Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed below.
Founding Conference of the
Fourth International
1938
Salute to Our Living Martyrs And Our Heroic Dead
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
Monday, September 06, 2010
Sunday, September 05, 2010
* “Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed below.
Founding Conference of the
Fourth International
1938
A MANIFESTO
Against Imperialist War!
*************
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
Founding Conference of the
Fourth International
1938
A MANIFESTO
Against Imperialist War!
*************
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
*Just When You Thought It Was Safe To…, Not Bop-Doo-Wop-An Encore
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Capris performing There's A Moon Out Tonight.
CD Review
Best Of Old Town Doo Wop, Various artists, 2-CD set, Ace Records
Confused by the headline? Don’t be, all it does is refer to a previous series of Oldies But Goodies (1950s-1960s oldies but goodies, just so you know) CD reviews in this space. That gargantuan task required shifting through ten, no, fifteen volumes of material that by the end left me limping, and crying uncle. See, as I explained in the last few reviews of the series, just when I thought I was done at Volume Ten I found that it was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. In any case I whipped off those last five reviews in one shot to be done with it.
The reason for such haste at that point seemed self-explanatory. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories, teen memories, teen high school memories mainly, from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in the reviewed compilations. How many times can one read about guys with two left feet, the social conventions of dancing close, wallflowers, the avoidance of wallflower-dom, meaningful sighs, meaningless sighs, the longings for certain obviously unattainable shes (or hes), the trials and tribulations associated with high school gymnasium crepe paper-adorned dances, moonlight-driven dream thoughts of after dance doings, and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. And there and then I threw in the towel, I thought.
Well now I have recovered enough to take a little different look at the music of this period-the doo wop sound that hovered in the background radio of every kid, every kid who had a radio, a transistor radio, to keep parental prying ears at arms length, and who was moonstruck enough to have been searching, high and low, for a sound that was not just the same old, same old that his or her parents listened to. Early rock and rock, especially that early Sun Record stuff, and plenty of rhythm and blues met that need but so did, for a time, old doo wop-the silky sounds of lead singer-driven, lyrics-driven, vocal-meshing harmony that was the stuff of teenage “petting” parties and staid old hokey school dances, mainly, in my case, elementary school dances.
As I mentioned in the oldies but goodies reviews not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to, or meant to be, playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability, slow danceabilty, to make any Jack or Jill start snapping fingers then, or now. As I asked in that previous series and is appropriate to ask here as well what about the now seeming mandatory question of the best song in the compilation? The one that stands out as the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).
Here The Capris’ There’s A Moon Out Tonight fills the bill. And, yes, I know, this is one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
CD Review
Best Of Old Town Doo Wop, Various artists, 2-CD set, Ace Records
Confused by the headline? Don’t be, all it does is refer to a previous series of Oldies But Goodies (1950s-1960s oldies but goodies, just so you know) CD reviews in this space. That gargantuan task required shifting through ten, no, fifteen volumes of material that by the end left me limping, and crying uncle. See, as I explained in the last few reviews of the series, just when I thought I was done at Volume Ten I found that it was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. In any case I whipped off those last five reviews in one shot to be done with it.
The reason for such haste at that point seemed self-explanatory. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories, teen memories, teen high school memories mainly, from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in the reviewed compilations. How many times can one read about guys with two left feet, the social conventions of dancing close, wallflowers, the avoidance of wallflower-dom, meaningful sighs, meaningless sighs, the longings for certain obviously unattainable shes (or hes), the trials and tribulations associated with high school gymnasium crepe paper-adorned dances, moonlight-driven dream thoughts of after dance doings, and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. And there and then I threw in the towel, I thought.
Well now I have recovered enough to take a little different look at the music of this period-the doo wop sound that hovered in the background radio of every kid, every kid who had a radio, a transistor radio, to keep parental prying ears at arms length, and who was moonstruck enough to have been searching, high and low, for a sound that was not just the same old, same old that his or her parents listened to. Early rock and rock, especially that early Sun Record stuff, and plenty of rhythm and blues met that need but so did, for a time, old doo wop-the silky sounds of lead singer-driven, lyrics-driven, vocal-meshing harmony that was the stuff of teenage “petting” parties and staid old hokey school dances, mainly, in my case, elementary school dances.
As I mentioned in the oldies but goodies reviews not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to, or meant to be, playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability, slow danceabilty, to make any Jack or Jill start snapping fingers then, or now. As I asked in that previous series and is appropriate to ask here as well what about the now seeming mandatory question of the best song in the compilation? The one that stands out as the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).
Here The Capris’ There’s A Moon Out Tonight fills the bill. And, yes, I know, this is one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
*Labor's Untold Story- From The Pen Of James P. Cannon- An Evaluation of Early American Communist Party Leader William Z. Foster
Click on the title to link to a James P. Cannon Internet Archive online copy of his evaluation of early American Communist Party leader William Z. Foster.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Markin comment:
This analysis of William Z. Foster by early American Trotskyist leader and Socialist Workers party founder, James P. Cannon, a fellow early American Communist Party (one of them, anyway)post-World I leader when all things seemed possible, factional partner in the never-ending factional struggles that rend that party in the "lost generation" 1920s, and later opponent of his, from inside and outside, the generic American communist movement takes on added significance because it is likely to stand as one of the few fairly honest evaluations of the man from a contemporary who maintained a communist perspective. Don't expect it from the latter days Stalinists (including Maoist variant). No way.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Markin comment:
This analysis of William Z. Foster by early American Trotskyist leader and Socialist Workers party founder, James P. Cannon, a fellow early American Communist Party (one of them, anyway)post-World I leader when all things seemed possible, factional partner in the never-ending factional struggles that rend that party in the "lost generation" 1920s, and later opponent of his, from inside and outside, the generic American communist movement takes on added significance because it is likely to stand as one of the few fairly honest evaluations of the man from a contemporary who maintained a communist perspective. Don't expect it from the latter days Stalinists (including Maoist variant). No way.
Saturday, September 04, 2010
* “Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed below.
Victor Serge 1939
Victor Serge and the IVth International
Source: Victor Serge & Leon Trotsky, La Lutte Contre le Stalinisme. Maspero, Paris, 1977
Translated for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor in 2005
Authors: The Editors of the Bulletin of the Russian Opposition, in “Quatrième Internationale,” April 1939
*********
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
Victor Serge 1939
Victor Serge and the IVth International
Source: Victor Serge & Leon Trotsky, La Lutte Contre le Stalinisme. Maspero, Paris, 1977
Translated for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor in 2005
Authors: The Editors of the Bulletin of the Russian Opposition, in “Quatrième Internationale,” April 1939
*********
Markin comment:
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
*From The Blogosphere-"The Rag Blog"- Life During Wartime: 'Danse Macabre'
Click on the title to link to the blog entry mentioned in the headline.
Markin comment:
Hey, I can appreciate a nice political cartoon as well as the next guy. But, why, go after the easy targets, the very easy targets, Beck and Palin? On the question of war the main enemy of the peoples of the world, and specifically the Afghan people, right now is one chief executive of the American imperial state, Barack Obama. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Afghanistan (And Iraq)! Is that fact so hard to put in cartoon form?
Markin comment:
Hey, I can appreciate a nice political cartoon as well as the next guy. But, why, go after the easy targets, the very easy targets, Beck and Palin? On the question of war the main enemy of the peoples of the world, and specifically the Afghan people, right now is one chief executive of the American imperial state, Barack Obama. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Afghanistan (And Iraq)! Is that fact so hard to put in cartoon form?
*Once Again, Just When You Thought It Was Safe To…, Not Bop-Doo-Wop
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Capris performing There's A Moon Out Tonight.
CD Review
Old Town Doo Wop, Volume Five, Various artists, Ace Records
Confused by the headline? Don’t be, all it does is refer to a previous series of Oldies But Goodies (1950s-1960s oldies but goodies, just so you know) CD reviews in this space. That gargantuan task required shifting through ten, no, fifteen volumes of material that by the end left me limping, and crying uncle. See, as I explained in the last few reviews of the series, just when I thought I was done at Volume Ten I found that it was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. In any case I whipped off those last five reviews in one shot to be done with it.
The reason for such haste at that point seemed self-explanatory. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories, teen memories, teen high school memories mainly, from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in the reviewed compilations. How many times can one read about guys with two left feet, the social conventions of dancing close, wallflowers, the avoidance of wallflower-dom, meaningful sighs, meaningless sighs, the longings for certain obviously unattainable shes (or hes), the trials and tribulations associated with high school gymnasium crepe paper-adorned dances, moonlight-driven dream thoughts of after dance doings, and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. And there and then I threw in the towel, I thought.
Well now I have recovered enough to take a little different look at the music of this period- the doo wop sound that hovered in the background radio of every kid, every kid who had a radio, a transistor radio, to keep parental prying ears at arms length and who was moonstruck enough to have been searching, high and low, for a sound that was not just the same old, same old that his or her parents listened to. Early rock and rock, especially that early Sun Record stuff, and plenty of rhythm and blues met that need but so did, for a time, old doo wop-the silky sounds of lead singer-driven, lyrics-driven, vocal-meshing harmony that was the stuff of teenage “petting” parties and staid old hokey school dances, mainly, in my case, elementary school dances.
As I mentioned in the oldies but goodies reviews not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to, or meant to be, playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability, slow danceabilty, to make any Jack or Jill start snapping fingers then, or now. As I asked in that previous series and is appropriate to ask here as well what about the now seeming mandatory question of the best song in the compilation? The one that stands out as the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).
Here The Capris'Stars In The Sky fills the bill. And, yes, I know, this is one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
CD Review
Old Town Doo Wop, Volume Five, Various artists, Ace Records
Confused by the headline? Don’t be, all it does is refer to a previous series of Oldies But Goodies (1950s-1960s oldies but goodies, just so you know) CD reviews in this space. That gargantuan task required shifting through ten, no, fifteen volumes of material that by the end left me limping, and crying uncle. See, as I explained in the last few reviews of the series, just when I thought I was done at Volume Ten I found that it was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. In any case I whipped off those last five reviews in one shot to be done with it.
The reason for such haste at that point seemed self-explanatory. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories, teen memories, teen high school memories mainly, from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in the reviewed compilations. How many times can one read about guys with two left feet, the social conventions of dancing close, wallflowers, the avoidance of wallflower-dom, meaningful sighs, meaningless sighs, the longings for certain obviously unattainable shes (or hes), the trials and tribulations associated with high school gymnasium crepe paper-adorned dances, moonlight-driven dream thoughts of after dance doings, and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. And there and then I threw in the towel, I thought.
Well now I have recovered enough to take a little different look at the music of this period- the doo wop sound that hovered in the background radio of every kid, every kid who had a radio, a transistor radio, to keep parental prying ears at arms length and who was moonstruck enough to have been searching, high and low, for a sound that was not just the same old, same old that his or her parents listened to. Early rock and rock, especially that early Sun Record stuff, and plenty of rhythm and blues met that need but so did, for a time, old doo wop-the silky sounds of lead singer-driven, lyrics-driven, vocal-meshing harmony that was the stuff of teenage “petting” parties and staid old hokey school dances, mainly, in my case, elementary school dances.
As I mentioned in the oldies but goodies reviews not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to, or meant to be, playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability, slow danceabilty, to make any Jack or Jill start snapping fingers then, or now. As I asked in that previous series and is appropriate to ask here as well what about the now seeming mandatory question of the best song in the compilation? The one that stands out as the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).
Here The Capris'Stars In The Sky fills the bill. And, yes, I know, this is one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
Friday, September 03, 2010
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- In Honor Of Keith Anwar-1952-2010
Markin comment:
I do not ordinarily post most current leftist political obituaries in this space but on this occasion I feel compelled to so for several reasons . For one, I actually ran across Keith Anwar back in the old days at various political functions in Boston and found him to be as described in his political obituary posted below, thoughtful, politically tough, and committed. Those were the days in Boston, at least, when the Sparts were seen as the "crazies" and "wild boys and girls" of the left, especially by non-wave-making, Democratic Party popular front-craving Stalinists led by Progressive Labor and assorted Social Democrats (led by the Socialist Workers Party, but there were many other candidates, willing candidates, for that designation). Brother Anwar's demeanor took the sting out of those accusations, false as they were among knowledgable politcal people in any case.
For another, as described in the tribute, Anwar was one of those dwindling number of labor militants who went back to those days, days when we "found" the working class and were all fighting like crazy to figure out what was what in the labor movement. And then spent most of the rest of his life testing that program he was committed to and himself out. Little did we know then that the next few decades would bring not only a dearth of class struggle but the effective deindustrialization of the American labor scene, and with it fewer opportunities to affect history at the base of society. Such fellow militants, rare in any case after the heyday of serious student leftism ended in the early 1970s, are becoming rarer and rarer as the baby-boomer generation starts passing away.
Finally, and this is a very important example of how the living links in the international working class movement are developed, his ethnic Afghani family background provided insight into the dogged, never-ending struggle for secularism in Afghanistan, especially at the time of the Soviet intervention in the late 1970s. That intervention by the Soviets, a progressive move as we are now painfully aware of, separated out those who would "scab" on defense of the Soviet Union when th eheat was on here in the West and those who would not. Keith Anwar's life was, seemingly, dedicated to this proposition: picket lines mean don't cross in the local workplace and in the international class struggle arena as well. Farewell, brother militant.
*******
Workers Vanguard No. 963
27 August 2010
Keith Anwar
1952-2010
Keith Anwar, an ardent socialist and longtime supporter of the Spartacist League, died in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 5 of an especially aggressive liver cancer that had been diagnosed barely five weeks earlier. He was 58 years old. We extend our heartfelt condolences to Keith’s wife, Connie; his two children, Brian and Tessa; his brother Bruce and sister-in-law Blandine; and to his many friends, co-workers and extended family. The speed with which this disease took Keith’s life has left us all stunned and deeply saddened.
A memorial service held shortly after Keith’s death drew close to 200 people, including family, Spartacist League members and supporters, former co-workers at the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) and local writers. Those who knew him well have recalled his uncompromising honesty, compassion and strength of character. As his son, Brian, poignantly pointed out at the gathering, “There are few men, few people that give more than they take. And that was Dad. He was more focused and hard-working than any person I’ve ever met.”
Keith was a multifaceted, talented individual who dedicated his adult life to fighting against oppression and bigotry in its many manifestations. A trade-union militant and talented writer, he was a materialist, an atheist who believed that mankind made its own history. Keith understood the importance of building a revolutionary workers party, representing the interests of workers, black people and other minorities, as the necessary instrument to bring about a society where those who labor rule. Those who worked with Keith were aware of his fierce opposition to both capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans.
Keith came of age at a time of great radicalization and outpouring of opposition to U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants. And like many young activists at that time, he joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Being the kind of guy who looked for answers and required some serious convincing, Keith took notice of Workers Vanguard while attending Brandeis University in the early 1970s and was won to the views of the Spartacist League. Keith moved to Chicago in the late ’70s and landed a job at U.S. Steel’s South Works, later becoming an apprentice millwright at Inland Steel, where he quickly became known as a fighter for labor by honoring a bricklayers strike.
In 1979, while employed at Inland and a member of United Steelworkers of America (USWA) Local 1010, Keith refused to cross a picket of striking workers from sister Local 8180. The company reacted swiftly by firing him. A campaign to get Keith reinstated in his job, which was heavily featured in WV at the time, generated enormous support among steel workers in the Chicago-Gary district who understood that Keith had acted in defense of a tradition that helped build the industrial unions in this country: Picket lines mean don’t cross!
The union took his case to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and won in 1982, when Inland was ordered to reinstate Keith with full back pay and seniority. Though this ruling was later overturned and Keith never got his job back, his refusal to cross picket lines earned him a great deal of authority that lasted throughout his life. Keith’s ties to USWA Local 1010 were instrumental in gaining the endorsement of a number of union officials for a labor-centered, united-front demonstration initiated by the SL that mobilized 3,000 people and prevented the Nazis from attacking Chicago’s Gay Pride March in June 1982. The union’s vice president, Cliff “Cowboy” Mezo, joined the mobilization and spoke at the rally. In 2001, Keith got a warm welcome from his former local as he was helping organize an anti-Klan mobilization in Gary, Indiana.
In 1986, Keith became a mechanic for the CTA and a member of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 308, where he again came to be known as a union militant and outspoken opponent of racism and bigotry in all forms. In 1987, bus driver Cassandra Seay and her mother were brutally beaten by the Chicago cops in their own home and slapped with trumped-up charges, including assaulting a police officer. Keith was in the forefront of rallying support in Local 308 for the defense of Seay, a member of ATU Local 241. It was through this successful campaign that the Chicago Labor Black Struggle League was formed, and Keith was one of its founding members. In the late 1980s, Keith helped organize an integrated team of transit workers to help a black co-worker move into a neighborhood that was just becoming integrated and where, the previous year, the home of a black couple who had moved in had been firebombed. The team of transit workers moved the family in and made a point to ostentatiously hang out on the front porch before leaving.
Upon hearing of Keith’s death, ATU Local 308 passed a motion offering condolences and solidarity to his family, noting “his high integrity and the faithful service he rendered to humanity.” Keith was instrumental in getting his union local to sign on in defense of class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and to donate repeatedly to his legal funds in the fight for freedom. Keith also helped build the Partisan Defense Committee’s annual Holiday Appeal benefits, successfully soliciting contributions from his union.
Keith was politically active for over 40 years. Swimming against the stream and fighting for what you know to be right and just can be a tough job, especially in this extended period of union defeats, lack of class struggle, and political and social reaction. In the last few years of his life, he stepped back from political work and focused on his writing, approaching it with the same professionalism and seriousness that he showed in other areas. In 2004, Keith edited a second edition of Memories of Afghanistan, the memoirs of his father, Mohammad H. Anwar, a modernizing Afghan intellectual of the last century. Keith wrote an afterword discussing the role of the U.S. government in fostering Islamic fundamentalism and tribal backwardness in Afghanistan. He focused on Washington’s support to Osama bin Laden and other reactionary mujahedin (holy warriors) following the 1979 entry of the Soviet Army into Afghanistan, where it fought on the side of social progress, particularly for horribly oppressed Afghan women.
Keith went on to become an active member of the Oak Park Writers Group, a network playwright at Chicago Dramatists and a member of the Dramatists’ Guild. He authored several short plays, primarily political-social satires, which were given public readings by established actors. This past June, Keith won the 2010 Dionysos Cup at the Polarity Ensemble Theatre’s Festival of New Plays for his script Kabulitis, which weaves together a story about a woman’s decline into dementia and the brutal treatment of women in Afghanistan.
This touching drama of an elderly American woman in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease who is haunted by memories of Afghanistan was based on the experience of Keith’s mother, Phyllis, who had joined her Afghan husband, Mohammed, in an ill-fated attempt to foster secularism and modernity in mid 20th-century Afghanistan. Phyllis was a longtime friend of the Spartacist League and a member from 1979 to 1982. As part of a 1980 national speaking tour titled “Women of the East—Proletarian Revolution or Slavery: Down With Islamic Reaction! Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!” she vividly retold her experience as the first woman of her time to refuse to wear the tent-like veil on the streets of Kabul. At the risk of her life, she secretly taught girls at a school which was disguised as a hospital to fool the mullahs.
Keith never sought the spotlight, so it was easy to miss the depth of his work on so many fronts. He was comfortable in his own skin, confident in his worldview and his approach to life. An obituary for Keith in the Chicago Tribune (13 July) quoted a member of the Oak Park Writers Group who remarked, “Keith was a lovely writer, but was just as proud of his work repairing trains.” As his son, Brian, put it at the memorial meeting, “Dad had those kind of hands. Hands that could fix a motor, or write an award-winning play.”
We will never forget that within Keith’s stoic sensibility and sometimes brooding style, there was an inner core of tremendous passion, will and creative ability that brought joy and sustenance to his family and friends, creative and intellectual contributions to the world and an unyielding fight on behalf of the working class. These qualities made up a man whose life made a difference in this world. He will be sorely missed.
I do not ordinarily post most current leftist political obituaries in this space but on this occasion I feel compelled to so for several reasons . For one, I actually ran across Keith Anwar back in the old days at various political functions in Boston and found him to be as described in his political obituary posted below, thoughtful, politically tough, and committed. Those were the days in Boston, at least, when the Sparts were seen as the "crazies" and "wild boys and girls" of the left, especially by non-wave-making, Democratic Party popular front-craving Stalinists led by Progressive Labor and assorted Social Democrats (led by the Socialist Workers Party, but there were many other candidates, willing candidates, for that designation). Brother Anwar's demeanor took the sting out of those accusations, false as they were among knowledgable politcal people in any case.
For another, as described in the tribute, Anwar was one of those dwindling number of labor militants who went back to those days, days when we "found" the working class and were all fighting like crazy to figure out what was what in the labor movement. And then spent most of the rest of his life testing that program he was committed to and himself out. Little did we know then that the next few decades would bring not only a dearth of class struggle but the effective deindustrialization of the American labor scene, and with it fewer opportunities to affect history at the base of society. Such fellow militants, rare in any case after the heyday of serious student leftism ended in the early 1970s, are becoming rarer and rarer as the baby-boomer generation starts passing away.
Finally, and this is a very important example of how the living links in the international working class movement are developed, his ethnic Afghani family background provided insight into the dogged, never-ending struggle for secularism in Afghanistan, especially at the time of the Soviet intervention in the late 1970s. That intervention by the Soviets, a progressive move as we are now painfully aware of, separated out those who would "scab" on defense of the Soviet Union when th eheat was on here in the West and those who would not. Keith Anwar's life was, seemingly, dedicated to this proposition: picket lines mean don't cross in the local workplace and in the international class struggle arena as well. Farewell, brother militant.
*******
Workers Vanguard No. 963
27 August 2010
Keith Anwar
1952-2010
Keith Anwar, an ardent socialist and longtime supporter of the Spartacist League, died in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 5 of an especially aggressive liver cancer that had been diagnosed barely five weeks earlier. He was 58 years old. We extend our heartfelt condolences to Keith’s wife, Connie; his two children, Brian and Tessa; his brother Bruce and sister-in-law Blandine; and to his many friends, co-workers and extended family. The speed with which this disease took Keith’s life has left us all stunned and deeply saddened.
A memorial service held shortly after Keith’s death drew close to 200 people, including family, Spartacist League members and supporters, former co-workers at the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) and local writers. Those who knew him well have recalled his uncompromising honesty, compassion and strength of character. As his son, Brian, poignantly pointed out at the gathering, “There are few men, few people that give more than they take. And that was Dad. He was more focused and hard-working than any person I’ve ever met.”
Keith was a multifaceted, talented individual who dedicated his adult life to fighting against oppression and bigotry in its many manifestations. A trade-union militant and talented writer, he was a materialist, an atheist who believed that mankind made its own history. Keith understood the importance of building a revolutionary workers party, representing the interests of workers, black people and other minorities, as the necessary instrument to bring about a society where those who labor rule. Those who worked with Keith were aware of his fierce opposition to both capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans.
Keith came of age at a time of great radicalization and outpouring of opposition to U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants. And like many young activists at that time, he joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Being the kind of guy who looked for answers and required some serious convincing, Keith took notice of Workers Vanguard while attending Brandeis University in the early 1970s and was won to the views of the Spartacist League. Keith moved to Chicago in the late ’70s and landed a job at U.S. Steel’s South Works, later becoming an apprentice millwright at Inland Steel, where he quickly became known as a fighter for labor by honoring a bricklayers strike.
In 1979, while employed at Inland and a member of United Steelworkers of America (USWA) Local 1010, Keith refused to cross a picket of striking workers from sister Local 8180. The company reacted swiftly by firing him. A campaign to get Keith reinstated in his job, which was heavily featured in WV at the time, generated enormous support among steel workers in the Chicago-Gary district who understood that Keith had acted in defense of a tradition that helped build the industrial unions in this country: Picket lines mean don’t cross!
The union took his case to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and won in 1982, when Inland was ordered to reinstate Keith with full back pay and seniority. Though this ruling was later overturned and Keith never got his job back, his refusal to cross picket lines earned him a great deal of authority that lasted throughout his life. Keith’s ties to USWA Local 1010 were instrumental in gaining the endorsement of a number of union officials for a labor-centered, united-front demonstration initiated by the SL that mobilized 3,000 people and prevented the Nazis from attacking Chicago’s Gay Pride March in June 1982. The union’s vice president, Cliff “Cowboy” Mezo, joined the mobilization and spoke at the rally. In 2001, Keith got a warm welcome from his former local as he was helping organize an anti-Klan mobilization in Gary, Indiana.
In 1986, Keith became a mechanic for the CTA and a member of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 308, where he again came to be known as a union militant and outspoken opponent of racism and bigotry in all forms. In 1987, bus driver Cassandra Seay and her mother were brutally beaten by the Chicago cops in their own home and slapped with trumped-up charges, including assaulting a police officer. Keith was in the forefront of rallying support in Local 308 for the defense of Seay, a member of ATU Local 241. It was through this successful campaign that the Chicago Labor Black Struggle League was formed, and Keith was one of its founding members. In the late 1980s, Keith helped organize an integrated team of transit workers to help a black co-worker move into a neighborhood that was just becoming integrated and where, the previous year, the home of a black couple who had moved in had been firebombed. The team of transit workers moved the family in and made a point to ostentatiously hang out on the front porch before leaving.
Upon hearing of Keith’s death, ATU Local 308 passed a motion offering condolences and solidarity to his family, noting “his high integrity and the faithful service he rendered to humanity.” Keith was instrumental in getting his union local to sign on in defense of class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and to donate repeatedly to his legal funds in the fight for freedom. Keith also helped build the Partisan Defense Committee’s annual Holiday Appeal benefits, successfully soliciting contributions from his union.
Keith was politically active for over 40 years. Swimming against the stream and fighting for what you know to be right and just can be a tough job, especially in this extended period of union defeats, lack of class struggle, and political and social reaction. In the last few years of his life, he stepped back from political work and focused on his writing, approaching it with the same professionalism and seriousness that he showed in other areas. In 2004, Keith edited a second edition of Memories of Afghanistan, the memoirs of his father, Mohammad H. Anwar, a modernizing Afghan intellectual of the last century. Keith wrote an afterword discussing the role of the U.S. government in fostering Islamic fundamentalism and tribal backwardness in Afghanistan. He focused on Washington’s support to Osama bin Laden and other reactionary mujahedin (holy warriors) following the 1979 entry of the Soviet Army into Afghanistan, where it fought on the side of social progress, particularly for horribly oppressed Afghan women.
Keith went on to become an active member of the Oak Park Writers Group, a network playwright at Chicago Dramatists and a member of the Dramatists’ Guild. He authored several short plays, primarily political-social satires, which were given public readings by established actors. This past June, Keith won the 2010 Dionysos Cup at the Polarity Ensemble Theatre’s Festival of New Plays for his script Kabulitis, which weaves together a story about a woman’s decline into dementia and the brutal treatment of women in Afghanistan.
This touching drama of an elderly American woman in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease who is haunted by memories of Afghanistan was based on the experience of Keith’s mother, Phyllis, who had joined her Afghan husband, Mohammed, in an ill-fated attempt to foster secularism and modernity in mid 20th-century Afghanistan. Phyllis was a longtime friend of the Spartacist League and a member from 1979 to 1982. As part of a 1980 national speaking tour titled “Women of the East—Proletarian Revolution or Slavery: Down With Islamic Reaction! Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!” she vividly retold her experience as the first woman of her time to refuse to wear the tent-like veil on the streets of Kabul. At the risk of her life, she secretly taught girls at a school which was disguised as a hospital to fool the mullahs.
Keith never sought the spotlight, so it was easy to miss the depth of his work on so many fronts. He was comfortable in his own skin, confident in his worldview and his approach to life. An obituary for Keith in the Chicago Tribune (13 July) quoted a member of the Oak Park Writers Group who remarked, “Keith was a lovely writer, but was just as proud of his work repairing trains.” As his son, Brian, put it at the memorial meeting, “Dad had those kind of hands. Hands that could fix a motor, or write an award-winning play.”
We will never forget that within Keith’s stoic sensibility and sometimes brooding style, there was an inner core of tremendous passion, will and creative ability that brought joy and sustenance to his family and friends, creative and intellectual contributions to the world and an unyielding fight on behalf of the working class. These qualities made up a man whose life made a difference in this world. He will be sorely missed.
* “Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives
Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed below:
How the Fourth International Was Conceived
by Jean van Heijenoort
This article was first published in the August 1944 issue of Fourth International.
[Jean van Heijenoort (1912-1986) was Trotsky's secretary in 1932 in Prinkipo, and followed him to France, Norway and Mexico. As a leader of the Fourth International he headed a provisional international centre in the United States during World War Two and left politics shortly thereafter.]
***************
Markin comment:
As a devotee of founding father Karl Marx’s communist work and writings started in the 1840s, especially the founding document, The Communist Manifesto, I know that the slogan-“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”- has been honored more in the breech than in the observance for more historical reasons than I want to go into in this commentary. Nevertheless the idea behind that slogan has, rightly, animated generations of revolutionaries in the search, the necessary search, for some kind of international configuration of workers' parties and workers' republics that would give weight and meaning to the slogan and lead, at some point, to that communist future that we so fervently desire, and given just a quick look at this old benighted world today, desperately need.
The idea of some kind of workers international has animated my political work for most of my life, even before I learned idea number one in the Marxist catechism. Hell, when I was nothing but scared rabbit, wet behind the ears, wonky little know-it-all little sophomore or sometime around that period, in high school I was trying to create such an organization (or, better, a youth auxiliary to such an organization) with a now preposterous sounding little name, Student Union For World Goals. That youth organization was, besides being mildly anti-communist, programmatically, a left-center rehash of the (adult) Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) program, that I took as my political model in those days. The folly of that activity is neither here nor there today, but what remains in that from very early on I sensed that if the oppressed of the world (although I would not have used such a term at that time) were to get a fair shake in this wicked old world then they would have to make up for the political weaknesses and not having ruled previously stemming from a feeling of powerlessness by being organized massively on an international basis.
So, recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International got disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
How the Fourth International Was Conceived
by Jean van Heijenoort
This article was first published in the August 1944 issue of Fourth International.
[Jean van Heijenoort (1912-1986) was Trotsky's secretary in 1932 in Prinkipo, and followed him to France, Norway and Mexico. As a leader of the Fourth International he headed a provisional international centre in the United States during World War Two and left politics shortly thereafter.]
***************
Markin comment:
As a devotee of founding father Karl Marx’s communist work and writings started in the 1840s, especially the founding document, The Communist Manifesto, I know that the slogan-“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”- has been honored more in the breech than in the observance for more historical reasons than I want to go into in this commentary. Nevertheless the idea behind that slogan has, rightly, animated generations of revolutionaries in the search, the necessary search, for some kind of international configuration of workers' parties and workers' republics that would give weight and meaning to the slogan and lead, at some point, to that communist future that we so fervently desire, and given just a quick look at this old benighted world today, desperately need.
The idea of some kind of workers international has animated my political work for most of my life, even before I learned idea number one in the Marxist catechism. Hell, when I was nothing but scared rabbit, wet behind the ears, wonky little know-it-all little sophomore or sometime around that period, in high school I was trying to create such an organization (or, better, a youth auxiliary to such an organization) with a now preposterous sounding little name, Student Union For World Goals. That youth organization was, besides being mildly anti-communist, programmatically, a left-center rehash of the (adult) Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) program, that I took as my political model in those days. The folly of that activity is neither here nor there today, but what remains in that from very early on I sensed that if the oppressed of the world (although I would not have used such a term at that time) were to get a fair shake in this wicked old world then they would have to make up for the political weaknesses and not having ruled previously stemming from a feeling of powerlessness by being organized massively on an international basis.
So, recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International got disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
*Again, Just When You Thought It Was Safe To…, Not Bop-Doo-Wop
Click on the headline to link to a Youtube film clip of The Earls performing the doo wop classic It's You.
CD Review
Old Town Doo Wop, Volume Four, Various artists, Ace Records
Confused by the headline? Don’t be, all it does is refer to a previous series of Oldies But Goodies (1950s-1960s oldies but goodies, just so you know) CD reviews in this space. That gargantuan task required shifting through ten, no, fifteen volumes of material that by the end left me limping, and crying uncle. See, as I explained in the last few reviews of the series, just when I thought I was done at Volume Ten I found that it was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. In any case I whipped off those last five reviews in one shot to be done with it.
The reason for such haste at that point seemed self-explanatory. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories, teen memories, teen high school memories mainly, from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in the reviewed compilations. How many times can one read about guys with two left feet, the social conventions of dancing close, wallflowers, the avoidance of wallflower-dom, meaningful sighs, meaningless sighs, the longings for certain obviously unattainable shes (or hes), the trials and tribulations associated with high school gymnasium crepe paper-adorned dances, moonlight-driven dream thoughts of after dance doings, and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. And there and then I threw in the towel, I thought.
Well now I have recovered enough to take a little different look at the music of this period- the doo wop sound that hovered in the background radio of every kid, every kid who had a radio, a transistor radio, to keep parental prying ears at arms length and who was moonstruck enough to have been searching, high and low, for a sound that was not just the same old, same old that his or her parents listened to. Early rock and rock, especially that early Sun Record stuff, and plenty of rhythm and blues met that need but so did, for a time, old doo wop-the silky sounds of lead singer-driven, lyrics-driven, vocal-meshing harmony that was the stuff of teenage “petting” parties and staid old hokey school dances, mainly, in my case, elementary school dances.
As I mentioned in the oldies but goodies reviews not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to, or meant to be, playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability, slow danceabilty, to make any Jack or Jill start snapping fingers then, or now. As I asked in that previous series and is appropriate to ask here as well what about the now seeming mandatory question of the best song in the compilation? The one that stands out as the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).
Here The Earls'It's You fills the bill. And, yes, I know, this is one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
CD Review
Old Town Doo Wop, Volume Four, Various artists, Ace Records
Confused by the headline? Don’t be, all it does is refer to a previous series of Oldies But Goodies (1950s-1960s oldies but goodies, just so you know) CD reviews in this space. That gargantuan task required shifting through ten, no, fifteen volumes of material that by the end left me limping, and crying uncle. See, as I explained in the last few reviews of the series, just when I thought I was done at Volume Ten I found that it was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. In any case I whipped off those last five reviews in one shot to be done with it.
The reason for such haste at that point seemed self-explanatory. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories, teen memories, teen high school memories mainly, from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in the reviewed compilations. How many times can one read about guys with two left feet, the social conventions of dancing close, wallflowers, the avoidance of wallflower-dom, meaningful sighs, meaningless sighs, the longings for certain obviously unattainable shes (or hes), the trials and tribulations associated with high school gymnasium crepe paper-adorned dances, moonlight-driven dream thoughts of after dance doings, and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. And there and then I threw in the towel, I thought.
Well now I have recovered enough to take a little different look at the music of this period- the doo wop sound that hovered in the background radio of every kid, every kid who had a radio, a transistor radio, to keep parental prying ears at arms length and who was moonstruck enough to have been searching, high and low, for a sound that was not just the same old, same old that his or her parents listened to. Early rock and rock, especially that early Sun Record stuff, and plenty of rhythm and blues met that need but so did, for a time, old doo wop-the silky sounds of lead singer-driven, lyrics-driven, vocal-meshing harmony that was the stuff of teenage “petting” parties and staid old hokey school dances, mainly, in my case, elementary school dances.
As I mentioned in the oldies but goodies reviews not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to, or meant to be, playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability, slow danceabilty, to make any Jack or Jill start snapping fingers then, or now. As I asked in that previous series and is appropriate to ask here as well what about the now seeming mandatory question of the best song in the compilation? The one that stands out as the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).
Here The Earls'It's You fills the bill. And, yes, I know, this is one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
*From The Blogosphere-From The HistoMat Blog-Selma James on the Black Jacobins
It took an earthquake whose destructive power was enhanced by dire poverty to rekindle interest in Haiti. Many who want to know who Haitians are seem to have turned to CLR James’ classic text, The Black Jacobins, a history of the revolution the slaves made.
Seizing on the revolution in France, they took their freedom and got revolutionary Paris to ratify it. But as the revolution’s power in France waned, to prevent slavery’s return they had to defeat the armies of Spain and Britain as well as France’s Napoleon and, amazingly, they did. In 1804 the independent republic of Haiti was born.
Black Jacobins was published in 1938 as a contribution to the movement for colonial emancipation — for Africa first of all, when few considered this possible. By 1963 it had been out of print for years but the exploding anti-imperialist and anti-racist movements had created a new market for it. Later books updating information on Haiti’s revolution have not challenged its classic status. It’s worth asking why.
First, James takes sides uncompromisingly with the slaves. While he has all the time in the world for anti-racist whites who loved Toussaint and the revolution, his point of reference is the struggle of those who were wresting themselves back from being the possession of others. The book recounts their courage, imagination and determination. But James doesn’t glamorise: ‘The slaves destroyed tirelessly. . . . And if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. They knew that as long as these plantations stood their lot would be to labour on them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them.’
Nor does he shield us from the terrorism and sadism of the masters. But the catalogue of tortures does more than torture the reader; it deepens our appreciation of the former slaves’ power to endure and overcome. Despite death and destruction, the slaves are never helpless victims. This may explain why strugglers from the Caribbean and even South Africa told the author that at low points in their movements Black Jacobins had helped sustain them. This quality is what makes the book thrilling and inspiring — we are learning from the Haitians’ determination to be free what being human is about.
Second, Toussaint L’Ouverture possessed all the skills of leadership that the revolution needed. An uneducated, middle-aged West Indian when it began, he was soon able to handle sophisticated European diplomats and politicians who foolishly thought they could manipulate him because he was black and had been a slave.
James liked to say that while the official claim is that Lincoln freed the slaves, it was in fact the slaves who had freed Lincoln — from his limitations and the conservative restraints of office. Here James says that ‘. . . Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint.’ Then he adds: ‘And even that is not the whole truth.’
In other words, while the movement chooses, creates and develops its leadership, historians are unlikely to pin that process down, whatever they surmise from events. What we can be sure of, however, is that the great leader is never a ‘self-made man,’ but a product of his individual talents and skills (and weaknesses) shaped by the movement he leads in the course of great upheavals. The Haitian Jacobins created Toussaint and he led them to where they had the will and determination to go.
This is still groundbreaking today, considering that there are parties and organisations, large and small, which claim that their leadership is crucial for a revolution’s success. There are also those who believe leadership is unnecessary and it would hold the movement back. In Haiti the slaves made the revolution, and Toussaint, one of them, played a vital role in their winning.
Third, James tells us who many of these revolutionary slaves were. They were not proletarians,
‘But working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organised mass movement.’
This is relevant to the problem of development which the book poses: what are non-industrial people to do after the revolution? The movement has struggled with this question for generations. Toussaint relied on the plantation system of the former masters who claimed to personify ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’; they ultimately captured and killed him. The ex-slaves would not have it. They wanted their own plots of land, and the end of the plantation – an early form of forced collectivisation.
Lenin finally (1923) proposed that the State encourage co-operatives which, independent of the party, would dominate the economy. Gandhi insisted that Indians must hold on to the cotton industry and its village way of life against all odds. Nyerere proposed ujamaa or African socialism for Tanzanians, and with the momentum of the independence movement, people made extraordinary strides (an untold story). China has more to tell us; and some Indigenous Latin Americans are gaining the power to say what they propose.
We know that Haiti went further than the movements elsewhere: it was decades before others abolished slavery. Haiti, so far ahead, was vulnerable to the imperial powers which it had infuriated by its revolutionary impertinence.
Now, despite often racist reporting of events there, we are learning how the present Black Jacobins have been organising and how their struggle has continued. President Aristide, whom they elected by 92% of the vote, was twice taken from them by an alliance of the US and the local elite. They demand his return. The least we can do is support that demand.
Seizing on the revolution in France, they took their freedom and got revolutionary Paris to ratify it. But as the revolution’s power in France waned, to prevent slavery’s return they had to defeat the armies of Spain and Britain as well as France’s Napoleon and, amazingly, they did. In 1804 the independent republic of Haiti was born.
Black Jacobins was published in 1938 as a contribution to the movement for colonial emancipation — for Africa first of all, when few considered this possible. By 1963 it had been out of print for years but the exploding anti-imperialist and anti-racist movements had created a new market for it. Later books updating information on Haiti’s revolution have not challenged its classic status. It’s worth asking why.
First, James takes sides uncompromisingly with the slaves. While he has all the time in the world for anti-racist whites who loved Toussaint and the revolution, his point of reference is the struggle of those who were wresting themselves back from being the possession of others. The book recounts their courage, imagination and determination. But James doesn’t glamorise: ‘The slaves destroyed tirelessly. . . . And if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. They knew that as long as these plantations stood their lot would be to labour on them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them.’
Nor does he shield us from the terrorism and sadism of the masters. But the catalogue of tortures does more than torture the reader; it deepens our appreciation of the former slaves’ power to endure and overcome. Despite death and destruction, the slaves are never helpless victims. This may explain why strugglers from the Caribbean and even South Africa told the author that at low points in their movements Black Jacobins had helped sustain them. This quality is what makes the book thrilling and inspiring — we are learning from the Haitians’ determination to be free what being human is about.
Second, Toussaint L’Ouverture possessed all the skills of leadership that the revolution needed. An uneducated, middle-aged West Indian when it began, he was soon able to handle sophisticated European diplomats and politicians who foolishly thought they could manipulate him because he was black and had been a slave.
James liked to say that while the official claim is that Lincoln freed the slaves, it was in fact the slaves who had freed Lincoln — from his limitations and the conservative restraints of office. Here James says that ‘. . . Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint.’ Then he adds: ‘And even that is not the whole truth.’
In other words, while the movement chooses, creates and develops its leadership, historians are unlikely to pin that process down, whatever they surmise from events. What we can be sure of, however, is that the great leader is never a ‘self-made man,’ but a product of his individual talents and skills (and weaknesses) shaped by the movement he leads in the course of great upheavals. The Haitian Jacobins created Toussaint and he led them to where they had the will and determination to go.
This is still groundbreaking today, considering that there are parties and organisations, large and small, which claim that their leadership is crucial for a revolution’s success. There are also those who believe leadership is unnecessary and it would hold the movement back. In Haiti the slaves made the revolution, and Toussaint, one of them, played a vital role in their winning.
Third, James tells us who many of these revolutionary slaves were. They were not proletarians,
‘But working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organised mass movement.’
This is relevant to the problem of development which the book poses: what are non-industrial people to do after the revolution? The movement has struggled with this question for generations. Toussaint relied on the plantation system of the former masters who claimed to personify ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’; they ultimately captured and killed him. The ex-slaves would not have it. They wanted their own plots of land, and the end of the plantation – an early form of forced collectivisation.
Lenin finally (1923) proposed that the State encourage co-operatives which, independent of the party, would dominate the economy. Gandhi insisted that Indians must hold on to the cotton industry and its village way of life against all odds. Nyerere proposed ujamaa or African socialism for Tanzanians, and with the momentum of the independence movement, people made extraordinary strides (an untold story). China has more to tell us; and some Indigenous Latin Americans are gaining the power to say what they propose.
We know that Haiti went further than the movements elsewhere: it was decades before others abolished slavery. Haiti, so far ahead, was vulnerable to the imperial powers which it had infuriated by its revolutionary impertinence.
Now, despite often racist reporting of events there, we are learning how the present Black Jacobins have been organising and how their struggle has continued. President Aristide, whom they elected by 92% of the vote, was twice taken from them by an alliance of the US and the local elite. They demand his return. The least we can do is support that demand.
*From The Blogosphere-Ignorance is Strength:Perhaps we need a little 'Salt'!-By Ed Felien / The Rag Blog / September 3, 2010
Click on the title to link to the blog mentioned in the headline.
*From The Blogosphere- The "SteveLendmanBlog"-The Israeli Lobby: Declassified Documents Expose Its Influence
Click on the title to link to the blog mentioned in the headline.
*From The Blogosphere-From The "Bob Feldman '68" Blog- A People's History Of Afghanistan, Part I
Click on the title to link to the blog mentioned in the headline.
Markin comment:
This is a great series for those who are not familiar with the critical role of Afghanistan in world politics, if not directly then as part of the history of world imperialism. Thanks, Bob Feldman.
And, speaking of world imperialism, let us keep our eyes on the prize-Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
This is a great series for those who are not familiar with the critical role of Afghanistan in world politics, if not directly then as part of the history of world imperialism. Thanks, Bob Feldman.
And, speaking of world imperialism, let us keep our eyes on the prize-Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
*From The Blogosphere-From The "HistoMat" Blog- On Tom Behan
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
Tom Behan - Revolutionary Historian
Though I did not really know Tom Behan, (and indeed one of my main memories of him was a meeting I think he one year at Marxism on 'A Marxist analysis of the Mafia' - which in about an hour certainly wiped away my sentimental sense of the 'rustic chivalry' and glamour about such organisations that I had imbibed from countless hours watching The Godfather trilogy and other mafia films - along with not living in a country where such organisations operated), it was still a tremendous shock to read the following email from the SWP about 'Tom Behan (1957-2010)':
'It is with great sadness that I have to inform comrades that Tom Behan died on Monday. Tom was a member of the party for over 30 years. He played an invaluable role in the protests in Genoa and he was responsible for bringing over Carlo Guiliani’s mother to speak at numerous political events in Britain. His writings on Italy – especially on Mussolini, the Resistance Movement and the Mafia are just wonderful and should be read by everyone. He will be greatly missed. An obituary for Tom will be in next week’s Socialist Worker.'
By way of the smallest possible tribute, I will transcribe a small section from the introduction of one of his last books about The Italian Resistance to fascism during the Second World War - which reminds us that democracy and liberation from tyranny and dictorships does not come from on high, via B-52 bombers, but from below, from mass movements and the mass collective action of millions of people. This is Tom Behan on 'The Meaning of the Resistance']:
In essence the Resistance is about democracy, direct democracy. And perhaps the most subversive idea of the entire movement was that you can defeat a far more powerful enemy - in this case by successfully conducting a campaign of guerrilla warfare. When the Italian government signed an armistice and collapsed in September 1943, the Nazis brought large numbers over the Alps in a great rush to occupy the country, and to block the Allies, who were already in the South. The idea that the most ruthless and efficient fighting machine in the world could be brought to a standstill seemed like a joke back then - yet less than two years later German Field Marshals were forced to surrender to ordinary communist industrial workers.
The story of the Italian Resistance movement is the story of how ordinary people (a people who are often racially stereotyped as being cowardly), who had lived under a dictatorship for 20 years, played a key role in ending a system which seemed set in stone, totally unbeatable. It is the story of how a society which seemed extremely stable and controlled, destined to continue in the same way forever, suddenly exploded from below with mass activity, such that for a brief period everything seemed possible.
How could such an organisation grow so quickly? First of all, the situation was so dire that many people felt they had nothing else left to lose. A historian hostile to the ideals of the French Revolution of 1789 [Thomas Carlyle] once captured the common causes of so many huge social upheavals, which were also applicable to Italy during the Second World War: 'Hunger and nakedness, and nightmare oppression lying heavy on twenty-five million hearts; this, not the wounded vanities or contradicted philosophies of philosophical advocates, rich shopkeepers, rural noblesse, was the prime mover in the French Revolution; as the like will be in all such revolutions, in all countries.'
By 1942 many Italian cities were being bombed nightly by the Allies, jobs were becoming scarce, as was food. A young worker in Milan recalled: 'Parents' body weight fell to 40-50 kilos, so they could give what little they had to their children. You reached the point that out of dying of hunger or dying from a bullet - it was better to die from a bullet.' Similarly, many families had loved ones fighting in Mussolini's armies who had either been killed, wounded or captured. For many conscript soldiers and their families, the idea of fighting alongside the invading Nazis, or dying for Mussolini's puppet regime created in September 1943 by the Germans, was simply never taken seriously.
People behaved in unusual ways: who would expect a Vice Chancellor in a speech to first-year university students to invite them to take up arms against the government? Well, it happened at Padua university in 1943.
The Resistance is important not just because it was a military movement which involved much of society, but because it was also a political movement, a movement for democracy against fascist dictatorship. Very few of the participants ever visualised their future in terms of the kind of stale parliamentary systems we know today; most were fighting for much more radical and participatory forms of democracy. Be that as it may, one simply cannot understand modern Italian society and politics without understanding the Resistance. Modern Italian democracy comes directly from the Resistance, it comes from below.
This is why it is has been so popular for many Italians - it was a war fought by volunteers. All Resistance fighters made their own personal decision that it was right to risk their own lives for a cause - a very different decision from that of someone joining an army because they receive their call-up papers through the letter box.
Tom Behan 'The Meaning of the [Italian] Resistance'
Tom Behan - Revolutionary Historian
Though I did not really know Tom Behan, (and indeed one of my main memories of him was a meeting I think he one year at Marxism on 'A Marxist analysis of the Mafia' - which in about an hour certainly wiped away my sentimental sense of the 'rustic chivalry' and glamour about such organisations that I had imbibed from countless hours watching The Godfather trilogy and other mafia films - along with not living in a country where such organisations operated), it was still a tremendous shock to read the following email from the SWP about 'Tom Behan (1957-2010)':
'It is with great sadness that I have to inform comrades that Tom Behan died on Monday. Tom was a member of the party for over 30 years. He played an invaluable role in the protests in Genoa and he was responsible for bringing over Carlo Guiliani’s mother to speak at numerous political events in Britain. His writings on Italy – especially on Mussolini, the Resistance Movement and the Mafia are just wonderful and should be read by everyone. He will be greatly missed. An obituary for Tom will be in next week’s Socialist Worker.'
By way of the smallest possible tribute, I will transcribe a small section from the introduction of one of his last books about The Italian Resistance to fascism during the Second World War - which reminds us that democracy and liberation from tyranny and dictorships does not come from on high, via B-52 bombers, but from below, from mass movements and the mass collective action of millions of people. This is Tom Behan on 'The Meaning of the Resistance']:
In essence the Resistance is about democracy, direct democracy. And perhaps the most subversive idea of the entire movement was that you can defeat a far more powerful enemy - in this case by successfully conducting a campaign of guerrilla warfare. When the Italian government signed an armistice and collapsed in September 1943, the Nazis brought large numbers over the Alps in a great rush to occupy the country, and to block the Allies, who were already in the South. The idea that the most ruthless and efficient fighting machine in the world could be brought to a standstill seemed like a joke back then - yet less than two years later German Field Marshals were forced to surrender to ordinary communist industrial workers.
The story of the Italian Resistance movement is the story of how ordinary people (a people who are often racially stereotyped as being cowardly), who had lived under a dictatorship for 20 years, played a key role in ending a system which seemed set in stone, totally unbeatable. It is the story of how a society which seemed extremely stable and controlled, destined to continue in the same way forever, suddenly exploded from below with mass activity, such that for a brief period everything seemed possible.
How could such an organisation grow so quickly? First of all, the situation was so dire that many people felt they had nothing else left to lose. A historian hostile to the ideals of the French Revolution of 1789 [Thomas Carlyle] once captured the common causes of so many huge social upheavals, which were also applicable to Italy during the Second World War: 'Hunger and nakedness, and nightmare oppression lying heavy on twenty-five million hearts; this, not the wounded vanities or contradicted philosophies of philosophical advocates, rich shopkeepers, rural noblesse, was the prime mover in the French Revolution; as the like will be in all such revolutions, in all countries.'
By 1942 many Italian cities were being bombed nightly by the Allies, jobs were becoming scarce, as was food. A young worker in Milan recalled: 'Parents' body weight fell to 40-50 kilos, so they could give what little they had to their children. You reached the point that out of dying of hunger or dying from a bullet - it was better to die from a bullet.' Similarly, many families had loved ones fighting in Mussolini's armies who had either been killed, wounded or captured. For many conscript soldiers and their families, the idea of fighting alongside the invading Nazis, or dying for Mussolini's puppet regime created in September 1943 by the Germans, was simply never taken seriously.
People behaved in unusual ways: who would expect a Vice Chancellor in a speech to first-year university students to invite them to take up arms against the government? Well, it happened at Padua university in 1943.
The Resistance is important not just because it was a military movement which involved much of society, but because it was also a political movement, a movement for democracy against fascist dictatorship. Very few of the participants ever visualised their future in terms of the kind of stale parliamentary systems we know today; most were fighting for much more radical and participatory forms of democracy. Be that as it may, one simply cannot understand modern Italian society and politics without understanding the Resistance. Modern Italian democracy comes directly from the Resistance, it comes from below.
This is why it is has been so popular for many Italians - it was a war fought by volunteers. All Resistance fighters made their own personal decision that it was right to risk their own lives for a cause - a very different decision from that of someone joining an army because they receive their call-up papers through the letter box.
Tom Behan 'The Meaning of the [Italian] Resistance'
*From The Blogosphere-From The "Unrepentant Communist" Blog-On Jim Gralton
Click on the title to link to the blog mentioned in the headline.
Thursday, September 02, 2010
*Just When You Thought It Was Safe To…, Not Bop-Doo-Wop
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Harptones performing a cover of Life Is But A Dream.
CD Review
Old Town Doo Wop, Volume Three, Various artists, Ace Records
Confused by the headline? Don’t be, all it does is refer to a previous series of Oldies But Goodies (1950s-1960s oldies but goodies, just so you know) CD reviews in this space. That gargantuan task required shifting through ten, no, fifteen volumes of material that by the end left me limping, and crying uncle. See, as I explained in the last few reviews of the series, just when I thought I was done at Volume Ten I found that it was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. In any case I whipped off those last five reviews in one shot to be done with it.
The reason for such haste at that point seemed self-explanatory. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories, teen memories, teen high school memories mainly, from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in the reviewed compilations. How many times can one read about guys with two left feet, the social conventions of dancing close, wallflowers, the avoidance of wallflower-dom, meaningful sighs, meaningless sighs, the longings for certain obviously unattainable shes (or hes), the trials and tribulations associated with high school gymnasium crepe paper-adorned dances, moonlight-driven dream thoughts of after dance doings, and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. And there and then I threw in the towel, I thought.
Well now I have recovered enough to take a little different look at the music of this period- the doo wop sound that hovered in the background radio of every kid, every kid who had a radio, a transistor radio, to keep parental prying ears at arms length and who was moonstruck enough to have been searching, high and low, for a sound that was not just the same old, same old that his or her parents listened to. Early rock and rock, especially that early Sun Record stuff, and plenty of rhythm and blues met that need but so did, for a time, old doo wop-the silky sounds of lead singer-driven, lyrics-driven, vocal-meshing harmony that was the stuff of teenage “petting” parties and staid old hokey school dances, mainly, in my case, elementary school dances.
As I mentioned in the oldies but goodies reviews not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to, or meant to be, playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability, slow danceabilty, to make any Jack or Jill start snapping fingers then, or now. As I asked in that previous series and is appropriate to ask here as well what about the now seeming mandatory question of the best song in the compilation? The one that stands out as the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).
Here The Harptone's Life Is But A Dream (also done by the Earls) fills the bill. And, yes, I know, this is one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
***************
Life Is But A Dream- The Harptones
Will you take part in
My life, my love
That is my dream
Life is but a dream
It's what you make it
Always try to give
Don't ever take it
Life has it's music
Life has it's songs of love
Life is but a dream
And I dream of you
Strange as it seems
All night I see you
I'm trying to tell you
Just what you mean to me
I love you
With all my heart
Adore you
And all your charms
I want you
To do your part
Come here to my open arms
Life is but a dream
And we can live in
We can make our love
None to compare with
Will you take part in
My life, my love
That is my dream
Life is but a dream
CD Review
Old Town Doo Wop, Volume Three, Various artists, Ace Records
Confused by the headline? Don’t be, all it does is refer to a previous series of Oldies But Goodies (1950s-1960s oldies but goodies, just so you know) CD reviews in this space. That gargantuan task required shifting through ten, no, fifteen volumes of material that by the end left me limping, and crying uncle. See, as I explained in the last few reviews of the series, just when I thought I was done at Volume Ten I found that it was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. In any case I whipped off those last five reviews in one shot to be done with it.
The reason for such haste at that point seemed self-explanatory. After all how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories, teen memories, teen high school memories mainly, from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in the reviewed compilations. How many times can one read about guys with two left feet, the social conventions of dancing close, wallflowers, the avoidance of wallflower-dom, meaningful sighs, meaningless sighs, the longings for certain obviously unattainable shes (or hes), the trials and tribulations associated with high school gymnasium crepe paper-adorned dances, moonlight-driven dream thoughts of after dance doings, and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. And there and then I threw in the towel, I thought.
Well now I have recovered enough to take a little different look at the music of this period- the doo wop sound that hovered in the background radio of every kid, every kid who had a radio, a transistor radio, to keep parental prying ears at arms length and who was moonstruck enough to have been searching, high and low, for a sound that was not just the same old, same old that his or her parents listened to. Early rock and rock, especially that early Sun Record stuff, and plenty of rhythm and blues met that need but so did, for a time, old doo wop-the silky sounds of lead singer-driven, lyrics-driven, vocal-meshing harmony that was the stuff of teenage “petting” parties and staid old hokey school dances, mainly, in my case, elementary school dances.
As I mentioned in the oldies but goodies reviews not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to, or meant to be, playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability, slow danceabilty, to make any Jack or Jill start snapping fingers then, or now. As I asked in that previous series and is appropriate to ask here as well what about the now seeming mandatory question of the best song in the compilation? The one that stands out as the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).
Here The Harptone's Life Is But A Dream (also done by the Earls) fills the bill. And, yes, I know, this is one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
***************
Life Is But A Dream- The Harptones
Will you take part in
My life, my love
That is my dream
Life is but a dream
It's what you make it
Always try to give
Don't ever take it
Life has it's music
Life has it's songs of love
Life is but a dream
And I dream of you
Strange as it seems
All night I see you
I'm trying to tell you
Just what you mean to me
I love you
With all my heart
Adore you
And all your charms
I want you
To do your part
Come here to my open arms
Life is but a dream
And we can live in
We can make our love
None to compare with
Will you take part in
My life, my love
That is my dream
Life is but a dream
*From The Pages Of Workers Vanguard-Economic Crisis and the Capitalist State, Parts One &Two-For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!
Click on the headline to link to the Workers Vanguard website for an online copy of Part Two of the article mentioned in the headline.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist program mentioned in this day's other posts.
*********
Workers Vanguard No. 961
2 July 2010
Liberals Push Regulation Hoax
Economic Crisis and the Capitalist State
Break with the Democrats!
For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!
Part One
Throughout the capitalist world, the human cost of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s has been staggering. In the European Union (EU), where a financial crisis now threatens a renewed downturn, 23 million workers are out of work. Unemployment for those under 25 is running over 20 percent; in Spain, youth unemployment is over 44 percent.
The early stages of the current economic crisis overlapped with the 2008 hunger crisis, in which skyrocketing food prices raised the spectre of mass starvation (see “Imperialism Starves World’s Poor,” WV Nos. 919 and 920, 29 August and 12 September 2008). Since 2008, some 130 million additional people have been driven into the ranks of the chronically hungry and undernourished. In many countries food prices have barely fallen from their peaks of two years ago, and in some Asian markets staples like rice and wheat are today selling above their 2008 levels. The worldwide total of those who are desperately hungry has, for the first time, climbed to more than one billion people—roughly one-sixth of humanity.
In the U.S., the number of people classified as living in extreme poverty—those unable to provide for the most basic needs of food, shelter and health care—has risen by more than a third over the past decade and now totals 17 million. Some 15 million workers are officially unemployed, a record 46 percent of them for longer than six months. When those who are constrained to work part-time or have abandoned the job hunt are included in the count, the number rises to over 26 million—almost 17 percent of the workforce. Since the housing price bubble burst in 2007, there have been over seven million foreclosures. And the number of working people who face being thrown into the street is on the rise, with a record 932,000 foreclosures in the first quarter of this year, up 16 percent from the same period last year.
As always in racist capitalist America, black people, typically the last hired and first fired, have been hit the hardest. Even high-income black borrowers are 80 percent more likely to lose their homes to foreclosure than their white counterparts. Nationally, the jobless rate for young black men aged 16-24 has reached Great Depression levels of over 34 percent. In rust-belt states like Illinois, Wisconsin and Ohio, joblessness for blacks is running over 20 percent; in Michigan, the figure is expected to soon hit 27 percent. Nearly one out of two black men in Milwaukee is without a job. Children of immigrant, black, Latino or Native American parents are more than twice as likely as white children to be living in poverty.
Barack Obama and the banker-politicians in his administration, following in the steps of George W. Bush, showered hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars on their financier friends and the auto bosses. Banks can borrow money from the Federal Reserve (the U.S. central bank) at 0.5 percent interest and purchase risk-free Treasury bonds paying 3 percent. Trying to kick-start the economy, the government is practically giving money away to the banks. This has in turn fueled a renewed speculative binge propelling a wide range of price bubbles, from corporate shares in stock exchanges to precious metals and fossil fuels—and food items.
Much of what currently looks like economic growth is in fact the froth generated by speculative bubbles. Over the past year, as millions were driven to the brink of starvation, the number of billionaires in the world increased by almost 30 percent to over 1,000. The net worth of this select club skyrocketed 50 percent and now totals a cool $3.6 trillion.
No sooner had Barack Obama signed into law his health care “reform”—a boondoggle for big business that cuts Medicare and taxes union health plans—than Washington was abuzz with talk of “retooling” Social Security by cutting benefits and increasing taxes, a task that his right-wing Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, took on without success. The New York Times (22 March) wrote that “the promise of future reductions would immediately reassure global markets fretful that the United States’ debt is already its highest since World War II.... That argument appeals to Mr. Obama.”
From the U.S. to the EU, capitalist governments are taking the ax to wages, pensions and social welfare programs in an attempt to make working people pay for the economic crisis. Simultaneously, they are mooting various financial regulation schemes in a vain attempt to overcome the sharp economic crises that are and always have been an inherent feature of the capitalist system. Chief among these measures is the much-ballyhooed bank “reform” that is passing through the U.S. Congress. When the final details were worked out, one Wall Street banker said, “We are all breathing a sigh of relief here…. We can live with this” (Financial Times, 25 June). At any rate, with the European financial crisis and the ongoing housing crisis in the U.S. threatening a “double-dip” recession, this amounts to something like moving the deck chairs on the Titanic.
This situation amply demonstrates the truth of the statement by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” This understanding represents a fundamental dividing line between ourselves—Marxist revolutionaries—and self-proclaimed “socialists” who promote illusions in the possibility of reforming the capitalist state, which in the U.S. they seek to do by exerting pressure on the Democratic Party. To such class collaborationism we counterpose the road of class struggle. The key is to break the political chains that shackle labor to the capitalist political parties and state. Break with the Democrats! For a workers party that fights for a workers government! There will be no end to the misery wrought by the capitalist rulers and their boom-bust economic system until the working class seizes power through a socialist revolution that smashes the capitalist state and erects in its place a workers state—the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Exploitation and Profit
The wealth of the capitalist class—the owners of the means of production—derives from the exploitation of labor. As Marx explained in Capital, his classic analysis of the capitalist economy, the wage-worker is constrained to sell to the capitalist his ability to work. The wage that a worker is paid corresponds to that part of the working day during which he produces the equivalent of what it costs to maintain himself and his family. The other part of the day, he works without remuneration, creating “surplus value,” which the capitalist pockets in the form of profit.
Over the past three and a half decades, in which working people in this country have largely been on the losing end of the class struggle, the rich have fabulously increased their wealth, mainly by holding down and driving down wages. Pay for production and other nonsupervisory workers—80 percent of the private workforce—is today 9 percent lower in real terms (i.e., adjusted for inflation) than it was in 1973. During that same period, labor productivity (output per worker) increased by more than 80 percent.
In short, capitalists have enormously ratcheted up what Marx called the rate of exploitation—the ratio of the share of the product of labor appropriated by the capitalists to the share represented by the worker’s wage. They did this by combining mass layoffs with extracting increased output from those workers still employed, including through forced overtime. Last year, through layoffs and short time, total hours worked decreased by 5 percent—twice as much as the 2.5 percent fall in gross domestic product. The London Economist (20 March) commented on these figures with evident approval: “America has gone on a diet: it has squeezed extra output from a smaller workforce and suffered a big rise in unemployment as a consequence.”
This likewise corresponds to Marx’s analysis of the basic laws governing the capitalist mode of production. Marx explained that the existence of a large pool of unemployed—the “industrial reserve army”—serves to restrain what he ironically referred to as workers’ “pretensions” to demand higher wages:
“The condemnation of one part of the working-class to enforced idleness by the over-work of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists....
“The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labour-army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. Relative surplus-population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labour works. It confines the field of action of this law within the limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital.”
—Capital, Volume I
To make ends meet, working families have increasingly gone into debt, maxing out credit cards and borrowing against the value of their homes. Americans today owe a staggering $13.5 trillion, or around $44,000 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. Any money that families have to spare after providing for essential needs is being spent not on consumption but on trying to ease that crushing debt burden. The average U.S. household today turns over more than 17 percent of its disposable income directly to financial capitalists to pay down mortgages, credit card debt and the like.
The current crisis has been exacerbated by the deindustrialization of the U.S., already under way for several decades. Despite the massive shift of social product from labor to capital, capitalists in this country have steadily cut back on productive capacity. This country already ranks behind every industrial nation except France in the percentage of overall economic activity devoted to manufacturing—13.9 percent, according to the World Bank, down four percentage points in a decade. Since the official start of the recession in December 2007, some eight million jobs have been lost. Many if not most of those jobs are gone for good, especially in manufacturing.
Those industrial workers who succeed in finding new employment are often forced into low-paying, temporary jobs that provide no health insurance, retirement benefits or even sick days. A cover story titled “The Disposable Worker” in Bloomberg BusinessWeek (18 January) reflected the bosses’ triumphalism:
“Some economists predict it will be years, not months, before employees regain any semblance of bargaining power. That’s because this recession’s unusual ferocity has accelerated trends—including offshoring, automation, the decline of labor unions’ influence, new management techniques, and regulatory changes—that already had been eroding workers’ economic standing....
“When employment in the U.S. eventually recovers, it’s likely to be because American workers swallow hard and accept lower pay.”
Standing in sharp contradiction to its declining economic base is U.S. imperialism’s overwhelming global military hegemony. The destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state in 1991-92 removed what had been the only significant counterweight to U.S. imperialism, which sees itself free to ride roughshod in Iraq and Afghanistan and to threaten any other regime that gets in its way. Defense of the interests of workers, blacks and immigrants in the U.S. is integrally linked to opposition to U.S. imperialism’s interventions abroad.
Capitalism’s Labor Lieutenants
What had already been an enormous increase in the rate of exploitation of workers, due to decades of giveback union contracts, two-tier wage systems and similar devices acceded to by the trade-union bureaucracy, has been further jacked up as a result of the economic crisis. Accepting the logic imposed by the capitalist system, the trade-union tops are reduced to negotiating the terms of surrender, from the union-busting auto bailout to attacks on teachers’ tenure and seniority.
Basing themselves on the mass organizations of the working class, the labor bureaucrats are at times pushed to engage in strike action. Yet their primary function is to ensure the subordination of the workers to the interests of the class enemy, especially through their fealty to the Democratic Party, of which they are a constituent part. No less than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is a party of and for the capitalist class—with the difference that the Democrats cynically pose as “friends of labor” and shed crocodile tears over the consequences of the anti-working-class measures that they themselves seek to impose.
Earlier this year, in support of Obama’s push for a “financial reform” law, the AFL-CIO tops launched a campaign, featuring an April 29 march by thousands of workers on Wall Street, demanding “Make Wall Street Pay.” A couple of weeks later, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka told a meeting of union officials in Washington: “We can pay for the jobs we need by making Wall Street pay back those bailouts, by taxing those huge Wall Street bonuses, by closing the tax loopholes that benefit hedge fund and private equity managers...and imposing a fee on financial speculation.”
However fatuous, such schemes are premised on the notion that the Democratic administration is at bottom the friend of working people and just needs some pressure to rein in the fat cats. Though occasionally engaging in a bit of tough talk about financial regulation, the Obama administration has done—and will do—little to displease its Wall Street cronies. Avoiding serious restrictions on bankers’ pay or their ability to speculate on financial markets makes it more attractive for them to do business on Wall Street rather than in the City of London, the world’s other major financial center.
In response to mass layoffs, the pro-capitalist labor officialdom has renewed its chauvinist protectionist appeals. They pushed for and got the “buy American” clause in Obama’s “rescue” package for industry last year. Such flag-waving serves only to subordinate workers to their red-white-and-blue exploiters while driving a wedge between native and foreign-born workers. In the current economic crisis, capitalist governments in the U.S. and elsewhere have ratcheted up attacks on immigrants which, if not fought, will only further divide the working class. It is crucial for the labor movement to organize immigrant workers. We demand: No deportations! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!
Along with liberal Democrats like New York Senator Charles Schumer, the union misleaders have been in the forefront of protectionism directed against China. In this vein, Trumka & Co. clamor against the Stalinist Communist Party regime for not revaluing its currency, the yuan (also called renminbi), upwards, claiming that its current value against the dollar undermines American exports and hence costs jobs at home.
Anti-China protectionism is directed against the bureaucratically deformed workers state that issued out of the 1949 Chinese Revolution. That revolution was a historic achievement for China’s workers and peasants and for the workers of the world, smashing capitalist/landlord rule and ripping the world’s most populous country out of the hands of the imperialist powers. Despite the rule of a privileged, nationalist bureaucracy, China’s collectivized economy has brought enormous gains to generations of workers, peasants and women. While capitalist property has made huge inroads over the last three decades of “market reforms,” nationalized property remains the core of the economy. The U.S. and other imperialist powers seek nothing less than the restoration of capitalist rule in China. The treacherous AFL-CIO misleaders aid the imperialists by their promotion of “dissidents” like Han Dongfang, who seeks to channel Chinese workers’ struggles in the direction of support to capitalist counterrevolution.
It is vital for the international proletariat to stand for the unconditional military defense of China and the other remaining deformed workers states—Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam—against imperialist and domestic counterrevolution. It is the task of the proletariat of those countries to carry out a political revolution to sweep out their nationalist Stalinist misrulers, who preach accommodation with the world capitalist order, and establish regimes based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism.
There has recently been an explosion of strikes by Chinese workers in foreign-owned plants like Honda and Toyota (see article, page 16). While the U.S. labor tops have been prostrate before the bosses’ attacks, the workers in the capitalist plants in China are winning gains the tried-and-true way—through class struggle! These strikes underline the need for international labor solidarity in opposition to the U.S. trade-union tops’ poisonous protectionist schemes, which divide workers along national lines.
Tea Party Reactionaries
The labor bureaucracy dutifully threw an enormous amount of union resources
—money and time—into getting Obama placed in office as U.S. capitalism’s CEO. Liberal-minded workers and intellectuals expected major reforms, from universal health insurance coverage to tighter financial regulation. These expectations were reinforced by the severity of the economic crisis and the upsurge of popular hostility toward Wall Street. The reformist left—the International Socialist Organization, Workers World Party et al.—hailed Obama’s election as evidence that their program of pressuring the Democratic Party could fundamentally improve conditions for workers, blacks and immigrants. Combating such illusions, we described Obama as a “Wall Street Democrat” and wrote right after the elections: “Obama seeks to socialize the bourgeoisie’s losses on the backs of working people, while helping the exploiters appropriate the profits for themselves” (WV No. 925, 21 November 2008).
And this is precisely what has happened. With the labor movement largely prostrate, organized opposition to the Obama administration’s policies has come primarily from the far-right wing. Racist yahoos, bible-thumpers, militiamen, John Birch Society types and “birthers” (who challenge the fact that Obama was born in the U.S.)—along with a fringe of fascist white-supremacists—were mobilized by the Republican right and their media shock jocks into a loose “Tea Party” movement in opposition initially to the economic stimulus package and then the health care “reform.” But at bottom it was not about particular policy issues. This movement displays the anti-black racism, anti-immigrant nativism and sexual bigotry that have long been wielded by the American bourgeoisie to divide the working class and buttress social reaction.
On March 20, shortly before the Congressional vote on Obama’s health care bill, Tea Party protesters outside the U.S. Capitol yelled the “N” word at civil rights veteran John Lewis and other black Congressmen and spat on another; they confronted openly gay Congressman Barney Frank with homophobic slurs. And no sooner had Tea Party candidate Rand Paul won Kentucky’s May 18 Republican Party Senate primary than he declared that he would have opposed forcing private businesses to desegregate under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
While partly a response to the current economic downturn, today’s Tea Party movement has roots going back to the white racist backlash against the limited gains for blacks and women, crucially including abortion rights, that resulted from the civil rights movement and other social upheavals of the 1960s. That backlash eventually took the form of opposition to “big government”—identified with court-ordered racial integration in the public schools, giving jobs to blacks and women under affirmative action programs and handing out welfare money to poor black women and their children (a demagogic lie since relatively few government funds went to the poor, black or white). This boiled over into the “tax revolt” of the late 1970s—the so-called revenge of the suburbs—which propelled Ronald Reagan into the White House and began the ascendancy of the Republican right in national politics.
It’s the Capitalist System, Not Personal Greed
At the AFL-CIO’s April 29 Wall Street demonstration, Trumka sought to appeal to workers’ justifiable outrage by denouncing the bankers’ “spirit of greed.” In fact, blaming the global economic downturn on the unbridled greed of a small number of financiers serves to divert attention from the destructive irrationality of the profit-driven capitalist system as a whole.
As Karl Marx explained, what drives the capitalist system up and down is the rate of profit: the amount of surplus value extracted from the exploitation of labor per unit of capital invested. The policies and actions of corporate management—whether of banks, industrial enterprises or retail chains—aim to maximize the return on equity—the ratio of profits to the market value of the firm’s stock.
The role of management is that of agents of the big capitalist shareholders in their corporations. If the return on equity of a given corporation declines or is substantially less than that of its main competitors, the price of its stock will fall. And woe unto management when that happens. The Sellout (2009), a book on the financial meltdown by financial journalist and TV commentator Charles Gasparino, is subtitled: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System. Gasparino peddles the notion that excessive greed helped cause the current crisis by leading investment bankers to take unsound risks. But Gasparino himself recounts that some CEOs of major investment banks, such as E. Stanley O’Neal at Merrill Lynch and John Mack at Morgan Stanley, were known for shying away from excessive risk before they took over the top job. They then became obsessed with increasing the bank’s return on equity. The only way they could do that given the economic environment at the time was to invest ever greater sums in mortgage-backed securities, including arcane derivatives, while amassing ever greater amounts of debt relative to the bank’s capital.
Some Wall Street executives recognized to some extent that they were in the midst of a speculative bubble but felt compelled to participate in it lest they lose out to the competition. As then- Citigroup CEO Charles Prince put it in mid 2007: “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” And when the music did stop, the government bailed out Prince and his Wall Street cohorts.
“Socialism for the Rich”: Wall Street Bailout Revisited
A case study of how the government serves as the executive committee of the capitalist ruling class is offered by the massive bailout of the big banks and other major financial players. The story of that bailout was detailed in two books that came out last year, both written by well-informed financial journalists: David Wessel’s In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic and Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis—and Themselves. Wessel is the economics editor of the Wall Street Journal and Sorkin is a mainstay of the business section of the New York Times.
Both books recount that the Bush administration collaborated closely with top Democratic as well as Republican officials of the Federal Reserve and Democratic Congressional leaders. Whatever right/left ideological divide exists between the two parties had, in this instance, no import whatsoever. Given the Republicans’ vocal opposition these days to Obama’s tepid proposals for additional regulation of the financial system, one might think that the visceral hostility between Republicans and Democrats would have prevented a bipartisan policy in response to the financial crisis. Quite the contrary. When the vital interests of American finance capital were at stake, the two parties acted in unison.
The three men primarily responsible for the $700 billion bailout fund called TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) and related measures were Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and the president of the key New York branch of the Federal Reserve, Tim Geithner (now Obama’s Treasury secretary). Paulson was CEO of Goldman Sachs when in 2006 the Bush gang recruited him as their main economic point man. Paulson’s predecessor at both Goldman and the U.S. Treasury was Robert Rubin, a centrist Democrat who served as economic consigliere in the Clinton administration in the 1990s. Bernanke, known as a moderate Republican, was chosen in 2005 to replace right-wing ideologue Alan Greenspan as Fed chairman by a presidential committee headed by Dick Cheney, the Darth Vader of the Bush administration. Geithner, a centrist Democrat, was a protégé of Robert Rubin in Clinton’s Treasury. Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner worked closely together on behalf of their Wall Street masters without substantive political differences.
Bush and Cheney, for all their strident championing of “free market” capitalism, did not hesitate to invoke massive government intervention in the face of the financial collapse. To do so, they simply turned over policymaking during the crisis to Paulson and Bernanke. Likewise, Democratic Congressional leaders gave the two a green light to do what they wanted. In July 2008, Paulson told Barney Frank, a liberal Massachusetts Democrat who heads the House Financial Services Committee, that he and Bernanke were considering taking expansive and unprecedented measures in an effort to calm the increasingly troubled financial markets. Frank advised him “to ask for what you need” and promised to support him.
Defending the bailout today, Geithner and others point to the fact that almost all of the TARP money has been repaid. But the financial institutions were able to do so only because the Fed subsequently lent them some $2 trillion, taking as collateral their more “toxic” assets. The government also guaranteed some $5.4 trillion of the banks’ loans and those of other financial institutions (so-called “counterparties”) with which they do business.
Wessel, in particular, underscores that the Wall Street bailout violated the professed ideological principles not just of the Bush administration but of the American capitalist class in general. Indeed, American capitalists will support extensive government intervention in the economy when it serves their interests and is on terms they can dictate—for example, the nationalization of the American Insurance Group (then the largest insurance company in the world) and the bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler.
In this regard, Wessel quotes Gao Xiqing, the head of China’s sovereign wealth fund, who quipped: “Now our people are joking that we look at the U.S. and see ‘socialism with American characteristics’.” This is a play on “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the term long used by the Beijing Stalinist regime to describe its own economic system, one that remains primarily based on state-owned enterprises and banks but has a large capitalist sector.
For Class Struggle to Fight Capitalist Austerity!
As happens in all economic downturns, workers’ apprehension over possible job losses has taken a toll on the already low level of labor struggle in the U.S. Last year saw the lowest level of strike activity of any year since World War II, by far. But as the experience of past economic crises also shows, that state of affairs will not last indefinitely.
It is necessary to forge a new leadership of the unions based on the understanding that there are two decisive classes in capitalist society, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, whose interests are irreconcilably opposed. Such a leadership, fighting for the unity of the multiracial proletariat in hard class struggle, would link those struggles to defense of the social interests of black people, Latinos and other oppressed minorities.
Today the question of revolutionary leadership is sharply posed in Europe, where there has been a wave of one-day general strikes against attempts by the capitalist governments to slash the wages of public-sector workers, gut pensions and jack up sales and other taxes. Greece has had a total of six one-day general strikes so far this year. On June 24, some two million demonstrated across France as the country was rocked for the second time in a month by strikes against a government plan to raise the retirement age. In Spain, hundreds of thousands of public-sector workers struck on June 8, while in Italy the six-million-strong CGIL union federation carried out a nationwide stoppage on June 25. However, the workers’ evident combativity runs up against the political program of the labor bureaucracies, all of which have a bankrupt strategy of seeking to reform the capitalist system of exploitation. What is needed is the forging of revolutionary parties that can lead the proletariat, at the head of all the oppressed, in sweeping away the capitalist order.
This road was outlined in the 1938 Transitional Program written by Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the October Revolution in 1917. Titled The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, the document, written in the midst of the Great Depression, put forward a series of demands that provide a bridge from workers’ current consciousness and daily struggles to the need for socialist revolution. Declaring “uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crises, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers,” the document stated:
“Against unemployment, ‘structural’ as well as ‘conjunctural,’ the time is ripe to advance, along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week.”
As Trotsky laid out, the fight for employment and decent living conditions for all must point to one final conclusion: the seizure of power by the proletariat and the expropriation of the capitalist class.
The struggle for a shorter workweek under capitalism also points to a fundamental goal of communism: a radical reduction in the labor time necessary to produce the means of consumption. The setting up of an internationally planned, socialist economy will lay the basis for a qualitative development of the world’s productive forces for the benefit of all. In a future communist society, everyone (not just a privileged elite) will have the free time and material and cultural resources to fully develop their creative capacities. In his work the Grundrisse (also known as the Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58), a precursor to Capital, Marx noted how such a development of the individual will, in turn, provide for a still greater development of human productivity:
“The saving of labour time is equivalent to the increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which itself, as the greatest productive force, in turn reacts upon the productive power of labour....
“Free time—which is both leisure and time for higher activity—has naturally transformed its possessor into another subject; and it is then as this other subject that he enters into the immediate production process.”
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Click on headline to link Part Two
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist program mentioned in this day's other posts.
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Workers Vanguard No. 961
2 July 2010
Liberals Push Regulation Hoax
Economic Crisis and the Capitalist State
Break with the Democrats!
For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!
Part One
Throughout the capitalist world, the human cost of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s has been staggering. In the European Union (EU), where a financial crisis now threatens a renewed downturn, 23 million workers are out of work. Unemployment for those under 25 is running over 20 percent; in Spain, youth unemployment is over 44 percent.
The early stages of the current economic crisis overlapped with the 2008 hunger crisis, in which skyrocketing food prices raised the spectre of mass starvation (see “Imperialism Starves World’s Poor,” WV Nos. 919 and 920, 29 August and 12 September 2008). Since 2008, some 130 million additional people have been driven into the ranks of the chronically hungry and undernourished. In many countries food prices have barely fallen from their peaks of two years ago, and in some Asian markets staples like rice and wheat are today selling above their 2008 levels. The worldwide total of those who are desperately hungry has, for the first time, climbed to more than one billion people—roughly one-sixth of humanity.
In the U.S., the number of people classified as living in extreme poverty—those unable to provide for the most basic needs of food, shelter and health care—has risen by more than a third over the past decade and now totals 17 million. Some 15 million workers are officially unemployed, a record 46 percent of them for longer than six months. When those who are constrained to work part-time or have abandoned the job hunt are included in the count, the number rises to over 26 million—almost 17 percent of the workforce. Since the housing price bubble burst in 2007, there have been over seven million foreclosures. And the number of working people who face being thrown into the street is on the rise, with a record 932,000 foreclosures in the first quarter of this year, up 16 percent from the same period last year.
As always in racist capitalist America, black people, typically the last hired and first fired, have been hit the hardest. Even high-income black borrowers are 80 percent more likely to lose their homes to foreclosure than their white counterparts. Nationally, the jobless rate for young black men aged 16-24 has reached Great Depression levels of over 34 percent. In rust-belt states like Illinois, Wisconsin and Ohio, joblessness for blacks is running over 20 percent; in Michigan, the figure is expected to soon hit 27 percent. Nearly one out of two black men in Milwaukee is without a job. Children of immigrant, black, Latino or Native American parents are more than twice as likely as white children to be living in poverty.
Barack Obama and the banker-politicians in his administration, following in the steps of George W. Bush, showered hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars on their financier friends and the auto bosses. Banks can borrow money from the Federal Reserve (the U.S. central bank) at 0.5 percent interest and purchase risk-free Treasury bonds paying 3 percent. Trying to kick-start the economy, the government is practically giving money away to the banks. This has in turn fueled a renewed speculative binge propelling a wide range of price bubbles, from corporate shares in stock exchanges to precious metals and fossil fuels—and food items.
Much of what currently looks like economic growth is in fact the froth generated by speculative bubbles. Over the past year, as millions were driven to the brink of starvation, the number of billionaires in the world increased by almost 30 percent to over 1,000. The net worth of this select club skyrocketed 50 percent and now totals a cool $3.6 trillion.
No sooner had Barack Obama signed into law his health care “reform”—a boondoggle for big business that cuts Medicare and taxes union health plans—than Washington was abuzz with talk of “retooling” Social Security by cutting benefits and increasing taxes, a task that his right-wing Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, took on without success. The New York Times (22 March) wrote that “the promise of future reductions would immediately reassure global markets fretful that the United States’ debt is already its highest since World War II.... That argument appeals to Mr. Obama.”
From the U.S. to the EU, capitalist governments are taking the ax to wages, pensions and social welfare programs in an attempt to make working people pay for the economic crisis. Simultaneously, they are mooting various financial regulation schemes in a vain attempt to overcome the sharp economic crises that are and always have been an inherent feature of the capitalist system. Chief among these measures is the much-ballyhooed bank “reform” that is passing through the U.S. Congress. When the final details were worked out, one Wall Street banker said, “We are all breathing a sigh of relief here…. We can live with this” (Financial Times, 25 June). At any rate, with the European financial crisis and the ongoing housing crisis in the U.S. threatening a “double-dip” recession, this amounts to something like moving the deck chairs on the Titanic.
This situation amply demonstrates the truth of the statement by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” This understanding represents a fundamental dividing line between ourselves—Marxist revolutionaries—and self-proclaimed “socialists” who promote illusions in the possibility of reforming the capitalist state, which in the U.S. they seek to do by exerting pressure on the Democratic Party. To such class collaborationism we counterpose the road of class struggle. The key is to break the political chains that shackle labor to the capitalist political parties and state. Break with the Democrats! For a workers party that fights for a workers government! There will be no end to the misery wrought by the capitalist rulers and their boom-bust economic system until the working class seizes power through a socialist revolution that smashes the capitalist state and erects in its place a workers state—the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Exploitation and Profit
The wealth of the capitalist class—the owners of the means of production—derives from the exploitation of labor. As Marx explained in Capital, his classic analysis of the capitalist economy, the wage-worker is constrained to sell to the capitalist his ability to work. The wage that a worker is paid corresponds to that part of the working day during which he produces the equivalent of what it costs to maintain himself and his family. The other part of the day, he works without remuneration, creating “surplus value,” which the capitalist pockets in the form of profit.
Over the past three and a half decades, in which working people in this country have largely been on the losing end of the class struggle, the rich have fabulously increased their wealth, mainly by holding down and driving down wages. Pay for production and other nonsupervisory workers—80 percent of the private workforce—is today 9 percent lower in real terms (i.e., adjusted for inflation) than it was in 1973. During that same period, labor productivity (output per worker) increased by more than 80 percent.
In short, capitalists have enormously ratcheted up what Marx called the rate of exploitation—the ratio of the share of the product of labor appropriated by the capitalists to the share represented by the worker’s wage. They did this by combining mass layoffs with extracting increased output from those workers still employed, including through forced overtime. Last year, through layoffs and short time, total hours worked decreased by 5 percent—twice as much as the 2.5 percent fall in gross domestic product. The London Economist (20 March) commented on these figures with evident approval: “America has gone on a diet: it has squeezed extra output from a smaller workforce and suffered a big rise in unemployment as a consequence.”
This likewise corresponds to Marx’s analysis of the basic laws governing the capitalist mode of production. Marx explained that the existence of a large pool of unemployed—the “industrial reserve army”—serves to restrain what he ironically referred to as workers’ “pretensions” to demand higher wages:
“The condemnation of one part of the working-class to enforced idleness by the over-work of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists....
“The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labour-army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. Relative surplus-population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labour works. It confines the field of action of this law within the limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital.”
—Capital, Volume I
To make ends meet, working families have increasingly gone into debt, maxing out credit cards and borrowing against the value of their homes. Americans today owe a staggering $13.5 trillion, or around $44,000 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. Any money that families have to spare after providing for essential needs is being spent not on consumption but on trying to ease that crushing debt burden. The average U.S. household today turns over more than 17 percent of its disposable income directly to financial capitalists to pay down mortgages, credit card debt and the like.
The current crisis has been exacerbated by the deindustrialization of the U.S., already under way for several decades. Despite the massive shift of social product from labor to capital, capitalists in this country have steadily cut back on productive capacity. This country already ranks behind every industrial nation except France in the percentage of overall economic activity devoted to manufacturing—13.9 percent, according to the World Bank, down four percentage points in a decade. Since the official start of the recession in December 2007, some eight million jobs have been lost. Many if not most of those jobs are gone for good, especially in manufacturing.
Those industrial workers who succeed in finding new employment are often forced into low-paying, temporary jobs that provide no health insurance, retirement benefits or even sick days. A cover story titled “The Disposable Worker” in Bloomberg BusinessWeek (18 January) reflected the bosses’ triumphalism:
“Some economists predict it will be years, not months, before employees regain any semblance of bargaining power. That’s because this recession’s unusual ferocity has accelerated trends—including offshoring, automation, the decline of labor unions’ influence, new management techniques, and regulatory changes—that already had been eroding workers’ economic standing....
“When employment in the U.S. eventually recovers, it’s likely to be because American workers swallow hard and accept lower pay.”
Standing in sharp contradiction to its declining economic base is U.S. imperialism’s overwhelming global military hegemony. The destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state in 1991-92 removed what had been the only significant counterweight to U.S. imperialism, which sees itself free to ride roughshod in Iraq and Afghanistan and to threaten any other regime that gets in its way. Defense of the interests of workers, blacks and immigrants in the U.S. is integrally linked to opposition to U.S. imperialism’s interventions abroad.
Capitalism’s Labor Lieutenants
What had already been an enormous increase in the rate of exploitation of workers, due to decades of giveback union contracts, two-tier wage systems and similar devices acceded to by the trade-union bureaucracy, has been further jacked up as a result of the economic crisis. Accepting the logic imposed by the capitalist system, the trade-union tops are reduced to negotiating the terms of surrender, from the union-busting auto bailout to attacks on teachers’ tenure and seniority.
Basing themselves on the mass organizations of the working class, the labor bureaucrats are at times pushed to engage in strike action. Yet their primary function is to ensure the subordination of the workers to the interests of the class enemy, especially through their fealty to the Democratic Party, of which they are a constituent part. No less than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is a party of and for the capitalist class—with the difference that the Democrats cynically pose as “friends of labor” and shed crocodile tears over the consequences of the anti-working-class measures that they themselves seek to impose.
Earlier this year, in support of Obama’s push for a “financial reform” law, the AFL-CIO tops launched a campaign, featuring an April 29 march by thousands of workers on Wall Street, demanding “Make Wall Street Pay.” A couple of weeks later, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka told a meeting of union officials in Washington: “We can pay for the jobs we need by making Wall Street pay back those bailouts, by taxing those huge Wall Street bonuses, by closing the tax loopholes that benefit hedge fund and private equity managers...and imposing a fee on financial speculation.”
However fatuous, such schemes are premised on the notion that the Democratic administration is at bottom the friend of working people and just needs some pressure to rein in the fat cats. Though occasionally engaging in a bit of tough talk about financial regulation, the Obama administration has done—and will do—little to displease its Wall Street cronies. Avoiding serious restrictions on bankers’ pay or their ability to speculate on financial markets makes it more attractive for them to do business on Wall Street rather than in the City of London, the world’s other major financial center.
In response to mass layoffs, the pro-capitalist labor officialdom has renewed its chauvinist protectionist appeals. They pushed for and got the “buy American” clause in Obama’s “rescue” package for industry last year. Such flag-waving serves only to subordinate workers to their red-white-and-blue exploiters while driving a wedge between native and foreign-born workers. In the current economic crisis, capitalist governments in the U.S. and elsewhere have ratcheted up attacks on immigrants which, if not fought, will only further divide the working class. It is crucial for the labor movement to organize immigrant workers. We demand: No deportations! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!
Along with liberal Democrats like New York Senator Charles Schumer, the union misleaders have been in the forefront of protectionism directed against China. In this vein, Trumka & Co. clamor against the Stalinist Communist Party regime for not revaluing its currency, the yuan (also called renminbi), upwards, claiming that its current value against the dollar undermines American exports and hence costs jobs at home.
Anti-China protectionism is directed against the bureaucratically deformed workers state that issued out of the 1949 Chinese Revolution. That revolution was a historic achievement for China’s workers and peasants and for the workers of the world, smashing capitalist/landlord rule and ripping the world’s most populous country out of the hands of the imperialist powers. Despite the rule of a privileged, nationalist bureaucracy, China’s collectivized economy has brought enormous gains to generations of workers, peasants and women. While capitalist property has made huge inroads over the last three decades of “market reforms,” nationalized property remains the core of the economy. The U.S. and other imperialist powers seek nothing less than the restoration of capitalist rule in China. The treacherous AFL-CIO misleaders aid the imperialists by their promotion of “dissidents” like Han Dongfang, who seeks to channel Chinese workers’ struggles in the direction of support to capitalist counterrevolution.
It is vital for the international proletariat to stand for the unconditional military defense of China and the other remaining deformed workers states—Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam—against imperialist and domestic counterrevolution. It is the task of the proletariat of those countries to carry out a political revolution to sweep out their nationalist Stalinist misrulers, who preach accommodation with the world capitalist order, and establish regimes based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism.
There has recently been an explosion of strikes by Chinese workers in foreign-owned plants like Honda and Toyota (see article, page 16). While the U.S. labor tops have been prostrate before the bosses’ attacks, the workers in the capitalist plants in China are winning gains the tried-and-true way—through class struggle! These strikes underline the need for international labor solidarity in opposition to the U.S. trade-union tops’ poisonous protectionist schemes, which divide workers along national lines.
Tea Party Reactionaries
The labor bureaucracy dutifully threw an enormous amount of union resources
—money and time—into getting Obama placed in office as U.S. capitalism’s CEO. Liberal-minded workers and intellectuals expected major reforms, from universal health insurance coverage to tighter financial regulation. These expectations were reinforced by the severity of the economic crisis and the upsurge of popular hostility toward Wall Street. The reformist left—the International Socialist Organization, Workers World Party et al.—hailed Obama’s election as evidence that their program of pressuring the Democratic Party could fundamentally improve conditions for workers, blacks and immigrants. Combating such illusions, we described Obama as a “Wall Street Democrat” and wrote right after the elections: “Obama seeks to socialize the bourgeoisie’s losses on the backs of working people, while helping the exploiters appropriate the profits for themselves” (WV No. 925, 21 November 2008).
And this is precisely what has happened. With the labor movement largely prostrate, organized opposition to the Obama administration’s policies has come primarily from the far-right wing. Racist yahoos, bible-thumpers, militiamen, John Birch Society types and “birthers” (who challenge the fact that Obama was born in the U.S.)—along with a fringe of fascist white-supremacists—were mobilized by the Republican right and their media shock jocks into a loose “Tea Party” movement in opposition initially to the economic stimulus package and then the health care “reform.” But at bottom it was not about particular policy issues. This movement displays the anti-black racism, anti-immigrant nativism and sexual bigotry that have long been wielded by the American bourgeoisie to divide the working class and buttress social reaction.
On March 20, shortly before the Congressional vote on Obama’s health care bill, Tea Party protesters outside the U.S. Capitol yelled the “N” word at civil rights veteran John Lewis and other black Congressmen and spat on another; they confronted openly gay Congressman Barney Frank with homophobic slurs. And no sooner had Tea Party candidate Rand Paul won Kentucky’s May 18 Republican Party Senate primary than he declared that he would have opposed forcing private businesses to desegregate under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
While partly a response to the current economic downturn, today’s Tea Party movement has roots going back to the white racist backlash against the limited gains for blacks and women, crucially including abortion rights, that resulted from the civil rights movement and other social upheavals of the 1960s. That backlash eventually took the form of opposition to “big government”—identified with court-ordered racial integration in the public schools, giving jobs to blacks and women under affirmative action programs and handing out welfare money to poor black women and their children (a demagogic lie since relatively few government funds went to the poor, black or white). This boiled over into the “tax revolt” of the late 1970s—the so-called revenge of the suburbs—which propelled Ronald Reagan into the White House and began the ascendancy of the Republican right in national politics.
It’s the Capitalist System, Not Personal Greed
At the AFL-CIO’s April 29 Wall Street demonstration, Trumka sought to appeal to workers’ justifiable outrage by denouncing the bankers’ “spirit of greed.” In fact, blaming the global economic downturn on the unbridled greed of a small number of financiers serves to divert attention from the destructive irrationality of the profit-driven capitalist system as a whole.
As Karl Marx explained, what drives the capitalist system up and down is the rate of profit: the amount of surplus value extracted from the exploitation of labor per unit of capital invested. The policies and actions of corporate management—whether of banks, industrial enterprises or retail chains—aim to maximize the return on equity—the ratio of profits to the market value of the firm’s stock.
The role of management is that of agents of the big capitalist shareholders in their corporations. If the return on equity of a given corporation declines or is substantially less than that of its main competitors, the price of its stock will fall. And woe unto management when that happens. The Sellout (2009), a book on the financial meltdown by financial journalist and TV commentator Charles Gasparino, is subtitled: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System. Gasparino peddles the notion that excessive greed helped cause the current crisis by leading investment bankers to take unsound risks. But Gasparino himself recounts that some CEOs of major investment banks, such as E. Stanley O’Neal at Merrill Lynch and John Mack at Morgan Stanley, were known for shying away from excessive risk before they took over the top job. They then became obsessed with increasing the bank’s return on equity. The only way they could do that given the economic environment at the time was to invest ever greater sums in mortgage-backed securities, including arcane derivatives, while amassing ever greater amounts of debt relative to the bank’s capital.
Some Wall Street executives recognized to some extent that they were in the midst of a speculative bubble but felt compelled to participate in it lest they lose out to the competition. As then- Citigroup CEO Charles Prince put it in mid 2007: “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” And when the music did stop, the government bailed out Prince and his Wall Street cohorts.
“Socialism for the Rich”: Wall Street Bailout Revisited
A case study of how the government serves as the executive committee of the capitalist ruling class is offered by the massive bailout of the big banks and other major financial players. The story of that bailout was detailed in two books that came out last year, both written by well-informed financial journalists: David Wessel’s In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic and Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis—and Themselves. Wessel is the economics editor of the Wall Street Journal and Sorkin is a mainstay of the business section of the New York Times.
Both books recount that the Bush administration collaborated closely with top Democratic as well as Republican officials of the Federal Reserve and Democratic Congressional leaders. Whatever right/left ideological divide exists between the two parties had, in this instance, no import whatsoever. Given the Republicans’ vocal opposition these days to Obama’s tepid proposals for additional regulation of the financial system, one might think that the visceral hostility between Republicans and Democrats would have prevented a bipartisan policy in response to the financial crisis. Quite the contrary. When the vital interests of American finance capital were at stake, the two parties acted in unison.
The three men primarily responsible for the $700 billion bailout fund called TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) and related measures were Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and the president of the key New York branch of the Federal Reserve, Tim Geithner (now Obama’s Treasury secretary). Paulson was CEO of Goldman Sachs when in 2006 the Bush gang recruited him as their main economic point man. Paulson’s predecessor at both Goldman and the U.S. Treasury was Robert Rubin, a centrist Democrat who served as economic consigliere in the Clinton administration in the 1990s. Bernanke, known as a moderate Republican, was chosen in 2005 to replace right-wing ideologue Alan Greenspan as Fed chairman by a presidential committee headed by Dick Cheney, the Darth Vader of the Bush administration. Geithner, a centrist Democrat, was a protégé of Robert Rubin in Clinton’s Treasury. Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner worked closely together on behalf of their Wall Street masters without substantive political differences.
Bush and Cheney, for all their strident championing of “free market” capitalism, did not hesitate to invoke massive government intervention in the face of the financial collapse. To do so, they simply turned over policymaking during the crisis to Paulson and Bernanke. Likewise, Democratic Congressional leaders gave the two a green light to do what they wanted. In July 2008, Paulson told Barney Frank, a liberal Massachusetts Democrat who heads the House Financial Services Committee, that he and Bernanke were considering taking expansive and unprecedented measures in an effort to calm the increasingly troubled financial markets. Frank advised him “to ask for what you need” and promised to support him.
Defending the bailout today, Geithner and others point to the fact that almost all of the TARP money has been repaid. But the financial institutions were able to do so only because the Fed subsequently lent them some $2 trillion, taking as collateral their more “toxic” assets. The government also guaranteed some $5.4 trillion of the banks’ loans and those of other financial institutions (so-called “counterparties”) with which they do business.
Wessel, in particular, underscores that the Wall Street bailout violated the professed ideological principles not just of the Bush administration but of the American capitalist class in general. Indeed, American capitalists will support extensive government intervention in the economy when it serves their interests and is on terms they can dictate—for example, the nationalization of the American Insurance Group (then the largest insurance company in the world) and the bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler.
In this regard, Wessel quotes Gao Xiqing, the head of China’s sovereign wealth fund, who quipped: “Now our people are joking that we look at the U.S. and see ‘socialism with American characteristics’.” This is a play on “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the term long used by the Beijing Stalinist regime to describe its own economic system, one that remains primarily based on state-owned enterprises and banks but has a large capitalist sector.
For Class Struggle to Fight Capitalist Austerity!
As happens in all economic downturns, workers’ apprehension over possible job losses has taken a toll on the already low level of labor struggle in the U.S. Last year saw the lowest level of strike activity of any year since World War II, by far. But as the experience of past economic crises also shows, that state of affairs will not last indefinitely.
It is necessary to forge a new leadership of the unions based on the understanding that there are two decisive classes in capitalist society, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, whose interests are irreconcilably opposed. Such a leadership, fighting for the unity of the multiracial proletariat in hard class struggle, would link those struggles to defense of the social interests of black people, Latinos and other oppressed minorities.
Today the question of revolutionary leadership is sharply posed in Europe, where there has been a wave of one-day general strikes against attempts by the capitalist governments to slash the wages of public-sector workers, gut pensions and jack up sales and other taxes. Greece has had a total of six one-day general strikes so far this year. On June 24, some two million demonstrated across France as the country was rocked for the second time in a month by strikes against a government plan to raise the retirement age. In Spain, hundreds of thousands of public-sector workers struck on June 8, while in Italy the six-million-strong CGIL union federation carried out a nationwide stoppage on June 25. However, the workers’ evident combativity runs up against the political program of the labor bureaucracies, all of which have a bankrupt strategy of seeking to reform the capitalist system of exploitation. What is needed is the forging of revolutionary parties that can lead the proletariat, at the head of all the oppressed, in sweeping away the capitalist order.
This road was outlined in the 1938 Transitional Program written by Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the October Revolution in 1917. Titled The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, the document, written in the midst of the Great Depression, put forward a series of demands that provide a bridge from workers’ current consciousness and daily struggles to the need for socialist revolution. Declaring “uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crises, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers,” the document stated:
“Against unemployment, ‘structural’ as well as ‘conjunctural,’ the time is ripe to advance, along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week.”
As Trotsky laid out, the fight for employment and decent living conditions for all must point to one final conclusion: the seizure of power by the proletariat and the expropriation of the capitalist class.
The struggle for a shorter workweek under capitalism also points to a fundamental goal of communism: a radical reduction in the labor time necessary to produce the means of consumption. The setting up of an internationally planned, socialist economy will lay the basis for a qualitative development of the world’s productive forces for the benefit of all. In a future communist society, everyone (not just a privileged elite) will have the free time and material and cultural resources to fully develop their creative capacities. In his work the Grundrisse (also known as the Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58), a precursor to Capital, Marx noted how such a development of the individual will, in turn, provide for a still greater development of human productivity:
“The saving of labour time is equivalent to the increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which itself, as the greatest productive force, in turn reacts upon the productive power of labour....
“Free time—which is both leisure and time for higher activity—has naturally transformed its possessor into another subject; and it is then as this other subject that he enters into the immediate production process.”
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Click on headline to link Part Two
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Chauvinist Mania Over “Ground Zero Mosque"
Click on the headline to link to the Workers Vanguard website for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist program mentioned in this day's other posts.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist program mentioned in this day's other posts.
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-ILWU Ship Boycott: Token of Solidarity with Palestinians
Click on the headline to link to the Workers Vanguard website for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our labor-centered communist program in defense of the besieged Palestinian people.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our labor-centered communist program in defense of the besieged Palestinian people.
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