the same breed, a privileged caste dominated above all by motives of self-benefit and self-preservation at the expense of the workers and against the workers.
The privileged bureaucratic caste everywhere is the most formidable obstacle to democracy and socialism. The struggle of the working class in both sections of the now divided world has become, in the most profound meaning of the term, a struggle against the usurping privileged bureaucracy.
In the Soviet Union, it is a struggle to restore the genuine workers’ democracy established by the revolution of 1917. Workers’ democracy has become a burning necessity to assure the harmonious transition to socialism. That is the meaning of the political revolution against the bureaucracy now developing throughout the whole Soviet sphere, which every socialist worthy of the name unreservedly supports.
In the United States, the struggle for workers’ democracy is preeminently a struggle of the rank and file to gain democratic control of their own organizations That is the necessary condition to prepare the final struggle to abolish capitalism and establish democracy in the country as a whole. No party in this country has a right to call itself socialist unless it stands foursquare for the rank-and-file workers of the United States against the bureaucrats.
Capitalism does not survive as a social system by its own strength, but by its influence within the workers’ movement, reflected and expressed by the labour aristocracy and the bureaucracy. So the fight for workers’ democracy is inseparable from the fight for socialism, and is the condition for its victory. Workers’ democracy is the only road to socialism, here in the United States and everywhere else, all the way from Moscow to Los Angeles, and from here to Budapest.