From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-"Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part One- Buonarroti and Babouvist Heritage" (“Young Spartacus”-February 1976)

Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.

Markin comment:

I will post any updates from that Occupy Boston site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History ’’series started in the fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.

* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

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Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part One- Buonarroti and Babouvist Heritage (“Young Spartacus”-February 1976)

By Joseph Seymour

EDITOR'S NOTE: Over the weekend of 17-19 January in Berkeley more than 100 supporters of the Spartacus Youth League and the Spartacist League par­ticipated in a SYL West Coast educa­tional conference. The program fea­tured presentations on the Soviet econ­omy, the Right Opposition in the Bol­shevik Party during the 1920's, and the heritage of Jacobin communism. Be­ginning with this issue Young Spartacus is publishing the contribution "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition" by Joseph Seymour, a member of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League. To preserve the character of the verbal presentation we have intro­duced only stylistic alterations and deletions.

I am in the process of giving a seven-part [SYL class] series, titled "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition." This talk constitutes a compression of the first three parts: it is an attempt to analyze the main European revolutionary movement from the French Revolution until the time that Marx as a left-of-center bourgeois democrat arrived in France and Engels as a Utopian socialist, bohemian hell rake from the University of Berlin arrived in England, where they were transformed into communists.

In the general conception of the origins and background of Marxism there is the tendency toward idealiza­tion and individualization which sees Marx as a genius who assimilated Heg­el, Ricardo and Adam Smith and who read history and then synthesized these intellectual traditions into Marxism. Now, this is simply not true. In 1847 Marx joined an organization which had a twelve year revolutionary history. He did not join as a member; he joined at the top after he had come to agree­ment with the leadership. But it was not his organization, and he was a leader not because these people were followers of Marx but because his own ideas were in congruence with theirs.

Objectively, there has been the sup­pression of the influence of the Jacobin communist tradition and the living organizational links, not simply the ideological and intellectual effects, of the French Revolution through two generations of revolutionary commu­nists who, in the broad sense, educated Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. There are, I think, several reasons as to why there is this false view.

First, since World War II, particu­larly, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, virtually all of the literature on Marxist historiography has been done by academics who have no knowledge of or interest in revolutionary organization, so that there has been a systematic idealization of Marx. Second, the Sta­linists, who have done much of the historical study of the pre-1848 left, are very much aware of the revolu­tionary movement, but introduce an­other kind of falsification, namely, the cult of personality projected back- wards. When Marx walks on the his­toric stage of 1843 in the Stalinist writings, he is presented as standing head and shoulders above the people who taught him things which he did not know and could not have figured out for himself. Within the Stalinist historiography of this period there is a strong tendency to deny Marx's as­sertion that the educator too must be educated. Finally, there is what could be called the obscurity of the obvious. Marx's debt to German philosophical traditions was in many ways unique. But Marx shared with almost all of his contemporaries a profound debt to the Jacobin communist tradition. In 1861 Marx wrote, in effect, "Well, of course, before 1848 everybody was a Babouvist." At that time all communists basically identified with the left wing of the French Revolution.

So, a main purpose of this series, of which the talk is a part, is to restore to the consciousness of our comrades our real debt to Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Julian Harney and Karl Schapper. Without them, both as individuals and as tendencies', Marx would have been nothing other than a German academic, just another version of Bruno Bauer.

Shaping impact of Great French Revolution

The great British historian, William Maitland, said that the most difficult thing about history is to remember that events which happened long ago were once in the future. Indeed, one of the most difficult things is to be able to put yourself into the political context of the 1820's and the 1830's. But there are two things that stand out, and they are interrelated.

First, one cannot overestimate the degree to which the consciousness of the revolutionaries and communists of those days was shaped by the French Revolution. The Jacobin dictatorship which lasted one year represented for any revolutionary democrat or com­munist—and the line between them was very thin—the only thing that they had to look back on, the only historic ex­perience that they could build on. The period from the overthrow of Robes­pierre at least to the revolution of 1830 in France and the Reform Act of 1832 in Britain, but really to the revo­lution of 1848, was a period of deep reaction, in which the possibility of a radical bourgeois-democratic republic seemed almost Utopian. The historic experiences on which to build a com­munist theory were very meager and were concentrated in one great event— the French Revolution, specifically, the Jacobin dictatorship.

Second, on the basis of the French Revolution and the attitudes of the ruling class, communism was generally identified with democracy. As Metternich remarked, "There is no difference between a liberal and a communist.” For Metternich there was no difference: if you had universal suf­frage, if you overthrew the govern­ment and instituted a bourgeois democ­racy, then the collectivization of property—the expropriation of the bourgeoisie—was relatively easy. Only the experience of the revolution, of 1848 allowed for a general re-evalua­tion of that premise. But before 1848, from Metternich through Marx, it was assumed that universal suffrage, at least in a country like England, would be associated with the massive econom­ic reorganization in the interests of the proletariat—the proletariat then
being not the industrial working class, but basically the plebeian masses, those who own nothing but their labor or who did not employ labor.

The French Revolution shares with the Bolshevik Revolution the fact that the revolutionaries had a strong doc­trinal pre-history. Robespierre, Saint-Just, Babeuf and Marat were no less committed to carrying out the doctrines of Rousseau, Diderot and the other French philosophes than Lenin and Trotsky were to Marx. Therefore, one cannot understand the French Revolu­tion, particularly Jacobin communism, without some knowledge of the left wing of the French Enlightenment.

The dominant philosopher who shaped the French revolutionary move­ment was Jean Jacques Rousseau. I will simply make the following point about Rousseau: unlike the other philos­ophers of the bourgeois-democratic movement, such as the Englishman Locke, Rousseau did not regard prop­erty as a natural right but as a social convention. He believed that as a social convention, property was serviceable in the interests of democracy and indivi­dual freedom. While having as an ideal a society of small property owners, Rousseau never regarded property as a natural right; therefore, one could indeed be a follower of Rousseau and be a communist, simply by differing with Rousseau not on the question of principle, but rather on the question of his empirical evaluation of property as the best convention to guarantee individual liberty.

There were also contemporaries of Rousseau, notably a Catholic priest named Mably and an atheist named Morelly, who disagreed with Rousseau. They contended that only under a collectivist system, only when there is equality of consumption and some kind of general collective organization of labor, can there arise a genuinely democratic society. There existed, therefore, in a doctrinal form, con­cepts of communism which arose out of the ideological preparation for the greatest of bourgeois-democratic revolutions.

Jacobin dictatorship

The Jacobin dictatorship, the reign of terror, the rule of Robespierre, represented an episode in which the revolutionary bourgeoisie, facing over­whelming international reaction and not yet having established its own strong state apparatus, had to make certain concessions to the masses, particularly the masses of Paris, which tended to be the seat of social power in France. In particular, the need to finance a revolutionary war could be done through either unrestrained inflationary fi­nance, in which the living standards of the population would decline, or some kind of economic controls. Fur­thermore, the revolutionary bourgeoi­sie also faced the question of the expropriation of the reactionaries and disposition of their property. Thus, the Robespierre dictatorship, under the direct military pressure of the so-called sans-culottes of Paris, insti­tuted elements of economic control in conflict with the basic bourgeois ideology of laissez faire, the unlimited expansion of incomes and the historic interests of the bourgeoisie.

However, Robespierre genuinely be­lieved that his policies represented a trans-class national interest. In 1793 Robespierre rewrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man, since the ori­ginal Declaration, representing an earlier phase, was too liberal. Inci­dentally, the rewritten Declaration of the Rights of Man is substantially • to the left of [Socialist Workers Party candidate] Peter Camejo's electoral campaign. The 1793 Declaration de­manded that every able-bodied French­man be guaranteed a job or that the
state provide support; that the state provide free education; that every foreign citizen resident in France for more than six months and not a coun­terrevolutionary be automatically granted French citizenship; and that when the government violates the rights of the people the people have the sacred right and duty to insurrect.

Now, when the French Revolution had beaten back the external military threat, the conservative bourgeoisie, whose social base was mainly the peasantry, overthrew Robespierre; the conservative bourgeoisie formed a
parliamentary majority which had an element of a right-left bloc, because Robespierre had also tended to sup­press elements of the Paris prole­tariat who were going too far. And that was Thermidor, the ninth of Thermidor. So the Robespierre heri­tage was therefore ambiguous. But, nonetheless, it was extremely important that the Jacobin dictatorship was assimilated in the communist tradition even by a certain kind of distortion of history—which saw Robespierre as really a communist—a distortion which certainly did not represent any malice, but rather a kind of false consciousness.

The Thermidorian reaction did not lead to a stable regime; only the overthrow of all elements of repre­sentative civilian government by Napoleon Bonaparte five years later stabilized that regime. So in the inter­im, the Jacobins, although suppressed and dispersed, continued to be a politi­cally organized force and a potential contender for power.

Conspiracy of Equals

In 1796 there was a regroupment of the left-wing revolutionaries headed by Babeuf which on the basis of their experience had gone over to commu­nism. Now, in some aspects, the Ba­beuf Conspiracy of Equals represen­ted a genuine, fundamental program­matic shift toward communism. But around the Babeuf Conspiracy of Equals, which was not a small group of fanatics by any means, there were also followers of Robespierre, so they constituted basically a unified left oppo­sition subscribing to two programs which were not really consistent with one another. One was a program simply calling for a return to the democratic constitution of 1793, which was acceptable to the Jacobins and had the historical authority of Robespierre. The other was the doctrine of Babouvists proper, which was that of a com­munistic regime.

The Conspiracy of Equals suffered from over-confidence; they simply passed out bills saying, "We are the secret committee of insurrection and we're going to insurrect." This agita­tion actually intersected considerable discontent. Thus, the army mutinied before they got around to organizing it, so that the rebellion was suppress­ed and the soldiers shipped out, and
the Conspiracy was infiltrated and suppressed. But it is worth noting that simply as an insurrection the Con­spiracy of Equals could have suc­ceeded. But the Conspiracy could not have carried out its program, and Babeuf personally would have been displaced by the right wing of his own movement. Nevertheless, one could have had a second reign of terror in 1796.

There was another important duali­ty in Babouvism. On the one hand, it had its popular program for re­turn to universal suffrage. On the other hand, the experience of the reign of terror, in which a conservative majority had ousted Robespierre, com­bined with the recognition that Robes­pierre had only stayed in power by calling upon the Paris population every once and awhile to invade the Convention and silence the representatives who had been elected by the peasants, convinced the Babouvists that they would need in the initial stages a dic­tatorship of revolutionaries. Filippo Buonarroti, who carried this tradition forward, described their ideas,

"To found a Republic belongs only to such disinterested friends of humanity and of their country whose reason and courage have shot above the rea­son and courage of their contempo­raries. The spirit of the Republic when established forms that of the citizens and of the magistrates, but at the commencement it is only the wisest and most ardent instigators of reform who can create the popular repub­lican spirit. It was therefore a point resolutely agreed upon by committee [the Babouvist committee] that the magistrates, imposed at first and ex­clusively of the best revolutionaries, should not be subsequently renewed by the full application of the constitutional laws at once, but only generally and partially as the proportion of progress of national regeneration."

One has here the germs of the concept of the dictatorship of the pro­letariat, albeit deformed through a certain objectively determined false
consciousness. The Babouvists empiri­cally recognized that, had there been a free election in 1796, the communist Jacobins or even the radical Jacobins would not have been a majority; they were a majority in Paris but not in the country. This was not transformed into an understanding of the class dif­ferences between the peasantry, which had already gotten what they wanted, namely the land and the abolition of feudal taxes and obligations, and a pre-industrial working class; rather, this recognition was translated into the notion of the difference between the enlightened revolutionists and the back­ward masses.

So the revolutionary regime was seen as the dictatorship of a revolu­tionary party, selected on-the basis of individual political morality. In this sense, the Babouvists did not and could not transcend the ideological premises of the bourgeois-democratic revolu­tion. Babeuf and Darthe were executed; but before his death, Babeuf wrote to one of his collaborators—he said, "Here are my notes, here are my ideas. Save these for posterity."

That collaborator for the next forty years worked to realize the Babouvist program. He was an Italian by the name of Filippo Michele Buonarroti. The most important work of his life, I would argue, was in the last five years, when the man was in his seven­ties. Because, he was an Italian, he did not participate as a politician during the Jacobin dictatorship but rather as a revolutionary administra­tor. He was a troubleshooter and a terrorist. So he began his career as the Jacobin equivalent of the Cheka. Then he was imprisoned for a while, but following Thermidor he was re­leased, in this regroupment he joined the Babouvists. He was an orthodox follower of Robespierre; he convinced Babeuf for tactical reasons to claim the traditions of Robespierre rather than Hebert, who had less historical prestige with the masses.

Thinking about Buonarroti's career, the parallels with Trotsky are so great as to be overwhelming. They simply force themselves upon one's conscious­ness, although there is a difference, and it is a difference which appears superficial but is in fact fundamental, the difference between the bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian revolution.

Buonarroti was the only one of his revolutionary generation to carry on against overwhelming historical odds, and in greater isolation than Trotsky faced, the traditions of the French Revolution and its most radical ex­pression. He did this in two forms. In the year 1828, as an old man, he published a book [History of Babeuf s Conspiracy of Equals], which both in effect and in purpose was The Revolution Betrayed of its day. In fact, the main theme was the original Thermidor, the one in 1794, not the one in 1924. In its day the book actually had a greater mass impact than The Revolution Betrayed, and was known as the Bible of revolutionaries. It was the book that educated the generation that educated Karl Marx. However, Buonarroti was not content, being a man of action, to limit himself simply to the literary expression of doctrine as important as that was. He also attempted to establish international revolutionary organizations.

Reaction and conspiratorial strategy

Yet there is a difference with Trotsky which is fundamental. In a certain sense it encapsulates the whole purpose of this class series. The French counterrevolution, and French Bonapartism, was forced by over­whelming historical objective circum­stances. Thus, the entire generation of Jacobins, including many Babouvists, capitulated to Bonapartism, so that throughout the Napoleonic era the bureaucracy and the army contained ex-Jacobins, ex-Hebertists, ex-Babouvists and ex-partisans of Robes­pierre. Even Napoleon himself could declare, "I was never a dictator; I was never an oppressor. I was a true son of the French Revolution. I'm here because I fought to liberate the people against the tyrants." Read some of Napoleon's last letters; he sounds very radical.

Buonarroti's ex-Jacobin comrades tended to abound within the interstices of the French bureaucracy. In fact, one of the reasons Buonarroti survived was that he skillfully exploited the Jacobin "old boys club." This fact conditioned his conception of strategy, which was not the organization of a revolution from the ground up but rather from the top of society, from communist sym­pathizers within the state bureaucracy, within the army, within these very re­stricted parliaments. Therefore, the Buonarroti organizations were con­spiratorial organizations in several different senses. They were not merely a means of hiding from the authorities, the absolutely reactionary authorities; they were a means of the conspiratorial infiltration and manipulation of the lib­eral opposition.

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Guidelines for recruitment to the first international communist (Babouvist) organization, the Sublimes Maitres Parfaits led by Filippo Buonarroti.

*Devotion to the principles of the order and willingness to sacrifice to them personal interest and pleasure.

*Courage, that is to say, scorn of danger of work and hardship. *Patience and perseverance.

*Moderation in the use of intoxicating liquors.

*The habit of speaking little and to the point.

*No wish to make an impression, to shine, and to impose oneself.

*Caution in gambling, in love, in anger, and in the opening of one's
heart.

*Exquisite sensibility concerning the wrongs that weigh on humanity.
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Buonarroti's strategy was to attempt to achieve through conspiratorial manipulation the organic radicalization of the French Revolution. You begin with a constitutional monarch, then you go to the liberal bourgeoisie, then the radical bourgeoisie, and then commu­nism. The Buonarroti secret societies would have their members join some­thing like the Society for Freedom of the Press or the semi-legal, liberal nationalistic oppositions in Metternich-ean Europe. So, you were electing somebody you thought was a good liberal; but he was really a communist on the hotline to Geneva, where Buonarroti was running the operation.

Thus, Buonarroti's strategy, which was in a certain sense realistically
conditioned by the existence of an era of bourgeois-democratic revolution, was the conspiratorial manipulation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the service of communism. For that reason these were hierarchical organ­izations whose ultimate program was not known to its lower ranks. Only Buonarroti and the Central Committee knew the real program. You joined if you were a liberal and believed in universal suffrage. If you were a revo¬lutionary democrat, you reached the second level; and you only got to know the final program after you had been coopted onto the Central Committee. Ultimately, Buonarroti's conception, of course, was Utopian. However, in the year 1821, Buonarroti's followers were involved in—even leading—partially successful, simultaneous insurrections in Spain, Naples and Rome. For one man, that is not bad!

In one talk I can only give some index of the importance of Buonarroti. If you read a biography of Marx, you will find under this period just names: he collaborated with this person here and that person there. Well, in almost every case, all of Marx's collabor¬ators in the 1840’s were either in­directly or directly influenced or re­cruited by Buonarroti! To give you just two examples, which could be multi¬plied ad infinitum. In 1847 the front group for the Communist League in Belgium was called the Democratic Association, of which Marx was the vice-president and a man named Lucien Jottrand was the president. In 1828 Buonarroti was in Belgium and he recruited a small circle of Belgian followers, one of whom was Lucien Jottrand. Another example: Marx's leading non-German collaborator throughout this period was the left-wing leader of British Chartism, Julian Harney, a very important figure in his own right. Barney’s mentor was an earlier left-wing leader of British Chartism named James Bronterre O'Brien. In 1836, Buonarroti's book on Babeuf was translated into English by -James Bronterre O'Brien.

So, I’ll conclude with an anecdote indicating what Buonarroti contributed to the communist movement. James Bronterre O'Brien, after he translated the book [History of Babeuf s Conspiracy of EquaIs], began a corres­pondence with Buonarroti the year be­fore Buonarroti died. At that time O'Brien was an Owenite, or had been an Owenite, Owenite socialism being pacifist and cooperativist. O'Brien translated Owen's writings into French and sent them to Buonarroti and asked him for his ideas on Owenite socialism. Buonarroti wrote back, in effect, "You know, it's remarkable that Owen, inde­pendent of Babeuf and I, has the same conception of what society should look like, what we are working for. But he seems to believe that you can get this while keeping the existing British gov­ernment, while keeping the monarchy.

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Raymond Burr’s Tough Guy Days- “Desperate” A Film Noir Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the B-film noir Desperate.

DVD Review

Desperate, starring Steve Brodie, Audrey Long, Raymond Burr, directed by Anthony Mann, RKO Radio Pictures, 1947

A guy, just an average, maybe getting a few breaks here, a few knock arounds there guy, a guy who knew a few things, knew a few guys, tough guys in the old broken down neighborhood, faded since its glory days around 1910, but kept his own nose clean. Like I said, just an average guy, an average guy who did his time overseas during the war (World War II in case anybody is asking), grabbed a few medals, saw a few things, saw a few more things that maybe he didn’t want to, or shouldn’t have seen but kept his mouth shut just like when he saw things in the old neighborhood. A guy trying to catch a break, maybe make a couple of bucks, have a couple of kids and call it a day. An ordinary average guy, got it.

Then his world caved in. Caved in big time, and not just his, but being an average guy, having done his average guy duty overseas, he came home and got married, married to a swell girl, sweet, pretty if not beautiful, and if pretty, also pretty naïve about big city ways, and tough neighborhoods, when guys keep quiet about stuff, unless and until they can square the thing themselves. And our guy, our average guy has plenty to square. Starting with, well, starting with him trying to put a couple of nickels together in the trucking industry in order to get that white picket fence and the house that comes with it in order to shelter that pretty wife and those future kids. So he takes a certain job see, a certain job that comes with some unexpected baggage, some old neighborhood baggage, from one of those wild boys who didn’t grow up to be just an average guy, but a tough guy. A tough guy who needed to move some stolen goods fast, via a truck, with no questions asked and no snitches.

Our guy, our guy to a tee. But see the thing went wrong, went wrong from the start because Mr. Tough Guy has a younger brother with the itch for the easy life. Naturally younger brother got things all balled up, got it as balled up as thing can get balled, and a cop dies. And when cops die extra heat, lots of extra heat gets turned on. So that is one problem our average guy is going to have since the cops will shoot first and sort the rest, the innocent or guilty part, later. The other problem is that our tough guy is very, very fond of that younger brother of his, a younger brother who is in the hands of the police and is set to step off , step off on the big one for that cop killing. So tough guy is ready to move might and main to get his brother free, including pointing fingers at our average guy. Our average guy, let’s face it, is nothing but a candidate for the frame anyway you cut it.

You could see with that set-up where a square average guy might get a little desperate, especially since he has no one to turn to except that pretty wife in order to make things right. So they flee, flee as far as they can to some Podunk farm where pretty wife, pregnant pretty wife as it turned out to complicate things for a guy trying to square things, grew up. Things got a little tense, a little tight for a while since our tough guy had this real thing about his brother and when that became a lost cause his tough guy thing said our average guy had to take the fall in revenge. And he did, almost, except, well except guys, even average guys, in film noirs are not stepping off for things that they didn’t do and so once again Mr. Tough Guy learns the noir lesson the hard way- crime doesn’t pay. And our average guy? Last we heard he was heading to sunny California as part of that great Okie/Arkie land giving out migration (no, not the Joad’s 1930s from hunger one, but the restless westward pioneer trek that produced those alienated hot- rodders, easy riders, and perfect wave surfers and their girls after World War II) looking for that white picket fence and the great blue-pink Western night.

Short Film Clips- Spike Lee's Malcolm X

Spike Lee is a great film maker. Denzel Washington is a great actor (could any other actor have given the spirit of Malcolm such a realistic treatment?). That said, something is missing here. We know that there are various academic revisionist trends in history and politics that reflect the changing appreciations of latter generations. Film offers no exception. The missing element here is the struggle going on around Malcolm as he tries honestly to break out of the Black Nationalist isolation of the Nation of Islam and articulate what the necessary strategy to drive the civil rights movement in America and the revolutionary struggles internationally forward. What is also missing is the sense that Malcolm, in the early 1960’s stood as the LONE voice of the rage of the ghettos, against the white establishment and their black hangers-on like Dr. King. There was a Chinese wall between his calls to break with the Kennedys, Johnsons and the rest of the Democratic Party, his calls for black armed self-defense what he rightly called the “Uncle Tom” black establishment which kowtowed to that white establishment. There still is. No amount of revisionism will erase that distinction. What those interested in Malcolm need to do is read his Autobiography of Malcolm X (see all my reviews for my take on Malcolm) and other books from the 1960’s struggles. Still, this film is a good primer to learn how the most honest revolutionary black liberation fighter in 20^th century America earned his place in history.         

From The "American Left History" Archives THE CONTRADICTIONS OF MALCOLM X (2007)

COMMENTARY

MALCOLM POSED THE QUESTION-WHICH WAY FORWARD FOR THE BLACK LIBERATION STRUGGLE?   OUR ANSWER- BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM

Let us be clear about one thing from the start, whatever contradictions Malcolm X’s brand of black nationalism entailed, whatever shortcomings he had as an emerging political leader, whatever mistakes he made alone the way as he groped for a solution to the seemingly intractable fight for black freedom he stood, and continues to stand, head and shoulders above any black leader thrown up in America in the 20^th century. Only Frederick Douglass in the 19^th century compares with him in stature. No attempts by latter-day historians or politicians to assimilate Malcolm along with other leaders of the civil rights struggle in this country, notably Dr. Martin Luther King, as part of the same continuum of leadership are false and dishonest to all parties. Malcolm X, as a minister of the Black Muslims and after his break from that organization, stood in opposition to the official liberal non-violence strategy of that leadership. His term “Uncle Toms” fully applies to their stance. And, in turn, that liberal black misleadership and its various hangers-on in the liberal establishment hated him when he spoke the truth about their role in white-controlled bourgeois Democratic Party politics.  The “chickens were coming home to roost”, indeed! The Jesse Jacksons, the Al Sharptons, the Obama the “Charmas” who represent today’s version of that misleadership please step back, step way back.

That said, who was Malcolm X? Or more properly what did he represent in his time. At one level, given the rudiments of his life story which are detailed in the Autobiography of Malcolm X, he represented that part of the black experience (an experience not only limited to blacks in immigrant America) which pulled itself by the bootstraps and turned away from the lumpen milieu of gangs, crimes and prisons into what I call ‘street’ intellectuals. That experience is far removed from the experience of what today passes for the black intelligentsia, who have run away from the turmoil of the streets. In liberation struggles both ‘street’ and academic intellectuals are necessary but the ‘street’ intellectual is perhaps more critical as the transmission belt to the masses. That is how liberation fighters get a hearing and no other way. In any case I have always been partial to the ‘streets’.

But what is the message for the way forward?  For Malcolm, until shortly before his death, that message was black separatism-the idea that the only way blacks could get any retribution was to go off on their own (or be left alone), in practical terms to form their own nation. To state the question that way in modern America points to the obvious limitation of such a scheme, even if blacks formed such a nation and wanted to express the right to national self-determination that goes with it..  Nevertheless whatever personal changes Malcolm made in his quest for political relevance and understanding whether he was a Black Muslim minister or after he broke for that group he still sought political direction through the fight of what is called today ‘people of color’ against the mainly white oppressor, at first in America and latter after travels throughout the ‘third world’. However sincere he was in that belief, and he was sincere, that strategy of black separatism or ‘third world’ vanguardism could never lead to the black freedom he so fervently desired. An underestimation of the power of internally unchallenged world, and in the first instance American, imperialism to corrupt liberation struggles or defeat or destroy them militarily never seemed to enter into his calculations.

Malcolm’s whole life story of struggle against the bedrock of  white racism in America, as the legitimate and at the time the ONLY voice speaking for the rage of the black ghettos, nevertheless never worked out fully any other strategy that could work in America, and by extension internationally. A close reading of his work demonstrates that as he got more politically aware he saw the then unfolding ‘third world’ liberations struggles as the key to black liberation in America. That, unfortunately for him, was exactly backwards. If the ‘third world’ struggles were ever ultimately to be successful and create more just societies then American imperialism-as the main enemy of the peoples of the world-then, as now had to be brought to bay. And that, my friends, whether you agree or not, requires class struggle here. That is where the fight for black liberation intersects the fight for socialism. And I will state until my last breathe that the key to the fight for socialism in America will be the cohesion of a central black cadre leading a multiethnic organization that will bring that home. And it will not be from the lips of the Kings of today that the struggle will be successful but by new more enlightened Malcolms, learning the lessons of history, who will get what they need-by any means necessary.  

Jay D. Jurie : 'Weimar Moment' or Chicken Little?

25 October 2012

Jay D. Jurie : 'Weimar Moment' or Chicken Little?

"Pillars of Society." Painting by militantly anti-Nazi German Dadaist George Grosz, 1926, during the Weimar Republic. Image from Alpha History.
It can't happen here:
A 'Weimar moment' or Chicken Little?

Whether or not the U.S. is at a 'Weimar moment,' those who are concerned about such a possibility should not be accused of needlessly worrying that "the sky is falling."

By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / October 25, 2012

"When and if fascism comes to America...it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, 'Americanism.'" -- Prof. Halford E. Luccock, Yale University Divinity School, quoted in The New York Times, September 12, 1938.

"...fascism will come to America in the name of national security." --Jim Garrison, Playboy magazine interview, October 1967

Is fascism imminent in the United States? This is a not a new question, it has been debated for decades. For more than 100 years it's been argued that a serious crisis threatening the political and economic order may well lead to a right-wing takeover.

When such a crisis reaches a prospective tipping point, the question becomes: will society pull back at the last minute, or will it take the plunge into authoritarianism? This potential tipping point is sometimes referred to as a "Weimar" moment, after the German republic that led up to Hitler and the Nazis.

Even before the term fascism was coined, an authoritarian takeover in the U.S. was the inspiration for Jack London's 1908 novel The Iron Heel. When fascism did come about in Europe, the fictional theme was picked up by Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 It Can't Happen Here, and in 1962 it even found its way into science fiction, with Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. Perhaps sensing a rekindled interest in this subject, in 2004 Phillip Roth wrote of a fascist electoral victory in his The Plot Against America.

Whether or not fascism or authoritarianism is at hand has also been of interest to social researchers, historians, and other non-fiction writers, as in Herbert Marcuse's 1972 Counterrevolution in Revolt, Bertram Gross's 1980 landmark Friendly Fascism, and Sheldon S. Wolin's 2008 Democracy Inc.

Reportedly, a plot was hatched in 1934 against the "New Deal" government of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Quoted in a 2005 Daily Kos article, U.S. Ambassador to Germany William Dodd wrote that

a clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government...a prominent executive of one of the largest corporations told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy.

How and when such a takeover might occur is often framed with a comparison of the current U.S. experience with the Republic of 1919-1933, named Weimar after the town where it was formed. In one final desperate bid for a World War I victory, Germany's naval high command decided in October 1918 to attack the blockading British fleet. Influenced by the Soviet revolution the preceding year, having already had enough of the war, and viewing the proposed attack as suicidal, the sailors of the German fleet anchored at Kiel revolted.

On November 7, a popular revolt against the war and in favor of a popular government to replace the monarchy of Wilhelm II broke out in Munich. These revolts, combined with a destitute economy and exhausted population, left Germany with little choice but to sue for peace. An armistice, the Versailles Treaty, was imposed that was very favorable toward the victorious Allies and was widely viewed as a humiliation within Germany. Although both revolts were crushed, on November 9 the monarchy of William II was brought down.

From the beginning Weimar was unpopular. According to historian Louis Snyder, its initial leaders were held responsible for ending the war on unfavorable terms, while the monarchy and military escaped blame for the disaster that had befallen the country. A split within the ruling Social Democratic Party soon ensued, with the minority Spartacist faction under the leadership of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg forming the Communist Party of Germany. In factional fighting that broke out on January 11, 1919, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered by right-wing troops with whom the majority had sided.

An uneasy coalition of Social Democrats with those to their right prevailed for the next 14 years. During this period, of all the industrialized nations, the German economy was hit the hardest by the Great Depression. By November 1923, the German mark had sunk to its lowest value; stories abound of how money was used as wallpaper, to fire up stoves, and so on. That same month, the Nazis staged their infamous Beer Hall Putsch.

1925 proved to be a critical election year. Rather than rallying around Wilhelm Marx, the centrist candidate, the left was split, with Communists running their own candidate, Ernst Thalmann. As a result, Paul von Hindenburg, the candidate of the nationalists, monarchists, religious traditionalists, and conservatives, was elected president. Under the aging and relatively ineffective Hindenburg, the Republic limped along until its last election in 1932.

Between 1925 and 1932 the Nazis grew tremendously. They not only blamed external forces for Germany's predicament, but internal enemies such as the Social Democrats and the Communists, as well as scapegoats such as the Jews. By the 1932 elections, the Nazis were Germany's single largest party. Hindenburg had once been viewed as a rightist candidate, but now his candidacy was supported by those seeking to block the Nazis. According to William Allen, the Social Democrats actively campaigned for Hindenburg as the "lesser evil."

The Communists again ran Thalmann as their candidate. Louis Snyder relates that the Social Democrats "hated the Communists even more than they hated the Nazis." Hindenburg won a narrow plurality in 1932. On January 30, 1933, he appointed Hitler as chancellor, effectively ending the Weimar Republic.

In the United States, there have been two other periods since World War II where the far right has made significant gains. The first was during McCarthyism in the 1950s and 1960s. Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy manipulated anti-Soviet Cold War fears to create a climate of repression. This receded when it became apparent his self-serving motives had gone too far and public attention shifted to the "New Frontier" of President John F. Kennedy, the emerging civil rights movement, and the onset of the Vietnam War.

The second period, which might be termed a long-term sweep, began in the late 1960s under President Nixon as a so-called "silent majority" backlash against the civil rights and anti-war movements, women's liberation, and anti-establishment politics generally. While there was no underlying economic crisis, elite groups and their right-wing allies were fearful that the gains of these movements threatened the overall system.

Herbert Marcuse labeled this reaction a counterrevolution:

The counterrevolution is largely preventive and, in the Western world, entirely preventive. Here, there is no recent revolution to be undone, and there is none in the offing. And yet, fear of revolution which creates the common interest links the various stages and forms of the counterrevolution.

Initiatives to roll back gains achieved by the left picked up speed in the mid-1970s through the early 1980s with the formation of the political New Right and the religious "Moral Majority." Through direct mail techniques, organizing for local elections, and with a base in religious fundamentalism, the "counterrevolution" built strength and enjoyed some successes. All of this groundwork played a key role in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, who in turn substantially contributed to the expansion of the right-wing agenda.

There have been brief interludes that have slowed the advance of the counterrevolution, including the elections of Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Here, a comparison with the Social Democrats of the Weimar Republic may be apt. Like the Social Democrats, while safeguarding some progressive gains, the Democrats also generally represent the interests of the prevailing economic elite. Like the Social Democrats, they are hostile toward those to their left.

These trends were all exacerbated by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and more explicitly, by the onset of the economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Largely funded by elite business interests and organized by their operatives, the Tea Party undertook vociferous opposition to Obama, the Democrats, and the left. Through an orchestrated effort, right-wing thugs disrupted town hall forums on health care.

Tea Party members began showing up at political events wearing guns, or carrying signs denouncing President Obama as a socialist or communist, or employing racist caricatures of him. Threats of violence were made against other Democrats, and violent acts were carried out, including the 2009 assassination of Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller. As the Nazis had scapegoated those who were relatively powerless, most particularly the Jews, far-right elements in the U.S. began to scapegoat Muslims, immigrants, and women seeking to exercise their rights, among others.

President Obama has shown no interest in protecting the Bill of Rights or repealing legislation put in place since 2001. Indeed, violations of civil liberties and human rights have increased under his watch. Police attacks against Occupy demonstrators showed evidence of national coordination and an intolerance of dissent. Regulations against demonstrations on federal property have been tightened.

While obvious comparisons can be made between the Weimar experience and what is taking place in the U.S. today, no two historical circumstances are exactly the same. Theses that speak of an encroaching authoritarianism can readily find supporting evidence. It can also be said that, like the Weimar Republic, the Democratic Party is in a role somewhat analogous to that of the Social Democrats.

As Marcuse pointed out, there is evidence of a long-term trend to firmly establish a permanent counterrevolution. Virtually every Republican presidency since that of Nixon has promoted this tendency, and every Democratic presidency has moderately slowed its advance while willingly or grudgingly giving ground.

Whether or not the U.S. is at a "Weimar moment," those who are concerned about such a possibility should not be accused of needlessly worrying that "the sky is falling." It should be regarded as prudent to act as if such a "moment" may be a distinct possibility, and to do all that is possible to stop it from happening. If there is one lesson to be taken from the Weimar Republic, it is to act effectively before it is too late.

[Jay D. Jurie graduated from the University of Colorado and Arizona State University. He researches and writes in the areas of public policy, public administration, and urban and regional planning, and lives in Sanford, Florida. Read articles by Jay D. Jurie on The Rag Blog.]


References and sources for further reading:

Allen, William S. 1965. The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1930-1935. Chicago: Quadrangle.
D., Steven. February 27, 2005, "The Real Plot to Overthrow FDR's America," Daily Kos: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/02/27/95580/-The-Real-Plot-to-Overthrow-FDR-s-America
Evans, Richard J., 2005, The Coming of the Third Reich. NY: Penguin.Freeman, Robert, March 15, 2009, "The U.S. is Facing a Weimar Moment," Common Dreams:https://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/15
Gross, Bertram, 1980, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America. NY: M. Evans.
Hedges, Chris, June 7, 2010, "The Christian Fascists are Growing Stronger," Truthdig:http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_christian_fascists_are_growing_stronger_20100607//
Henwood, Doug, November 5, 2012, "Why Should the Left Support Obama?" in The Nation:http://www.thenation.com/article/170650/why-should-left-support-obama#
Marcuse, Herbert, 1971, "The Movement in a New Era of Repression: An Assessment," Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 16, pp. 1-14.
Marcuse, Herbert, 1972, Counterrevolution and Revolt. Boston: Beacon.
Snyder, Louis L., 1966, The Weimar Republic. NY: Van Nostrand.
Whitehead, John M., "Occupy Wall Street and 'Friendly Fascism': Life in the Corporate Police State," The Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/occupy-wall-street_b_1067166.html
Wolin, S.S., 2008, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.

The Rag Blog

Jack A. Smith : The Left and the 'Lesser Evil' Dilemma

05 November 2012

Jack A. Smith : The Left and the 'Lesser Evil' Dilemma

Graphic from Liberation News.
For whom should the left vote?

Many progressives now view Obama as the 'lesser evil,' but worry he will sell them out once again.

By Jack A. Smith / The Rag Blog / November 5, 2012

There are important differences, of course, between Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican contender Mitt Romney, but the long conservative trend in American politics will continue regardless of who wins the presidential election November 6. Either candidate will move it right along.

From a left point of view, Obama is superior to Romney in the sense that the Democratic center right is politically preferable to the Republican right/far right. The Democrats will cause less social damage -- though not less war damage or the pain of gross inequality or the harm done civil liberties -- than their conservative cousins.

Indeed, both candidates are conservative. Obama is moderately so, judging by his first term in the White House, though “liberal” in his current campaign rhetoric and on two social issues -- abortion and gay marriage. Romney is definitely so, though he shifts opportunistically from the extreme right to the right and back again. In the last weeks of the campaign, sensing his impending defeat, the former Massachusetts governor momentarily leaned to the center right.

The Republican Party has gravitated ever further to the right during the last few decades and is now securely in the hands of extremist politicians, symbolized by the ascendancy of the Tea Party and the many House and Senate members who follow its far right agenda. Jim Hightower, the well known liberal Texas columnist, wrote an article in AlterNet October 8 that briefly described key programs in the GOP platform:

• Medicare must be replaced with a privatized "VoucherCare" (or, more accurately, "WeDon'tCare") medical system;
• All poverty programs must be slashed or eliminated to "free" poor people from a crippling and shameful dependency on public aid;
• The government framework that sustains a middle class (from student loans to Social Security) must be turned over to Wall Street so individuals are free to "manage" their own fates through marketplace choice;
• Such worker protections as collective bargaining, minimum wage, and unemployment payments must be stripped away to remove artificial impediments to the "natural rationality" of free market forces;
• The corporate and moneyed elites (forgive a bit of redundancy there) must be freed from tax and regulatory burdens that impede their entrepreneurial creativity;
• The First Amendment must be interpreted to mean that unlimited political spending of corporate cash equals free speech; and
• Etcetera, ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

The one thing Hightower left out is that if the Republicans insist on identifying corporate bosses as “Job Creators,” why then aren’t they creating jobs? Romney blames China, as do the Democrats, but that’s election politics. China is a rising capitalist economy that only started to really take off about 15 years ago, and it is doing what all such rising economies do -- adopting some measures to grow and protect their developing industries and trade.

The U.S. did it too as a growing economy for many decades. That’s capitalism. It goes where it can make the most profit. Washington supports this. Nothing prevents the U.S. government from investing in the creation of millions of jobs in America except conservative ideology.

Despite the seeming distance between the two parties on economic issues -- emphasized by Republican proposals cribbed from the pages of Atlas Shrugged -- economist Jared Bernstein, a Democrat, wrote on his blog September 6 that he was going beyond “good Democrats and bad Republicans” to perceive “the ascendancy of a largely bipartisan vision that promotes individualist market-based solutions over solutions that recognize there are big problems that markets cannot effectively solve.” He’s on to something.

Bernstein, until this year Vice President Joe Biden’s chief economic adviser, then wrote:

We cannot, for example, constantly cut the federal government’s revenue stream without undermining its ability to meet pressing social needs. We know that more resources will be needed to meet the challenges of prospering in a global economy, keeping up with technological changes, funding health care and pension systems, helping individuals balance work and family life, improving the skills of our workforce, and reducing social and economic inequality. Yet discussion of this reality is off the table.

There are a number of major policy areas of virtual agreement between the parties. Their most flagrant coupling is in the key area of foreign/military policy.

The Democrats -- humiliated for years by right wing charges of being “soft on defense” -- have become the war party led by a Commander-in-Chief who relishes his job to the extent of keeping his own individual kill list. What neoconservative would dare fault him for this? Imagine the liberal outcry had Bush been discovered with a kill list! This time the liberals didn’t kick up much fuss.

During the third presidential debate Romney had little choice but to align himself with Obama’s war policies in Afghanistan, the attacks on western Pakistan, the regime change undeclared war against Libya, the regime change war in Syria, the aggressive anti-China “pivot” to Asia and drone assaults against Yemen and Somalia with many more to come.

Virtually all liberals, progressives, some leftists, and organized labor will vote for Obama. Many will do so with trepidation, given their disappointment about his performance in office, particularly his tilt toward the right, willingness to compromise more than half way with the Republicans, and his reluctance to wage a sharp struggle on behalf of supposed Democratic Party goals.

Many of these forces now view Obama as the “lesser evil,” but worry he will sell them out once again. According to the Washington publication The Hill on Oct. 24:

Major labor unions and dozens of liberal groups working to elect President Obama are worried he could "betray" them in the lame-duck session by agreeing to a deal to cut safety-net programs. While Obama is relying on labor unions and other organizations on the left to turn out Democratic voters in battleground states, some of his allies have lingering concerns about whether he will stand by them if elected....

The AFL-CIO has planned a series of coordinated events around the country on Nov. 8, two days after Election Day, to pressure lawmakers not to sign onto any deficit-reduction deal that cuts Medicare and Social Security benefits by raising the Medicare eligibility age or changing the formula used for Social Security cost-of-living adjustments.

"There’s going to be a major effort by lots of groups to make sure the people we vote for don’t sell us down the river," said Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future. “People, groups, organizations and networks are working very hard to get Obama and the Democrats elected, and yet we are worried that it is possible that we could be betrayed almost immediately," he said.

One specific issue behind this distrust is the awareness that, if reelected, Obama has said he will seek a “grand bargain” with the Republicans intended to slash the deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade. During deficit talks with House leader John Boehner over a year ago Obama voluntarily declared that cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security were “on the table” for negotiation -- the first time any Democratic President ever offered to compromise on what amounts to the crowning legislative achievements of the New Deal and Great Society administrations.

At the time Obama envisioned reducing Medicare by $1 trillion and Medicaid by $360 billion over two decades. The exact amount from Social Security was not disclosed. During the campaign Obama promised to “protect” these three “entitlements.”

While denouncing Romney’s “plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program and increase health care costs for seniors,” AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka disclosed Oct. 23 that “a bipartisan group of senators who are not up for reelection is working behind closed doors in Washington to reach a so-called grand bargain that completely bypasses this debate and ignores the views of voters. What is the grand bargain? It boils down to lower tax rates for rich people -- paid for by benefit cuts for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

Another reason for a certain suspicion about what Obama will achieve in a second term is based on his unfulfilled promises from the 2008 election. Here are some of them from an October 27 article titled “The Progressive Case Against Obama” by Matt Stoller:

A higher minimum wage, a ban on the replacement of striking workers, seven days of paid sick leave, a more diverse media ownership structure, renegotiation of NAFTA, letting bankruptcy judges write down mortgage debt, a ban on illegal wiretaps, an end to national security letters, stopping the war on whistle-blowers, passing the Employee Free Choice Act, restoring habeas corpus, and labor protections in the FAA bill.

Each of these pledges would have tilted bargaining leverage to debtors, to labor, or to political dissidents. So Obama promised them to distinguish himself from Bush, and then went back on his word because these promises didn’t fit with the larger policy arc of shifting American society toward his vision.

Many liberals and progressives seem convinced that the two-party system is the only viable battleground within which to contest for peace and social progress, even if the two ruling parties are right of center. This is one reason they shun progressive or left third parties.

This national electoral battleground, however, as has become evident to many Americans in recent years, is owned and operated by the wealthy ruling elite which has, through its control of the two-party system, stifled any social progress in the United States for 40 years.

Throughout these same four decades the Democrats have shifted from the center left to center right. The last center left Democratic presidential candidate was the recently departed former Sen. George McGovern, who was whipped by the Republicans in 1972. In tribute to this last antiwar and progressive presidential candidate, and as a contrast to the present center right standard bearer, we recall McGovern’s comment from the 1972 Democratic convention:

As one whose heart has ached for the past 10 years over the agony of Vietnam, I will halt a senseless bombing of Indochina on Inaugural Day. There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools. There will be no more talk of bombing the dikes or the cities of the North [Vietnam]. And within 90 days of my inauguration, every American soldier and every American prisoner will be out of the jungle and out of their cells and then home in America where they belong.

There is more to America’s presidential and congressional elections than meets the eye of the average voter. Next week’s election, for instance, has two aspects. One has been in-your-face visible for over a year before Election Day, costing billions. The other is usually concealed because it’s not a matter that entertains public debate or intervention.

The visible aspect -- the campaign, slogans and speeches, the debates, arguments and rallies-- is contained within the parameters of the political system which Obama and Romney meticulously observe. Those parameters, or limitations, are mainly established by that privileged elite sector of the citizenry lately identified as the 1% and its minions.

The concealed aspect of elections in the U.S. is that they are usually undemocratic in essence; and that the fundamental underlying issues of the day are rarely mentioned, much less contested.

Many of the major candidates are selected, groomed, and financed by the elite, who then invest fortunes in the election campaigns for president, Congress and state legislatures (over $6 billion in this election). And after their representatives to all these offices are elected, they spend billions more on the federal and state level lobbying for influence, transferring cash for or against legislation affecting their financial and big business interests.

American electoral democracy is based on one person, one vote -- and it’s true that the wealthy contributor of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to favored candidates is similarly restricted to a single ballot. But the big spenders influence multitudes of voters through financing mass advertising, which in effect multiplies the donor’s political clout by a huge factor.

Democracy is grossly undermined by the funding from rich individuals and corporations that determine the outcome of many, probably most, elections. These are the wealthy with whom a Romney can easily describe 47% of the American people as scroungers dependent on government handouts, and they will chuckle and applaud. They are the same breed with whom an Obama can comfortably mock the “professional left” within his party and get knowing nods and smiles.

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama at debate in Denver. Photo by Charlie Neibergall / AP.
The most important of the major issues completely omitted from the elections and the national narrative is the obvious fact that the United States is an imperialist state and a militarist society. It rules the world, not just the seas as did Britannia, and the sun never sets on America’s worldwide military bases, an “empire of bases” as Chalmers Johnson wrote.

Most Americans, including the liberals, become discomforted or angered when their country is described as imperialist and militarist. But what else is a society that in effect controls the world through military power; that has been at war or planning for the next war for over 70 years without letup; that spends nearly $700 billion a year on its armed forces and an equal amount on various national security entities?

The American people never voted on whether to become or continue as an imperialist or militarist society any more than they voted to invade Iraq, or to deregulate the banks, or to vaporize the civilian city of Hiroshima.

In the main a big majority believe Washington’s foreign/military policies are defensive and humanitarian because that’s what the government, the schools, churches, and commercial mass media drum into their heads throughout their lives. They have been misinformed and manipulated to accept the status quo on the basis of Washington’s fear-mongering, exaggerated national security needs, mythologies about American history, and a two-party political system primarily devoted to furthering the interests of big business, multinational corporations, too-big-to-fail banks, and Wall Street.

Needless to say, both ruling parties have participated in all this and it is simply taken for granted they will continue to cultivate militarism and practice imperialism in order to remain the world’s dominant hegemon.

There are many ways to keep the voting population in line. The great majority of Americans are religious people, including many fundamentalists. Both candidates of the political duopoly have exploited religious beliefs by telling the people that God is on America’s side and that the deity supports America’s dominant role in the world, and its wars, too.

At the Democratic convention in September, Obama concluded his speech with these inspiring words: “Providence is with us, and we are surely blessed to be citizens of the greatest nation on Earth.” The term Providence, in the sense intended, suggests that God “is with us,” guides America’s destiny and approves of the activities we have defined as imperialist and militarist.

Romney declared last month that “God did not create this country to be a nation of followers. America is not destined to be one of several equally balanced global powers. America must lead the world.”

Further along these lines, Obama said in the third debate that “America remains the one indispensable nation, and the world needs a strong America, and it is stronger now than when I came into office.” Having God’s backing and being the only one of some 200 nation states in the world that cannot be dispensed with is what is meant by the expression “American Exceptionalism” — a designation that gives Washington a free pass to do anything it wants.

American “leadership” (i.e., global hegemony) has been a policy of the Democratic and Republican parties for several decades. A main reason the American foreign policy elite gathered behind Obama in 2007 was his continual emphasis upon maintaining Washington’s world leadership.

Many other key policies will not change whether Obama or Romney occupy the Oval Office.

• For instance, the U.S. is the most unequal society among the leading capitalist nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). About half its people are either low income or poor, and they received lower benefits than families resident in other OECD countries. What will Obama and Romney do about this if elected to the White House? Nothing. Burgeoning inequality wasn’t even a topic during the three debates. And in Obama’s nearly four years in office he completely ignored this most important social problem plaguing America.
  
  According to the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz: “Economic inequality begets political inequality and vice versa. Then the very vision that makes America special -- upward mobility and opportunity for all -- is undermined. One person, one vote becomes one dollar, one vote. That is not democracy.”


• Climate change caused by global warming is here. America has been wracked in recent years with devastating storms, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, as have other parts of the world. One of the worst of all storms decimated large parts of the eastern United States a few days ago. And what will Obama and Romney do about it? Nothing. This most important of international questions was not thought worthy of mention in all three debates. Bill McKibben got it right the other day when he said: “Corporate polluters have bought the silence of our elected leaders.”
  
  Obama’s environmental comprehension and occasional rhetoric are an improvement over Romney’s current climate denial (one more cynical reversal of his earlier views). But the president has done virtually nothing to fight climate change during his first term -- and he simply can’t blame it all on the Republicans. He has a bully pulpit with which to galvanize public consciousness but doesn’t use it. Actually the Obama government has played a backward role in the annual UN climate talks -- delaying everything, even though the U.S. is history’s most notorious emitter of the greenhouse gases that have brought the world to this sorry pass.


• The shameful erosion of civil liberties that swiftly increased during the Bush Administration has been continued and expanded during the Obama Administration. One cannot help but question the teacher training that goes into producing a Harvard Professor of Constitutional Law who blithely approves legislation containing a provision for indefinite detention that in effect suspends habeas corpus for some, a heretofore sacrosanct aspect of American democracy.


• The economic suffering of African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans in the years since 2008, when the Great Recession began, is far worse than that of whites. Black family income and wealth is incomparably lower. Black unemployment is twice that of whites. The Obama White House has not brought forth one program to alleviate the conditions afflicting these three communities, and it’s hardly likely a Romney government would do any better.

On other visible election issues, such as the rights of labor unions, the Democrats are much better than the Republicans, who despise the unions, but Obama has certainly been asleep at the switch, or maybe he just knows labor will support him come what may.

Portraying himself as a friend of labor, Obama refused to fight hard enough -- even when the Democrats controlled the House and Senate -- to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, the one bill labor truly wanted from the White House in return for years of service. During his first term Obama presided over anti-union legislation and stood mute as the labor movement was pummeled mercilessly in several state legislatures, even losing collective bargaining rights in some states. With friends like this...

In rhetoric, Obama is far superior to the Republicans on such issues as social programs, the deficit, unemployment, foreclosures, tax policy, Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. But in actual practice he has either done virtually nothing or has already made compromises. When he thinks he may lose he backs away instead of fighting on and at least educating people in the process. Look at it this way:

• The only social program to emerge from the Obama Administration is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a near duplicate of Romney’s Republican plan in Massachusetts. Obama wouldn’t even consider the long overdue and far better single payer/Medicare-for-all plan.
  
  Obamacare is an improvement over the present system, although it still leaves millions without healthcare. But it only came about after convincing Big Insurance and Big Pharma that it would greatly increase their profits. The big insurance and drug companies accumulate overhead costs of 30%. Government-provided Universal Medicare, based on today’s overhead, would only be about 3% because profit and excessive executive pay would be excluded.


• In his willingness to compromise, Obama largely accepted the Tea Party right wing emphasis on deficit reduction instead of investing in the economy and social programs, especially to recover from the Great Recession, continuing stagnation and high unemployment. This will mainly entail budget reductions and targeted tax increases focusing on finally ending the Bush tax cuts for people earning $250,000 or more a year. These cuts were supposed to expire two years ago but were extended by Obama in a compromise tax deal with obstructionist Republicans Congress.

It’s an old Republican trick when in office to greatly increase the deficit through tax breaks and war costs, then demand that the succeeding Democratic Administration focus on reducing the deficit by virtually eliminating social programs for the people. Reagan and Bush #1 did it successfully to President Bill Clinton (who spent eight years eliminating the deficit without sponsoring one significant social program), and Bush #2 has done it to Obama.

Almost as informative as what separates the two parties is what they agree upon. Bill Quigley, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, compiled the following list, which was published on AlterNet Oct. 27:

1. Neither candidate is interested in stopping the use of the death penalty for federal or state crimes.
2. Neither candidate is interested in eliminating or reducing the 5,113 U.S. nuclear warheads.
3. Neither candidate is campaigning to close Guantanamo prison.
4. Neither candidate has called for arresting and prosecuting high ranking people on Wall Street for the subprime mortgage catastrophe.
5. Neither candidate is interested in holding anyone in the Bush administration accountable for the torture committed by U.S. personnel against prisoners in Guantanamo or in Iraq or Afghanistan.
6. Neither candidate is interested in stopping the use of drones to assassinate people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia.
7. Neither candidate is against warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention, or racial profiling in fighting "terrorism."
8. Neither candidate is interested in fighting for a living wage. In fact neither are really committed beyond lip service to raising the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour -- which, if it kept pace with inflation since the 1960s should be about $10 an hour.
9. Neither candidate was interested in arresting Osama bin Laden and having him tried in court.
10. Neither candidate will declare they refuse to bomb Iran.
11. Neither candidate is refusing to take huge campaign contributions from people and organizations.
12. Neither candidate proposes any significant specific steps to reverse global warming.
13. Neither candidate is talking about the over 2 million people in jails and prisons in the U.S.
14. Neither candidate proposes to create public jobs so everyone who wants to work can.
15. Neither candidate opposes the nuclear power industry. In fact both support expansion.

Over the past several weeks, liberal and progressive groups have been seeking to convince disenchanted voters who share their politics to once again get behind Obama with renewed enthusiasm and hope for progress. These organizations fear such voters will not turn out on election day or instead vote for a progressive third party candidate such as the Green Party’s Jill Stein, or a socialist candidate, such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s Peta Lindsay, both of whom are on the New York State ballot.

It would be better for all American working families, including the poor and the oppressed sectors if the Republicans were defeated, and Obama will do less harm than Romney and the far right.

I will not vote for Obama because he is a warrior president comfortably leading an imperialist and militarist system -- a man who ignores poor and low income families, who eviscerates our civil liberties, and who knows the truth about global warming but does pathetically little about it.

I’ll vote for Peta Lindsay, a young African American socialist woman. I completely agree with her 10-point election platform, the last point of which is “Seize the banks, jail Wall Street Criminals.” [Peta Lindsay is on the ballot in 12 states.] And I want to help to build socialism, the only real answer to the problems afflicting America and the world.

[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian -- for decades the nation's preeminent leftist newsweekly -- that closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter. Read more articles by Jack A. Smith on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- The Blues Is…, Part III

 

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Howlin’Wolf performing Killing Floor.

CD Review

Putamayo Presents: American Blues, various artists, Putamayo Word Music, 2003

The blues ain’t nothing but…He, Daddy Fingers (strictly a stage front name, with a no will power Clarence Mark Smith real name needing, desperately needing, cover just like a million other guys trying to reach for the big lights, trying to reach heyday early 1950s Maxwell Street, hell, maybe trying get a record contract, a valued Chess contract, and that first sweet easy credit, no down payment, low monthly payments Cadillac, pink or yellow, with all the trimming and some sweet mama sitting high tit proud in front), had to laugh, laugh out loud sometimes when these white hipsters asked him what the blues were (he, well behind the white bread fad times, having spent the last twenty years mostly in the hidden down South, the chittlin’ circuit down South, from Biloxi to Beaumont, working bowling alleys, barbecue joints (the best places where even if the money was short you had your ribs and beer, a few whisky shots maybe, some young brown skin with lonely eyes woman lookin’ for a high-flying brown skin man in need of a woman’s cooking , or at least a friendly bed for a few nights), an odd juke house now electrified, some back road road-side diner converted for an evening into a house of entertainment, hell even a church basement when the good lord wasn’t looking or was out on an off Saturday night had not noticed that these kids asking that august question were not his old Chi town, New Jack City, ‘Frisco Bay hipsters but mostly fresh-faced kids in guy plaid short shirts and chinos and girl cashmere sweaters and floppy skirts were not hip, not black-hearted, black dressed devil’s music hip. For one thing no hipster, and hell certainly no wanna-be hipster would even pose the question but just dig on the beat, dig on the phantom guitar work as he worked the fret board raw, dig on being one with the note progression. Being, well, beat.).

Plaid and cashmere sweater crowding around some makeshift juke stage, some old corner barroom flop spot or like tonight here on this elegant stage with all the glitter lights at Smokin’ Joe’s Place, Cambridge’s now the home of the blues for all who were interested in the genealogy of such things came around looking, searching for some explanation like it was some lost code recently discovered like that Rosetta Stone they found a while back to figure out what old pharaoh and his kind said (hell, he could have deciphered that easy enough for those interested- work the black bastards to death and if they slack up, whip them, whip them bad, whip them white, and ain’t it always been so). So he told them, plaid guy and cashmere bump sweater girl, told them straight lie, or straight amusing thing, that like his daddy, his real daddy who had passed down the blues to him, and who got it from his daddy, and so on back, hell, maybe back to pharaoh times when those slave needed something to keep them working at a steady death-defying pace, that the blues wasn’t nothing but a good woman on your mind. And if some un-cool, or maybe dope addled wanna-be Chi town hipster, or some white bread all glimmering girl from Forest Hills out for negro kicks, had been naïve enough to ask the question that would have been enough but plaid and cashmere wanted more.

Wanted to know why the three chord progression thing was done this way instead of that, or whether the whole blues thing came from the Georgia Sea Islands (by way of ancient homeland Africa) like they had never heard of Mister’s Mississippi cotton boll plantation, Captain’s lashes, broiling suns, their great grandfathers marching through broken down Vicksburg, about Brother Jim Crow, or about trying to scratch two dollars out of one dollar land. Wanted to know if in Daddy Finger’s exalted opinion Mister Charley Patton was the sweet daddy daddy of the blues, wanted to know if Mister Robert Johnson did in fact sell his soul to the devil out on Highway 61, 51, 49 take a number that 1930 take a number night, wanted to know if Mister Mississippi John Hurt was a sweet daddy of an old man (also“discovered” of late) like he seemed to be down in Newport, wanted to know if black-hearted Mister Muddy really was a man-child with man-child young girl appetites, wanted to know if Mister Howlin’ Wolf ever swallowed that harmonica when he did that heated version they had heard about of How Many More Years (not knowing that Wolf was drunk as a skunk, high shelf whisky not some Sonny Boy’s home brew, when he did that one or that, he Daddy Fingers, had backed Wolf up many a night when Mister Huber Sumlin was in his cups or was on the outs with the big man), wanted to know, laugh, if Mister Woody Guthrie spoke a better talking blues that Mister Leady Belly, or Mister Pete Seeger was truer to the blues tradition that Mister Bob Dylan (like he, Daddy Fingers, spent his time thinking about such things rather than trying to keep body and soul together from one back of the bus Mister James Crow bus station to the next in order to get to some godforsaken hidden juke joint to make a couple of bucks, have some of Sonny Boy’s son’s golden liquor, and maybe catch a stray lonesome Saturday woman without a man, or if with a man, a man without the look of a guy who settled his disputes, his woman disputes, at the sharp end of a knife, wanted to know, wanted to know, wanted to know more than the cold hard fact that, truth or lie, the blues wasn’t nothing but a good girl on your mind. Nothing but having your wanting habits on. But that never was good enough for them, and thus the fool questions. And always, tonight included, the fool Hey Daddy Fingers what are the blues. Okay, baby boy, baby girl, the blues is … And thus this compilation

On The Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution 1917-Books To While Away The Class Struggle By-From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-"My Life"

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry's headline

Book Review

MY LIFE by Leon Trotsky, 1930

Today we expect political memoir writers to take part in a game of show and tell about the most intimate details of their private personal lives on their road to celebrity. Refreshingly, you will find no such tantalizing details in Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky's memoir written in 1930 just after Stalin had exiled him to Turkey. Instead you will find a thoughtful political self-examination by a man trying to draw the lessons of his fall from power in order to set his future political agenda. This task is in accord with his stated conception of his role as an individual agent at service in the historical struggle toward a socialist future.

Thus, underlying the selection of events highlighted in the memoir such as the rise of the revolutionary wave in Russia in 1905 and 1917, the devastation to the socialist program of World War I and the degeneration of the Russian Revolution especially after Lenin’s death and the failure of the German Revolution of 1923 is a sense of urgency about the need for continued struggle for a socialist future. It also provides a platform as well for polemics against those foes and former supporters who have either abandoned or betrayed that struggle.

At the beginning of the 21st century when socialist political programs are in decline it is hard to imagine the spirit that drove Trotsky to dedicate his whole life to the fight for a socialist society. However, at the beginning of the 20th century he represented only the most consistent and audacious of a revolutionary generation of Eastern Europeans and Russians who set out to change the history of the 20th century. It was as if the best and brightest of that generation were afraid, for better or worse, not to take part in the political struggles that would shape the modern world.

As Trotsky notes this element was lacking, with the exceptions of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and precious few others, in the Western labor movement. Trotsky using his own experiences tells the story of the creation of this revolutionary cadre with care and generally proper proportions.
Many of the events such as the disputes within the Russian revolutionary movement, the attempts by the Western Powers to overthrow the Bolsheviks in the Civil War after their seizure of power and the struggle of the various tendencies inside the Russian Communist Party and in the Communist International discussed in the book may not be familiar to today's audience. Nevertheless one can still learn something from the strength of Trotsky's commitment to his cause and the fight to preserve his personal and political integrity against overwhelming odds. As the organizer of the October Revolution, creator of the Red Army in the Civil War, orator, writer and fighter Trotsky he was one of the most feared men of the early 20th century to friend and foe alike.

Nevertheless, I do not believe that he took his personal fall from power as a world historic tragedy. Moreover, he does not gloss over his political mistakes. Nor does he generally do personal injustice to his various political opponents although I would not want to have been subject to his rapier wit and pen. Politicians, revolutionary or otherwise, in our times should take note.