Lybia and the Media

American Crystal Sugar lockout

‘Without better contract,
we’ll continue fighting’
1,300 battle bosses’ union-busting campaign

Militant/David Rosenfeld

Workers at Bridgestone/Firestone plant in Des Moines, Iowa, raised $1,383 at plant gate collections October 11-12 for workers locked out by American Crystal Sugar in Upper Midwest.

BY NATALIE MORRISON
MOORHEAD, Minn.—Locked out members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union maintain around-the-clock pickets here outside the gates of American Crystal Sugar, but especially at the two shift changes when scabs are brought in to maintain production.

“In the past, the company would see what gate we are at and switch to the gate to where we didn’t have pickets, so now we make sure we’re are at all the gates,” Brad Knapper, one of 1,300 workers locked out by American Crystal since August 1, told the Militant.

American Crystal bosses imposed a lockout after union members rejected by 96 percent the company’s concession contract demands. The workers affected are employed at plants in the Red River Valley of Minnesota and North Dakota and in two smaller plants in southern Minnesota and Iowa.

“If we don’t get a fair contract we are going to keep fighting,” Richard Larson, who is locked out at the American Crystal plant in East Grand Forks, said in a phone interview. He was referring to the resumption of negotiations October 24. “We want the language in the contract about outsourcing out. If we don’t stop it now it will just get worse the next contract.”

In addition to concessions in wages and health benefits, the company’s contract offer included stipulations that would allow bosses to increasingly contract out union jobs and thereby weaken the union.

American Crystal hired a scab-herding agency, Strom Engineering, to replace the union workers during the lockout, which the bosses appear to have planned far in advance. For months leading up to the contract vote, the company brought in future replacement workers to “shadow” union workers in the plants. “Tens of millions of dollars have been spent so far and tens of millions more will have to be spent to maintain the lockout,” pointed out John Rausch, one of the pickets here.

Preparing for a possibility of a longer struggle, the union has organized a hardship committee of two workers from each plant. Tami Knapper, a union volunteer and wife of Brad Knapper, said the committee uses money donated to the solidarity fund to make sure “locked-out workers can continue to make their mortgage payments, their car payments and other bills.”

Tens of thousands have been donated from unions, individual workers and others. Members of the United Steelworkers raised $1,383 outside the Bridgestone/Firestone plant in Des Moines, Iowa, October 11-12 by asking workers to back their union brothers and sisters standing up to American Crystal.

Union teachers here as well as in Crookston and East Grand Forks have been organizing weekly food donations. Tami Knapper said that most of this food goes to the locked-out workers in North Dakota who have been denied unemployment compensation by the state government.

“Thank you to everyone who helped make our food drives and deliveries of all the food and goods collected for our locked-out brothers and sisters at the North Dakota factories,” wrote Debra Kostrzewski from Argyle October 22 in the opinion section of Inforum, the daily newspaper in the Fargo-Moorhead area. “We and they cannot express the gratitude felt for those gestures. The financial support we have received is amazing. The personal donations, change collected by children and checks received from our union brothers and sisters of different national and international unions all across the nation is phenomenal.”

Donations to the sugar workers can be sent to BCTGM Local 167G, 100 N 3rd, Suite 50, Grand Forks, ND 58203. Write checks to BCTGM 167G with “2011 BCTGM lockout” in the memo line.

"....a system that is rotten to the core."

David Harvey—The Party of Wall Street Meets its Nemesis

By David Harvey / 28 October 2011

The Party of Wall Street has ruled unchallenged in the United States for far too long. It has totally (as opposed to partially) dominated the policies of Presidents over at least four decades (if not longer), no matter whether individual Presidents have been its willing agents or not. It has legally corrupted Congress via the craven dependency of politicians in both parties upon its raw money power and access to the mainstream media that it controls. Thanks to the appointments made and approved by Presidents and Congress, the Party of Wall Street dominates much of the state apparatus as well as the judiciary, in particular the Supreme Court, whose partisan judgments increasingly favor venal money interests, in spheres as diverse as electoral, labor, environmental and contract law.

The Party of Wall Street has one universal principle of rule: that there shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with one objective. Those possessed of money power shall not only be privileged to accumulate wealth endlessly at will, but they shall have the right to inherit the earth, taking either direct or indirect dominion not only of the land and all the resources and productive capacities that reside therein, but also assume absolute command, directly or indirectly, over the labor and creative potentialities of all those others it needs. The rest of humanity shall be deemed disposable.

These principles and practices do not arise out of individual greed, short-sightedness or mere malfeasance (although all of these are plentifully to be found). These principles have been carved into the body politic of our world through the collective will of a capitalist class animated by the coercive laws of competition. If my lobbying group spends less than yours then I will get less in the way of favors. If this jurisdiction spends on people’s needs it shall be deemed uncompetitive.

Many decent people are locked into the embrace of a system that is rotten to the core. If they are to earn even a reasonable living they have no other job option except to give the devil his due: they are only “following orders,” as Adolf Eichmann famously claimed, or “doing what the system demands” as others now put it, acceding to the barbarous and immoral principles and practices of the Party of Wall Street. The coercive laws of competition force us all, to some degree or other, to obey the rules of this ruthless and uncaring system. The problem is systemic, not individual.

The Party’s favored slogans of freedom and liberty to be guaranteed by private property rights, free markets and free trade, actually translate into the freedom to exploit the labor of others, to dispossess the assets of the common people at will and the freedom to pillage the environment for individual or class benefit.

Once in control of the state apparatus, the Party of Wall Street typically privatizes all the juicy morsels at below market value to open new terrains for their capital accumulation. They arrange subcontracting (the military-industrial complex being a prime example) and taxation practices (subsidies to agro-business and low capital gains taxes) that permit them freely to ransack the public coffers. They deliberately foster such complicated regulatory systems and such astonishing administrative incompetence within the rest of the state apparatus (remember the EPA under Reagan, and FEMA and “heck-of-a job” Brown under Bush) as to convince an inherently skeptical public that the state can never ever play a constructive or supportive role in improving the daily life or the future prospects of anyone. And, finally, they use the monopoly of violence that all sovereign states claim, to exclude the public from much of what passes for public space and to harass, put under surveillance and, if necessary, criminalize and incarcerate all those who do not broadly accede to its dictates. It excels in practices of repressive tolerance that perpetuate the illusion of freedom of expression as long as that expression does not ruthlessly expose the true nature of their project and the repressive apparatus upon which it rests.

The Party of Wall Street ceaselessly wages class war. “Of course there is class war,” says Warren Buffett, “and it is my class, the rich, who are making it and we are winning.” Much of this war is waged in secret, behind a series of masks and obfuscations through which the aims and objectives of the Party of Wall Street are disguised.

The Party of Wall Street knows all too well that when profound political and economic questions are transformed into cultural issues they become unanswerable. It regularly calls up a huge range of captive expert opinion, for the most part employed in the think tanks and universities they fund and splattered throughout the media they control, to create controversies out of all manner of issues that simply do not matter and to propose solutions to questions that do not exist. One minute they talk of nothing other than the austerity necessary for everyone else to cure the deficit, and the next they are proposing to reduce their own taxation no matter what impact this may have on the deficit. The one thing that can never be openly debated and discussed, is the true nature of the class war they have been so ceaselessly and ruthlessly waging. To depict something as “class war” is, in the current political climate and in their expert judgment, to place it beyond the pale of serious consideration, even to be branded a fool, if not seditious.

But now, for the first time, there is an explicit movement to confront The Party of Wall Street and its unalloyed money power. The “street” in Wall Street is being occupied—oh horror upon horrors—by others! Spreading from city to city, the tactics of Occupy Wall Street are to take a central public space, a park or a square, close to where many of the levers of power are centered, and by putting human bodies there convert public space into a political commons, a place for open discussion and debate over what that power is doing and how best to oppose its reach. This tactic, most conspicuously re-animated in the noble and on-going struggles centered on Tahrir Square in Cairo, has spread across the world (Plaza del Sol in Madrid, Syntagma Square in Athens, now the steps of Saint Paul’s in London as well as Wall Street itself). It shows us that the collective power of bodies in public space is still the most effective instrument of opposition when all other means of access are blocked. What Tahrir Square showed to the world was an obvious truth: that it is bodies on the street and in the squares not the babble of sentiments on Twitter or Facebook that really matter.

The aim of this movement in the United States is simple. It says: “We the people are determined to take back our country from the moneyed powers that currently run it. Our aim is to prove Warren Buffett wrong. His class, the rich, shall no longer rule unchallenged nor automatically inherit the earth. Nor is his class, the rich, always destined to win.”

It says “we are the 99 percent.” We have the majority and this majority can, must and shall prevail. Since all other channels of expression are closed to us by money power, we have no other option except to occupy the parks, squares and streets of our cities until our opinions are heard and our needs attended to.

To succeed, the movement has to reach out to the 99 percent. This it can do and is doing step by step. First, there are all those being plunged into immiseration by unemployment, and all those who have been or are now being dispossessed of their houses and their assets by the Wall Street phalanx. It must forge broad coalitions between students, immigrants, the underemployed and all those threatened by the totally unnecessary and draconian austerity politics being inflicted upon the nation and the world, at the behest of the Party of Wall Street. It must focus on the astonishing levels of exploitation in workplaces—from the immigrant domestic workers who the rich so ruthlessly exploit in their homes, to the restaurant workers who slave for almost nothing in the kitchens of the establishments in which the rich so grandly eat. It must bring together the creative workers and artists whose talents are so often turned into commercial products under the control of big money power.

The movement must above all reach out to all the alienated, the dissatisfied and the discontented, all those who recognize and deeply feel in their gut that there is something profoundly wrong, that the system the Party of Wall Street has devised is not only barbaric, unethical and morally wrong, but also broken.

All this has to be democratically assembled into a coherent opposition, which must also freely contemplate what an alternative city, an alternative political system and, ultimately, an alternative way of organizing production, distribution and consumption for the benefit of the people, might look like. Otherwise, a future for the young that points to spiraling private indebtedness and deepening public austerity, all for the benefit of the one percent, is no future at all.

In response to the Occupy Wall Street movement the state backed by capitalist class power makes an astonishing claim: that they and only they have the exclusive right to regulate and dispose of public space. The public has no common right to public space! By what right do mayors, police chiefs, military officers and state officials tell we, the people, that they have the right to determine what is public about “our” public space, and who may occupy that space, and when? When did they presume to evict us, the people, from any space we, the people, decide collectively and peacefully to occupy? They claim they are taking action in the public interest (and cite laws to prove it), but it is we who are the public! Where is “our interest” in all of this? And, by the way, is it not “our” money that the banks and financiers so blatantly use to accumulate “their” bonuses?

In the face of the organized power of the Party of Wall Street to divide and rule, the movement that is emerging must also take as one of its founding principles that it will neither be divided nor diverted until the Party of Wall Street is brought either to its senses—to see that the common good must prevail over narrow venal interests—or to its knees. Corporate privileges to have all of the rights of individuals without the responsibiities of true citizens must be rolled back. Public goods such as education and health care must be publically provided and made freely available. The monopoly powers in the media must be broken. The buying of elections must be ruled unconstitutional. The privatization of knowledge and culture must be prohibited. The freedom to exploit and dispossess others must be severely curbed and ultimately outlawed.

Americans believe in equality. Polling data show they believe (no matter what their general political allegiances might be) that the top twenty percent of the population might be justified in claiming thirty percent of the total wealth. That the top twenty percent now control 85 percent of the wealth is unacceptable. That most of that is controlled by the top one percent is totally unacceptable. What the Occupy Wall Street movement proposes is that we, the people of the United States, commit to a reversal of that level of inequality, not only of wealth and income, but even more importantly of the political power that such a disparity confers. The people of the United States are rightly proud of the their democracy, but it has always been endangered by capital’s corruptive power. Now that it is dominated by that power, the time is surely nigh, as Jefferson long ago suggested would be necessary, to make another American revolution: one based on social justice, equality and a caring and thoughtful approach to the relation to nature.

The struggle that has broken out—the People versus the Party of Wall Street—is crucial to our collective future. The struggle is global as well as local in its nature. It brings together Chilean students who are locked in a life-and-death struggle with political power to create a free and quality education system for all, and so begin dismantling the neoliberal model that Pinochet so brutally imposed. It embraces the agitators in Tahrir Square who recognize that the fall of Mubarak (like the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship) was but the first step in an emancipatory struggle to break free from money power. It includes the “indignados” in Spain, the striking workers in Greece, the militant opposition emerging all around the world, from London to Durban, Buenos Aires, Shenzhen and Mumbai. The brutal dominations of big capital and sheer money power are everywhere on the defensive.

Whose side will each of us as individuals come down on? Which street will we occupy? Only time will tell. But what we do know is that the time is now. The system is not only broken and exposed but incapable of any response other than repression. So we, the people, have no option but to struggle for the collective right to decide how that system shall be reconstructed and in what image. The Party of Wall Street has had its day and failed miserably. How to construct an alternative on its ruins is both an inescapable opportunity and an obligation that none of us can or would ever want to avoid.

Happy Halloween from Marxist Update!

The letter from Lovecraft [below] details a Halloween night dream the writer had.
Happy Halloween!

Jay Rothermel
Editor, Marxist Update

The Very Old Folk
By H. P. Lovecraft

Thursday [November 3, 1927]

Dear Melmoth:–

. . . So you are busy delving into the shady past of that insufferable young Asiatic Varius Avitus Bassianus? Ugh! There are few persons I loathe more than that cursed little Syrian rat!

I have myself been carried back to Roman times by my recent perusal of James Rhoades’ Æneid, a translation never before read by me, and more faithful to P. Maro than any other versified version I have ever seen—including that of my late uncle Dr. Clark, which did not attain publication. This Virgilian diversion, together with the spectral thoughts incident to All Hallows’ Eve with its Witch-Sabbaths on the hills, produced in me last Monday night a Roman dream of such supernal clearness and vividness, and such titanic adumbrations of hidden horror, that I verily believe I shall some day employ it in fiction. Roman dreams were no uncommon features of my youth—I used to follow the Divine Julius all over Gallia as a Tribunus Militum o’nights—but I had so long ceased to experience them, that the present one impressed me with extraordinary force.

It was a flaming sunset or late afternoon in the tiny provincial town of Pompelo, at the foot of the Pyrenees in Hispania Citerior. The year must have been in the late republic, for the province was still ruled by a senatorial proconsul instead of a prætorian legate of Augustus, and the day was the first before the Kalends of November. The hills rose scarlet and gold to the north of the little town, and the westering sun shone ruddily and mystically on the crude new stone and plaster buildings of the dusty forum and the wooden walls of the circus some distance to the east. Groups of citizens—broad-browed Roman colonists and coarse-haired Romanised natives, together with obvious hybrids of the two strains, alike clad in cheap woollen togas—and sprinklings of helmeted legionaries and coarse-mantled, black-bearded tribesmen of the circumambient Vascones—all thronged the few paved streets and forum; moved by some vague and ill-defined uneasiness.

I myself had just alighted from a litter, which the Illyrian bearers seemed to have brought in some haste from Calagurris, across the Iberus to the southward. It appeared that I was a provincial quæstor named L. Cælius Rufus, and that I had been summoned by the proconsul, P. Scribonius Libo, who had come from Tarraco some days before. The soldiers were the fifth cohort of the XIIth legion, under the military tribune Sex. Asellius; and the legatus of the whole region, Cn. Balbutius, had also come from Calagurris, where the permanent station was.

The cause of the conference was a horror that brooded on the hills. All the townsfolk were frightened, and had begged the presence of a cohort from Calagurris. It was the Terrible Season of the autumn, and the wild people in the mountains were preparing for the frightful ceremonies which only rumour told of in the towns. They were the very old folk who dwelt higher up in the hills and spoke a choppy language which the Vascones could not understand. One seldom saw them; but a few times a year they sent down little yellow, squint-eyed messengers (who looked like Scythians) to trade with the merchants by means of gestures, and every spring and autumn they held the infamous rites on the peaks, their howlings and altar-fires throwing terror into the villages. Always the same—the night before the Kalends of Maius and the night before the Kalends of November. Townsfolk would disappear just before these nights, and would never be heard of again. And there were whispers that the native shepherds and farmers were not ill-disposed toward the very old folk—that more than one thatched hut was vacant before midnight on the two hideous Sabbaths.

This year the horror was very great, for the people knew that the wrath of the very old folk was upon Pompelo. Three months previously five of the little squint-eyed traders had come down from the hills, and in a market brawl three of them had been killed. The remaining two had gone back wordlessly to their mountains—and this autumn not a single villager had disappeared. There was menace in this immunity. It was not like the very old folk to spare their victims at the Sabbath. It was too good to be normal, and the villagers were afraid.

For many nights there had been a hollow drumming on the hills, and at last the ædile Tib. Annæus Stilpo (half native in blood) had sent to Balbutius at Calagurris for a cohort to stamp out the Sabbath on the terrible night. Balbutius had carelessly refused, on the ground that the villagers' fears were empty, and that the loathsome rites of hill folk were of no concern to the Roman People unless our own citizens were menaced. I, however, who seemed to be a close friend of Balbutius, had disagreed with him; averring that I had studied deeply in the black forbidden lore, and that I believed the very old folk capable of visiting almost any nameless doom upon the town, which after all was a Roman settlement and contained a great number of our citizens. The complaining ædile's own mother Helvia was a pure Roman, the daughter of M. Helvius Cinna, who had come over with Scipio's army. Accordingly I had sent a slave—a nimble little Greek called Antipater—to the proconsul with letters, and Scribonius had heeded my plea and ordered Balbutius to send his fifth cohort, under Asellius, to Pompelo; entering the hills at dusk on the eve of November's Kalends and stamping out whatever nameless orgies he might find—bringing such prisoners as he might take to Tarraco for the next proprætor's court. Balbutius, however, had protested, so that more correspondence had ensued. I had written so much to the proconsul that he had become gravely interested, and had resolved to make a personal inquiry into the horror.

He had at length proceeded to Pompelo with his lictors and attendants; there hearing enough rumours to be greatly impressed and disturbed, and standing firmly by his order for the Sabbath's extirpation. Desirous of conferring with one who had studied the subject, he ordered me to accompany Asellius' cohort—and Balbutius had also come along to press his adverse advice, for he honestly believed that drastic military action would stir up a dangerous sentiment of unrest amongst the Vascones both tribal and settled.

So here we all were in the mystic sunset of the autumn hills—old Scribonius Libo in his toga prætexta, the golden light glancing on his shiny bald head and wrinkled hawk face, Balbutius with his gleaming helmet and breastplate, blue-shaven lips compressed in conscientiously dogged opposition, young Asellius with his polished greaves and superior sneer, and the curious throng of townsfolk, legionaries, tribesmen, peasants, lictors, slaves, and attendants. I myself seemed to wear a common toga, and to have no especially distinguishing characteristic. And everywhere horror brooded. The town and country folk scarcely dared speak aloud, and the men of Libo's entourage, who had been there nearly a week, seemed to have caught something of the nameless dread. Old Scribonius himself looked very grave, and the sharp voices of us later comers seemed to hold something of curious inappropriateness, as in a place of death or the temple of some mystic god.

We entered the prætorium and held grave converse. Balbutius pressed his objections, and was sustained by Asellius, who appeared to hold all the natives in extreme contempt while at the same time deeming it inadvisable to excite them. Both soldiers maintained that we could better afford to antagonise the minority of colonists and civilised natives by inaction, than to antagonise a probable majority of tribesmen and cottagers by stamping out the dread rites.

I, on the other hand, renewed my demand for action, and offered to accompany the cohort on any expedition it might undertake. I pointed out that the barbarous Vascones were at best turbulent and uncertain, so that skirmishes with them were inevitable sooner or later whichever course we might take; that they had not in the past proved dangerous adversaries to our legions, and that it would ill become the representatives of the Roman People to suffer barbarians to interfere with a course which the justice and prestige of the Republic demanded. That, on the other hand, the successful administration of a province depended primarily upon the safety and good-will of the civilised element in whose hands the local machinery of commerce and prosperity reposed, and in whose veins a large mixture of our own Italian blood coursed. These, though in numbers they might form a minority, were the stable element whose constancy might be relied on, and whose cooperation would most firmly bind the province to the Imperium of the Senate and the Roman People. It was at once a duty and an advantage to afford them the protection due to Roman citizens; even (and here I shot a sarcastic look at Balbutius and Asellius) at the expense of a little trouble and activity, and of a slight interruption of the draught-playing and cock-fighting at the camp in Calagurris. That the danger to the town and inhabitants of Pompelo was a real one, I could not from my studies doubt. I had read many scrolls out of Syria and Ægyptus, and the cryptic towns of Etruria, and had talked at length with the bloodthirsty priest of Diana Aricina in his temple in the woods bordering Lacus Nemorensis. There were shocking dooms that might be called out of the hills on the Sabbaths; dooms which ought not to exist within the territories of the Roman People; and to permit orgies of the kind known to prevail at Sabbaths would be but little in consonance with the customs of those whose forefathers, A. Postumius being consul, had executed so many Roman citizens for the practice of the Bacchanalia—a matter kept ever in memory by the Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus, graven upon bronze and set open to every eye. Checked in time, before the progress of the rites might evoke anything with which the iron of a Roman pilum might not be able to deal, the Sabbath would not be too much for the powers of a single cohort. Only participants need be apprehended, and the sparing of a great number of mere spectators would considerably lessen the resentment which any of the sympathising country folk might feel. In short, both principle and policy demanded stern action; and I could not doubt but that Publius Scribonius, bearing in mind the dignity and obligations of the Roman People, would adhere to his plan of despatching the cohort, me accompanying, despite such objections as Balbutius and Asellius—speaking indeed more like provincials than Romans—might see fit to offer and multiply.

The slanting sun was now very low, and the whole hushed town seemed draped in an unreal and malign glamour. Then P. Scribonius the proconsul signified his approval of my words, and stationed me with the cohort in the provisional capacity of a centurio primipilus; Balbutius and Asellius assenting, the former with better grace than the latter. As twilight fell on the wild autumnal slopes, a measured, hideous beating of strange drums floated down from afar in terrible rhythm. Some few of the legionarii shewed timidity, but sharp commands brought them into line, and the whole cohort was soon drawn up on the open plain east of the circus. Libo himself, as well as Balbutius, insisted on accompanying the cohort; but great difficulty was suffered in getting a native guide to point out the paths up the mountain. Finally a young man named Vercellius, the son of pure Roman parents, agreed to take us at least past the foothills. We began to march in the new dusk, with the thin silver sickle of a young moon trembling over the woods on our left. That which disquieted us most was the fact that the Sabbath was to be held at all. Reports of the coming cohort must have reached the hills, and even the lack of a final decision could not make the rumour less alarming—yet there were the sinister drums as of yore, as if the celebrants had some peculiar reason to be indifferent whether or not the forces of the Roman People marched against them. The sound grew louder as we entered a rising gap in the hills, steep wooded banks enclosing us narrowly on either side, and displaying curiously fantastic tree-trunks in the light of our bobbing torches. All were afoot save Libo, Balbutius, Asellius, two or three of the centuriones, and myself, and at length the way became so steep and narrow that those who had horses were forced to leave them; a squad of ten men being left to guard them, though robber bands were not likely to be abroad on such a night of terror. Once in a while it seemed as though we detected a skulking form in the woods nearby, and after a half-hour's climb the steepness and narrowness of the way made the advance of so great a body of men—over 300, all told—exceedingly cumbrous and difficult. Then with utter and horrifying suddenness we heard a frightful sound from below. It was from the tethered horses—they had screamed, not neighed, but screamed... and there was no light down there, nor the sound of any human thing, to shew why they had done so. At the same moment bonfires blazed out on all the peaks ahead, so that terror seemed to lurk equally well before and behind us. Looking for the youth Vercellius, our guide, we found only a crumpled heap weltering in a pool of blood. In his hand was a short sword snatched from the belt of D. Vibulanus, a subcenturio, and on his face was such a look of terror that the stoutest veterans turned pale at the sight. He had killed himself when the horses screamed... he, who had been born and lived all his life in that region, and knew what men whispered about the hills. All the torches now began to dim, and the cries of frightened legionaries mingled with the unceasing screams of the tethered horses. The air grew perceptibly colder, more suddenly so than is usual at November's brink, and seemed stirred by terrible undulations which I could not help connecting with the beating of huge wings. The whole cohort now remained at a standstill, and as the torches faded I watched what I thought were fantastic shadows outlined in the sky by the spectral luminosity of the Via Lactea as it flowed through Perseus, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, and Cygnus. Then suddenly all the stars were blotted from the sky—even bright Deneb and Vega ahead, and the lone Altair and Fomalhaut behind us. And as the torches died out altogether, there remained above the stricken and shrieking cohort only the noxious and horrible altar-flames on the towering peaks; hellish and red, and now silhouetting the mad, leaping, and colossal forms of such nameless beasts as had never a Phrygian priest or Campanian grandam whispered of in the wildest of furtive tales. And above the nighted screaming of men and horses that dæmonic drumming rose to louder pitch, whilst an ice-cold wind of shocking sentience and deliberateness swept down from those forbidden heights and coiled about each man separately, till all the cohort was struggling and screaming in the dark, as if acting out the fate of Laocoön and his sons. Only old Scribonius Libo seemed resigned. He uttered words amidst the screaming, and they echo still in my ears. "Malitia vetus—malitia vetus est ... venit ... tandem venit ..."

And then I waked. It was the most vivid dream in years, drawing upon wells of the subconscious long untouched and forgotten. Of the fate of that cohort no record exists, but the town at least was saved—for encyclopædias tell of the survival of Pompelo to this day, under the modern Spanish name of Pompelona...
Yrs for Gothick Supremacy–

C · IVLIVS · VERVS · MAXIMINVS.

"....organize and make the revolution."

International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations

General Resolution

The Plenary Session of the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO) was successfully held in Madrid with the participation of almost all the member parties and organizations from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia.

Throughout the sessions, and after reviewing the work of the parties in their respective countries, the Plenary took note of the inability of capital to resolve the general crisis with the various methods that it has used so far. Unemployment and misery are affecting millions of workers, and particularly young people and women, both in the main imperialist economies as well as in the dependent countries. The neoliberal programs and policies have not resolved the great difficulties of the system much less the situation of the working class and the peoples.

New sectors of the workers and popular masses are joining the struggle for their rights: the youth, public employees, the unemployed, immigrants are defending the gains won through decades of combat and are trying out new forms of struggle and unity; they are learning precious lessons that raise the level of consciousness of the broad masses and are putting forward objectives of greater significance against capitalism; the advanced sectors are looking at the objectives of socialism.

The idea that the weight of the crisis should fall on the class that has caused it and not on its victims is already a widely shared objective, even an outcry. In Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, the workers are confronting the policies of privatization, cutbacks in social services and plundering; in sub-Sahara Africa, the peoples are resisting being made the battlefield of the imperialist looters; in Asia the workers are carrying out great strike movements and are heroically resisting the imperialist military occupation.

The struggle of the Arab peoples is of particular importance. The workers, youth and women brought down the hated tyrannies allied with imperialism in combative and massive demonstrations, as happened in Tunisia and Egypt; they ignited the flames of combative actions of the working masses in other countries in the region such as Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, etc.

We emphasize the role of the Communist Party of the Workers of Tunisia (PCOT) in the development of the political revolution as well as in the continuation of the struggle to overthrow capitalism and to transform the social and economic structures of the country. In that process, the PCOT is fulfilling its historical responsibilities and showing itself as a revolutionary political reference point.

We decisively condemn the armed imperialist intervention (of France, Great Britain, U.S. and NATO) against Libya, which has caused the devastation of the country and the slaughter of more than 50,000 civilians. They have tried to justify the imperialist aggression as the “defense of freedom and the democracy for the Libyans,” when in fact it is to bring about a redistribution of Libya’s oil and water resources, as well as to smother the yearning for freedom of all the Arab peoples by blood and fire. That is why the imperialist powers attacked and defeated their former ally Gaddafi, but they could not drown the resistance and the fight for freedom of the Libyan people that will develop.

The imperialist countries headed by the U.S. are planning to carry out military aggression in Syria and from there they are aiming at Iran. Once again they are using the just aspirations and struggle of the workers and youth to win democracy and freedom. We the workers, peoples and youth as well as revolutionaries and communists reject those disastrous intensions. We proclaim the right of the peoples to self-determination. The destiny of Syria must be resolved by the Syrian workers and youth.

The imperialist war that is devastating Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya even though it causes great atrocities and suffering for the peoples is turning into a quagmire for the occupying military forces, which are receiving serious blows inflicted by the heroic resistance. We condemn the imperialist military aggression and we firmly support the struggle against the occupation.

We defend the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, their heroic fight against imperialism and Zionism as well as their right to be recognized as a State by the United Nations.

The noose of the foreign debt continues to tighten against the development of the dependent countries and the situation of the working masses. The huge debt is now affecting the U.S. itself, which recently raised the debt ceiling imposed by its own legislation. Its inability to pay was resolved temporarily with the “legal” extension of the debt ceiling at the cost of cutbacks to wages, pensions, health care and education, as well as other public services; those measures are turning against the capitalists themselves because they expand the recession to an international scale. In Greece they are trying to resolve the bankruptcy by making the workers pay an opprobrious foreign debt that is growing enormously under the guise of aid. It is an unjust and illegitimate foreign debt, the workers did not contract it and it has been paid many times over. For that reason in all regions of the world we workers, peoples and revolutionaries are vigorously raising the slogan of nonpayment of the debt.

Our parties and organizations of the ICMLPO, other political and mass organizations are raising in a determined manner an international campaign for the cancellation of Tunisia’s foreign debt.

The development of the struggle of the workers and peoples, the resistance to the effects of the crisis, the demands for freedom and democracy that are developing, at a different level, in all countries, are returning the protagonism and leading role to the working class, which is showing most severely the contradiction between capital and labor. The rest of the popular sectors (students, women, unemployed, users of public goods and services, etc.) are grouping themselves around the working class; they are becoming unified and speaking out against the aggression of imperialism and the exploitation of capitalism.

The discrediting of the bourgeois institutions and the union bureaucracies, but above all the struggle of the working class, is contributing to unmasking the true nature of bourgeois democracy and the capitalist institutions as well as its servants, the opportunists and revisionists. In these circumstances appreciable sectors of the working class, the peoples and the youth are looking for alternatives roads. It is up to us proletarian revolutionaries to play a more dynamic role: to denounce the nature of the oppression and exploitation, to clarify the class nature of the conflicts, the traitorous role of the union bureaucracy, the labor aristocracy, the diversionary action of opportunism and, mainly, to fight for the leadership of the organization and the struggles of the working masses and youth.

In this process it is indispensable to push forward class-struggle trade unionism, the unity of the workers and union movement, unity in action and in programmatic proposals. Within the working class and its fights we must work for the unity of the popular movement, for the incorporation of the peasant masses, the youth and the oppressed peoples and nationalities. We must combat capitalism and imperialism in a single front, with clenched fists; we must raise the banner of socialism.

The workers and popular movement are confronting the challenge of the fight against the domination of imperialism and capitalism, for freedom and democracy, as well as the determination to demarcate positions between the revolution and reformism.

The conditions for the revolutionary struggle of the workers and peoples are favorable and tomorrow they will be better. The present situation makes the necessity of the social revolution more evident and the important social and political events show the possibility of organizing it. Our parties and organizations reaffirm their decision to organize and make the revolution.

In reaffirming ourselves on the basis of proletarian internationalism we express our fighting solidarity with the workers and peoples who are struggling all over the world.

Workers of the world, unite!

Madrid, October, 2011

Albania (Communist Party)
Brazil (Revolutionary Communist Party)
Burkina Faso (Revolutionary Communist Party of Volta)
Denmark (Communist Party of the Workers – AKP)
Dominican Republic (Communist Party of Labor)
Ecuador (Marxist-Leninist Communist Party)
France (Communist Party of the Workers – PCOF)
Germany (Organization for the Reconstruction of the Communist Party – Arbeit Zukunft)
Greece (Organization for the Reconstruction of the Communist Party – 1918-1955)
Iran (Party if Labor – PLI – Toufan)
Italy (Communist Platform)
México (Communist Party – ML)
Morocco (Democratic Way)
Spain (Communist Party M-L)
Tunisia (Communist Party of the Workers)
Turkey (Revolutionary Communist Party – TDKP)
Venezuela (Marxist-Leninist Communist Party)

OWS: "There is a long road ahead...."

Occupy first. Demands come later

 Slavoj Žižek

What to do after the occupations of Wall Street and beyond – the protests that started far away, reached the centre and are now, reinforced, rolling back around the world? One of the great dangers the protesters face is that they will fall in love with themselves. In a San Francisco echo of the Wall Street occupation this week, a man addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate as if it was a happening in the hippy style of the 60s: "They are asking us what is our programme. We have no programme. We are here to have a good time."

Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called "class struggle essentialism" for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, and other struggles, capitalism is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem. So the first lesson to be taken is: do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not "Main Street, not Wall Street", but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions – not questions of what we do not want, but about what we do want. What social organisation can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders do we need? What organs, including those of control and repression? The 20th-century alternatives obviously did not work.

While it is thrilling to enjoy the pleasures of the "horizontal organisation" of protesting crowds with egalitarian solidarity and open-ended free debates, we should also bear in mind what GK Chesterton wrote: "Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid." This holds also for politics in times of uncertainty: the open-ended debates will have to coalesce not only in some new master-signifiers, but also in concrete answers to the old Leninist question, "What is to be done?"

The direct conservative attacks are easy to answer. Are the protests un-American? When conservative fundamentalists claim that America is a Christian nation, one should remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. It is the protesters who are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street pagans worship false idols.

Are the protesters violent? True, their very language may appear violent (occupation, and so on), but they are violent only in the sense in which Mahatma Gandhi was violent. They are violent because they want to put a stop to the way things are – but what is this violence compared with the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?

They are called losers – but are the true losers not there on Wall Street, who received massive bailouts? They are called socialists – but in the US, there already is socialism for the rich. They are accused of not respecting private property – but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if the protesters were to be destroying it night and day – just think of thousands of homes repossessed.

They are not communists, if communism means the system that deservedly collapsed in 1990 – and remember that communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism. The success of Chinese communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care for the commons – the commons of nature, of knowledge – which are threatened by the system.

They are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. They are not dreamers; they are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything, but reacting to how the system is gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice but goes on walking; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. The protesters are just reminding those in power to look down.

This is the easy part. The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support them but are already working hard to dilute the protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, those in power will try to make the protests into a harmless moralistic gesture.

In boxing, to clinch means to hold the opponent's body with one or both arms in order to prevent or hinder punches. Bill Clinton's reaction to the Wall Street protests is a perfect case of political clinching. Clinton thinks that the protests are "on balance … a positive thing", but he is worried about the nebulousness of the cause: "They need to be for something specific, and not just against something because if you're just against something, someone else will fill the vacuum you create," he said. Clinton suggested the protesters get behind President Obama's jobs plan, which he claimed would create "a couple million jobs in the next year and a half".

What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of concrete pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper way, as it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly new.

The reason protesters went out is that they had enough of the world where recycling your Coke cans, giving a couple of dollars to charity, or buying a cappuccino where 1% goes towards developing world troubles, is enough to make them feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, they saw that for a long time they were also allowing their political engagements to be outsourced – and they want them back.

The art of politics is also to insist on a particular demand that, while thoroughly "realist", disturbs the very core of the hegemonic ideology: ie one that, while definitely feasible and legitimate, is de facto impossible (universal healthcare in the US was such a case). In the aftermath of the Wall Street protests, we should definitely mobilise people to make such demands – however, it is no less important to simultaneously remain subtracted from the pragmatic field of negotiations and "realist" proposals.

What one should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarily remains a debate on enemy's turf; time is needed to deploy the new content. All we say now can be taken from us – everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our "terror", ominous and threatening as it should be.

OWS: anarchist chickens come home to roost

OWS: it never stops!

from LBO News from Doug Henwood by Doug Henwood

Edited version of my October 22 radio commentary.

Sorry for repeating myself on Occupy Wall Street, but it seems pretty important. An acquaintance in Australia posted this to a discussion group the other day:

This is I truly hope the very beginning of the reconstruction and the rediscovery of an American Left. I keep banging on about this, but American comrades must understand how this is galvanising the world. If the Left in America re-emerges as an historical agent, then a lot will become possible.

All this, from what started as a small encampment in a small park at the narrow southern tip of an island off the coast of America, as Spalding Gray once called Manhattan.

A major controversy of the moment is whether to make demands, and if so, of what kind. The demands working group has come up with a list I find quite admirable, perhaps because it bears a lot of resemblance to things I’ve been saying all along. I’ve already posted the text here. That draft must go to the OWS general assembly for approval—approval that may be in considerable doubt.

There are objections on specifics. No mention of the prison–industrial complex. (Mass incarceration is a horror, but the role of prison labor is wildly exaggerated.) No mention of, as one critic put it, the racialized nature of poverty. I think there’s a great virtue to simplicity, instead of getting into the usual laundry list. And should by some miracle something like this be enacted, there’s no doubt that it would disproportionately benefit people of color, even as it also benefitted many people of no color.

But there are objections to the very notion of demands. Some think that “demands” are for terrorists, not peaceful assemblies. It’s a good thing that the labor movement never thought that way in its heyday. A lot of anarchists believe that demanding remedies of the state legitimizes the state. I wonder who else could mobilize the resources to meet the challenges of deprivation and environmental destruction. They also believe that jobs suck, and demanding more of them would only make things worse. I doubt that that would resonate with the 25 million un- and under-employed. To this camp, making demands are an opening to being co-opted. They might also be the way to win adherents and win something good.

The twinklers have come up with their own manifesto, the Liberty Square Blueprint . It’s remarkably vague, invoking a rambling set of principles, which they weirdly refer to as “bullet point visions.” (There’s a strange New Age Corporate cast to a lot of their language—a mix of cybertopianism and orgo-localism.) They want to “empower marginalized people to express themselves, build community, and engage systemic/cultural discrimination”? Who are the “we” that grant “them” this power? And how?

The economic planks include:

“Create an economy in harmony with nature…based on sound ethical assumptions and observed individual and market behavior through behavioral economics and econometrics.” I have no idea what that would mean in practice. Could you generate electricity that way? And econometrics? Vector autorregressions will set us free.

Also, “Implementing and improving community currencies, barter, sharing, and trade systems.” Barter is a major waste of time, and as David Graeber has been arguing, hasn’t really existed in a major way in any society known to anthropology. Community currencies are fine for haircuts, but scissors? Steel? It seems they haven’t thought through the role of economic scale at all. Perhaps their devotion to open-source software has obscured the institutional complexity required to produce the computers and networks it runs on.

And “eliminating financial/resource speculation that supports the current economy at the expense of future generations.” Who exactly would do this, if not a state?

This is hard stuff. I do worry about this movement being hijacked by Democrats for electoral purposes. I think that working for candidates would be a disastrous compromise. We don’t want to lose long-term utopian desire in the course of devising shorter-term concrete demands. The key is to pressure the powers that be without becoming their pawn—to make practical demands that are not death to passion or the imagination.

Full employment is no small demand to make. The bourgeoisie hates it, because it would strengthen the bargaining power of the working class. It, plus the other planks of an expanded welfare state mentioned in the Demands draft, would give people the confidence and freedom to think about a better world. This isn’t fictional: it happened in the 1970s, as the transformation of consciousness among middle-class college students spread into the working class. Quality of work life—in a real, not a GM sense—became a central concern in organized labor, at least among the rank and file. It was one of the things that alarmed elites, leading to the crackdown of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Spontaneous gatherings will not replace the state any time soon, and if we want a better world, we need a better state. To use the jargon, this is extra-parlimentary pressure on the parliament. Relying on the state involves trusting an institution that has demonstrated itself to be often violent, corrupt, and oppressive. But I see no alternative to the state.

This is a very important discussion to have, and one of the great things about OWS is that we’re having it.

A "crisis of historic magnitude"

Crisis stems from rule of capitalists  

 

The lives of hundreds of millions worldwide are being affected in myriad ways by the ruinous consequences of a brewing crisis of historic magnitude. Underlying this crisis is the contraction of production, trade and employment throughout the world capitalist economy.

In the U.S alone since 2007, household income has gone through its largest decline in decades. Nearly 26 million workers are without full-time jobs and the average period of unemployment has nearly tripled since 2007.

In addition to shrinking paychecks, layoff notices or health care or pension cancellations from the boss, many workers also face the growing burden of unpayable debts from home mortgages to college loans, marked as "assets" in bank ledgers that are packaged and sold in ponzi schemes promising handsome return for the propertied owners.

Facing declining profits in production, capitalists seek other avenues to maximize returns. Instead of investing in expanding productive capacity, they blow up debt balloons fueled by investment in increasingly complex and leveraged "financial instruments."

As the world financial system becomes increasingly unstable and begins to shake, the crisis appears to be rooted in banking and finance. But this is not the source of the problem; it is merely a symptom.

Layoffs and shutdowns mount alongside the growing necessity and ability to increase production. The problem is not something gone awry with capitalism or of excesses that need to be regulated and checked by a correct government policy. Capitalism is functioning the only way it can; the crisis is a product of its natural and lawful workings.

The owners of the factories, mines, mills, land, etc. who buy and sell the labor power of the toiling majority hold political power and use their government to advance their interests.

Layers of working people in the United States—from sugar workers in the Upper Midwest to dockworkers in the state of Washington and others—are resisting the drive by the employing class to roll back living standards and job conditions and deal blows to the unions in order to boost their profit margins.

Tens of millions of workers, farmers, and youth—from Greece, Spain, and elsewhere across Europe; to villages, towns, and cities in Asia, Africa, and the Americas; to Wall Street and across the U.S.—are recognizing the miserable future capitalism offers them, a future of economic devastation, stepped-up assaults on political rights to organize, and spreading bloody imperialist wars.

As long as workers' confidence and practice of solidarity continues to grow as a result of these struggles, we get stronger. "Now and again the workers are victorious, but only for a time," says the Communist Manifesto. "The real fruit of their battles lies not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers."

It's today's struggles that will lay the basis for forging a mass working-class movement capable of wresting power from the hands of the capitalist rulers and building a society based on human needs and solidarity, not profits.

OWS: Fertile ground

'Occupy Wall St.' actions spread to cities across US

Draw thousands affected by capitalist crisis
 
BY SETH GALINSKY
AND RUTH ROBINETT  
NEW YORK—Thousands of young people, students, middle-class layers, and workers—both employed and jobless—have joined Occupy Wall Street protests here over the last several weeks. Zuccotti Park, a few block's from the Wall Street financial district, has become a magnet for those who are being battered by the capitalist economic crisis and are looking to do something about it.

Some come just for a few hours, others have been camped out in the square for days or weeks. One university student from Virginia skipped classes and hitchhiked to New York to take part. Forty students from the University of Kentucky raised thousands of dollars to join the action for a few days.

United in opposition to Wall Street as a symbol of capitalist greed, participants represent a wide spectrum of political views. Handmade signs abound, often colorfully reflecting its wielder's personal experience: "College degree=Unemployment. Thanks Wall Street," "I am a social worker student who owes $60,000 in loans. I am the 99%," and "F*** your unpaid internship." A smattering of conspiracy theorists and a fringe of rightists are also present promoting their nostrums.

Inspired by the protest, similar actions have spread to cities and towns throughout the United States, tapping into a growing sentiment that something is wrong and needs to change. Under the Occupy Wall Street banner, many have joined in labor protests: from demonstrations in support of laid-off school aides, postal workers, and building workers in New York to rallies backing locked-out sugar workers in the Upper Midwest.

"I used to think the government had my best interests in mind, but now I know that's not true," Fashion Institute of Technology student Steven Robinson told the Militant.

"We need more jobs, cheaper tuition for college, higher wages," said Marcio Martinez, a recent high school graduate.

Stacey Taylor and her husband are truck drivers who came from southern Indiana to join the protests. "We pay our share of taxes and the top 1 percent doesn't," she said.

Occupy Wall Street began September 17 as an open-ended protest in response to a call by Adbusters, an anarchist collective in Canada. Adbusters states it is a "global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs" whose aim is to "topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way" we live.

The first day of protest attracted about 2,000 people. When New York police wouldn't allow the demonstrators to protest on Wall Street, they set up camp instead a few blocks away at Zuccotti Park, where hundreds slept overnight.

The protest gained momentum after cops arrested 80 demonstrators during a September 24 march and were videotaped attacking several women with pepper spray.

The arrests and police brutality, instead of intimidating the protesters, gave them a boost and won broad sympathy. More started streaming in from all over the country.

In the largest action so far, some 10,000 people joined an October 5 march organized by unions in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. Among others, the protest was actively built by groups forming part of the Democratic Party's left wing, including the Working Families Party and MoveOn.org.

The second issue of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, a four-color broadsheet, responded to criticism that the organizers had raised what they are against, but not any clear demands of what they are for. "No list of demands" was the headline of the editorial note. Arguing that the occupation itself is the goal, the paper said, "We are speaking to each other, and listening. This occupation is first about participation."  
 
'Millionaires March'
On October 11, Occupy Wall Street organized a "Millionaires March" up 5th and Park avenues outside the homes of the owners and CEOs of several banks and large corporations.

Referring to a 2 percent New York tax on millionaires that will expire in December, Occupy Wall Street organizer Doug Forand told the press, "This is fiscally, economically, and morally wrong."

"The American people understand that not everybody has been following the rules; that Wall Street is an example of that," President Barack Obama said of the protests. Obama and other Democratic Party figures have been demagogically arguing that the problem is Republican opposition to "sharing" the burdens of the economic crisis.

"So far the Wall Street Occupiers have helped the Democratic Party," said Robert Reich, former labor secretary in the William Clinton administration. "Their inchoate demand that the rich pay their fair share is tailor-made for the Democrats' new plan for a 5.6 percent tax on millionaires." To get the Democrats to fight for the plan "pressure from the left is critically important," he said.

Some conservative politicians and papers have attacked the protests, others have taken a more careful, muted stance.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Republican presidential candidates Ron Paul and Rick Santorum "empathize with the protesters' frustration but they don't agree with all of their goals." But not Republican candidate Herman Cain. "If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself," he said.

Many of those participating in Occupy Wall Street actions around the country are open to working-class politics and are attracted to unfolding struggles by workers.

Socialist Workers Party members have sold dozens of subscriptions to the Militant, hundreds of single copies of the paper, as well as literature from Pathfinder Press, at rallies and encampments in New York and around the country.

These activities have become fertile ground for discussing the need for working people to resist the mounting attacks by the bosses and their government, and to organize a movement that can wrest political power from the exploiters and reconstruct society on foundations of human solidarity, not profit for a few.  

Manik Mukherjee Speaking at International Action Center on September 19,...

The dialectic of nature

Dutch edition of Reason in Revolt out now - Preface

Written by Alan Woods
Tuesday, 18 October 2011

The Dutch edition of Reason in Revolt is being launched today, October 18, at 19.00 hours at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and tomorrow, October 19 in Antwerp at 19.00 hours at the Cafe 'Den Bengel', Market 5, 2000 Antwerp, with Alan Woods speaking. For more information about the book click here. The book is also being launched in the Netherlands on October 20, at 19.30, at Stayokay Amsterdam Zeeburg, Timorplein 21, 1094CC Amsterdam, with Alan Woods speaking.

Preface to the Dutch edition

The publication of Reason in Revolt in 1995 was greeted by enthusiasm by many people, not only on the left, but by scientists and other people interested in philosophy and the latest scientific theories, such as chaos and complexity, which in many respects reflect a dialectical approach to nature. The latest discoveries of science have fundamentally modified the old view of evolution as a slow, gradual process, uninterrupted by sudden catastrophes and leaps.

Since the book first appeared, there have been a number of spectacular advances in science – notably the human genome. These results have completely demolished the positions of genetic determinism that we criticised in Reason in Revolt. They have also dealt a mortal blow to the nonsense of the Creationists who want to reject Darwinism in favour of the first book of Genesis.

The theory of evolution by natural selection, which Darwin drew from careful observations of nature, cut the ground from under the idea that humans were the product of divine creation. This was a revolution in thinking that shattered the dominant belief of the day and caused uproar. The religious establishment was horrified. After all, if the story of creation could be doubted, so too could the existence of the creator.

This theory has been firmly established as a cornerstone of biology. Yet ever since its proposal, it has sustained wave after wave of attack. The latest onslaught of the creationists is the “theory” called intelligent design.

Evolution under attack

In the 18^th century the American bourgeois revolution was fought under the flag of Reason. Most of the founding fathers were either atheists or free thinkers. Now, in the second decade of the 21^st century, the decay of capitalism expresses itself in a general backsliding of thought and culture at all levels.

There is nothing new in this. Religion has always been hostile to science. The Inquisition burned Giordano Bruno at the state and forced Galileo to recant his scientific theories by the threat of torture. In the 18^th century, Bishop Berkeley developed a whole philosophy in order to oppose the ideas of Isaac Newton, which he regarded as atheistic and materialistic. And naturally the Church viciously persecuted Charles Darwin for his views.

So-called intelligent design was invented in the late 1980s Phillip Johnson, a lawyer and born-again Christian. Johnson began to develop a strategy to challenge Darwin by alleging that the evidence for natural selection was poor. His real motivation was his belief that by explaining the world only through material processes was inherently atheistic. If there was a god, science would never be able to discover Him.

Throughout the 90s, the ID movement took to disseminating articles, books and DVDs and organising conferences all over the world. The timing of the new onslaught against Darwin was not accidental. It coincides with the rise of the New Right, an amalgamation of right wing monetarists, born again Christians, anti-communists and assorted cranks and loonies in the USA.

What is astonishing, however, is the fact that the charlatan Johnson succeeded in recruiting scientists to his cause. These included biochemist Professor Michael Behe, mathematician Dr William Dembski, and philosopher of science Dr Stephen Meyer. These scientists developed the theory of intelligent design (ID) which claims that certain features of the natural world are best explained as the result of an intelligent being.

This movement had an impact on politics and education. George W. Bush advocated teaching both evolution and "Intelligent Design" in schools, "so people can know what the debate is about." This assumes that the theory of evolution and the creationist nonsense are on the same level.

Pressure was put on American schools to place intelligent design on the syllabus. In Dover, Pa., a school board required students to listen to a statement about Intelligent Design in a biology class — and parents mindful of the took the board to court to uphold the separation of church and state written into the American Constitution.

Creationism demolished

The late Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that if a truly intelligent designer were responsible for the panda, He would have provided a more useful tool than the stubby proto-thumb that pandas use to laboriously strip bamboo in order to eat it. One could multiply such examples at will.

Why, for instance, should humans be designed to walk upright when our skeletons are designed to move about on all fours?

As a result of this singularly unintelligent design, humans are the only animals to suffer from backache and female humans are the only ones to suffer agonies in childbirth. Of course, if one accepts what is written in the first book of Genesis, this was a punishment of the Almighty for Eve’s part in Original Sin. But the question must then be asked why this Intelligent Designer should place the Serpent and the Apple in the Garden of Eden in the first place.

If we accept the idea of intelligent design, it must be confessed that the Creator did not make a very good job of it. One recalls the words of Alfonso the Wise who said:” Had I been present when the Almighty made the Universe, I could have given Him some good advice.”

It is hard to see how an all-wise Creator could have made such a mess of things, creating a world in which hunger, disease, wars and death play such a prominent role – unless He really hated the world and the human race. But in that case, what we have before us is not so much a case of intelligent design, but rather unintelligent or malignant design.

The discoveries of the human genome have completely demolished this reactionary gibberish. Humans are not the unique creation of the Almighty, but the product of billions of years of evolution. We carry the living proof of this in our genes. We share our genes, not only with the apes and other mammals, but with the lowly fruit fly and bacteria, and with creatures even older and more primitive than bacteria. Our genetic makeup is a map of evolution and the clearest proof of it. But there are none so blind as those that will not see.

The Big Bang

However, there was one part of Reason in Revolt that was especially controversial – namely the section on cosmology, where we argued against the theory of the big bang. The standard model of the universe seemed to be so entrenched that it was apparently unassailable. The overwhelming majority accepted it uncritically. To call it into question was unthinkable.

This is not a new phenomenon in the history of science. In his remarkable book The Nature of Scientific Revolution, Thomas Kuhn explained the dialectical way in which science develops. At regular intervals scientists establish a paradigm that apparently explains everything. But at a certain point, small irregularities are found that contradict the accepted model. This eventually leads to its overthrow and replacement by a new model, which will itself eventually be surpassed.

The whole history of science is the history of humanity’s advance from ignorance to knowledge, from error to the truth. This is itself a dialectical process, where each generation arrives at a theory that explains many things. In this way, human knowledge penetrates deeper and deeper into the secrets of the Universe. And this process is never-ending.

The day will never dawn when humanity will be able to say: “We now understand everything”. The Universe is infinite, and so is the process of human understanding, which inevitably proceeds through a whole series of errors, or, more correctly, partial truths.

Dialectical materialism assumes that the Universe is infinite, eternal, and ever changing. This does not at all preclude the possibility of a big bang. Indeed, we have already argued that there have probably been many big bangs. But what it certainly does preclude is any question of matter (or energy, which is exactly the same thing) can be created out of nothing (as the big bang implies) or destroyed.

The Big Bang theory was an attempt to explain the history of the Universe on the basis of certain observed phenomena, in particular the fact that we can see the galaxies receding from each other. Because of this, most astronomers believe that these star groupings were closer together in the past. If we run the film backwards then all matter, space and time would have erupted from a point in a massive explosion, involving staggering amounts of energy.

In the most widely accepted cosmological model, called the inflationary model, the universe was born in an instantaneous creation of matter and energy. It is the modern equivalent of the old religious dogma of the creation of the world from nothing. The Big Bang is alleged to be the beginning of space, matter and time. As the universe has inflated since that event, matter and energy have spread out in clumps. The spreading could potentially continue forever.

The standard model presumes that the Big Bang is the beginning of space and time; that there was nothingness, and then suddenly out of nothingness there sprang space, time, matter, radiation and everything else. Questions about what happened "before" the Big Bang cannot really be asked because there is supposed to have been "no" before - since there was no time.

Since none of the known laws of physics could apply if we accept that matter, space and time did not exist, such a question would be meaningless. In this way, an absolute limitation is placed on the possibility of our understanding the Universe, thus leaving the door wide open for all kinds of mystical ideas – which have been pouring out in vast quantities in recent years.

Let us consider two sentences: “I do not know” and “I cannot know”. They are very different propositions! The first is obviously valid. There are very many things we do not know. But the history of science is the history of humankind’s progress from ignorance to knowledge (the word science comes from the Latin word meaning knowledge).

Once we accept that there is a limit to what we can know, we leave the door open to all kinds of religious mysticism and obscurantism. In the past it was religion that argued that there are certain corners of reality that are inaccessible to the human mind. These dark corners should better be left to religion and superstition. But the whole history of science answers this nonsense. What we do not know today we will know tomorrow.

It is really a monstrous aberration that for the first time in 2,500 years it is the scientists (some of them, anyway) who argued that the Big Bang represented an impassable barrier for science. No wonder the Vatican was so eager to embrace this theory. It left the door wide open for the Ju-Ju Man. As time has passed, however, the hypothesis has encountered many problems, casting doubt on its validity.

This model has gained widespread acceptance because it accounts for several important features we see in the Universe - such as why everything looks the same in all directions and the fact that the cosmos appears "flat" (parallel lines would never meet however long). When Reason in Revolt was published the theory appeared firmly entrenched and virtually unassailable. That was how things stood in 1995, but times change, and also scientific theories.

It is still the most widely accepted model only because no alternate has yet been found. But the fact that it is widely accepted does not make it correct. Scientific truth can never be established by consensus. If that were the case, no scientific advance would be possible, and we would still believe the Ptolemaic model of the universe, which after all served to explain many observed phenomena and enjoyed a very widespread consensus for hundreds of years.

Although the standard model has proved difficult to dislodge, over the past decade a growing number of scientists are becoming troubled about its contradictions and inconsistencies. The contradictions and deficiencies of the standard model are not small but glaring. The most obvious case is so-called “dark matter”, the existence of which is essential to the theory. Yet astronomers are unable to detect most of the matter in the universe.

There is an ever growing number of scientists are having second thoughts about the implications of the Big Bang theory. According to mathematical physicist Neil Turok, who teaches at Cambridge University, the Big Bang represents just one stage in an infinitely repeated cycle of universal expansion and contraction. Turok theorizes that neither time nor the universe has a beginning or end. He argues that there have been many Big Bangs, and there will be many more.

Turok has been attacked by the Vatican, which would seem to indicate he is probably on the right track. He won 2008's first annual TED Prize, awarded to the world's most innovative thinkers. Together with Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt he has published a book called Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang. I have not read the book and probably would not agree with everything in it, but it is certainly significant that a growing number of scientists are beginning to question the existing orthodoxy.

Even Sir Roger Penrose, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the theory ten years ago, has changed his mind about the Big Bang. He now imagines an eternal cycle of expanding universes where matter becomes energy and back again in the birth of new universes and so on and so on. One does not have to accept this idea to see what it means. Scientists can see that it is not possible to place a boundary on the universe, or to speak of a moment in which “time began” and all the other mystical nonsense that people have accepted as good coin for the last few decades.

We have argued consistently that the material universe has neither a beginning nor an end – it is infinite in both time and space. Matter (and energy, which is the same thing) can neither be created nor destroyed. The universe is infinite and eternal, with no beginning and no end. It is constantly in motion: changing, evolving, dying and being reborn. We can confidently predict that in the next couple of decades the dialectical view will be vindicated by the further march of science.

The dialectic of history

The most striking manifestation of dialectics is the crisis of capitalism itself. Dialectics are taking their revenge on the European bourgeoisie who have understood nothing, predicted nothing and are capable of solving nothing. Dialectics teaches us that sooner or later, things change into their opposite.

The old, stable, peaceful, prosperous Europe is dead, and with it the old peaceful, harmonious relations between the classes. The future of Europe will be one of years and decades of austerity, unemployment and falling living standards. That is a finished recipe for a revival of the class struggle everywhere. It is true that most people have not yet grasped the seriousness of the crisis. Consciousness is lagging far behind events. But that also will change into its opposite.

I recently saw a programme on television in which a scientist, standing in a baseball stadium in San Francisco, pointed out that he was standing immediately above the San Andreas Fault. The cracks in the walls of the stadium bore eloquent testimony to this fact. “The problem we have is that the plates are moving too slowly,” he said, which seemed rather surprising.

Surely it would be an even bigger problem if they moved more quickly? But no. The geologists have calculated the speed that the continents are moving. If the tectonic plates of the San Andreas Fault are moving at a slower pace, at a certain point they will have to catch up with a bang, which means a cataclysmic earthquake.

It is just the same with society. Human consciousness in general is very conservative. Most people do not like change, especially sudden, violent change. They will cling to the things they know and have got used to: the ideas, religion, institutions, morality, leaders and parties. Routine, habit and customs all lie like a leaden weight on the shoulders of humanity. For all these reasons consciousness lags behind events.

That is true, but at certain periods great events force man and women to question their old beliefs and assumptions. They are jolted out of the old supine, apathetic indifference and forced to come to terms with reality. In such periods consciousness can change very rapidly. That is what a revolution is. Just as the tectonic plates, having moved too slowly, compensate by a violent earthquake, so the lagging of consciousness behind events is compensated by sudden changes in the psychology of the masses. We have seen this process recently in Tunisia, Egypt, Spain and Greece.

Sadly, Ted Grant, my old friend, comrade and teacher will not see the publication of this Dutch translation nor did he see that of the second English edition. After a lifetime of tireless service to the cause of Marxism and the working class, he passed away at the ripe old age of 93.

Ted always had a passionate interest in Marxist theory, and philosophy in particular. He also followed all the developments of modern science very closely. In addition to the Financial Times and The Economist, he subscribed to The New Scientist, which he used to devour from cover to cover. He would often be infuriated by the mystical and idealist slant that some scientists gave to the discoveries of modern science. He would look up from the pages of his journal and shake his head in disbelief:

“These people confuse science with science fiction,” he would exclaim indignantly. There was one remark that struck me as particularly profound. He said that in the human mind, “matter has finally become conscious of itself”. A more beautiful way of expressing philosophical materialism would be difficult to imagine.

It is a matter of great satisfaction to me that in the last years of his life Ted could see the tremendous interest in our ideas that has been expressed in many countries. This does not mean, of course, that philosophy—any philosophy—must dictate to science, as did the Church in the Middle Ages, or as the bureaucracy in Stalinist Russia. Science has its own methods of investigation, observation and experiment, and must follow these and these alone. But scientists necessarily approach their subject matter with certain assumptions, of which they are usually unaware. These assumptions invariably have a philosophical character. Behind every hypothesis there are always many assumptions, not all of them derived from science itself.

In writing Reason in Revolt, I was deeply impressed by the fact that the discoveries of modern science furnish us with many more examples of the truth of dialectics than the examples that were available to Engels in the 19th century. The method of Marxism provides one with all the basic tools needed to analyse and understand living reality. Dialectical materialism allows us to study reality, not as a series of dry, unconnected, senseless events or “facts”, but as a dynamic process, driven by its internal contradictions, ever changing and with an infinitely rich content. Marxism is much more than a political doctrine, or a theory of economics. It is the philosophy of the future.

The ideas of Marxism have never been more relevant and necessary than at this time. The advanced workers and youth of Belgium, the Netherlands and the whole of Europe will rediscover these ideas and reclaim them for themselves. That is the only guarantee for the success of the struggle for socialism.

London, July 22^nd, 2011