NEW IN ENGLISH & SPALabor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The L

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

"TOWARD SOVIET AMERICA REVISITED!"

RAY O' LIGHT NEWSLETTER

November-December 2012
Number 75

From the Belly of the Beast


Publication of the Revolutionary Organization of Labor, USA

The 2012 U.S. Election Results:
The U.S. Empire Wins and We Lose

-Statement of the Revolutionary Organization of Labor, USA
   November 10, 2012-

The results are now in on the 2012 U.S. Election. Imperialist apologist George Will accurately summed it up, as follows: "A nation vocally disgusted with the status quo has reinforced it by ratifying existing control of the executive branch and both halves of the legislative branch." ("And the winner is: The status quo," Washington Post, 11-7-12)

Will pointed out that the voters are worse off than they were when Obama entered office; they have less net worth; they have less income and official unemployment has been more than eight percent in forty-three months under Obama, more months than the total under all eleven previous presidents over the past sixty years combined. "Yet voters preferred the president who presided over this to a Republican who … made his economic expertise his presidential credential," said Will. (Will could have added many other seemingly contradictory facts, including: that Obama beat Romney, the supposed candidate of the rich, in eight of the ten wealthiest counties in the USA, and that, compared to his 2008 election contest with John McCain, there was a sharp increase in Obama's share of the important Latino vote which climbed to 70% against Romney, despite the fact that the Obama Regime more than doubled the deportations of Latino immigrants from the Bush years!) Will points out, compellingly, that the voters in this same election "ratified Republican control of the House, keeping in place those excoriated as obstructionists by the president the voters retained." (ibid.)

Will, the reactionary, appears baffled by the seeming contradictions in the 2012 voters decision-making. This is because he, like all the U.S. imperialist-sponsored pundits, frames the political scene in the USA as a "battle" between the Republicans and Democrats.

These election results become quite understandable, however, when we take into account two important facts: First, political rule on behalf of Wall Street finance capital, the ruling class of the USA, is carried out by the "Republicrats." The Democratic and Republican Parties (some tea party forces excluded) operate, they fight and cooperate, as a dialectically intertwined single force in defense of the U.S. Empire at home and abroad. The clearest indication of this fact in the 2012 campaign was the content of the third televised presidential debate between Obama and Romney in which their political unity on virtually every foreign policy issue regarding war and diplomacy, and the strategic military and economic interests of U.S. imperialism was unmistakable.

Secondly, this was the first U.S. election conducted during the Citizens United era of unlimited, untraceable corporate cash. A whopping six billion dollars was spent, mostly by Corporate America and Wall Street finance capital, the U.S. monopoly capitalist and imperialist ruling class. And they got what they paid for. For there was no political fall-out, no sweeping out of either the incumbent Congress, with its record low popularity, or the incumbent president, presiding over the ongoing economic crisis plaguing the 99%, because of their "Republicrat" bail-outs of Wall Street, their failure to provide any relief for Main Street, and their ongoing efforts to increase their austerity measures aimed against the 99% of us, and especially against the U.S. working class and oppressed nationalities. Watch out for the "fiscal cliff" negotiations and revival and implementation of Obama's bipartisan (i.e. Republicrat) Simpson-Bowles Commission austerity plan recommendations in 2013!

From these election results it should be crystal clear that New Jersey's Larry Hamm, leader of Peoples Organization for Progress (POP), had it right when he said six months ago, "The most important day of the 2012 election season will be the day after the election. We'll need to be out in the streets demanding decent jobs and homes, etc. …" On the eve of the 2012 election, brother Hamm and POP announced: "On November 13th we will march to demand a national jobs program, a moratorium on home foreclosures, universal health care for all, an end to student debt, and the immediate return of all U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan." According to brother Hamm, the November 13th New Jersey demonstration will make a call for a National March for Jobs in Washington, DC.

Across the USA, we should follow the good example of New Jersey POP in the days ahead as well as respond to their call. Mass protest actions against the "Republicrat" austerity measures through which the Wall Street finance capitalists want to permanently place the burden of their capitalist economic crisis on the shoulders of the workers and oppressed nationalities of the USA are vital to our survival.

— But they are not sufficient. Short run resistance to the monopoly capitalist and imperialist offensive, to its unrelenting effort to place and keep the burden of the world-wide capitalist economic crisis on the shoulders of the workers and oppressed, can only be effective when it is dialectically interconnected with the long run aim of socialist revolution. We need only recall the rich revolutionary experience of the workers throughout the USA and the world during the 1930's and the last great capitalist economic depression to recognize this truth. On this 95th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia let us reclaim the marvelous legacy of the Soviet Union that grew, flourished and prospered while surrounded by a hostile capitalist world engulfed in and paralyzed by the economic crisis in the Great Depression, the Soviet Union whose legendary heroism played the decisive role in the defeat of fascism in World War II. For this Soviet legacy contains the path forward for the working people of the USA and the world out of the jungle of capitalist enslavement.


 



On the 95th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution

TOWARD SOVIET AMERICA REVISITED!

by RAY LIGHT

The 2012 U.S. presidential election campaign has been held in the midst of what even the most hardcore U.S. imperialist apologists have admitted is the worst and most persistent economic crisis in the USA since the Great Depression of the 1930's. Immediately after the crisis became acute in the Fall of 2008, the "Republicrat" government began its massive bail out and rescue of the Wall Street ruling financial oligarchy, first under President George W. Bush and ever since then under President Barack Obama. Under Bush and Obama, not one criminal Wall Street banker has been charged with a crime, let alone convicted and imprisoned. And this same imperialist government has refused to provide relief to the hard-pressed masses of the working class and the shrinking middle class even four years later. Instead, increasingly, austerity measures are being introduced against the 99% of us straining under the yoke of the dictatorship of Wall Street finance capital.

Nevertheless, initially, and for much of this period, the only significant political mass mobilization of the angry mass response to the monopoly capitalist-dominated U.S. government took place among the ruined petty bourgeois small businesspeople and other increasingly desperate middle class folks as they were organized by right-wing, semi-fascist forces into a variety of reactionary "tea party" groups around the country.

Finally, in February 2011, inspired by the Arab Spring and by the massive working class resistance throughout Southern Europe to European Union-dictated austerity measures, a powerful public sector union-led occupation of the Wisconsin State House broke out in response to an all-out assault on collective bargaining by newly elected tea party Governor Scott Walker. It was followed by militant actions and effective electoral referenda work of organized labor in neighboring Mid Western states including Ohio.  In September of 2011, working people and distressed youth and elderly folks began to come together spontaneously in "Occupy" groups across the USA, beginning with the very positive Occupy Wall Street initiative in New York City. Thus, thousands of U.S. workers and tens of thousands of unemployed, underemployed (including college youth saddled with heavy student loan debt), those without health care, the homeless and those on the verge of being homeless, finally began to express some anger and outrage directed politically at various branches and sectors of the U.S. government and at the Wall Street ruling class.

Unfortunately, since then, while the conditions of the U.S. working class and the poor have continued to deteriorate, this progressive mass motion has been undermined, disrupted and diverted into "toothless" electoral activity around the 2012 Presidential campaign (in support of Obama and the Democratic Party) for most of this year.* That is, until now.

* One exception was the brief but explosive USA-wide mass protest demanding that the murderer of Trayvon Martin, a clearly innocent Afro-American youth, be arrested.

With not much more than a month left in the campaign, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), aroused and mobilized by a Black woman-led militant and democratic union leadership core, with impressively strong backing of parents and the Chicago labor community, launched and won a daring strike to defend public school education and their students as well as their own working and living standards. What made this strike all the more noteworthy is that, while the national leadership of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and of the entire AFL-CIO has been pressuring the CTU membership to support the Democratic Party and its candidates, the main adversary and target of their strike was one of the most powerful Democratic Party personages, Chicago Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's first chief of staff and one of his closest political friends!

The Chicago teachers' bold and well organized strike has, in turn, inspired Walmart workers in Illinois and elsewhere to dare to begin to take on that global giant retailer, a monster corporation more powerful than many governments. Walmart worker protests are continuing to spread across the USA as we write these words.

But all these mass protests, strikes and organizing drives will lead nowhere over the long run without a political break with the Democratic Party — a political break with U.S. monopoly capitalism and imperialism. What is most seriously missing and needed in the current U.S. situation is the presence of a substantial communist party connected to all these "green shoots" of working class, unemployed and underemployed youth and oppressed nationality rebellion and connected to a vibrant, revolutionary international communist movementactively working toward the goal of replacing moribund, destructive capitalism with a bright and beautiful socialist future for toiling humanity.

The aim of this article is two-fold. First, is to make clear the nature of the current U.S. monopoly capitalist and imperialist offensive against the workers and oppressed peoples within the USA. The goal of this Wall Street drive to further impoverish the 99% of us, is to place and keep the burden of the world-wide capitalist economic crisis on the shoulders of the workers and oppressed. Indeed, in our previous issue, I asserted that the 2012 Presidential Election in the USA, rather than being about Romney versus Obama, Democrats versus Republicans, etc. has been mainly concerned "about positioning the U.S. government so as to give it the best chance for implementing a most severe austerity program against the 99% of the people of the USA in its desperate effort to save the U.S. monopoly capitalist and imperialist ruling class and, if possible, to preserve its hegemonic position in the world capitalist system. This requires that the government lead the effort to impoverish the people of the USA, U.S. society, deepening the basis for the super-exploitation of the workers and oppressed nationality people within the U.S. multinational state." ("The Declining U.S. Empire and the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election," Ray O' Light Newsletter #74, September-October 2012)

The conclusion from this first point is that the working people in the USA have no choice but to militantly resist the Wall Street finance capitalist ruling class and its "Republicrat" imperialist state apparatus.

The second point is to establish the fact thatshort run resistance to the monopoly capitalist and imperialist offensive, to its unrelenting effort to place and keep the burden of the world-wide capitalist economic crisis on the shoulders of the workers and oppressed, can only be effective when it is dialectically interconnected with the long run aim of socialist revolution. And the conclusion we hope you draw from this article is that the socialist revolution is not only good and necessary for working class and oppressed nationality folks like us but that the struggle for socialism is such a noble and realizable aim that you become inspired to "get on board."



At this point it is worth recalling that, as the world capitalist economy, including the U.S. capitalist economy in particular, was collapsing in 2008, Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, declared: "This is no time to experiment with Socialism."  Such has been the weak and bankrupt state of the U.S. and international communist and workers movement in recent years that her ignorant and counterrevolutionary statement went virtually unchallenged!

Indeed, Sarah Palin's position is supported in the 2012 election campaign period by arguably the most "left-wing" Democratic Party functionary of this period, Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor in the first Clinton Administration. The current issue of The Progressive (November 2012) contains a substantial interview with the "left progressive" Reich. After boldly exposing Obama as a "Rockefeller Republican," thus ridiculing the Republican Right's accusation that Obama is a "socialist" but also unwittingly exposing the bankruptcy of most of the U.S. left (for their support of Obama) at the same time, Reich makes clear his own anti-socialist viewpoint. Reich asserts that, "it's not a matter of capitalism versus socialism or capitalism versus communism. There are no other isms in the world [other than capitalism]. There never really were. Russia was not a communist state. It was a totalitarian state. European socialism was really European democratic socialism … not really socialism." (My emphasis)



Soviet Union Coat of Arms

This year the U.S. presidential election takes place on November 6th, the day before the 95th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia. So it is fitting that we expose "the Big Lie" of Palin-Reich and the "Republicrats" as we commemorate the earth-shaking revolution's anniversary. This great proletarian revolution led to the creation of the magnificent Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) with its unprecedented successes in turning that prison-house of nations into the model for solving the problem of nationalities living together in peace and harmony. The Soviet Communist Party, while still under Lenin's leadership, as part of the consolidation of the USSR, led in the establishment of the Communist International (Comintern) that inspired the creation of revolutionary communist parties all over the world.

The USSR, under the leadership of Stalin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made the decisive contribution to the defeat of world fascism in World War II, ushering in a period of unprecedented flowering of political independence for oppressed peoples throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, crowned by the victorious Chinese national democratic revolution, and the establishment of a Socialist Camp that rivaled the imperialist world capitalist camp in its size and scope. Finally, perhaps even more buried than these gigantic achievements, were the unprecedented economic, social and cultural accomplishments of the Soviet people in developing the USSR from a backward to an advanced country in little more than a generation. Even more striking, most of this was accomplished while the rest of the world, the capitalist world, was mired in the Great Depression.

Among so many other significant contributions to world proletarian revolution, the victorious Russian Revolution inspired the creation of the Communist Party of the USA and drew the veteran Irish-American militant working class leader, William Z. Foster, into the ranks of world communism.*

* Foster was widely known, even before the founding of the CPUSA, because of his outstanding leadership of important national strikes in the meatpacking and steel industries during and just after World War I. Thus he was already deeply feared by Corporate America as well as its labor stooges, the bankrupt AFL top leaders (from Gompers to Woll to Green).

Eighty years ago, in 1932, in the first U.S. presidential election during the Great Depression, William Z. Foster was nominated as the Communist Party candidate for President of the USA.* With the strength of their connections to the Comintern, Foster and the CPUSA were already widely seen as the outstanding champions of the unemployed and the impoverished masses of the USA.**

* His Vice Presidential running mate was veteran Afro-American communist James Ford – in 1932, in the teeth of U.S. apartheid!

** The Communist International (Comintern) resolved to hold "International Unemployment Day" demonstrations all over the world on March 6, 1930. In the USA, it became "the first major protest demonstration of the Depression years," as thirty-five thousand workers, led by Foster, marched in the face of the New York City police and spectacular demonstrations of the unemployed were held in other large cities across the USA as well. As the CPUSA's most prominent leader, Foster was arrested that day in New York and was sent to prison for more than six months.

The small and weak proletarian revolutionary forces in the USA today as well as the working class and oppressed nationalities in this country are currently experiencing the first U.S. presidential election in the midst of the most acute capitalist economic crisis since that great depression. And this current crisis, showing no signs of resolving or being overcome anytime soon, could yet become an even deeper and more intractable crisis than the Great Depression.


William Z. Foster

In the lead-up to the 1932 election campaign, to cultivate and take advantage of the renewed interest in the Communist Party's program and practice among hard-pressed working people in the Depression-ridden USA, Foster wrote a book, entitled, Toward Soviet America. "Its central purpose is to explain to the oppressed and exploited masses of workers and poor farmers how, under the leadership of the Communist Party, they can best protect themselves now, and in due season cut their way out of the capitalist jungle to socialism." (p. vi) 

In light of the fact that there is today no genuine and militant communist party in the USA with significant influence among the working class and the oppressed masses and linked to a vibrant international communist movement, I am revisiting Foster's Toward Soviet America with the hope that this eighty year old CPUSA book and political experience will help us find our way back to the winning ways of our now distant past.

Foster outlined the Party's approach to the Capitalist Economic Depression and why and how the U.S. working class needed to take the revolutionary path out of the crisis. Essential to Foster's argument were the undeniable, unprecedented accomplishments of the first 14 years of the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR. And, by 1932, these marvelous Soviet accomplishments were in stark contrast to the rest of the world, mired in the misery of the world capitalist economic crisis, the Great Depression! Thus, Foster opens Chapter I with the following: "The most striking and significant political and social fact in the world today is the glaring contrast between the industrial, political and social conditions prevailing in the capitalist countries and those obtaining in the Soviet Union." (ibid., p. 1) 

In this chapter, entitled, "The Decline of Capitalism," Foster documents the unprecedented rapid decline in business, trade and industrial activity, the closing of banks, retail stores, bankruptcies of cities and towns. He states: "Since the onset of the present economic crisis, American workers and poor farmers, through unemployment, part-time work, wage-cuts, reduced prices for agricultural products, tax increases, etc. have suffered a general decline in their living standards of at least 50%." "The standards of living of the producing masses have declined catastrophically, mass starvation existing in every capitalist country, including the United States." (ibid.) This result is due to the fact, as Foster explains, that, "Throughout capitalism the policy of the ruling class is to try to find a way out of the crisis by throwing its burden upon the shoulders of the working class, the poor farmers and the lower sections of the city petty bourgeoisie." (ibid., p. 7)

After surveying the capitalist offensive throughout Europe featuring wage cuts and reduction of unemployment benefits and social insurance generally, Foster describes the crisis of famine in China and India and the health crisis in Brazil. Foster concludes: "The world over, the bankrupt capitalist system is physically destroying the producing masses … All this is a picture of a society in decay. Great mills and factories standing idle and warehouses piled full of goods, while millions of toilers starve and lack the necessities of life … never until capitalism appeared upon the world scene was such an anomaly possible – starvation in the midst of plenty … it is a crime against the human race."  (ibid., pp. 14 & 15)

The remainder of Chapter I features an astute Marxist analysis of the basic ingredients that made the Great Depression not just another cyclical crisis that capitalism had experienced for generations, but a general crisis of capitalism. These ingredients include:

a) overexpansion of industry – for example, the U.S. auto industry with an estimated yearly capacity of ten million cars was at 20% capacity the year he wrote the book [in the current crisis: the Obama-led bail out of the over-extended auto industry featured drastic worsening of auto workers' wages and working conditions];

b) chronic industrial stagnation, especially of older industries such as shipbuilding, coal and textiles, a problem that plagued older industries in all the capitalist countries [replicated today when the only growth industries are in new age computer-related industries, robotics, etc.];

c) permanent mass unemployment – during the boom period of the 1920's there were still three million U.S. unemployed [in the post World War II period, U.S. economists created the "discouraged worker" category that made millions of long term unemployed statistically disappear when they became too discouraged to look for work];

d) choking of international trade – with "the tendency for each capitalist country to wall itself off from the commerce of the others" [in the current crisis there are increasing suits filed in the World Trade Organization and elsewhere by the USA, China, the EU and other global powers against each other's anti-competitive maneuvers]; 

e) breakdown of the medium of exchange – "more than half the capitalist world off the gold standard" "with various systems of inflating the currency in effect" [in 1971, Nixon took the USA off the gold standard and made the dollar the dominant medium of exchange, on the basis of the hegemonic military, political and economic power of U.S. imperialism; in this crisis period the U.S. government has engaged in "quantitative easing," deflating the value of the currency by printing more dollars and making those in possession of current dollars such as the Chinese and Japanese creditors less wealthy];

f) "the development of fascism in various forms in all capitalist countries" [in the current crisis in the USA – the scapegoating of Latino immigrants and the proliferation of anti-immigrant laws in Arizona and elsewhere, the proliferation of white supremacist vigilante organizations, and the tea party-Republican-led effort to "take back" the United States from the non-whites, the increasingly ignorant, vicious and open attacks on the status of women, and the increasingly repressive domestic laws such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the National Defense Authorization Act];

g) the birth of a new world social system – with the rise of the USSR, capitalism has lost territorially one-sixth of the territory of the globe "and is rapidly losing more to the Chinese Soviets …" (these excerpts quoted from pp. 33-40) [point g is the one big difference between the Depression-era global environment described by comrade Foster and the current global situation when the vibrant, expanding Socialist Camp established on the basis of the Soviet-led victory over global fascism in World War II has disintegrated, as the victorious Chinese Revolution of 1949 never proceeded to the socialist stage by advancing back to Chinese Soviets when the conditions had arrived to do so and the Soviet Union itself degenerated to a point where it could be openly replaced by capitalism.] 

As indicated above, this chapter has such a familiar ring to it for those of us experiencing today's economic crisis in the USA. As another example, in the first few years of the current crisis, we had taken note of the fact that just about every day bourgeois political and economic "experts" claimed that the worst was over; there was good news on the jobs front; sales were up, etc. etc. Such pieces of "good news" are now called "green shoots" and putting a positive "spin" on the crisis is considered a patriotic duty by the media folks fronting for the U.S. monopoly capitalist ruling class and its bankrupt system. Eighty years ago, Foster described "the cultivation of prosperity illusions" as "one of the principal methods of the capitalists to break the resistance of the workers against wage-cuts, starvation, relief systems, etc." (ibid., pp. 18 & 19)  In this regard, Foster quotes U.S. President Herbert Hoover's ludicrous assertion (just two days after the great CPUSA-led national demonstration of the unemployed exploded across the country on March 6, 1930) that, "The depression will be over in 60 days." 

Foster concludes this chapter with the following: "Capitalism has created the objective conditions for Socialism. But it can go no further. It cannot carry society to higher stages of development, to Socialism and Communism; it has become an obstacle in the upward path of humanity, a means of condemning hundreds of millions of people to mass starvation and death. History will soon sweep aside this obsolete system." (ibid., pp. 69-70) But Foster also warns: "Where there is no strong revolutionary movement the capitalists will find a way out at the expense of the toiling masses; that is, the economic crisis, following the laws of cyclical crises, will eventually wear itself out by reducing production, slashing prices and wages and drastically reducing the living standards of the masses."(ibid., p. 68)

Chapter II is entitled "The Rise of Socialism." Foster cites the 22% to 25% yearly increase in the USSR's industrial production as never before seen in history. The best average achieved by the USA, from 1870 to 1890, was 8.3%. Writing for The Nation magazine, never known as a communist journal, Louis Fischer is quoted by Foster as follows: "The Soviet frontier is like a charmed circle which the world economic crisis cannot cross. While banks crash, while production falls and trade languishes abroad, the Soviet Union continues in an orgy of construction and national development. The scale and speed of its progress are unprecedented." (The Nation, 11-25-31)

The "right to work" established in the USSR was no empty gesture as unemployment was eliminated. Already by 1932 there was a seven hour day and five day work week. Workers on disability received full wages. There was a concerted and effective campaign to wipe out illiteracy and already the USSR was the biggest publisher of books in the world, ensuring that the Soviet population would be well informed. As the hard-core working class leader Foster put it, "Under Socialism wages are as high as the total economy will permit; under capitalism they are as low as the workers can be compelled to accept." (Toward Soviet America, p. 101) According to Foster, "the wages of Russian workers are now about double what they were before the revolution … in contrast to rapid wage declines in all capitalist countries." (ibid.)

Moreover, at a time [1932] when virtually no Afro-Americans could vote in the Southern USA and millions of northern workers in the industrial heartland were immigrants whose right to vote was being denied wherever possible, "citizenship in the Soviet democracy is based upon work … whoever works can vote … [with] no qualifications of sex, nationality, residence, etc." In direct contradiction to today's "prevailing wisdom" that Soviet or socialist society was a liberal welfare state without a healthy work ethic, Foster explained that "The dictatorship of the proletariat, unlike the capitalist dictatorship, makes no pretenses of being an all-class democracy, a democracy of both exploiters and exploited. It is frankly a democracy of the toiling masses, directed against the exploiters. Its freedom is only for useful producers, not for social parasites." (Ibid., p. 134, my emphasis)

Foster exposed how the workers and poor peasants of the Soviet Union decisively answered the "left" and right opportunist critics of the building of socialism inside and outside of the USSR, in the first place with their heroic labor. At the time of his writing of this book, the first great Five Year Plan, which western imperialist experts and social democrats had laughed at as an unreachable goal, had already been completed — a year ahead of schedule!

Lenin had taught that, "The Soviet democracy consists of workers organized so informally that for the first time the people as a whole are learning to govern." (Cited by Foster (p. 139) from "Soviets at Work") In this connection, says Foster, "the Russian workers and peasants have built up the most gigantic mass organizations in human history." Among the most important of these organizations, Foster lists the "communist organizations proper (the Party, the Youth and the Pioneers [children])" with about 15 million members, the trade unions with 17 million members, and the consumers coops with 70 million. In addition, there were many huge organizations for culture, sport, defense, aviation, etc. containing scores of millions more. Finally, he lists "the Soviet electorate of 85 million voters, the largest in the world." Foster refers to these mass organizations as "the very backbone of the whole Soviet system." (ibid., pp. 139-140)

No wonder the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik) had grown seven-fold (from 440,000 members to 2.8 million members) in the eight years since Lenin's death. For the Communist Party was then the leader and organizer of the proletarian dictatorship ushering in the bright future of socialism and communism. 

Chapter III is entitled, "Capitalist Attempts to Liquidate the Crisis." Among the futile efforts of the U.S. monopoly capitalists and imperialists to solve the economic crisis of the Great Depression many of the same maneuvers used then are again being foisted upon the working class today. Foster describes the introduction of intensified speed-up, greater efficiency and productivity. Today, these not-so-modern "techniques" have helped to generate what the Obama Regime and the Republicrat Congress have demagogically spoken of as the "jobless recovery." With these "techniques," the working class and especially the working poor continue to experience chronic and epidemic unemployment and underemployment as well as pay cuts, while Wall Street has experienced near record profits.

Likewise, Foster discusses the efforts by the trusts and cartels to boost their profits by destroying huge sections of their commodity production. He gives examples of one hundred thousand gallons of milk dumped into a river in Oakland, California and similar efforts with salmon in Alaska, as well as the destruction of cabbage and eggs to keep them off the market. Because these concentrated capitalist combinations stimulate production in the midst of a crisis of overproduction (where the working people cannot buy back what they have already produced because they are systematically shortchanged when they exchange their living labor for a wage from the capitalist), the trusts and cartels only aggravate the crisis. This is also the underlying problem with efforts at state capitalism or planned capitalist economy. In the current crisis, the several trillions of dollars of our tax money used by Bush and Obama to bail out Wall Street did not result in the recipient financial institutions making loans to small businesses and new mortgage buyers. Instead, it was used to buy up distressed companies and further consolidate and concentrate U.S. finance capital.

In addition, Foster exposed quite thoroughly the fact that the treacherous main leadership of the American Federation of Labor (Green, Woll and company) was an integral part of the monopolists' attempts to get out of the crisis. "Their support of the rationalization of industry is part of the speed-up program of the bosses. Their systematic betrayal of the Negroes, women and young workers dovetails into the employers' special exploitation of these sections of the workers." At their worst when dealing with the key Depression-era issue of unemployment, Foster cites the 1931 AFL Convention held in Vancouver that reaffirmed the existing policy opposing unemployment insurance for the working class in the USA such as was already provided in Great Britain and Germany! Foster said that the AFL's rank and file members supported unemployment relief and that "the AFL Convention which could adopt such a decision was made up of 90% high-paid officials; the workers had no voice or representation."

Unemployment relief is a concrete demand that was won under the leadership of Foster and the CPUSA during the Great Depression and the only significant benefit that U.S. workers have had in this current crisis. But the treacherous role of the current AFL-CIO leadership (so similar to that AFL leadership eighty years ago as described by Foster) has been crucial to the fact that there has been so little militant trade union resistance to the Wall Street bailouts made by the current Republicrat government and to the mortgage foreclosures, wage cuts, layoffs, education cuts, et al. that have ravaged the 99% of us.

So Foster's description of the U.S. monopoly capitalist ruling class efforts to escape the economic crisis of its own making through speed-up, greater efficiency and productivity, through trusts, cartels and tax-payer subsidized state monopoly capitalism and through the treachery of the top leaders of the trade union movement have much in common with efforts of the U.S. ruling class to do so today.

Chapter IV is entitled, "The Revolutionary Way Out of the Crisis." Here, among other things, Foster presents "The Communist Party Program of Immediate Demands." He explains that "the Party bases its immediate struggle upon partial demands corresponding to the most urgent necessities of the toiling masses."

Foster then states: "The most important of these demands are concentrated in the Party's 1932 election platform, as follows:

1.   UNEMPLOYMENT AND SOCIAL INSURANCE AT THE EXPENSE OF THE STATE AND EMPLOYERS.

2.   Against Hoover's wage-cutting policy.

3.   Emergency relief, without restrictions by the government and banks, for the poor farmers, exemption of poor farmers from taxes, and from forced collection of debts.

4.   Equal rights for the Negroes, and self-determination for the Black Belt.

5.   Against capitalist terror; against all forms of suppression of the political rights of the workers.

6.   Against imperialist war; for defense of the Chinese people and of the Soviet Union." (ibid., pp. 247, 248)

Foster made a detailed, well thought out explanation of each of these demands and the militant struggle that would be required to win these demands. This was a serious communist party with deep connections to the U.S. and international working class. Its serious and battle-tested leader, William Z. Foster, explained many of the challenges facing the communist movement in the USA on the revolutionary road out of the crisis. Foster observed that, "… on the surface of things, the workers of the United States are the most conservative of any great industrial country. This is primarily because, living in the land of the most powerful and rapidly rising imperialism, their standards of living have been somewhat higher than those in other countries. Besides, their class consciousness has been greatly hindered by the so-called democratic traditions in the United States, harking back to the days of free land." (ibid., p. 260) Foster also points to "the lack of homogeneity among the workers – many races, many nationalities, many traditions" and the unparalleled flood of propaganda "through countless newspapers, schools, churches, labor leaders, politicians, radios, motion pictures, etc." by which the capitalists exploited all these factors.

Despite all these challenges, Foster believed that, while large numbers of these conservative U.S. workers would fall victim to social reformism "…hence, the great danger of the Socialist Party and the A.F. of L. leadership … ," he was optimistic. He felt that "the conservative American workers did not have to pass through a stage of social reformism before they will accept the Communist program." According to Foster, already in 1932, "experience already amply demonstrates that the Communist party, with its program of partial demands and united front policy, coupled with its ultimate revolutionary objectives, can and does successfully mobilize masses of these workers just breaking from the two old parties." (ibid., p. 266)

 


Foster understood that "the capitalists, in the midst of the sharpening general crisis of capitalism, are determined to force the living standards of American toilers down to European levels or lower." As a result, he believed, "The workers will respond to this offensive by increasing class consciousness and mass struggle. More and more they will turn to the Communist party for leadership … The working class of this country will tread the path of the workers of the world, to the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a Soviet government."  (ibid., p. 267)

Chapter V is entitled "The United Soviet States of America." Comrade Foster opens with this profound observation: "The Marxian principle holds true that the prevailing mode of production and exchange determines the character of the general organization of a given society. Thus the pioneer British capitalist society, based upon the private ownership of industry and the exploitation of the workers, forecast the type which, with only minor variations, came later to be developed by the whole capitalist world. Its parliamentary democracy, rampant patriotism, robot-like education of the masses, reformist trade unionism, etc. fitted naturally into the capitalist scheme of things everywhere. By the same principle, the Soviet Union now forecasts the general outlines of the new social order that the world is approaching." (ibid., p. 268)*

* The authoritative History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik) describes the emergence of the Soviets, as follows: "… in the fire of the struggle against tsardom, the revolutionary creative initiative of the working-class masses forged a new and powerful weapon – the Soviets of Workers' Deputies. The Soviets of Workers' Deputies – which were assemblies of delegates from all mills and factories – represented a type of mass political organization of the working class which the world had never seen before. The Soviets that first arose in 1905 were the prototype of the Soviet power which the proletariat, led by the Bolshevik Party, set up in 1917. ... They were set up exclusively by the revolutionary sections of the population, in defiance of all laws and prescripts of tsardom. They were a manifestation of the independent action of the people who were rising to fight tsardom. The Bolsheviks regarded the Soviets as the embryo of revolutionary power." (p. 79)

Foster continues, "From capitalism to Communism, through the intermediary stage of Socialism; that is the way American society, like society in general, is headed. It represents the main line of march of the human race to the next higher social stage in its historical advance. It is the trend to which all the economic, political and social forces of today are contributing." (ibid., p. 269) "A Soviet government will provide the workers and poor farmers with the political instrument necessary to defend their interests. The whole purpose of such a government will be to advance the welfare of those who do useful work." (ibid., p. 275)

There are so many wonderfully enlightened political expressions in this final and most speculative chapter in the book. For example, Foster, in 1932, is projecting that the United Soviet States of America (USSA) will provide free medical care in the USA with the emphasis on healthful living.* Compare this to the current U.S. obesity epidemic largely generated by the monopoly fast food restaurants, and soft drink corporations, etc. He discusses the need for the USSA to eliminate the adulteration of our food, decades before genetically modified crops. He sees the value of the USSA eliminating congestion in cities through urban planning. He expressed similarly enlightened views on crime and incarceration, eliminating Prohibition and making the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages as well as education against excessive drinking all the responsibility of the socialist state.

* Of course, the USSR was then the first and only country to have universal free medical care.

With regard to the capitalist charges about "forced labor" in the USSR, Foster exposes the fact that "forced labor is native to capitalism, not Socialism. The whole Socialist system is utterly antagonistic to any enslavement of the workers."  (ibid., p. 330) Among other things, Foster cites a newspaper quote from R.T. Rainey, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives asserting that, "Labor is freer in Russia than in any other country in the world." (New York World-Telegram, 4-8-32) With regard to the wages received by the leaders of the ruling Communist party in the USSR, Foster observes: "Besides the revolutionary enthusiasm and initiative of the masses and many other indications already present of the eventual wageless system, there is the 'Party maximum.' That is, the members of the Communist party have a set wage limit above which they cannot go. Thus Stalin gets the same wages as many hundreds of thousands of other workers and much less than large numbers of non-Party mechanics and engineers." (ibid., p. 331)

Finally, Foster addresses the issue of Collectivism and Individualism. "Defenders of capitalism declare that Socialism destroys individualism … They mean that the anti-social individualism of capitalism will go. Under Socialism no one will have the right to exploit another; no longer will a profit-hungry employer be able to shut his factory gates and sentence thousands to starvation; no more will it be possible for a little clique of capitalists  and their political henchmen to plunge the world into a blood-bath of war. Yes, such deadly individualism is doomed. But the revolution will create in its stead a new and better development of the individual. The collectivist society of Socialism, by freeing the masses from economic and political slavery will, for the first time in history, give the masses an opportunity to fully develop and express their personalities." (ibid., p. 333)

In this spirit of collectivism, let's pause to reflect on where the people of the USA are in the aftermath of the lose-lose 2012 U.S. Election season. Carl Sandburg's epic poem, The People Yes, has insight and encouragement for us.

Excerpt from The People Yes by Carl Sandburg

"The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
    They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
     The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
     You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
  ...

The people know the salt of the sea
    and the strength of the winds
    lashing the corners of the earth.
    The people take the earth
    as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
    Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
    They are in tune and step
    with constellations of universal law.
  ...

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
    the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march:
     'Where to? What next?'"



Some concluding thoughts about Toward Soviet America

1)   Toward Soviet America reads extremely well, even with eighty years of historical hindsight. The imperialist powers' war preparations directed against the USSR and the rising Chinese revolution as described in the book was key to the outbreak of World War II. Indeed, the world capitalist system only recovered from the Great Depression on the basis of the incredibly destructive and bloody World War that cost sixty million lives, including almost thirty million Soviet citizens. The menace of fascism was real and the German fascist war machine's invasion of the USSR, in June of 1941, was arguably the most powerful and brutal such invasion in modern history. And it took legendary heroism and sacrifice on the part of the Soviet people and the Red Army under the leadership of Stalin and the CPSU(B) to militarily defeat Nazi Germany. The terrible toll of the war left the Soviet Party and people with more of an orientation toward peace than revolution, a weak strategic position from which to deal with predatory U.S. and international imperialism. And neither the Eastern European democracies (other than Socialist Albania) nor China, Korea and Vietnam ever actively reached for the goal of developing Soviet power in their countries thereafter.

2)   I found only one significant political weakness in the book, Foster's use of the concept of "social fascism" as a substitute for "social democracy." This was no doubt a reflection of the left sectarian tendency during the Cominern's Sixth Congress to rely so much on the mighty USSR that communists around the world were under the illusion that they did not have to seek allies in the struggle against capital. To overstate the reactionary character of social democracy in the short run by calling it "fascist" meant to abdicate our communist responsibility to unite the proletarian and peoples forces to the maximum while isolating the enemy to the maximum. It served to hand over large sections of the masses to the enemy. Indeed, from 1924 on, the CPUSA had run its own presidential candidate, Foster himself.  And Foster had recognized, especially in 1924, that the CPUSA had unnecessarily isolated itself from its previous allies in and around the labor movement, important labor people such as Debs and John Fitzpatrick, as well as the Farmer-Labor Party, the LaFollette movement, etc. by running its own slate. 

For the purposes of this revisit to Toward Soviet America, however, I believe the most compelling point is just how spectacularly successful the Soviet Union itself was in such a short period of time. This proletarian truth is completely contrary to the conventional wisdom of the pathetically weak, social pacifist and social chauvinist social democratic U.S. left today and various Trotskyite, revisionist and reformist NGO forces around the world that the Soviet Union was a "failed project" which should be permanently abandoned. The incredible success of the USSR is reflected in every page of Toward Soviet America. And, in reality the emergence and persistence of this left sectarian error, not only on the part of the CPUSA but of communist parties all over the world that were connected to the mighty USSR, reflected this truth as well.

In order to correct this error, in 1935 the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) under the leadership of the legendary anti-Nazi Bulgarian Communist hero, Georgi Dimitrov, charted a "united front (with social democracy) against fascism" strategic corrective of what Dimitrov referred to as "self-satisfied sectarianism."  The Seventh Congress "rightist" correction of the left errors of the Sixth Congress period never had the opportunity to be recalibrated by an Eighth Congress since the Comintern was dissolved in 1943 and never reestablished in the post World War II period.

3)   In Toward Soviet America, Comrade Foster reports that, on the 14th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia, November 7, 1931, a Provisional Chinese Soviet government was organized with 70 million people living in the territory where the Chinese Soviets held power. Comrade Foster believed that, "It was largely the fear of the growing Chinese revolution, its tremendous effect upon the vast millions of Asia, the danger of a great Russian-Chinese Soviet Union, that determined the imperialists upon their present war to partition China and to lay the basis for an attack upon the Soviet Union." (Toward Soviet America, p. 60, my emphasis)

In 1935, at the same time that Mao Tse-tung came into Chinese Communist Party leadership, and the "right" correction of the Comintern Sixth Congress line was implemented all over the world, the Chinese Communist Party, implementing the "united front against fascism" line, abandoned the goal of a "Soviet China" in favor of a "Peoples Republic." Even in all the more than six decades since the world-historic victory of the Chinese national democratic revolution in 1949, there has been no apparent serious effort to advance to the Soviet, socialist stage of the revolution in China.

In the main military battles between the communist and capitalist forces in the twentieth century, it was the communist forces that prevailed. But, beginning in the post World War II period, and especially since the death of Stalin, imperialism, headed by U.S. imperialism, has been able to win the peace. Sun Tzu, the ancient and legendary Chinese expert on the art of war, taught: "supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." The fact that the goal of Soviet power has been discarded and abandoned along the way by the so-called international communist movement has been key to the successes of U.S. imperialism and world reaction in their struggles against the international working class and the oppressed peoples over the past fifty years and more.

4)   Last but not least – impressively, most of what Foster projected with regard to the USA and the CPUSA in Toward Soviet America actually came to pass. While the country has not yet become the United States of Soviet America, the CPUSA did lead the U.S. working class throughout the Great Depression. It led in the creation of the militant and democratic Congress of Industrial Organization, the CIO, the industrial union that united the skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers, men and women, the native-born and immigrant workers, the Afro-American and white workers. It led in the establishment of the unemployed councils that actively led the fight against evictions in cities and towns throughout the USA that helped achieve and maintain unity between the employed and unemployed sectors of the working class. And the CPUSA, including through its mass influence, and its own members' and contacts' participation in the war against fascism, contributed to the Soviet Union-led global defeat of world fascism.

      This magnificent victory ushered in the immediate post World War II period of the flowering of the national liberation movements of the oppressed peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East against international imperialism, culminating in the victory of the Chinese national democratic revolution in 1949 that liberated one-quarter of humanity. And it led directly to the creation of a Socialist Camp that, with the liberation of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Red Army and the liberation of half of Korea and Vietnam, equaled in size and scope the capitalist camp and threatened to end capitalism as a powerful force in the world.

LET'S GO "BACK TO THE FUTURE" OF SOVIET POWER!

LET'S FIGHT FOR A UNITED SOVIET STATES OF AMERICA!

LET'S FIGHT FOR A SOVIET SOCIALIST WORLD!

http://www.mltranslations.org/

Protest: "Red Dawn" is War Propaganda! Peace in Korea!

Sunday, November 25, 2012

U.S. SWP on 2012 elections

Capitalist pundits election 'analyses' show their class disdain, blindness
 
BY JOHN STUDER  
The big-business media, from the left to the right, has spilled much ink analyzing the recent U.S. elections. What comes through in their various demographic theories is a bourgeois class blindness that prevents these "experts" from understanding attitudes and trends in the working class and how they may or may not be reflected in the elections.

Among these "theories" are conjectures about voting patterns of the majority of so-called whites, whom they often refer to in writing as blue-collar or poor whites, but whom they view with disdain as "white trash."

But the "white America" the pundits write about doesn't exist. And they prefer not to see the reality of an America that is increasingly class divided.

In the mind of self-styled progressive liberals, heavily represented by bourgeois-minded meritocrats and professionals, workers who are Caucasian are essentially ignorant, reactionary, and becoming increasingly racist as a natural response to the effects of the economic crisis on their lives. According to this view, these workers can be expected to vote Republican in general, and all the more so in the recent election in order to vote out a Black candidate. This is why a layer of Democratic Party liberals write off any effort to win the so-called white vote and instead focus on the so-called Latino and Black vote, along with those of "smart people" like themselves.

This sentiment was partially captured by Obama himself in 2008 when he spoke about workers in small towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania: "It's not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment."

Another notion that flows from this outlook is the idea that growth of reactionary views among working people in the U.S. are part of a similar trend around the world.

A good example of this is an article by New York Times guest columnist Thomas Edsall, who interviewed Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the American Center for American Progress and adviser to the Obama campaign.

Edsall writes: "In the United States, Teixeira noted, 'The Republican Party has become the party of the white working class,' while in Europe many working-class voters who had been the core of Social Democratic parties have moved over to far right parties."

Conservative pundits hold a similar version of the same class prejudices about workers who are Caucasian as liberals do, but instead of lamenting about it, many wish it were more true.

Attitudes in the working class are not something that can be directly gleaned from election results or any other method by those who live in a world entirely outside of the working class. Workers' views only find distorted reflection in the bourgeois electoral arena, where, in the absence of sustained class-struggle battles from which workers gain self-confidence and a sense of political independence, most today look for a "lesser evil" to vote for.

One thing the election results do not support is the view that there is a rising tide of racism among workers today. There are plenty of reasons why one would not vote Barack Obama, from his open disdain for working people to concerns about growing government interference in people's lives.

The most striking thing about the election is that—after four years of the most profound economic crisis in living memory—the lesser evil for most workers, including a substantial section of those who are Caucasian, was not the challenger but the incumbent. And an incumbent who has not even talked about a real jobs program much less shown an inclination to enact one.

But many saw Romney as more out of touch with the crushing effects of the capitalist crisis. Many assumed a second Obama presidency might at least be more open to providing government relief from the crisis.

The exit polls reflect some of these sentiments. While 51 percent of voters said that government was too intrusive in their lives, 55 percent said the U.S. economic system favors the wealthy. And the majority thought that Romney's policies would favor the rich.

"Romney did terribly among the white working class" in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, complained Steven Sailer, a conservative with openly racist views, on VDARE.com Nov. 7.

And some 9 million workers who are Caucasian were among the millions of working people who didn't bother to vote for either of the bosses' parties.

This doesn't mean Romney didn't win votes from lots of working people who are Caucasian, particularly in more rural areas and parts of the South. He did, especially from those fed up with the accumulated economic blows suffered over Obama's first four years. But there is no reason to assume that a growing—as opposed to shrinking—minority did so for racist reasons. There is no rise in KKK violence or other evidence to support such a contention.

And workers on the job know that coworkers who voted for Obama or Romney are equally likely to jump into discussion about how to meet the bosses' attacks and fight together, regardless of racial, religious or other differences.

Profound social changes resulting from the massive proletarian Black rights battle of the 1950s and '60s that smashed Jim Crow segregation have wrought irreversible changes in the working class that have opened the door to greater unity in action. And today working people in general are feeling the effects of the crisis and increasingly look to advance their class interests above all.

This is true within the Black nationality, where conditions of life for workers—both absolute and relative to others sections of the working class—are getting worse under the impact of the economic crisis. And the crisis is reinforcing forms of national oppression endemic to social relations under capitalism. At the same time, class divisions among African-Americans are widening.

The fight against racist discrimination and to overcome national divisions remains one of the biggest tasks ahead in forging a working-class vanguard in the U.S. But, contrary to the hopes of conservative pundits and the accepted wisdom of liberals, racist bigotry against African-Americans and other forms of prejudice are not on the rise among working people who are Caucasian or of other backgrounds.

This conclusion is consistent with the personal experience of many working people today on and off the job. This is one of the strengths of our class, the only truly progressive class, in the U.S.

Votes on ballot measures
Another more recent shift in attitudes among working people in favor of equal rights and against bigotry was registered in votes on a number of ballot referenda. In Maryland, Maine, Washington and Minnesota, millions of workers voted to push back state laws that discriminate, based on prejudice, against equal rights in marriage based on gender and sexual orientation.

In Florida, a measure to strengthen discriminatory restrictions against young women's ability to get an abortion was rejected. The vote also upheld legal protection for the right to privacy.

Some measures put on the ballot by labor unions did not fare so well. But here it would be wrong to think the vote is a reflection of those who are for and against organized labor. Rather the referenda highlight the failing strategy of the top labor officialdom.

Among the ballot measures, in Michigan leaders of the Service Employees International Union and others organized an effort to write into the state constitution the right of public sector unions to bargain collectively and a prohibition against the legislature enacting "right to work" laws.

The measure, Proposition 2, failed by 58 to 42 percent.

The Socialist Workers Party called for a yes vote. "Not because restrictive laws are the reason our unions are getting weaker, a rationalization often heard from union officials," James Harris, SWP presidential candidate said, but as part of "laying the groundwork to transform our unions into effective working-class combat organizations against the bosses' deepening attacks."

At the same time, such substitutes for organizing unions or bringing union power to bear are not something workers will or can rally around. The ballot measure is put forward by the same labor officials who, contrary to leading battles against efforts by politicians and employers to slash our rights or wages, have worked overtime to avoid and limit such fights while supporting some of the same capitalist politicians leading the assault.

Regardless of which "lesser evil" they pulled the lever for, or if they stayed home, or how they voted on any referenda, workers by the millions are feeling the squeeze from the propertied rulers' attacks and are looking to discuss where they come from and a way to fight back.

Through these discussions and coming battles, workers will gain experience and self-confidence, and will begin to transform themselves by the millions into actors on the stage of history. And along the way, they will stop looking for lesser evils and start looking for a way to replace the rule of the propertied class with a government of workers and farmers.  

http://www.themilitant.com/2012/7644/764401.html

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Derrida - lifetime aversions


Derrida: A Biography by Benoît Peeters - review
Terry Eagleton

In May 1992, the dons of Cambridge University filed into their parliament to vote on whether to award an honorary degree to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, founder of so-called deconstruction. Despite a deftly managed smear campaign by the opposition, Derrida's supporters carried the day. It would be interesting to know how many of those who tried to block him in the name of rigorous scholarship had read a single book of his, or even a couple of articles.
  
The truth is that they did not need to. The word was abroad that this purveyor of fashionable French gobbledegook was a charlatan and a nihilist, a man who believed that anything could mean anything and that there was nothing in the world but writing. He was a corrupter of youth who had to be stopped in his tracks. As a teenager, Derrida had fantasised with some of his friends about blowing up their school with some explosives they had acquired. There were those in Cambridge who thought he was planning to do the same to western civilisation. He did, however, have an unlikely sympathiser. When the Duke of Edinburgh, chancellor of Cambridge University, presented Derrida with his degree in the year in which Charles and Diana separated, he murmured to him that deconstruction had begun to affect his own family too.

Deconstruction holds that nothing is ever entirely itself. There is a certain otherness lurking within every assured identity. It seizes on the out-of-place element in a system, and uses it to show how the system is never quite as stable as it imagines. There is something within any structure that is part of it but also escapes its logic. It comes as no surprise that the author of these ideas was a Sephardic Jew from colonial Algeria, half in and half out of French society. If his language was French, he could also speak the patois of working-class Arabs. He would later return to his home country as a conscript in the French army, a classic instance of divided identity.

At the age of 12, Derrida was excluded from his lycee when the Algerian government, anxious to outdo the Vichy regime in its antisemitic zeal, decided to lower the quota of Jewish pupils. Paradoxically, the effect of this brutal rejection on a "little black and very Arab Jew", as he described himself, was not only to make him feel an outsider, but to breed in him a lifelong aversion to communities. He was taken in by a Jewish school, and hated the idea of being defined by his Jewish identity. Identity and homogeneity were what he would later seek to deconstruct. Yet the experience also gave him a deep suspicion of solidarity.

If he was always a man of the left, he had an outsider's distaste for orthodoxy and organisation. His role was that of the gadfly, the professional dissident, the joker in the pack. In the end, he was writing of the "absolute singularity" of every human being, and was always a dedicated non-joiner. Norms, doctrines and mass movements were likely to be oppressive, whereas margins and deviations were potentially subversive. Yet the English Defence League is marginal. And it took a mass movement to topple Gaddafi. Respecting freedom of speech is an orthodoxy, and the right to strike is a doctrine.

From a modest background in Algiers, Derrida moved to the most prestigious lycee in France, and from there to the Ecole Normale Supérieure. It was a heavily Stalinist institution at the time, which confirmed his reluctance to shout with the larger crowd. If Derrida was later to declare himself a communist, it was only in the sense that Kennedy called himself a Berliner. When student revolt erupted around him in May 1968, he stood mostly on the sidelines. Yet the libertarian impulse of the sixty-eighters was also a driving force behind his own work. The previous year had been his annus mirabilis, witnessing the appearance of three of the books that were to make his name revered and reviled across the globe.

Before long, the taciturn, socially gauche young man from the colonies was gracing the dinner tables of a galaxy of French luminaries: Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot and others. Even the French government fell under his spell. When François Mitterrand came to power in 1981, Derrida was invited to set up an international college of philosophy in Paris. Deconstruction was now all the rage from Sydney to San Diego, while Derrida himself was feted as an intellectual superstar. Soon, there was an American comic book featuring a sinister Doctor Deconstructo, and magazines on home decor were inviting their readers to deconstruct the concept of a garden.

I suspect that one reason Derrida enjoyed travelling the world so much was because it allowed him some respite from the bitchy, sectarian, backstabbing, backscratching climate of Parisian intellectual life, which this superb biography faithfully records. What the book fails to underline quite as heavily is how waspish the maitre himself could be.

Two dramatic moments stand out in Derrida's subsequent career. Travelling to communist Prague in 1981 to address a secretly organised philosophy seminar, he was arrested and charged with drug smuggling. It seems the authorities saw the dismantling of binary oppositions as a threat to the state. The police officer who had planted the drugs in Derrida's suitcase was himself later arrested for drug trafficking.

Six years later, Derrida's life was again disrupted, this time by the revelation that his recently dead friend, the critic Paul de Man, had contributed antisemitic articles to the pro-German Belgian press during the second world war. Shattered by the news, Derrida wrote a long essay in De Man's defence – which must rank among the most shamelessly disingenuous texts of modern times.

Benoît Peeters has ransacked the voluminous Derrida archives and interviewed scores of his friends and colleagues. The result is a marvellously compelling account, lucidly translated by Andrew Brown. The man who emerges from this portrait is an agonised soul with sudden outbreaks of gaiety, an astonishingly original thinker with more than a dash of vanity who nevertheless made himself fully available to the humblest student.

In personal conversation he was that most admirable of intellectuals, one visibly relieved not to have to speak of intellectual matters. He was one of the latest in an honourable lineage of anti-philosophers – from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Marx to Freud, Adorno, Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin – who could say what they had to say only by inventing a new style of writing and philosophising.

Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: "What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this 'I' who speaks of speaking?"

Even so, the Cambridge backwoodsmen were wrong. Derrida, who died of cancer in 2004 urging his friends to affirm life, was no nihilist. Nor did he want to blow up western civilisation with a stick of conceptual dynamite. He simply wished to make us less arrogantly assured that when we speak of truth, love, identity and authority, we know exactly what we mean.

• Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right is published by Yale University Press.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/14/derrida-biography-benoit-peeters-review?INTCMP=SRCH

Friday, November 16, 2012

Khrushchev's Downfall


The Premature Obituary of Socialism by Paul Siegel [San Francisco: 1993]


Women & the Socialist Revolution by Mary-Alice Waters [New York: 1976; Second Printing 1979]


COINTELPRO against the Women's Movement


The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism


The Politics of Women's Liberation Today by Mary-Alice Waters [New York: 1970]


Samir Amin: The US imperial project is to destroy the Arab nations

Samir Amin and Socialism in the 21st Century

Prospects for Socialism in Europe and the U.S.: Video 1 of 2

Prospects for Socialism in Europe and the U.S.: Video 2 of 2

Ireland: again, which way forward?

Ireland: Acts of War?

 

The recent killing of a prison warden from Maghaberry prison, by an as yet unknown republican grouping, has sent shock waves through the body politic. Many had assumed that as a result of the outpourings of both the Good Friday Agreement and the St Andrews Agreement the days of violence were behind us.

Stormount, seat of the Northern Irish government. Photo: sitomonStormount, seat of the Northern Ireland Executive. Photo: sitomonSadly that is not true. No one with any sense of humanity in them can take pleasure in the deliberate killing of a fellow human being. As we approach the anniversary of the ending of the First World War, celebrated with chauvinistic glee by the British ruling classes, we should never forget the horrors of war, the savage slaughter of millions and the glorification of the "nation" and the demonisation of the enemy.

"...all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress…" (James Connolly, "Can Warfare Be Civilized?" From The Worker , 30 January 1915.



But despite the experiences of the horrors of war there are sadly those who still wallow in the glorification of war and the use of violence against their perceived enemies. A quick search of the web will produce discussion sites where juvenile comments are made about enemies, comments that reveal a lack of understanding of the consequences of war, of the dehumanising effects of hatred and a glorification in killing.

The mainstream media have speculated that the killing of the prison warden arose directly from the consequences of the current prison protest. There is a dirty protest taking place by protesting republican prisoners. They are protesting against strip searching and claim that the prison authorities reneged on an agreement reached 18 months ago.

But then questions have to be asked: will the killing of the warden advance the cause of the prisoners, will it bring an end to the protest, will it force the prison authorities and the Stormont Administration to concede to the prisoners' demands?

A famous military strategist, Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), once wrote, "War is the continuation of politics by other means". So what are or were the politics behind the killing?

Two days after that event there was a march in Dublin calling for the release of Marian Price organised by the Free Marian Price Campaign. While there was a ban on party banners the march was in itself political. It was exposing the vindictive nature of the British Government, exposing the selective internment of those who reject the pacification programmes of the Government, explicit in the outpourings of the Good Friday Agreement and the St Andrews Agreement. But there were only about 450 people on the march and one of the speakers, Clare Daly formerly of the Socialist Party and still in the moribund United Left Alliance, felt that she had to mention the killing of the Prison Warden and condemn it. She was, she said, a supporter of human rights and that included the human rights of Marian and David Black.

Her attendance at the march and her decision to speak was, particularly given her long background in the Socialist Party (for long perceived as having an anti-republican and a pro-loyalist agenda a politically significant step. We, in the Red Plough have long argued that the failure of the "left" to engage with republicanism was and still is a mistake. So here was a minor breakthrough. Sadly many who would have been on the march probably stayed away because of the killing.

So we would argue that the killing far from advancing a mass struggle outside the jail in support of political prisoners has on the contrary set back any serious efforts to garner support from a wide cross section of people.

The struggle in the prison has been ongoing for a long time. There have been efforts to resolve that situation also for a long time. Talks in the background had been taking place to reach a settlement.

In the light of the killing does anyone seriously think that the situation will be resolved sooner or later? Will the killing of one prison warden, or the killing of ten, make any difference to British policy? On the contrary it will only harden their resolve. Indeed one would think that perhaps that was the intent behind the armed action.

Perhaps there are people out there who think a movement can be built on the backs of the prisoners' struggles and sacrifices? If so they are sadly deluded. The history of prison protests shows that only on very few occasions did the people on the outside give mass support to the prisoners and go on to build a mass movement. Those were in the aftermath of the 1916 uprising and the 1981 hunger strikes. Within 10 years following 1916 a mass movement was destroyed, Ireland was partitioned, thousands of republicans were jailed and the republican movement all but destroyed. And British Imperialism still ruled Ireland.

Ten republican prisoners died on hunger strike in 1981. Their deaths propelled Provisional Sinn Fein into electoral prominence. They, PSF, then went on to negotiate away the political concession wrung from the Brits, in exchange for power sharing and the baubles of office. Despite having the most effective guerrilla army in Europe, the Provo armed struggle failed miserably. The Republican armed struggle was defeated. The Republican political struggle only ended up with an even more entrenched sectarian state than before. Yes, Republicans are serving in a British run administration, but that won't make a basic bit of differences to the lives of the working classes, whether catholic or protestant. And British imperialism still rules in Ireland.

So it is hard to see the politics behind the current armed actions of republican groups. That is other than a mere longing for a United Ireland. There is little united action among republicans to bring the masses onto the streets. There are few signs of reaching out to the working classes. Instead what comes across is an elitist arrogance that only they and they alone, know what is good for the people of Ireland. In that they are no different from the leaderships of both administrations on the isle of Ireland.

"We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means." (Carl von Clausewitz)

Where is the political intercourse? We see little or no evidence of it. It seems that the end is armed struggle as if that in itself is enough. Or is there a thought that a torch can be passed onto future generations so that they can rise from the flames and initiate an armed struggle that can achieve republican goals?

Was it for this that Wolfe Tone wrote:

"To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils and to assert the independence of my country – these were my objectives. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter – these were my means."

Where is "means" today in armed actions? Will it unite "the whole people of Ireland"? Will it "abolish the memory of all past dissensions,"? Will it "substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter "?

Furthermore there is little evidence of objectives such as "subvert the tyranny of our execrable government", "break the connection with England", "assert the independence of my country".

Sadly the road some republicans are walking down is a road to death, jail and political oblivion. It is not the road to either a United Ireland or a Socialist Republic? When in the light of past failures down a particular road, one keeps going down that road then surely it is time to pack it in.

There is, however, another road, but it is not a road for elitists, not a road for self appointed "leaderships" nor a road for those who "tax" drug dealers (thereby legitimising and licensing drug dealing) nor a road for those who are,

"...known as a 'physical force party' – a party, that is to say, whose members are united upon no one point, and agree upon no single principle, except upon the use of physical force as the sole means of settling the dispute between the people of this country and the governing power of Great Britain.

"The latter-day high falutin' 'hillside' man, on the other hand, exalts into a principle that which the revolutionists of other countries have looked upon as a weapon, and in his gatherings prohibits all discussion of those principles which formed the main strength of his prototypes elsewhere and made the successful use of that weapon possible. (Physical Force in Irish Politics, James Connolly, Workers' Republic, 22 July 1899).

 

That other road is one that requires patience, persistence and political struggle. It is the road of class struggle. It is the road to socialism and it is a road that neither elevates any method of struggle as a principle, nor dismisses any method of struggle. The building of an alternative to what now exists in both parts of Ireland has no short cuts. The existing leaderships of the current radical socialist and republican groupings face a huge responsibility of leadership in these times. Are they capable of leading or are they just content to follow the course of least resistance?

11 November 2012

Capitalism has failed - IEA v CPGB-ML

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Social democracy's neo-liberal course

Rightward direction of Hollande government gets clearer
Thursday, 15 November 2012

By Najete Michell

Since being elected on 6 May the Hollande government appeared to lack direction on several issues, reflecting pressures from the right and the left.

Critique of the government has focused on it ‘not communicating’ and for postponing difficult decisions.

All this hesitation succeeded in was to make nobody happy, reflected in a rising dissatisfaction rate, up to 58 per cent in the latest polls.

But in the last 2 weeks, these hesitations were suddenly resolved with the adoption of the Gallois report. The report, conducted by Louis Gallois the former head of EADS aerospace group, was commissioned by Hollande to look into the declining competitivity of France compared to Germany in particular.

France’s share of Eurozone exports is down to 13 per cent, compared with 17 per cent a year ago, while its unemployment rate stands at 10.2 per cent, against Germany's 6.9 per cent. In October, the IMF cut its growth forecasts for the French economy to 0.1 per cent this year and 0.4 per cent in 2013.

Austerity measures become clearer

Hollande had already announced the general approach in a television speech in September when he ‘asked’ the French to make an effort for two years and put up with cuts and austerity (without using the words) so that the country can ‘become more competitive’. The speech explicitly stated that only after such efforts can there be any measures for the redistribution of wealth or improving the living standards of the least well off.

The Gallois report spells out what this concretely means. The report's 22 proposals include slashing the social contributions paid by employers by 20bn euros (£16bn), as well as those paid by employees by 10bn euros, leading to a cut in employment based tax income of E30bn. The report then suggests these funds are recouped by an increase in VAT (a non-progressive tax) and by major cuts to public spending.

Of course there is not one single measure compelling capital to invest. So we are not ‘waiting for redistribution’, Hollande in fact proposes redistribution now, but in favour of capital.

These measures would be on top of the measures announced in his September speech where he flagged up tax rises of 20bn Euro and spending cuts of 10bn Euro next year aimed at reducing the state deficit to the Eurozone target of 3 per cent of GDP (from 4.5 per cent this year).

Hollande has rightly described this as the biggest effort of fiscal contraction in 30 years.

In October the French parliament voted through the recommendation of the European agreement on the economy, which says that the target for state deficits should be reduced to 0.5 per cent of GDP (even lower than the 3 per cent currently set).

A demonstration of 80 000 against it did not stop it being voted through. Despite some opposition inside the SP it was overwhelmingly passed, to the big relief of capital.

So on the economy, after hesitations, a clear course has been set continuing Sarkozy’s austerity policies and endorsing the approach of cuts and fiscal contraction being set across Europe.

Social and environmental policy

As expected Hollande and the Socialist Party have not stuck to their promises on other issues either.

First, on ‘marriage for all’ (gay marriage), the initial bill included not only gay marriage and adoption but other equal rights regardless of gender and sexuality, such as fertility treatments. But the latter were withdrawn after strong lobbying by socially reactionary layers.

Similarly the government is retreating on the rights of non-EU foreigners to vote in local elections. This is a very delicate matter as this was the one measure Mitterrand did not implement when he came to office in 1981. This created bitter resentment in the affected sections of the population and this time the SP promised it would apply it for the next municipal elections in 2014. But given the mobilisation of the right and the extreme right against it, it is again considering putting it off.

On the environment, a major struggle has developed against the entirely unnecessary proposal to build an airport near Nantes, in Brittany at Notre Dame des Landes. The strong local opposition, which is occupying the fields despite severe police repression, is supported by the Greens and others. This is adding to concerns and debate among the Greens – on nuclear power for example – about whether to stay in the government.

International policy

The same applies to the international policy pursued by Hollande. Above all, he has pledged to intervene in Syria, rushing to recognise the US sponsored new opposition formation. And in the latest example of France’s stepped up military role in sub-Saharan Africa in its former colonies, is preparing for intervention in Mali.

His government’s position on Palestine has been very weak. During Benjamin Netanyahu recent visit to France, he went out of his way to support the right-wing Israeli PM, saying they shared common views on Israel. During a visit to the Jewish school in Toulouse (where three innocent Jewish children were killed by Mohammed Merah several months ago) Netanyahu called on French Jews to emigrate to Israel. Hollande made no response, nor did he say anything to the claim that the just cause of fighting anti-Semitism is the same as defending Israel.

Racism and anti-Roma policies

However, while the government has been very slow in most areas, there is an exception.

Manuel Valls, Minister of Internal Affairs and Immigration, has been omnipresent since the Socialist Party took office. The list of his attacks grows all the time.

He has continued the persecution of the French Roma begun by Sarkozy in 2010. At the time, they condemned the way the Roma were evicted, but Valls has intensified the expulsions from their camps without offering any other accommodation or camping grounds on which they can stay.

The Roma have not only been forced to constantly move by the authorities and the police, but have been faced unofficial attacks. For example, in Marseille, a Roma camp was attacked by local people, who forced out the inhabitants and then burnt down their camp, while the police looked on doing nothing.

Valls has also shown his "muscular" way to apply "law and order" in Black and Arab communities. Under the pressure of the police union, he has refused to implement one of the SP electoral campaign pledges to end the racist use of stop and search powers by the French police (who have the right to make random checks for identity cards). These powers are used particularly against Black and Arab people, often forcing the victims to attend the police station, disrupting their employment or other harassment.

In a further show of ‘muscularity’, Valls organised the extradition to Spain of French citizen and Batasuna member, Aurore Martin. Batasuna, the non-violent Basque nationalist organization, is legal in France, although it is illegal in Spain.

In a sad indictment of the rightward drift in the French population, this has all made Valls into the most popular minister of this government among the population and in the Socialist Party itself.

Decline of left within the SP

The opposition in the SP has been slowly declining over the years and at the last SP conference on 26 October could only muster 13 per cent on key votes.

The whole conference, which was not well attended, was a non-event insofar as there was hardly any debate. Under the pretext that the ‘right is attacking us so let's unite’, the general approach was against any voices of opposition and the hegemony of the view that the party must support the government.

At the same time the government and the SP refuse any collaboration with the left outside the SP organized in the Front de Gauche

This right-wing orientation by the government and the party is simply worsening the relationship of forces with capital, demoralising the population and helping create the conditions for the rapid return of the right to office, alongside the strengthening of the Le Pen’s extreme right.

Having effectively adopted most of the policies of the extreme right, the right is only divided over tactics on whether to seek to replace it or make electoral alliances with it.

http://www.socialistaction.net/International/Europe/France/Rightward-direction-of-Hollande-government-gets-clearer.html

Peter Marcuse on Sandy and OWS

Occupy Sandy: Social Change through Prefiguring Action
Peter Marcuse

The Occupy movement has been involved in organizing aid for families hard hit by storm Sandy, and many volunteers , both from Occupy groups and not but organized through them, have been in the hardest hit areas, in some of those hardest to reach and to help. How did that come about?

This isn’t the Wall Street that Occupy Wall Street is occupying; it’s a section of Brooklyn that runs from single-family moderate income housing to public housing. And they’re not there proselytizing for Occupy; they’re working with volunteers from other groups, church groups, neighborhood associations, and with FEMA and other government agencies, including the police, as well.

Occupy Sandy’s “anthem” is spritely without politics or moralizing. A New York Times reporter’s account says the only link to other Occupy movements is that the organizers came from earlier ones, including Occupy Wall Street. Time runs an account about a visit of a volunteer from Occupy Sandy to a house-confined elderly woman that ends with the words: “The word occupy was never spoken.”

One headline from a OccupyMutualAidFacebook post, helps explain:

More Evidence that A Better World is Possible: FEMA & #OWS Occupy Sandy breaking bread in Staten Island.

What evidence? It’s that people will show solidarity, will volunteer to help their neighbors or others simply in need, working without compensation (no market relations here), without state compulsion (no hierarchy of power here, externally or internally), no ideological no ideological.

One of the Occupiers says:

“Remember, Occupy Sandy is NOT charity work. We are here because we know another world is necessary, and the way to make it is through practice in our own communities. This is the Mutual in Mutual Aid. ‘If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.’” ~ Lilla Watson, on Occupy Wall St. Facebook page

Sometimes, indeed, a sign betrays the link to other Occupy activities, but very muted:

A perceptive comment from an Occupy volunteer clarifies, as reported by the Associated Press:

Is this Occupy Wall Street’s finest hour? In the church basement, Carrie Morris paused from folding blankets into garbage bags and smiled at the idea.
“We always had mutual aid going on,” she said. “It’s a big part of what we do. That’s the idea, to help each other. And we want to serve as a model for the larger society that, you know, everybody should be doing this.”

That’s the logic behind downplaying the link of Occupy Sandy with Occupy Wall Street. It’s also the explanation for a sometimes problematic but core feature of the internal “organization” of the Occupy movements in general: they don’t want to be organizations, but voluntary assemblies of people. The might have facilitators or spokespersons, but not leaders or officers. They operat by consensus rather than majority vote, usually open to anyone to participate, not “members.” General Assemblies in Occupy are not designed for efficiency, but as an expression of how democratic decisions might be made, of what horizontal democracy involves. The overlaps with, but is different from, historical model utopian communities, and indeed from many of the model communes and co-op enterprises of the 1960’s.

There’s a difference between creating a model and prefiguring a particular alternative to existing ways of doing things, exemplifying different forms of human behavior and different relationships between people, and between people and institutions. . The difference can be troublesome if not kept in mind. The utopian communities and the communes were largely seen by their members as isolated from the society in which they existed. There goals were self-government, self-determination, escape from outside determinants of behavior. Perhaps they saw themselves as models, but their efforts were aimed at perfecting their model, not spreading its example round broadly. They reacted to the ills that they saw in the world around them not by dealing directly with them, but by trying to insulate themselves from them. The focus of Occupying on a particular space was shared some of that view of things: Occupiers wanted, in a small way, to create a world of their own. If there also was a hope that their world would be a model for the larger world outside, it was muted, and certainly not widely realized. Thus there were many obituaries for the Occupy movement in the mainstream media when the space in which their model of self-direction was taken from them and the experience apparently ended in a bubble burst, obituaries that incorrectly saw the creation of insulated spaces as the essence of Occupy.

But this utopian “bubble” trend, or the aspiration for an ideal horizontal democracy in the Occupy movement, is not what drives Occupy Sandy. Occupy Sandy is not suggesting that all disasters should be met by voluntary loosely-organized efforts that occur spontaneously and without planning. Rather, it realizes the essential interrelationship between what its adherents are doing and the world outside, even in developing positive relationships not only with FEMA but also with the police and National Guards, most of the time institutions seen as unwelcome intrusions in the model of what Occupy would like to see in the future. Occupy Sandy is simply prefiguring, in its own behavior, how certain social relationships might exist independently of the assumed rigid requirements of the outside world, independently of the market and the state — actually, not independent of the state, but in reliance on it to assemble resources Occupy Sandy itself could not and should not assemble. It is not suggesting that its response to Sandy should be a model of disaster response, as opposed to the response of FEMA and police authorities; it is simply saying such responses should be coupled with an activation of fundamental human instincts of solidarity that are outside of state or market.

Occupy Sandy, then, is linked to the Occupy Wall Street—generated movements not by setting up a model in opposition to the outside world, making itself independent of the outside, but showing how, within that outside world, one can see in action relationships, ways of doing things, that prefigure how they might also be in a changed and better society. And they do it by example, not by signs or confrontations. It is oppositional to the prevailing order too, but in a subtler way than most Occupy actions. It does not replace them for both are necessary, but it is different, and the differences are important. And in what it does it changes people too, both the occupiers and those they come in contact with – a vital part of all Occupy activities.

Two other points about occupy Sandy, on practical, one theoretical. The practical one is that Occupy Sandy has a huge advantage over Occupy Wall Street: it has the support of a large majority of the population, perhaps even of all, certainly a much larger part of the 99% than Occupy Wall Street. There will be trouble in the future, as the differentiation between the effects of storm Sandy on the rich and the poor, the residents of well-built protected homes whose owners carry flood insurance and the lower-income folk who don’t have it, the difference between the residents of public housing and the owners of vacation homes, etc. And controversies will arise when, as for instance in the case of Katrina, evaluations show how some people, some activities, some sections of town (here perhaps lower Manhattan), are favored in governmental actions dealing with the damages from the storm. Then the militancy of Occupy Wall Street may indeed be needed.

The theoretical point is speculative. Herbert Marcuse, in An Essay on Liberation, begins by asking whether there is not a biological foundation for the need for liberation:

“We would …have, this side of all “values,” an instinctual foundation for solidarity among human beings – a solidarity which has been effectively repressed in line with the requirements of class society but which now appears as a precondition for liberation.”

He speaks of a “vital need for the abolition of injustice and misery” as a very real and personal emotional need in individuals, often emphasizing particularly its role for the young, a need that impels them towards action designed to eliminate those undesirable conditions, a need to “so something,” actively, with body as well as mind. The frustration that young people experience in finding ways of acting towards fulfilling that need may result in what he calls The Great Refusal, an opting out from prevailing requirements constraining behavior. This line of thinking was often adopted by the participants in the communes of the 60’s and 70’s, and perhaps underlay some of the much earlier utopian communities of history. But Refusal, in his sense, is inherently frustrating. If the withdrawal that led to the communes and to some extent to the Occupy encampments also, is aborted, the need for other forms of action becomes pressing. Working with Occupy Sandy, perhaps, is an expression of that need and a clearly positive way to try to satisfy it.

It may well be that, in the very near future, the unambiguous positive elements of Occupy Sandy will be less needed and the more controversial and conflictual issues that Occupy Wall Street focused on at its beginnings will again come to the fore. In the meantime, however, Occupy Sandy can be wholeheartedly welcomed as not only enormously helpful to many individuals battered by a disaster today, but also as prefiguring actions and relationships that exist today and could be continued and become dominant in a better world tomorrow.

http://pmarcuse.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/blog-23-occupy-sandy-social-change-through-prefiguring-action/