AN ANNIVERSARY OF SORTS

COMMENTARY

This summer marks the 35th year of my commitment to Marxism. Those who have been reading my commentaries for a while know that I try to commemorate, and comment on, important anniversaries in our common working class and leftist history like those of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti or the start of the Paris Commune. Those same readers also know that I have been rather short with bourgeois politicians like John Kerry who have a habit of commemorating every little political action they have taken. The winner for me was Kerry’s very public celebration at historic Fanueil Hall in Boston in 2006 of the 35th anniversary of his anti-war testimony before Congress in 1971. Christ, I still chuckle over the absurdity of that one. But hear me out on this. I want no pat on the back but to just make a comment about why, despite the current historic trend away from socialist solutions to the world’s problems, I still proudly carry the title communist.

I once remarked in a review of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto that the third section of that document where he polemicized against the various other liberal and so-called socialist groups of his day that in my search for political solutions in my early days I had probably held virtually every position that he argued against. And believe me, dear reader, that is no exaggeration-except maybe I did not advocate for feudal socialism. But the rest, liberalism, both tactical and principled versions of pacifism, anarchism, guerilla warfare, well you get the drift. This is probably why when I headed, reluctantly I might add, to Marxism it stuck. And that is the main idea I am trying to get at in this piece. That is the power of Marxism as a tool for looking at and changing the world. The only other point I would add is that over the past thirty-five years nothing in politics, our few victories and our many, too many defeats at the hands of the capitalists, has made me regret that I took the road back to my working class roots. I have made many a political mistake in my life, that is for sure. But this is not one of them. LONG LIVE THE WORLD SOCIALIST REVOLUTION!!!