On The 100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-HONOR LENIN, LUXEMBURG AND LIEBKNECHT-THE THREE L'S

HONOR LENIN. LUXEMBURG AND LIEBKNECHT- THE THREE L’S



On The 100^th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-


By Frank Jackman

History in the conditional, what might have happened if this or that thing, event, person had swerved this much or that, is always a tricky proposition. Tricky as reflected in this piece’s commemorative headline. Rosa Luxemburg the acknowledged theoretical wizard of the German Social-Democratic Party, the numero uno party of the Second, Socialist International, which was the logical organization to initiate the socialist revolution before World War II and Karl Liebknecht, the hellfire and brimstone propagandist and public speaker of that same party were assassinated in separate locale on the orders of the then ruling self-same Social-Democratic Party. The chasm between the Social-Democratic leaders trying to save Germany for “Western Civilization” in the wake of the “uncivilized” socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 had grown that wide that it was as if they were on two different planets, and maybe they were.

(By the way I am almost embarrassed to mention the term “socialist revolution” these days when people, especially young people, would be clueless as to what I was talking about or would think that this concept was so hopelessly old-fashioned that it would meet the same blank stares. Let me assure you that back in the day, yes, that back in the day, many a youth had that very term on the tips of their tongues. Could palpably feel it in the air. Hell, just ask your parents, or grandparents.)

Okay here is the conditional and maybe think about it before you dismiss the idea out of hand if only because the whole scheme is very much in the conditional. Rosa and Karl, among others made almost every mistake in the book before and during the Spartacist uprising in some of the main German cities in late 1918 after the German defeat in the war. Their biggest mistake before the uprising was sticking with the Social Democrats, as a left wing, when that party had turned at best reformist and eminently not a vehicle for the socialist revolution, or even a half-assed democratic “revolution” which is what they got with the overthrow of the Kaiser. They broke too late, and subsequently too late from a slightly more left-wing Independent Socialist Party which had split from the S-D when that party became the leading war party in Germany for all intents and purposes and the working class was raising its collective head and asking why.  

The big mistake during the uprising was not taking enough protective cover, not keeping the leadership safe, keeping out of sight like Lenin had in Finland when things were dicey in 1917 Russia and fell easy prey to the Freikorps assassins. Here is the conditional, and as always it can be expanded to some nth degree if you let things get out of hand. What if, as in Russia, Rosa and Karl had broken from that rotten (for socialism) S-D organization and had a more firmly entrenched cadre with some experience in independent existence. What if the Spartacists had protected their acknowledged leaders better. There might have been a different trajectory for the aborted and failed German left-wing revolutionary opportunities over the next several years, there certainly would have been better leadership and perhaps, just perhaps the Nazi onslaught might have been stillborn, might have left Munich 1923 as their “heroic” and last moment.   


Instead we have a still sad 100^th anniversary of the assassination of two great international socialist fighters who headed to the danger not away always worthy of a nod and me left having to face those blank stares who are looking for way forward but might as well be on a different planet-from me.  

**********
COMMENTARY


EVERY JANUARY WE HONOR, LENIN OF RUSSIA, ROSA LUXEMBURG OF POLAND AND KARL LIEBKNECHT OF GERMANY AS THREE LEADERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT. HERE’S WHY WE HONOR LIEBKNECHT.


In honor of the 3 L's. The authority of Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia, and Luxemburg, the Rose of the Revolution, need no special commendation. I would however like to comment on Karl Liebknecht who has received less historical recognition and has had less written about him. Nevertheless, Karl Liebknecht apparently had the capacity to lead the German Revolution. A man whose actions inspired 50,000 Berlin workers, under penalty of being drafted to the front, to strike against his imprisonment in the middle of a World War is self- evidently a man with the authority to lead a revolution. His tragic personal fate in the aftermath of the Spartacus uprising, killed by counterrevolutionaries, helped condition the later dismal fate of the German revolution, especially in 1923.

History has posed certain questions concerning the establishment of socialism that remains unresolved today primarily to due the crisis of leadership of the international labor movement. Although Liebknecht admittedly was not a theoretician I do not believe that someone of Lenin's or Trotsky's theoretical level of achievenment was necessary after the Russian experience. To these eyes the Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution and Lenin's Bolshevik organizational concepts have stood the test of time, if mainly by negative experience.

What was necessary was a leadership that assimilated those lessons. Liebknecht, given enough time to study those lessons, seems to have been capable of that. A corollary to that view is that one must protect leading cadre when the state starts bearing down. Especially small propaganda groups like the Spartacists with fewer resources for protection of leadership. This was not done. If you do not protect your leadership you wind up with a Levi, Brandler or Thalheimer (successively leaders of the German Communist Party) who seemed organically incapable of learning those lessons.

One of the problems with being the son of a famous politician is that, as founder of the early German Social Democratic Party Wilhelm Liebknecht's son, much was expected of Karl, especially on the question of leading the German working class against German militarism. Wilhelm had done a prison term (with August Bebel) for opposition to the Franco-Prussian War. As for Karl I have always admired that famous picture of him walking across the Potsdam Plaza in uniform, subject to imprisonment after lost of his parliamentary immunity, with briefcase under arm ready to go in and do battle with the parliamentary cretins of the Social Democratic Party over support for the war budget. That is the kind of leadership cadre we desperately need now. REMEMBER HIS FAMOUS SLOGANS- ‘THE MAIN ENEMY IS AT HOME’-‘ NOT ONE PENNY, NOT ONE PERSON (updated) FOR THE WAR’. Wilhelm would have been proud.

From The Archives-NICARAGUA - DANIEL ORTEGA REDUX

COMMENTARY

U.S. HANDS OFF NICARAGUA!

Karl Marx once commented that many historical events have occurred first as tragedy and a second time as farce. I do not know any tragic part of the Nicaraguan revolution of the 1980’s except the U.S. sponsored Contra War which led to the closing down of revolutionary progress and eventually to defeat of that revolutionary upsurge. However, the apparent resurrection (perhaps, literally as he has reconciled himself to the reactionary Catholic Church) of Daniel Ortega, the old Sandinista leader as President of Nicaragua definitely fits into that second category of historical experience. In order to achieve office Ortega has refined the art of master chameleon and has changed political allies in search of the main chance as often as he changes his stockings. Gone is the old socialist–oriented program that animated the revolution and the young generation of Sandinista revolutionaries who defended it. Now it is the fight for the main chance of parliamentary office- and let the desperately impoverished masses be damned.

This is hardly the first time a formerly progressive organization or politician has degenerated with time or a change in fortunes, but it does remind this writer of the old commitments of leftists in America to the fight against U. S. imperialist intervention in Nicaragua in the 1980’s. Despite Ortega’s and his fellow Sandinistas political demise those commitments remain. Why? One George W. Bush and his dwindling coterie of die-hard supporters who have never forgiven the "lost" of Cuba, continue to have fits over the upstart Hugo Charvez and see "red" when the name Ortega comes up. The United States State Department has issued a statement that it wants to be friendly with the Ortega government. That is the kiss of death. Beware and be ready!

In the 1980's many of us defended the Nicarauguan Revolution against American imperialism’s efforts, through its proxy- the wholly United States funded Contras, to send that regime back into the Stone Age. And they finally succeeded. Nevertheless leftists saw this upheaval as a sign of a renewal of the revolutionary struggles in Central and South America in the aftermath of the death of Ernesto “Che” Guevara in failed guerilla warfare in the hinterlands of Bolivia and the failed popular front parliamentary socialist experience in Chile under Allende.

Many leftists I knew then fought against American policy under the principle that a small country had a democratic right to national to self-determination against the designs of the United States to “prevent” the establishment of a "Soviet" beachhead in Central America. Those were the days of Cold War and Nicarauga, after Cuba, was in the crosshairs of American imperialist fury. American policy treated the stodgy Soviet bureaucrats of the time as if they were some kind of "global class warriors" spreading revolution everywhere rather than the narrow devotees to "socialism in country" they were. To give a funny, if not bizarre, example of the way that American policy responded to the Sandinista threat I recall a speech by the supposedly rational President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, who stated that the Sandinista’s army was only two days march to the east coast side of the Texas border. A small, ragtag army, assuming that it wanted to make that trek, was thus suppose to threaten the mightiest military power on earth on its home ground. Weird, even for those times.

Many of us also argued, unlike Fidel Castro and others, that the Sandinistas needed to push the revolution forward by major expropriations and nationalizations like those that had occurred in Cuba and pushed the Cuban Revolution forward. The Sandinistas backed off from any such strategy. Today, fifteen years after the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas Nicaragua stands as one of the poorest nations on earth, the land question is still unresolved and the country is desperately in need of investment in industrial infrastructure and immediate aid. However, for a very long time the Nicaragua has been off the radar of the world's concerns. Only with the resurfacing of Ortega, as a faded reminder of past conflicts, has the American government expressed any interest in conditions there-mainly to blast the election of Ortega. In any case, although leftists are not now called upon to defend a left wing government like that formed in the 1980’s by the then subjectively revolutionary Sandinistas it is still necessary to call on militants to say- U.S. HANDS OFF NICARAGUA!

*From The Marxist Archives- From The Pen of John Reed- "American "Democracy" And Colonial Oppression"

Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard", newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S, article on the subject mentioned in the headline.

*From The "Renegade Eye" Blog- On Pat Robertson

Click on, if you dare tempt the fates, to the "Renegade Eye" blog for a pithy comment on one Pat Robertson.

Markin comment:

Pat Robertson is living proof, if we really needed any more, that not all our religious fundamentalist enemies are in the Middle East or elsewhere. And, in the end,they are all just as dangerous to our cause, the communist future. Viva Toussaint and his fight for Haitian independence against the French back in the day!

*From The "SteveLendmanBlog"-"Notes from Besieged Gaza" - A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a SteveLendmanBlog entry-Notes from Besieged Gaza.

Markin comment:

End the blockade of Gaza now! Defend the Palestinian people!

*From The "HistoMat" Blog- Solidartiy With The Haitian People

Click on the title to link to a "HistoMat" blog entry, "Solidarity with the Haitian People".

Markin comment:

The title of the blog says it all.

*Outsourcing For Fun And Profit- A Film Review Of "Outsourced"

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the trailer for "Outsourced".

DVD Review

Outsourced, starring Josh Hamilton, directed by John Jeffcoat, 2006

Okay, it was bound to happen, right? After all the gnashing of teeth about the lost of American jobs to other countries, after all the India-China bashing as the symbol of those loses and after all the strident, if fruitless, lambasting of those facts by every yahoo politician and cretin-like labor bureaucrat we were bound to get out of Hollywood (or Bollywood, for that matter) a comedic take on this phenomenon. And, given the political ethos of these times, a little ‘lesson’ in multi-culturalism to boot.

It may be unfair to lay the vagaries of the world labor market and the current phase of capitalist “globalization” on a simple film, and I won’t, at least not much because this was actually an entertaining film on its own terms, but its subtext (nice weasel word, right?) does fit in rather nicely about the state of the still fervent “outsourcing” strategy that virtually every large corporation in America (and elsewhere) has hit upon in order tot reduce (and reduce significantly) their wage bills, particularly administrative costs and the price of unskilled and semi-skilled labor.

A quick sketch of the plot is in order. An American telemarketing corporation in order to cut those high administrative costs fires it’s American–centered order-taking staff and out sources to the highly skilled but cheap wage Indian labor market. A middle level executive, the star of the film, Josh Hamilton, is called upon to bring the Indians up to speed and the twists and turns of the plot turn around the struggle to get the Indians to conform to the Taylor productivity speed up system well-known in American business circles. The faults and follies of this transformation drive the, sometimes understated, comedy of the film. Along the way, naturally, said executive gets an up close and personal lesson in multiculturalism from a very fetching Indian love interest.

But here is the point for our purposes-in the end, and I am really giving nothing away here, the Indian employees in their turn are fired so that the corporation can set up shop in the even cheaper Chinese labor market. In short, the race to the bottom continues on its merry way unabated. It is that unabated condition that I will finish up with. I’ve mentioned those cretin-like labor bureaucrats above who have “belly-ached” about the flight of jobs to other countries without lifting finger one to organize labor internationally to drive wages up and make the flight of jobs out much less attractive . Hell, they haven’t, at least since the great wave of industrial unionism led by the CIO drives of the 1930’s, done anything to organize labor in the cheap-labor American south or, and here is the real crime, Wal-mart. This is hardly the end of the discussion. Let’s leave it at this for now- organize globally and think locally. Thinking the other way around gets us no place- American, Indian or Chinese.

On The Question Of Cease Fires

Commentary


As the reader is probably aware of by now the Israeli government, under whatever prodding from its international allies and pressure from worldwide outrage, has called a unilateral military cease fire (as of this writing) in its dispute with the Hamas-led government in Gaza. Given, the military and political realities, or for that matter the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza no one can be unhappy to see the slaughter stopped (over 1200 Palestinians killed, including many women and children, and thousand more injured and homeless. This, however, begs the question about the radical anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist position on cease fires. In short, where or when do we call for them and to whom do we address the question.

A cease fire, in the final analysis, reflects one option of many in a military situation. In the present case while we welcome a cease fire we did not call on Israel to do so. All of our sympathies here are with the beleaguered Palestinians, despite their Hamas political leadership. We called for military defense of the Hamas-led forces against Israel. We would have supported a cease fire called by those forces, if the military called for it as is apparent here with the disproportion of forces.

The real question for those of us who called for the defense of the Palestinian people is whether we contract out the question of a cease fire to one of more of the imperialist allies of Israel or some imperialist-dominated international agency, like the United Nations. No, we do not do that. As even a brief look at the sordid history of imperialist-brokered cease fires and other military maneuvers demonstrates, at the end of the day this neither does anything for the beleaguered forces we support nor does it resolve any of the questions that are on the historic agenda. All such efforts on the part of militants, well meaning or not, and there have been more than a few socialists who have called on these imperialist agencies, is a rather touching faith in these institutions. Some defense of the Palestinian people! More on this later, as this is hardly a fully worked out exposition on the matter.

INDEPENDENCE FOR KOSOVO NOW!

COMMENTARY

SUPPORT THE RIGHT OF NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATIONS FOR THE KOSOVARS –UNITED NATIONS, NATO-OUT OF KOSOVO. SERBIA HANDS OFF KOSOVO!


In an irony that is probably wasted on both Democratic and Republican bourgeois politicians caught up in the midst of an Iraq War the justification for which the Bush Administration has declared as its objectives ‘peace, freedom, democracy’ and all kinds of other good things' the question of Kosovo rates nothing but space on the back pages, if that. For those with short political memories a few years ago that was the American-led NATO air war against Serbia in ‘support’ of the besieged Kosovo Albanians. That too was supposedly fought under the democratic banner – yet today it still has not produced the national right to self-determination for the Kosovars that it was allegedly fought for. And the Kosovars are rightly mad as hell about it. If one will recall Serbia claimed (and still claims) Kosovo as part of historic Serbia. Like many another oppressor nation it plunged its jack boot into the predominantly Albanian province of Kosovo in an attempt to ‘ethnically cleanse’ that little trouble spot. The professed goal of the American-led NATO air war, a goal that was unquestioningly supported by these same Kosovar, was to ‘stop’ the genocide. Of course in that attempt NATO tried to bomb Serbia back to the Stone Age, and came close. Now almost eight years later the province is still part of Serbia, still administered by the United Nations and defended by NATO and the Kosovars are still no closer to real independence. If the Kosovars think that they were the witting or unwitting pawns in an international con game they are, of course, right. However, there is a lesson for leftists to be learned here, as well.

Let us be clear, socialists support the democratic right to national self-determination where the basis for a nation exists not as some supra-historical advance for humankind but as a way to take the national question off the agenda and place the class question to the fore. There are thus occasions where we do not raise that demand just as on other occasions we not only support the demand but call for independence. We call, for example, today for independence for Quebec. Kosovo calls for the same slogan as well. However, during the NATO air war, as I mentioned above, the main political organization of the time- the Kosovo Liberation Front- acted as direct military agents for those same NATO forces therefore subordinating themselves to an arm of international imperialism. At that point to invoke, as many on the international left did, the Kosovars’ right to self-determination, as the rationale for supporting the war against Serbia war was incorrect. As witnessed by subsequent history that support moreover did not advance the Kosovo cause a step. An analogous situation to that of Kosovo then applies today in Kurdish Iraq. The Iraqi Kurds have voluntarily placed themselves and their militias under direct American military power and thus in Iraq we do not raise the call for the formation of an independent Kurdish state. But, as an indication of how complicated the dispersed Kurdish nation’s national self-determination question is (to speak nothing of other situations like the almost intractable Palestinian question) we certainly would today call for the right to national self-determination to a separate Kurdish state in places like Turkey and Iran. More later. But for now- Independence for Kosovo! Serbia Hands Off!

YES,THE WAR NEWS FROM IRAQ IS GRIM-BUT THE WAR NEWS FROM WASHINGTON IS EVEN WORST

COMMENTARY

THE TROOPS ARE NOT COMING HOME FOR THIS CHRISTMAS OR ANY CHRISTMAS SOON! NO TROOP ESCALATION IN IRAQ!

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT

Yes, the subject is Iraq, again. Yes, I have been something of a Johnny-one note on the subject since last spring. But hear me out. Every time I try to move away from the subject and onto more satisfying matters like a book review on some aspect of revolutionary history something unpleasant happens in Washington to upset my well laid plans. This time it is the apparent ‘victory’ of the “hawks” among the military brass and the neo-cons for the willing ear of George W. Bush over future Iraq War strategy. What we are prepared to get in that direction is not troop withdrawal but troop escalation. Moreover, there is serious talk in military circles of going after Sadr’s Madhi Army.

This by the way is the army that has bloodied the American Army in the past, especially in Fallujah. If the Madhi Army’s backs are again the wall, as projected, who knows what hell is in store. Moreover, as Sadr is a major prop of the current Iraqi government, such as it is, the smell of ‘regime change’ in Iraq is also in the air. Apparently the smell of ‘victory’ has once again gotten the better of rationality in Washington. Christ, will this madness never stop. I have noted, a little sarcastically, more than once before that in the quest for ‘stability’ in Iraq the grandchildren of the troops fighting in Iraq now will be joining grandfather and mother over there. With the current news I may not be that far off the mark.

In the wake of the publication of the Iraq Study Group Report (remember that little 'sure fire' plan) I have been raked over the coals by my liberal friends for being rather mean-spirited about the recommendations, or rather the chances of implementation by the Bush Administration. I have even, half-jokingly, stated that they will probably find President Bush’s copy of this document under some couch in the White House when he leaves office. Well, those liberal friends have had a whole week to savor their victory. Apparently I am not so far off on the eventual fate of that plan. And if one thinks about it why would the Bush Administration render more than lip-service to that report.

First, it was congressionally-mandated and not a doctored job coming from the administration. Second, it came from “Poppy’s" crowd. Third, it makes ugly reading for any President six years into his term who is concerned with his place in history. Fourth, and this is the kicker, this is George W. Bush we are talking about. When he says he wants victory in Iraq, that he wants to ‘stay the course’ that is literally what he means. Moreover, his place in history is already being etched in stone as one of the most dim-witted experiments bourgeois democracy has faced in its long and shady presidential history. However, unlike Lyndon Johnson and the effect of the Vietnam War escalations Bush faces no more elections. So why the hell not throw the dice for ‘victory’. After all they are HIS troops. What good is it being Commander-in-Chief if you can't keep your troops gainfully employed. Anti-war activists better know this and act, and I do mean act, accordingly. The only escalation we support is the increase in number of troop transport drivers, humvee drivers, pilots and sailors it takes to get the troops the hell out of Iraq now.

Below I am reposting a blog, written in the week of September 18, 2006 which more fully addresses the question of troop escalation. I stand by its political thrust today. Believe me I would rather have political victories than fortunetelling clairvoyance.

THE TROOPS ARE NOT COMING HOME FOR THIS CHRISTMAS OR ANY CHRISTMAS SOON!

COMMENTARY

IRAQ LOOKS MORE AND MORE LIKE VIETNAM EVERY DAY-IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF ALL UNITED STATES/ALLIED TROOPS!

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY

This writer for a long time has resisted the facile task route of comparing the situation in Iraq today to the Vietnam of some forty years ago. But it is getting harder and harder to do so. On the face of it the differences are obvious. In Vietnam revolutionary leftist forces were attempting to unify into one state that which by international diplomacy abetted by previous bouts of international Stalinist treachery had been artificial split. Furthermore, the defining concept behind the revolutionary forces there to resolve the agrarian question and the fight for what those forces conceived to be the road to socialism. Today in Iraq there are nationalist/sectarian forces which want to take revenge on the results of the European- derived Treaty of Versailles after World War I and divide this artificially created state-gun in hands. The fact that in Kurdish-controlled areas only the Kurdish flag can fly really says it all. Additionally, as far as this writer can tell, from the little known about murky underworld of radical Islamic politics there are no forces fighting for anything like a secular- democratic, much less, socialist solution to the problems there. Rather something like an Islamic Republic under repressive and anti-women Sharia law appears to be the favored political solution.

However, those differences between the domestic forces in Iraq and Vietnam aside the real way Iraq today looks like Vietnam is the similarities in the role of American imperialism on the ground. The latest news this week, the week of September 18, 2006, coming from the central military command is there will be no draw down of troops any time soon. LET ME REPEAT- THERE WILL NOT BE ANY DRAW DOWN ANY TIME SOON. All those who foolishly believed that draw down would occur and did not take the Bush Administration at its word when it declared empathically that troops would not be withdrawn as long as it drew breathe should ponder this. More on this below.

There are starting to be voices heard, dormant for a while, spearheaded by the editors of National Review and other neo-con sources that the lesson to be learned from Iraq is that to really win in Iraq the Americans must sent in more troops. How much such sentiments are worth from these previous supporters of a quick and cheap airpower strategy is beside the point. What is noteworthy is that this premise is not an isolated sentiment and even finds support among alleged opponents of the war. And that, in a nutshell, is where the comparison to Vietnam comes into play. The hubris which led the Bush Administration into the quagmire of Iraq is still very much in play. The notion that in order rectify the original mistake of invasion more mistakes, such as increased troop levels, can solve the problem and bring victory where none is possible is the same mentality that led to all the escalations of the Vietnam era. Against all reason the Bushies of America and the world cannot believe that the situation is lost. Well, hell that is their problem. Militant leftists have other problems like organizing the opposition to worry over.

Additionally, President Bush himself is getting a little testy at the Prime Minister of Iraq. He cannot believe that at this late stage the wholly-owned American puppet government in Iraq hasn’t stepped up to its tasks of creating domestic tranquility. One should remember the names Diem and Thieu from Vietnamese history who got the same kinds of dressing-downs from previous American administrations. With that thought in mind let me ask this question. Is there anyone today on the planet outside the immediate Bush family that believes that the writ of the Iraqi government runs outside the Green Zone (and even that premise might be shaky)? These guys (and they are overwhelmingly men) never led anything, went into exile under Saddam rather than go underground and build a resistance movement and represent no one but themselves.

But, enough of that. The real question is what are we anti-war, anti-imperialist activists going to do about the situation. President Bush has been rightly accused of upping the security alerts during election time to highlight the security question that he has (successfully) used as a trump card to swing the electoral balance in his favor. The lesser well-known fact is that during the fall of election years, including this year, the leaderships of the reformist anti-war movements close down the nationally- centered demonstrations campaign which are the lynchpins of their politics. It is no secret that this is done to help so-called anti-war Democratic politicians or at least not be a source of embarrassment to their weak parliamentary opposition to the war. In a blog written this summer I wrote an open letter to the troops in Iraq. The thrust of the letter was that the conventional politicians, their own military leadership and the anti-war movement had left the troops in Iraq hanging in the wind. As we enter the fall electoral campaign this is truer than ever. I will repeat here what I stated there- if the troops are to withdraw from Iraq it will have to be on their own hook. Start forming the soldiers and sailors committees now. Militant leftists here must support those efforts. Unfortunately today there is no other way to end the war. FORWARD.

THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!

*HO CHI MINH AND THE VIETNAMESE NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for Ho Chi Minh.

HO CHI MINH AND THE NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE IN VIETNAM

BOOK REVIEW

HO CHI MINH: A LIFE, WILLIAM J. DUIKER, HYPERION PRESS, NEW YORK, 2000

By way of an introduction I note that while I was writing a draft of this book review President George W. Bush had just completed participation in an international conference held in Vietnam. In one of the small ironies of history a photograph of the meeting between American and Vietnamese leaders displayed a huge bust of the late Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh hovering over the room. There was a time in the 1950’s and 1960’s when Ho was more than a mere historical reminder in the room. To many youth, particularly in the West, ‘Uncle’ Ho represented the most intransigent opposition to Western imperialism. Today, at a time when heroes for leftists are few and far between and Vietnam’s leadership has taken a distinctly different direction toward the shoals of “market socialism” and away from Ho Chi Minh’s ideas a look at his politically flawed but fascinating life seems in order.

The Russian Bolshevik revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky on more than one occasion noted that the Western labor movement had not produced the kind of hardened, resilient and committed revolutionaries produced in Russian and Eastern Europe. While there were definite historical reasons for that divergence centered on different political conditions it nevertheless remained an abiding different (and does until this day). The life of Ho Chi Minh as presented in the biography under review is yet another example that highlights that difference, this time in early 20th Asia, in revolutionary commitment and intensity. While the fates and the political directions of both Trotsky and the Stalinist Ho diverted shapely the commitment to communism, as they understood it, remained a lifelong commitment, even under inhumanly trying circumstances. Ho’s biographer has done an excellent job of gathering the materials, some only recently accessible from Soviet and other archives, which enable a knowledgeable reader to follow the ups and downs of his political career. That, said, the author does not and cannot really understand the nature of communist commitment and in the end can not draw any serious political conclusions about the life of his subject. His book nevertheless will be used as a definitive study of Ho’s life and influence.

Forty or so years ago the name Ho Chi Minh brought forth either anger or admiration. Anger, from the former colonialist power France for having been forced to abandon Vietnam after its military defeat and from a neo-colonialist American imperialist military force about to get its comeuppance from guerilla and regularly armed forces led by the wily Ho. Admiration, from the youth of the world, particularly the West, that a ‘new’ strategy might be 'aborning' to defeat the various imperialisms of the world and create another road to socialism not based on the Soviet or Chinese-style models.

Ho essentially built up his organization from scratch under very loose Communist International supervision from Moscow. From an American Communist’s point of view the Communist International always seemed to be intervening, for good or evil, in the internal life of its party to insure implementation of the party line. Sometimes the commands were as quickly communicated as the telegram wires would carry them. Such was apparently not the case in remote Vietnam. While Ho was a committed Stalinist he was clearly no self-serving bureaucrat of the Soviet-type revolutionaries have come to loathe. Rather it is his virtually unchanging lifelong political perspective of a variation of the ‘bloc of four classes’ strategy handed down from the Comintern in the lead up to the Chinese Revolution of the mid-1920’s that places him in the Stalinist camp. Previously, I have called such a strategy as applied to places like China and Vietnam as 'Stalinism under the gun'. Apparently the vicissitudes of Vietnamese mountain life and geographical proximity led to more contact with the Chinese revolutionaries. Seemingly Ho was more influenced by them than the Soviets on some aspects of revolutionary rural warfare. However, a look at Ho’s political actions, especially in the post World War II period, shows a pronounced bias toward Soviet leadership in the showdown of between the Soviet Union and China for leadership of the international communist movement. That tilt was not reciprocated by the Soviets as they generally saw the Vietnamese struggle as marginal to their global interests.


One of the most contradictory phenomena that confronted the revolutionary movement in the 20th century was the fact that unlike Karl Marx’s projections the socialist revolution did not start in the Western industrialized society. It started in economically backward Russia and moved East. Moreover, it started with a small although very politicized industrial working class dependent on the good will of a vast peasantry and preceded to areas where the industrial working class was either virtually non-existent or had been militarily or politically decimated. Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam under French colonialism represented just such a development. Hence, from the beginning of the revolutionary struggle in Vietnam it was an alliance between the revolutionary intellectuals and the peasantry that formed the basis for the national liberation front not the traditionally Bolshevik intellectual/worker combination prescribed by Lenin. This is important, because the program which will animated the peasantry, land to the tiller, is very different from the program of workers democracy. And that in a nutshell is the difference between Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam. The difference between ‘socialism in one country’ and permanent revolution’ Ho won that political fight but can anyone today argue that Vietnam is on the road to socialism as either Stalinists or Trotskyists would understand the development.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Let me make one thing clear-as a partisan of Leon Trotsky this writer has many political differences with world Stalinism. Not the least of which the blood line draw over the question of the murder of Vietnamese Trotskyists by Ho‘s forces in the post-World War II uprising against the French during the first phase of the independence struggle. Yes, we then, later during the American phase of the struggle and now defend the Vietnamese revolution against world imperialism and against internal counterrevolution but a political crime of such magnitude cannot be swept under the rug. Some day the memory of the struggles and sacrifice of the Vietnamese Trotskyist liberation fighters will receive their just recognition-in Vietnam and elsewhere.

ROTC OFF CAMPUSES! JROTC OUT OF THE HIGH SCHOOLS!

COMMENTARY

WHILE WE ARE AT IT-KEEP THE MILITARY RECRUITERS OUT TOO!

HATS OFF TO THE SAN FRANCISCO SCHOOL BOARD


In the Op/Ed page of the Idea section of the Boston Sunday Globe of November 19, 2006 conservative pundit, one Jeff Jacoby, in a commentary entitled “Anti-Military Bigotry” is up in arms (figuratively, of course, since like most neo-cons of late he did not avail himself of the opportunity to partake of military service) about the decision of the San Francisco School Board to eliminate the JROTC (Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps) program from the city’s schools. The gist of Mr. Jacoby’s argument is that the decision of that Left Coast town is another unmistakable example of its anti-military and therefore unpatriotic bias, especially in a time of the great struggle his beloved President Bush is leading in the “war on terror”. Militant leftists take a rather different view of the matter. Yes, indeed we do. Hell, we commend that school board decision as an exemplary anti-war action and seek to drive ROTC and JROTC off all campuses and out of all schools.

As part of his argument Mr. Jacoby has dressed up the role of JROTC by giving a litany of its positive effects on San Francisco students as a great bonding and “community” creating activity. In short, it is on the same level as the Boy or Girl Scouts, 4-H Clubs and the like. Wrong. However one wants to dress it up ROTC and JROTC are military organizations which act as a transmission belt to recruit students for military service. The name speaks for itself. Whether those organizations do that successfully or not or provide some non-military activities are separate questions- and subordinate to their real aim. The military is not using them as a vehicle to further the brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind. Ask the Iraqis, among others, for the truth of that assertion.

It is no accident that in the 1930’s and again during the Vietnam War of the 1960’s that a major campus activity for leftists, and not only leftists, was to drive ROTC off college campuses. Why? In the final analysis, as Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin pointed out long ago, the state is “armed bodies of men (and these days, women) - the military, the police, etc.” There are many ways to create that armed body-ROTC and JROTC help that effort. If you want to stop a war there is no way around that hard political problem of curtailing the military's power to recruit. As part of the solution to this problem young militants on campuses and in high schools can form, if they have not already done so, united front committees to organize for the removal of these programs. As an elementary and concrete act of opposition to the Iraq War and ultimately of American imperialism militants have to demand-ROTC OFF CAMPUSES! JROTC OUT OF THE SCHOOLS! MILITARY RECRUITERS OUT EVERYWHERE!

THE LATEST PENTAGON IRAQ "CANNON FODDER" DEPLOYMENT PLANS

On November 17, 2006 the Pentagon announced that it will send up to 57,000 troops in five brigades to Iraq to replace units already there beginning in the first part of 2007. Presumably those troops will serve for a normal year rotation. The import of this news is that troops levels will remain the same as at present, about 140,000. Which makes me wonder-What the hell is all this noise about withdrawal and drawdown by politicans, particularly Democratic Party politicans, about? The stark reality is there will be no withdrawal soon. I am reposting a commentary I wrote on September 24, 2006 concerning this very issue. In the fast-changing political world some points made there may no longer be relevant. However I stand by the general thrust of the commentary.

UPDATE: NOVEMBER 20, 2006. Will this madness never stop. Over the weekend the Pentagon has leaked information that there are three potential strategies under discussion in a "commission" they have created to assess the situation in Iraq independently of the of the ill-starred Iraq Study Group. The three potential strategies are, predictably, a heavy increase in troops levels to gain victory, immediate withdrawal and a gradual reduction of American troops and replacement by Iraqi forces. While the Pentagon (and Senator McCain) may have appetites for troops increases in order to obtain "victory" that seems out of the question now. Immediate withdrawal is also dismissed out of hand. After all that might lead to a full-blown civil war. Hello, what the hell is occurring now? Generals, what do you need-the Battle of Bull Run- before you recognize a state of civil war?

The most probable course is a slow drawdown as the Iraqi replacement forces become better trained. In short, this is the case for withdrawal when the situation in Iraq stabilizes itself. Over the last year I have had fun poking holes in that one when anyone advances the argument. My rejoinder has been that the grandchildren of the troops already over in Iraq will be joining 'granddad and grandma' in the fighting before that event occurs. All this "commission" news boils down to is one hard fact- the troops will not be coming home this Christmas or any Christmas soon. Read on.


THE TROOPS ARE NOT COMING HOME FOR THIS CHRISTMAS OR ANY CHRISTMAS SOON!

COMMENTARY

IRAQ LOOKS MORE AND MORE LIKE VIETNAM EVERY DAY-IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF ALL UNITED STATES/ALLIED TROOPS!


FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY
ORIGINALLY POSTED: SEPTEMBER 24, 2006
This writer for a long time has resisted the facile task route of comparing the situation in Iraq today to the Vietnam of some forty years ago. But it is getting harder and harder to do so. On the face of it the differences are obvious. In Vietnam revolutionary leftist forces were attempting to unify into one state that which by international diplomacy and previous bouts of international Stalinist treachery had been artificial split. Furthermore, the defining concept behind the revolutionary forces there was to resolve the agrarian question and the fight for what those forces conceived to be the road to socialism. Today in Iraq there are nationalist/sectarian forces which want to take revenge on the results of the European- derived Treaty of Versailles after World War I and divide this artificially created state-gun in hands. The fact that in Kurdish-controlled areas only the Kurdish flag can fly really says it all. Additionally, as far as this writer can tell, from the little known about murky underworld of radical Islamic politics there are no forces fighting for anything like a secular- democratic much less socialist solution to the problems there. Rather something like an Islamic Republic under repressive and anti-women Sharia law appears to be the favored political solution.

However, those differences between the domestic forces in Iraq and Vietnam aside the real way Iraq today looks like Vietnam is the similarities in the role of American imperialism on the ground. The latest news this week, the week of September 18, 2006, coming from the central military command is there will be no draw down of troops any time soon. LET ME REPEAT- THERE WILL NOT BE ANY DRAW DOWN ANY TIME SOON. All those who foolishly believed that draw down would occur and did not take the Bush Administration at its word when it declared empathically that troops would not be withdrawn as long as it drew breathe should ponder this. More on this below.

There are starting to be voices heard, dormant for a while, spearheaded by the editors of National Review and other neo-con sources that the lesson to be learned from Iraq is that to really win in Iraq the Americans must sent in more troops. How much such sentiments are worth from these previous supporters of a quick and cheap airpower strategy in Iraq is beside the point. What is noteworthy is that this premise is not an isolated sentiment even among alleged opponents of the war. And that, in a nutshell, is where the comparison to Vietnam comes into play. The hubris which led the United States into the quagmire of Iraq is still very much in play. The notion that in order rectify the original mistake of invasion more mistakes, such as increased troop levels, can solve the problem and bring victory where none is possible is the same mentality that led to all the escalations of the Vietnam era. Against all reason the Bushies of America and the world cannot believe that the situation is lost. Well, hell that is their problem. Militant leftists have other problems like organizing the opposition to worry over.

Additionally, President Bush himself is getting a little testy at the Prime Minister of Iraq. He cannot believe that at this late stage wholly owned American puppet government in Iraq hasn’t stepped up to its tasks of creating domestic tranquility. One should remember the names Diem and Thieu from Vietnamese history who got the same kinds of dressing-downs from previous American administrations. With that thought in mind let me ask this question. Is there anyone today on the planet outside the immediate Bush family that believes that the writ of the Iraqi government runs outside the Green Zone (and even that premise might be shaky)? These guys (and they are overwhelmingly men) never led anything, went into exile under Saddam rather than go underground and build a resistance movement and represent no one but themselves.

But, enough of that. The real question is what are we anti-war, anti-imperialist activists going to do about the situation. President Bush has been rightly accused of upping the security alerts during election time to highlight the security question that he has (successfully) used as a trump card to swing the electoral balance in his favor. The least well-known fact is that during the fall of election years, including this year, the leaderships of the reformist anti-war movements close down the nationally- centered demonstrations campaign which are the lynchpins of their politics. It is no secret that this is done to help so-called anti-war Democratic politicians or at least not be a source of embarrassment to their weak parliamentary opposition to the war. In a blog written this summer I wrote an open letter to the troops in Iraq. The thrust of the letter was that the conventional politicians, their own military leadership and the anti-war movement had left the troops in Iraq hanging in the wind. As we enter the fall electoral campaign this is truer than ever. I will repeat here what I stated there- if the troops are to withdraw from Iraq it will have to be on their own hook. Start forming the soldiers and sailors committees now. Militant leftists here must support those efforts. Unfortunately today there is no other way to end the war. FORWARD.

THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!

LENIN ON THE DAWN OF MODERN IMPERIALISM

BOOK REVIEW
IMPERIALISM: THE HIGHEST STAGE OF CAPITALISM, V.I. LENIN, PLUTO PRESS, UNITED KINGDOM, 1996

Over the last generation much has been made of the positive effects of the latter day ‘globalization’ of the international capitalist markets. By this, I assume, commentators mean that kids in Kansas and kids in Katmandu have access to those same pairs of Nike sneakers. Although the outlines of the development of globalization have been known for at least a century, called by less kindly souls like myself- imperialism- apparently the latest devotees of the trend just got the news.

Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin analyzed this tendency of international capitalism in 1916 in a little book called Imperialism-the Highest Stage of Capitalism reviewed here. His major premises were that the 'globalization' of the capitalist markets of his day had made the nation-state an impediment to economic growth and that the concentration of capital into fewer cartels created intolerable tensions internationally ultimately culminating in wars for the redistribution of markets. While Lenin’s analysis could benefit from a little updating, particularly on the effects of the shift of the industrial labor market away from the high cost metropolitan areas to the former colonial areas in the search for lower wage bills and higher profit margins, the increased role of state intervention in markets and the effects of technological innovations, the basis premises are still sound.

While much of the positive ‘globalization’ rhetoric mentioned above has been overblown- especially concerning its effects on the demise of the nation-state and its alledged replacement by multi-national corporations and a multicultural ethic- the chickens are now starting to come home to roost on the down side of the world political situation. Everyone and their brother and sister, multi-national corporation or local “mom and pop” shoestring operation, is scurrying back to the 'safe' confines of the nation-state. With their guns drawn. What gives?

What gives is this. The international capitalist system, which after the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the early 1990’s, lived in a self-imposed fool’s paradise believing that the contradictions of the system would flatten out on their own and that everyone had reached the best of all possible worlds. There was even some sentiment for one-world government, of course a United States-dominated one, from quarters not normally known for such flights of fancy. The events of the last several years have graphically disabused the more cutthroat capitalists, their ideologues and mouthpieces of this notion.

This retrogression to the defenses of individual nation-states reminiscent of the so-called “Dark Ages” apparently is only the vanguard of what promises to be a much more restrictive world. The ruling classes, however, seem unable to put serious efforts in other types of endeavors. Which takes us back to Lenin. He not only wrote this little book on the tendencies of international capitalism as a piece of analysis but he did it for a reason. And that reason was to demonstrate to the militant leftists of his day, during the carnage of World War I, that the hitherto for progressive nature of capitalist development had run out of steam and the socialist revolution was on the historic agenda. And then proceeded to put theory into practice by leading the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. Today, the critics of globalization are much stronger on the effects of the process of international capitalist organization and its effects but weak, very weak, on the way to organize out of the impasse. Lenin knew what to do. Do we?

*THE LATEST IN GLOBALIZATION 'CHIC'- BORDER WALLS

Click on the title to link to a Wikipedia entry (use with caution) on the Israeli "Peace" wall.

COMMENTARY

WHAT NEXT? MOATS?

REVISED: NOVEMBER 3, 2006

Over the last generation much has been made of the positive effects of the latter day ‘globalization’ of the international capitalist markets. By this, I assume, commentators mean that kids in Kansas and kids in Katmandu have access to those same pairs of Nike sneakers advertised world wide. Although the outlines of the development of globalization have been known for at least a century, called by less kindly souls like myself- imperialism- apparently the latest devotees of the trend just got the news. Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin analyzed this tendency of international capitalism in 1916 in a little book called Imperialism-the Highest Stage of Capitalism. While Lenin’s analysis could benefit from a little updating, particularly on the effects of the shift of the industrial labor market away from the high cost metropolitan areas to the former colonial areas in the search for lower wage bills and higher profit margins, the basis premises are still sound.

While much of the positive ‘globalization’ rhetoric has been overblown- especially concerning its effects on the demise of the nation-state and its replacement by free-floating multi-national corporations and a multicultural ethic- the chickens are now starting to come home to roost on the down side of the world political situation. Everyone, and their brother and sister, multi-national corporation or local “mom and pop” shoestring operation, is scurrying back to the allegedly safe confines of the nation-state. With their guns drawn outward and cement at the ready.

Cases in point. Over the last several years the Israeli nation-state has been furiously building huge concrete walls to separate itself from the dreaded Palestinians who are fighting over and claiming the same territory and looking for their own nation-state. Additionally, last week, the week of September 10, 2006, saw the democratically elected United States House of Representatives pass an immigration bill that would create a wall, concrete or not I do not know, along several hundred miles of the 2000 mile United States southern border with Mexico. This slap at the dreaded Mexican laborers searching for work is also, like the Palestinian fight, a fight over disputed territory as any Mexican could easily make the argument that he or she was merely going home by crossing the border. But that is a point for another day. (Do not forget the Anglo-Texas and California land grabs or the infamous Gadsden Purchase that expanded the United States southwestward if you are bewildered by the last sentence). Now comes news that the democratically elected government of Iraq, ever so gently assisted by its American sponsor,is planning to fortify, with cement and other materials, the whole city of Baghdad. All of the above are allegedly done in the name of somebody’s or some nation’s security. Since this blog was originally written in September China has been busily building a wall against the threat of refugees from its neighbor North Korea, after the fallout over its nuclear weapons testing. Others are the planning stages of their own wall motifs What gives?

What gives is this. The international capitalist system which after the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the early 1990’s lived in a self-imposed fool’s paradise that the contradictions of the system would flatten out on their own and that everyone had reached the best of all possible worlds. There was even some sentiment for one-world government, from quarters not normally known for such flights of fancy. The events of the last several years have graphically disabused the more cutthroat capitalist elements of this notion.

This retrogression to the defenses of nation-states by physical fortifications reminiscent of the so-called “Dark Ages” apparently is only the vanguard of what promises to be a much more restrictive world. Unless we do something about it, and soon, it will not be pretty. The only walls that make sense in this world are the walls in front of the oceans to protect from their wrath in places like New Orleans. The ruling classes, however, seem unable to put serious efforts in those types of endeavors. Which takes us back to Lenin. He not only wrote that little book on the tendencies of international capitalism as a piece of analysis but he did it for a reason. And that reason was to demonstrate to the militant leftists of his day that the hitherto for progressive nature of capitalist development had run out of steam and the socialist revolution was on the historic agenda. Today, the critics of globalization are much stronger on the effects of the process but weak, very weak, on the way out of the impasse. Lenin knew what to do. Do we?

*IT AIN'T GOING TO BE POPULAR BUT-HANDS OFF NORTH KOREA!

Click on the headline to link to a Workers Vanguard article U.S. Imperialism Hands Off North Korea!, dated January 17, 2003.

COMMENTARY

AMERICAN IMPERIALISM- WHEN YOU LET THE GENIE OUT OF THE BOTTLE –WATCH OUT-AND DON’T CRY ABOUT IT

In a recent blog commenting on Massachusetts Senator John Forbes Kerry’s emerging presidential campaign for the elections of 2008 (see October 2006 archives, dated October 13th) this writer commented on Mr. Kerry’s hue and cry over the fact that North Korea had recently detonated some small nuclear devise and his call for America to take ‘appropriate action’ including, presumably a preemptive first strike against that country. That position has also been echoed by others in the liberal and Democratic Party establishments. At that time I wrote that I would have further comments later. Here goes.

The hard realities of international politics and military policy in the year 2006 are that any “third world” countries that are in the crosshairs of the American imperialists(or other imperialists) need nuclear weapons in order to survive. I warned from the start this commentary would not be pretty. The two destructive wars in Iraq over the past 15 years, where a marginally harmful figure to imperialists interests like Saddam Hussein was dealt severe conventional military blows, when the West even had a tiny thought that he had the potential (in some distant future) to produce such weaponry dramatically brings that point home. In the current one-superpower world dominated overwhelmingly by a far-flung American military presence this fact cannot have been lost on any leader of a small nation-least of all Kim Jung Il of North Korea.

Western imperialism’s hypocrisy over the occurrence of the blast and the media’s treatment of it, replete with vintage film footage reminiscent of old Soviet May Day parades, like some central event of the presumably long past Cold War seems strikingly irrational in the context of current American military capabilities.
Let me cite the standard leftist comments on such hypocrisy. While such comments might seem tired and reflect an old Cold War reality they nevertheless should underline any leftist response to the international situation today. Hell, for all practical purposes it is starting to look like that kind of world again. To begin- America, after all, let the genie out of the bottle when it first developed the atomic bomb for use in the waning days of World War II. Those who let the genie out of the bottle should not cry- over 60 years later- when some upstarts come along, use the simplification of that technology to develop their own weaponry and want to play in the same sandbox.

Commentators , in defending American leadership of an exclusive nuclear club, have placed great emphasis on the deterrent effect, based on mutually assured destruction, of the then escalating nuclear arms race during most parts of the Cold War which ended with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. Two comments should disabuse the reader of the notion of firm stewardship by American imperialism over that time. One, the Americans ruling class did in fact use nuclear weapons on essentially defenseless and defeated people in Japan. And has been the only power in history to do so. Two, the American imperialists today have several thousand serious nuclear weapons with the capacity to launch them anytime, anywhere and if history is any judge with little compunction to use them. “Third World” tin-pot dictators, quasi-socialist bureaucrats and other assorted rulers are not the only ones that should be worried by such facts. Damn, I am worried too.

Among the first political activities that I engaged in as a youth was the fight for unilateral nuclear disarmament. I admired the struggles of the British Labor Party to make Great Britain a nuclear-free zone during the height of the Cold War. As an advocate today for a socialist world that youthful dream still holds sway in the back of my mind- but now with a much better understanding of the nature of world politics and far less naiveté about the nature and intentions of the American capitalist system. Iraq today is only the most graphic example of the ruthlessness of that system. However, unlike such groups as the hard-line Stalinist Workers World Party which apparently wants the North Korean U.S. political franchise (for what it is worth) I do not see Kim Jung Il as one of nature’s noblemen. Nor is North Korea a “workers paradise” by any stretch of the imagination. However it is up to the workers and peasants of North Korea (along with their brethren in the South) to take care of that question of "regime change" and move forward to a socialist society. That task cannot be outsourced under the bloody dictates of international imperialism and its hangers-on. Until that future socialist time , however, make no mistake I join others, including the Workers World Party, in demanding- HANDS OFF NORTH KOREA!

Revised October 20, 2006

WHO IS SENATOR JOHN FORBES KERRY AND WHY IS HE BLEEDING ALL OVER THE RUG?

COMMENTARY

KERRY’S MEA CULPA IS NOT ENOUGH-WE NEED A WORKERS PARTY CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT

FORGET ELEPHANTS, DONKEYS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!!

No one can fault Massachusetts United Senator John Forbes Kerry for lacking in commemorative spirit. Last spring he wooed an audience at Fanueil Hall with a speech observing the 35th Annivesary of his testimony before a Senate Committee investigating the Vietnam War (Do people in the real world, outside of politics, really observe such anniversaries?). This week, the week of October 8, 2006, he again is on the stump celebrating the 4th Anniversary of his ill-fated vote to authorize President Bush to go to war in Iraq. The highlight of the speech apparently was his ‘heartfelt’ admission that he was wrong to give such approval. As a matter of elemenatry politic hygiene one would think with Kerry ‘s gyrations that he would be hiding out alone somewhere in the hills of New Hampshire not shouting about it from the rooftops. But such is the nature of capitalist politics- when you really have the 'fire in the belly' to be president there is nothing you will not do to abase yourself to get that ‘job’. Ask Bill Clinton (and maybe, ask Hillary). Ask the master- Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Need I say more.

Let us go through the numbers on the question of opposition to the Iraq war one more time. On the national parliamentary level the only real action that counts in opposition to the war in Iraq is not some belated mea culpa on an authorization vote but the vote on the war budget. You know, the way the damn war gets funded. Senator Kerry voted with both hands (and probably both feet) for that one. Democrats and Republicans LIKE to vote for the war budgets. It is now worst than useless to think otherwise. A new set of worker party candidates or other independents with a socialist program must be put forth to vote against the war budget (among other things). But that is the music of the future. As bad as Kerry’ position is THAT women, punitive ( I do not mean putative) Democratic presidential candidate New York Senator Hillary “Hawk”Clinton’s is even worst. While making some very tentative anti-war sounds she continues to stand by her 2002 vote. And like Kerry in 2004 she will probably be anointed the ‘anti-war’ candidate in 2008 agains the Republicans. Well, let the liberal anti-war activists twist in the wind on that one.

One other point about Senator Kerry deserves mentioning here lest one think that he is the reincarnation of the pacifist Indian leader Gandhi. This week North Korea exploded some small nuclear devise which raised all kinds of hypocritical outcries of 'foul' from the exclusive international nuclear club headed by American imperialism. Senator Kerry went out of his way to comment on this so-called outrage and argued for ‘appropriate’ action to stem the North Koreans. For those who need it spelled out that means preemptive military strikes, if necessary. Kerry represents the real position of the Iraqi defeatist wing of the capitalist class. To President Bush they say- It’s Iran, stupid, It’s North Korea, stupid. No one in the establishment, least of all Kerry, is turning swords into plowshares here, they just want another target. After two destructive wars in Iraq the hard reality of international politics in the case of small ‘third world’ nations in the crosshairs of American (or other) imperialist guns is you damn well better have nuclear weapons or you will not survive. More on this latter.

THESE ARE NOT SALAD DAYS FOR LIBERAL HAWKS

BOOK REVIEW

THE GOOD FIGHT: WHY LIBERALS-AND ONLY LIBERALS-CAN WIN THE WAR ON TERROR AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, PETER BEINART, HARPERCOLLINS, NEWYORK, 2006

In the normal course of events these days the tasks of working class socialists, particularly during the electoral cycle, are to create and distribute propaganda in favor of socialist solutions to the crisis of humankind and to organize around a socialist program. Since we are not in an immediate struggle for political power that is more than enough work. Thus, usually the goings-on among capitalist propagandists and ideologues have no direct relation to working on those tasks. However every once in a while, as now during a electoral cycle, it is interesting to take note of what is going on in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Why? Make no mistake, while the relation of forces today is totally on their side, in the final analysis we will have to directly fight the liberal wing of that party for the political allegiance of the better elements of that party. Does any militant leftist believe that today in 2006 that our recruiting grounds are located anywhere in the vicinity of the Republican Party?

With that thought in mind Mr. Beinart’s book, the Good Fight, is an outline of a plan to undercut the so-called liberal-pacifist wing of the Democratic Party in order to draw back the allegiance of what at one time were the elements that made the Democratic Party a governing party during much of the 20th century. In short, Mr. Beinart is fighting for what appears to him to be the ‘soul’ of the Democratic Party. Mr. Beinart’s central argument is that while he and other liberal hawks were wrong, dead wrong, on support to the Bush Administrations war in Iraq those who did at least get that question right are nevertheless wrong on a strategy to either defeat or contain Islamic terrorism. Of course, in the process Mr. Beinart thus retroactively absolves himself of his ‘little error’ on Iraq in the interests of the greater war on terrorism. Nobody ever said democratic ideologues were incapable of the occasional sleight-of-hand.

The predicate for this thesis is that there is vast ‘conspiracy’ underfoot by those, apparently led by the filmmaker Michael Moore and kindred spirits, who want to take over the Democratic Party and emulate Neville Chamberlain's capitualtion to Hitler at Munich as a reaction to the current "war on terror". The result, according to Mr. Beinart, is that the centrist/ Lieberman wing will have no home and the Democratic Party will not rule again like in the good old days of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. In answer, this writer makes this observation-what planet does Mr. Beinart live on? If memory serves Mr. Moore supported one General Wesley Clark, the mad commander of NATO forces in Serbia who attempted to bomb that country back to Stone Age conditions, in the presidential primaries of 2004. Moreover, do any rational liberal politicians or activists take political counsel from Mr. Moore? Certainly he is a political gadfly and provocative filmmaker but, please, go after the big game. And spend less time on the Internet.

Moreover, and I do not need to rely on memory for this one, who in the Democratic Party opposed the now crumbling war in Afghanistan? There were very few of us in those days, even those who were allegedly opposed to all wars on pacifist grounds, out on the streets protesting that invasion in the aftermath of the hysteria over 9/11. I saw no Democratic Party opposition, hawk or dove, to that little adventure. No, overall, as we are painfully aware every day, the Democratic Party is nothing more than a somewhat loyal parliamentary opposition. They take no more risks than the Republicans. The real problem is that on foreign policy, either in its containment or confrontational stages, the Democratic Party is Republican-lite. That in a nutshell is their political malaise-the Republicans do better at and are perceived to be better at protecting the long term interests of the ruling classes-end of story.

Mr. Beinart’s book does bring up a serious political question about how to fight the war on terror for those who favor a workers government and we duck the issue at our peril. Be forewarned, Islamic fundamentalism is a present threat to not only democratic forms of government but ultimately also to socialist forms as well. Thus, without being forced to outline an abstract blueprint to a theoretical question- How would a workers government in power respond to the actions of the Islamic terrorists? Fair enough.

The obvious first answer is that a workers government would try to break the stranglehold of Islamic fundamentalism at the base by, yes, throwing lots of money and organizers at the problems which keep the Islamic masses in poverty. Beyond that the breaking up of the Islamic terrorist organizations appears to be much more of police problem than a military one. A workers government, like any responsible government, would mercilessly track down every one of these cells in the appropriate manner. Finally, a workers government under foreseeable conditions would not be a pacifist government, even though its long-term aim is a peaceful world. There is a long way to go before humankind gets to that stage.

Let me suggest the following as one possible scenario that a future workers government might follow. The Soviet Union’s intervention into Afghanistan in 1979 drove the West, including the American Democratic Party headed by one President Jimmy Carter, to support the Islamic fundamentalists of that time as a proxy against the Soviets. The Soviet Union, even if eventually only half-heartedly committed to the intervention, in retrospect, was then the vanguard of the fight against Islamic fundamentalism. Does anyone today want to rethink that Western opposition to Soviet intervention into Afghanistan? One should. A workers government today would follow the Soviet lead demonstrated in Afghanistan and in earlier fights in the 1920’s against counterrevolutionary Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia as it attempted to consolidate the Soviet state. That is a sketch of some aspects of a workers government policy to think about. As these thoughts suggest in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism the real options are fairly narrow.

THE (IL)LOGIC OF THE NATION-STATE

COMMENTARY

‘GLOBALIZATION’ THEORY TAKES A BEATING

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!


The recent events in the Middle East and elsewhere have highlighted the irrational nature of trying to confine economic, social and political developments to the nation-state system in the age of imperialism. Every conflict from the sectarian civil war in Iraq to the Israeli- Lebanese border war to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle cries out for a socialist solution. That is a fight to the finish, not between ethnically divided populations, but a working class based solution. Today’s political configurations, including the prevalent of religious fundamentalism on all sides in every struggle, make that proposition seem utopian at best and irrelevant at worst. This writer will concede that it is entirely possible that just solutions to these conflicts may proved ultimately intractable nevertheless it is equally obvious that the capitalist nation-state system provides no way out of this dilemma. Sometimes one must fight for what is necessary as well as what is right.

Ironically, Marxists have historically had mixed feelings about the role of the nation-state in history. In the age of the rise of capitalist development at a time when the capitalist system as a whole was a truly progressive historical development, that is until about World War I, Marxists welcomed the formation of nation-states against the particularist , provincial nature of the feudal system. Since World War I, that is since the rise of the full blown imperialist age, Marxist have generally opposed the nation-state in the metropolitan areas. Nevertheless, even today Marxists extend support to national liberation struggles and defend the right to national self-determination for oppressed and neo-colonial peoples. The right to national self-determination has been an integral of the revolutionary program since the early days of the Communist International. The support for struggle of the Palestinian peoples for their own, even if truncated, state falls under that premise. Why? To take the national question off the agenda and place the class question to the fore.

While this little note makes no pretense to do anything but pose the question, to be taken up in future blogs, of the strategies necessary to replace the nation-state with other forms of political organization it does take issue with the notion, currently fashionable, that the process of ‘globalization’ will solve the problems of the nation-state by making borders irrelevant. Well, this writer for one would be more than happy if that were to be the case. However, who is the utopian here? If anything the process of globalization-let us call it by its right name, the international capitalist system- has intensified the tensions in the nation-state system. This ‘globalization’, by the way did not start recently. The whole development of the capitalist system from its progressive beginnings to its imperialist decay has been the struggle to internationalize the market. In short, the capitalists have had their chance - it is time to move on over and let others solve the question of international economic, social and political development. More, much more, later.


THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE RANK AND FILE SOLDIERS IN IRAQ

Your Commander-In-Chief and Chain of Command have stabbed you in the back.
The politicians, Democratic and Republican, have stabbed you in the back and spit in your face.
The anti-war movement has failed you miserably.
Damn, the ball is in your court now. It is time to leave.

This writer usually relies on his own resources to distribute his commentaries. For this important commentary, he urgently asks for the help of anyone whether you agree, agree a little or for that matter violently disagree with the contents to disseminate it. Let the service men and women in Iraq decide what they want about it. If you have friends, relatives or know anyone serving in Iraq e-mail, fax, call or write a letter (if anybody does that anymore) to them about this commentary.

Brother and Sister Soldiers, Sailors and Air Personnel in Iraq, you and I need to talk. However, before we do so I want to come to the table with clean hands. Directly below are the headlines and first paragraph of a blog (dated, August 4, 2006- see my blog site at the end of this letter) written by me and placed on several Internet sites recently:


AN OPEN LETTER TO ALL ANTI-WAR ACTIVISTS- TAKE THE PLEDGE -SUPPORT THE TROOPS-HELL, NO!

THEY MAY BE OUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS BUT THESE ARE NOT OUR TROOPS! END THE OCCUPATION OF IRAQ NOW!! IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OF UNITED STATES/ALLIED TROOPS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST!!!

“In light of the recent seemingly never-ending revelations concerning American military atrocities toward Iraqi civilians it is high time to set the record straight about the appropriate slogans that anti-war militants use to affect the political outcome of the situation in Iraq. For those militant leftists, including this writer, who have opposed the American war aims since before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 our main slogan expressing our opposition to imperialism has been for the immediate withdrawal of all American and Allied forces from the Middle East. That continues to be the thrust of our political struggle today. But, more, much more, is necessary to accomplish that goal. It is no longer up to us-the ball is in the court of the rank and file service personnel in Iraq………”


As you can see it calls, in unambiguous terms, for all anti-war activists who have not done so already to renounce the Support The Troops slogan which has motivated many activists and declare forthrightly for Immediate Withdrawal Now- ‘cut and run’ if you will. This writer, an old militant leftist who has known army life, has opposed the Iraqi debacle from before its start under that slogan. I made no apologies for any of the above then and I make none now. But, hear me out.

It has become a truism but it bears repeating- Your Commander-In-Chief, President George W. Bush, abetted by your Chain of Command from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on down has lied to you the troops who have had to carry out their policy. Did you find, what now seems like an ancient question, weapons of mass destruction? No. Were you ‘liberators’ of the Iraqi peoples? No. Are you making the world ‘safe for democracy’? Hell, no. The Iraqi government, such as it is, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the United States government. The Iraqi government’s writ extends no further than the Green Zone, if there. Now, as of August 1, 2006, some of your fellow soldiers are being sent from other parts of Iraq to Baghdad, essentially as hostages, in the ongoing sectarian war. As of August 22, 2006 President Bush has declared, as he has in the past, that the troops will not be withdrawn from Iraq on his watch. He means every word of that.

And how about the generals? This misadventure started out as a generals’ war. “Shock and Awe”. Remember? But, it sure in hell is not a generals’ war now. Look at the lists of those killed. I do. There are plenty of sergeants, corporals and PFC’s there but mighty, mighty thin at the officer level. Surprise, surprise. A look at the wounded lists would undoubtedly show the same thing.

Are your senior officers on the ground trying to keep your butts out of harm’s way and get you out of that inferno? Hell, no. They are at least smart enough to know not to leave the Green Zone-it is dangerous out there beyond the zone. Hell, you know that. Now, as of August 3, 2006 your senior command staff no longer believes in the mission. Before a Senate Armed Services Committee panel your day to day operational commanders have sounded the retreat. Read between the lines, please- the war is lost. Today, that idea is just in their minds, tomorrow they will be moving on to the next adventure. But, you ain't going nowhere. In short, your civilian and military leaders in the chain of command are stabbing you in the back-and they like it that way. As long as you don’t complain.

But something must be up because Marine Corps General Pace during the week of August 15, 2006 made a point of addressing his Marines in Iraq in person telling them essentially all is well and to stay the course. Damn, you know these generals never talk to the rank and file soldiers unless they want something. Hell, yes you have questions about the mission in Iraq but do not expect a straight answer from the brass. They want something and it’s your butt on the line that they want. General Pace, on the other hand, flew out of Iraq the next day. Get it.

The following has also become a truism-Your Congressional leaders, Democratic and Republican, the people who fund the war have stabbed you in the back. They continue to vote the war budget to keep you there- Read this from a recent blog of mine:

“Well the votes are in from various proposals for withdrawing from Iraq put forth by some Democrats. The results speak for themselves. On the parliamentary level anti-war militants are alone. Forget the ‘softball’ non-binding Levin-Reed proposal. Jesus, they all vote for those things as a cheap way to bolster their tarnished images. They can vote for that kind of proposition all day. No, I am talking about the Kerry proposal. That went down 86-13.

In this series the writer has been trying to hammer home the one real question that counts on the parliamentary level. Yes or No on the war budget. We had our answer on that one last week- 98-1 for the war budget. Enough said.”

Translation- these people do not want you out of Iraq anytime soon. While you are getting shot at, blown away and desert-addled they can wait until next year, or the year after or (my favorite) when the situation in Iraq becomes stabilized. Christ, your grandchildren will be fighting over there by then. Enough said, indeed!

And what about the anti-war movement? We, and the writer takes his fair share of political responsibility on this, did not have, and still do not have a political strategy that would stop this war. In the final analysis, the only way to do it is to change the government which started it in the first place. For what it is worth the only time that a war was stopped was when the workers and soldiers took over the government and stopped it in World War I. That event was the revolution in Russia in 1917. That does not help us right this minute, though.

Let me just relate one thing. The name Markin is a pseudonym I write under. Let me tell where it comes from. Markin was a working class sailor in the Baltic Fleet of the Russian Navy in World War I. As war-weariness developed and it became abundantly clear that Russia could not continue in the war and revolution was in the air Markin started organizing sailor and soldier committees to challenge the brass and, ultimately, the government. To make a long story short Markin, and eventually many other Markins were really the individuals who stepped up the plate and did the right thing for themselves and their buddies. Unfortunately it now is up to you. What are you going to do? Are there any Markins out there in Iraq?

I do not know whether this is still a part of basic training but when I was in boot camp during the Vietnam War the Drill Sergeant used to beat into our closely-shaven heads that the American army does not retreat. Bull! That pearl of wisdom is o.k. for green troops but any half-ass officer knows you damn well better have a retreat plan. Where do you think the word ‘skedaddle’ came from? Call it ‘skedaddle’, ‘cut and run’, declare a victory in Iraq, however you want to justify it- but it is time to leave.

I have said enough. Some talking head from cyberspace cannot do your thinking for you. Do this, though- talk it over with your girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, wives, parents, children, anyone you care about and who cares about you. Then talk to your buddies in the barracks, on guard duty, at the PX, wherever. You know what the right thing to do is. But above all keep your own counsel. Markin in his time knew what to do. Remember Markin. When the troops in Iraq take up the slogan Support the Troops-Hell, No! then you know the end of the war is near. Enough said, for now.

FOR MORE POLITICAL COMMENTARY AND BOOKS REVIEWS CHECK MY BLOG AT- Http://markinbookreview.blogspot.com/