[2011] Then as farce: the 'second phase' of FSLN electoralism

Martha Grevatt's article "Sandinista revolution enters second phase" published online by Workers World Party gives an inaccurate and one-sided view of the FSLN, the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution, and the 1990 Nicaraguan election. Whatever one's opinion of Grevatt's reporting from present-day Nicaragua, our movement's understanding of what happened in Nicaragua is central to the task of rebuilding communist leadership, and communist parties worthy of the name, today.

In her unfortunately "me-too" cheerleading paean to the current FSLN, Grevatt writes:

The FSLN is named for liberation fighter Augusto César Sandino, who was murdered by U.S. Marines in 1933. In 1979, guerrilla fighters from the front overthrew the hated, U.S.-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. A five-member "junta" that included Ortega took over leadership. In 1984 Ortega was elected president.

Are these kinds of misremembered generalizations allowed life because the article's author remembers history this way, or because no one bothered to go back and re-read the contemporary accounts of the FSLN and the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution? For it was a Nicaraguan Revolution, not simply a guerillaist overthrow of a US-backed dictator, as Grevatt leads readers to believe. The 1979 Revolution [occurring in the same annus mirabilis as the Grenadian and Iranian revolutions] was prepared for over a decade by a communist leadership team around Carlos Fonseca, who fell in battle in 1976. In addition to a military civil war, the revolution conquered power through unprecedented rural and urban organization, preparing workers and peasants for power, and actually governing liberated areas well before 7/19/1979. A reading of the FSLN's Historic Program gives an excellent insight into the Marxist spirit of Fonseca's team, and their embrace of the "Cuban road."

Continuing, Grevatt writes:

From 1981 to 1990 the U.S. engaged in economic sabotage against Nicaragua and financed the "contras," counterrevolutionaries who waged a war of terror that cost 40,000 to 50,000 lives. In 1990, Ortega lost to opposition candidate Violeta Chamorro, whose campaign was heavily funded by the U.S.

From reading this, one would think Nicaragua's workers and farmers lost the contra war. In fact, by 1988 the contra war was finished as a strategic military operation by Washington and its regional allies to overthrow the results of the 1979 revolution. FSLN's own corrections of its errors among indigenous peoples, and progress on land reform, eroded any material basis the contras had to remain in the field.

One would also think, reading Grevatt, that the 1990 electoral defeat for Daniel Ortega was the result of an unprecedented wave of contra terror and Yankee dollars. But in fact, the 1990 Nicaraguan elections only registered a situation that had already come to exist in the Nicaraguan class struggle. To pose the question of the FSLN's political evolution in the sharpest and most accurate way: the most politically advanced cadre were left leaderless in an organization-wide retreat from the "Cuban road" of overthrowing capitalism and building a mass communist party. Daniel Ortega came to be the spokesman for these forces, which rationalized their course as a "third-way": part Olaf Palme, part perestroika. We who were there will not forget the 1990 FSLN election slogan: "With Daniel we'll get more."

Hardly a slogan to rival "Hasta la victoria simepre!"

And hardly grounds for saying that the reelection of Ortega today would represent, as Grevatt says in her headline, a "second phase" of the 1979 revolution. Rhetoric of phases and stages used to mask and obscure the organization of defeat and demobilization of workers and farmers by the FSLN for nearly a quarter century does not help rebuild a communist movement in Nicaragua or the United States. ["Second phase" sounds distinctly like the kind of double-dealing outcome imposed recently on Verizon workers, whose union leadership drove them back to work unconditionally. ]

Perilous retreats are necessary at all levels of working class struggle, but revolutionaries must present them and defend them as retreats, not as antechambers to greater victories when they clearly are not. Grevatt's unscientific and impressionistic view of Ortega's at-best middle class radicalism is nothing short of scandalous.

Grevatt should know that Ortega's politics do not advance the historic demands of Nicaragua's toilers. He has given ample proof if his course over the decades. On abortion and womens' rights, something all communists have a mortal stake in, we will merely note that today he is an anti-choice as he was twenty years ago :

Ortega sought to rationalize this position by pointing to the U.S.-sponsored counterrevolutionary war and its impact on Nicaragua's small population. "The ones fighting in the front lines against this aggression are young men," he said. "One way of depleting our youth is to promote the sterilization of women in Nicaragua—just imagine what would happen then—or to promote a policy of abortion."

"The problem is that the woman is the one who reproduces. The man can't play that role," Ortega continued. Some women, he said, "aspiring to be liberated," decide not to bear children. "A woman who does so negates her own continuity, the continuity of the human species."

This stance was one registration of the FSLN leadership's growing abandonment of the revolutionary government's proletarian course in the early years following the overthrow of Somoza. The workers and farmers government had begun to take far-reaching measures in the interests of the producing majority. By the mid-1980s, however, the FSLN leadership began retreating from mobilizing working people to fight for their interests. Instead, it relied more and more on alliances with sections of the capitalist class. The current FSLN leadership has sought to carve out for itself a place in capitalist ruling circles, and to use its political influence to expand lucrative business interests as well.

All the ALBA window-dressing in the world cannot rechristen a capitalist electoral party like the FSLN as a revolutionary organization. Marxists judge individuals, groups, and political parties by their actions, not their campaign slogans or Tammany Hall-style perspicacity.

In a communist newspaper today, we are given not our own line of march, but this by Grevatt:

The FSLN-led government favors redistribution of wealth. It gives assistance to small farmers and thousands of worker-owned and -run cooperatives, not to big agribusiness as in the U.S. Under the FSLN, the cost of living for an average family has gone down while minimum salaries have doubled.

Quoting the press releases and public statements of Ortega flunkies like Dr. Paul Oquist will not suffice.

One should not leave the impression that the FSLN alone has a monopoly on shamelessly "dining-out" with the working class solely on the basis of past victories now explicitly rejected. Nationalist movements in the semicolonial world that never posed or achieved the clarity or mass mobilization of the FSLN in its heroic [i.e. communist] period, are likewise acting today on the fact that they are unfit for anything but ballot-mongering:

....exhaustion of revolutionary content marks the political evolution of petty-bourgeois and aspiring bourgeois leaderships of national liberation movements today: from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other Palestinian organizations such as Hamas, to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA).

These organizations arose (or re-arose) during the closing decades of the twentieth century on the basis of powerful opposition to national oppression among the Palestinian, Irish, and Basque peoples. Over the past four decades, however, the leaderships of these organizations have relied on spectacular armed actions, in combination (especially as such operations not only produced no gains but met intensified repression) with diplomatic and political maneuvers to reach a negotiated accommodation with the oppressors. Mobilizations organized by them were more and more used solely as pressure to better realize such an accommodation.

None of these leaderships ever proved capable of mobilizing and leading the workers and peasants as the backbone of a revolutionary democratic movement capable of fighting effectively for national liberation, freedom from imperialist domination, land to the tillers, the right to armed self-defense, and the organization of the working class to act in the interests of the producing classes. None developed a leadership of the revolutionary caliber and political capacity of the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army in Cuba, the National Liberation Front of Algeria, Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua, New Jewel Movement of Grenada, or the revolutionary movement in Burkina Faso. [*]

Petty bourgeois leaderships like the FSLN today are an impediment. Telling workers in any part of the Americas that their electoral victory is a breakthrough for our class simply prepares the next generation for demoralization. We need a new levy of Carlos Fonsecas, and that will not be accomplished by a new electoral mandate for the FSLN's policies.

I will close with one more quotation of the programmatic basis today of these squalid, anti-worker policies:

....A brief declaration issued by the FSLN delegation to the Nicaraguan National Assembly Aug. 16, 2006, echoed this position.

"We are a party in favor of life," it said. "Therefore we reaffirm our respect, promotion, development, and protection of the lives of Nicaraguan men and women… and consequently we stand against abortion."

According to Ipas, a U.S.-based reproductive rights groups, only 24 authorized abortions have been performed in Nicaragua in the last three years, while some 32,000 illegal abortions are performed in the country each year. Maternal and infant mortality rates in Nicaragua are among the highest in the region, with abortions contributing to 16 percent of all maternal deaths.

Jay Rothermel

09/12/2011

25 years since Eastern Airline Strike began

I joined the Socialist Workers Party 4 months aftern the Eastern strike started.  It was and is a real confirmation of the party's perspectives.

An outline for an article I really wish I had time to write:

25 years since the start of the Eastern Airlines  Strike

1.  Lorenzo and "Lorenzoism"

2.  The 1989 political context

                Rout of organized labor

                                PATCO

                                P9

                                Continental

                                UK Miners' Strike

                1987 Stock Market Crash

               

3.  Machinists, pilots, flight attendants

                Labor solidarity

                Rank and file leadership

4.  Pittston Coal Strike

                Convergence with Eastern strike

                Interpenetration and reinforcement

5.  SWP Working class campaign

                JB [plenum]: "This train has left the station         

                and we are in one of the rear cars. We have to 

                fight our way to the front"

                                               

                IAM fraction members

                Building solidarity through the fractions

                Propaganda and recruitment

                A striking confirmation of the

                                "changing face of US politics."

7. "These are great and glorious times we are living        

in." [JB, Thanksgiving 1989 St Louis, MO                 Active

Workers Conference.]

                Cuba's rectification campaign

                Eastern/Pittston: a break in the rout?

                ANC

                FSLN

                Abortion rights/clinic defense

                Eastern Europe/USSR

               

8. Eastern went out of business as Gulf War began

                Union tops maneuvers fruitless

                "Better to die on your feet than live on

                                your knees."

                Rank and file lasted "one day longer"

                                than Frank Lorenzo.

9. On going to work wearing a "No Lorenzo" button:

                Some personal notes

__________________________

Words from one of the strikers:

The Eastern Strike Was A Victory For Workers 

BY ERNIE MAILHOT

Reporting on the Northwest Airlines pilots strike, the big- business press often refers to the 1989-91 strike at Eastern Airlines as a "defeat for both the company and union." The following excerpt, from The Eastern Airlines Strike: Accomplishments of the rank-and-file Machinists and gains for the labor movement, tells a different story. Ernie Mailhot, a ramp worker and cleaner at Eastern Airlines, was a rank-and- file striker. He was strike staff coordinator for International Association of Machinists Local Lodge 1018 from December 1989 to December 1990. The Eastern Airlines Strike is copyright (c) 1991 by Pathfinder Press, and reprinted with permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

After 686 days on strike against Eastern Airlines, rank- and-file members of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and our supporters registered the final piece of our victory against the union-busting drive of the employers when the carrier folded at midnight on January 18, 1991....

Eastern strikers from coast to coast, from Puerto Rico to Canada, reacted by calling to congratulate each other and going out to airports to celebrate.

Mark McCormick was one of the Eastern strikers who made his way to New York's La Guardia Airport the night of January 18. "I wouldn't have missed this for the world," he said, as he stood watching management personnel walk out. With a big smile on his face, he suggested to the managers that they "take tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow off."

Over the next few hours, strikers and our supporters showed up - many with handmade signs - at rowdy picket lines. The sign I think expressed our feelings the best was the one at the Miami airport that read, "We said we'd last `One day longer.' "...

The twenty-two-month strike of the IAM had defeated Eastern's attempt to create a profitable nonunion airline and set an example for all bosses who want a "union-free environment" if they can get away with it.

What the strikers were up against

To strikers and other working people, the scope of the accomplishments and victories scored in the Eastern strike are measured by what we were up against.

In 1981 U.S. president Ronald Reagan tried to set in motion union busting on a national scale when he broke the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). A pattern soon developed of union-busting drives by the employers in major industries, with Frank Lorenzo's destruction of the striking unions at Continental Airlines in 1983 spearheading the assault.

Takeback contracts, permanent replacement workers, and union busting itself became the order of the day. In the airline industry, nonunion airlines were established and strikes, such as that of the Independent Federation of Flight Attendants at TWA in 1986, were crushed.

On March 4, 1989, when we went on strike at Eastern Airlines, we looked back on almost a decade of many more defeats than victories for labor - defeats that more often than not came without a real fight by union members.

We faced Frank Lorenzo, the number one union buster in the United States. We faced government agencies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, that continually backed Eastern management in the face of massive union documentation of safety violations at the airline....

Despite this, we decided it was time to fight, rather than accept our only other choice: letting Lorenzo destroy our union and set an example for every other boss like him.

When we walked out on March 4, 1989, most of the rank and file of the IAM sensed our strength for the first time. The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) and Local 553 of the Transport Workers Union (TWU), which organized the flight attendants, also recognized our strength and our fighting determination. They joined our picket lines. The unity we had achieved between the unions and the pilots' association greatly increased our initial strength, and, in turn, our confidence.

The huge rallies at airports across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico -many held in cities with only a few strikers - showed us the broad support and identification our fight had evoked among working people. Many, having gone through years of concession contracts and union busting, saw the fight as their own....

The unity of the Machinists, flight attendants, and pilots in a major national strike, over a period of eight and a half months, is something that had not been seen in the airline industry before.

Winning the support of the pilots for that period of time allowed us to begin to put our stamp on the battle and step forward as a rank-and-file leadership. In addition, we became seasoned enough to understand and weather the later treachery of the pilots' officialdom....

The joint work we were able to do with the United Mine Workers, backing its strike against the Pittston coal company through the spring, summer, and fall of 1989, also played a big role in our gaining experience and confidence. From Los Angeles, to Buffalo, to Pittsburgh, to Miami, the striking Machinists and miners learned from each other. Sometimes this took the form of joint tours; other times it meant collaborating to figure out how best to rally support for both our strikes within the unions.

These organizing experiences helped show us that we could affect the battle. The dealings in the courtroom, conflicts among competing investor schemes, and debates in Congress - all these reflected the pressure brought to bear when we exercised union power and reached out to the broader ranks of labor.

Our slogan became that we would last "one day longer" than Frank Lorenzo. This meant that we would never let Eastern run a profitable airline as long as it operated with scab labor. We knew that by achieving that goal, we would help set an example for every other working person in the United States and internationally - our real family, not the "Eastern family." On April 18, 1990, in a victory for all labor, our slogan became a reality. On that day the federal government, through its bankruptcy court, removed Lorenzo from control of Eastern....

After Lorenzo was removed, our slogan remained "One day longer," but it became "One day longer" than Eastern....

Fight went far beyond fight for jobs

The fighting Machinists and our supporters accomplished huge things that go far beyond the struggle for the jobs that we had at Eastern. We showed that unlike the Lorenzos and the rest of the boss class in this country, who are motivated by greed for profits, workers will step forward and put themselves on the line in the interests of working people everywhere. This also came through in thousands of examples of other unionists pitching in to support our strike - not only here, but in New Zealand, Britain, Bermuda, and other countries....

Thousands of us are now working in other IAM-organized jobs, as packinghouse workers, as aerospace workers, or in other industries. We take the lessons of the strike with us, and one lesson we will never forget is "An injury to one is an injury to all."

It is important to remember that our fight against Eastern and other companies like it not only improves the relationship of forces for other unionists. It also creates a more encouraging environment for all those who fight against social injustices - from racist attacks to Washington's criminal wars, such as the slaughter recently unleashed against the people of Iraq.

Because of our fight at Eastern, a boss who is considering forcing his workers out on strike so he can break their union and lower their wages and benefits will think a little longer before making such a move.

As important as that is, even more important is the impact we have had on the thinking of working people who are inspired by our fight and will come to follow our example.

http://www.themilitant.com/1998/6233/6233_26.html

Ukraine and the petty bourgeois left: Reading notes

This week I have been reading the 1946 document "Revolutionary Marxism or Petty Bourgeois Revisionism? A Demarcation of the Programs of the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Party. Statement by the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party."

The document can be read here.

While reading, I was also following events in Ukraine, and commenting on them on Facebook.

Notes I made turned out to be clarification of issues relating to Ukraine today as they are misinterpreted and obscured by the petty bourgeois left.  

To borrow a phrase from the 1946 SWP document, "along with abstentionism.... [they have] raised eclecticism and inconsistency to the level of guiding principles.  Nor is this an accidental phenomenon.  There is one class in modern society that cannot be consistent in its politics.  This is the petty bourgeoisie."

 

Who wants a 'man on horseback'?

Petty bourgeois left today internationally: a miasma of capitulation to Putin concerning Ukraine.

*

"Popular Front" today? Defense of capitalist regimes that are supposedly objectively anti-US.  But such regimes are unwilling and incapable of organizing the working class in their own countries to fight Washington.  They fear calling masses together for any reason.

*

It is true that the US today is trying to encircle Russia [and China.]

Must the working class in Russia and Ukraine subordinate all to Putin's pragmatic and supposedly consistent anti-Americanism?

Should workers in Russia, Ukraine, [and the US, for that matter] be told [in the name of communism or radicalism or "anti-capitalism"]  that Putin is their ally?

*

European Union is not a "capitalist United States of Europe" with one nefarious program orchestrated by Washington.

*

Presenting Russia today as objectively anti-imperialist and anti-fascist is dishonest to the point of treachery.  The line breeds demobilization and defeatist consciousness. 

Some workers and middle class elements taught to look to Russia as a progressive anti-US pole in [bourgeois politics] will [in the absence of a growing communist movement] be attracted to rightist solutions out of demoralization and concomitant cynicism.

*

Petty bourgeois left and Stalinist organizations and individuals today dishonestly present Putin as [albeit an inconsistent] fighter against US imperialism who must be defended.  They present social explosions that oppose interests of the Russian ruling class as nefarious conspiracies organized by Republican politicians and the CIA.

This endorsement of Putin can mislead and divert initial motion toward independent working class political action and class consciousness.

*

The "lesser evil international" - anti-US "coalition" of bourgeois states [Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela] must be defended [so the middle class left declaims].

For the middle class left, Putin must be defended at all costs. Russian workers and farmers, it is assumed, have interests in complete consonance with Putin's regime. 

*

Workers in Ukraine are told to wait to defend their living standards and democratic rights because these actions supposedly coincide with Washington's "anti-Moscow" line.  It is "too dangerous" now to begin the slow and contradictory awakening political life and class consciousness.]  Hence the fascist-baiting of inevitable capitalist-bred social explosions.

[n.b.: Imagine telling Fannie Lou Hamer not to oppose LBJ in 1964 because the most important issue was "defeating Goldwater at all costs"?]

[n.b.: Must workers at VW or Walmart wait until they have Simon-pure class consciousness before they begin their struggle?]

*

The "Russian Question today"

Organizations like Workers World Party [which I take to be emblematic of this international trend - JR] enjoy the luxury of condemning the "dictatorship of capital" in Russia in the abstract, while providing left-cover [and disorienting the working class internationally in the process] with concrete rationalizations for specific Russian policies.  They slur-over and obscure the class line when it suits them.

[n.b.: supporting Russia and its Ukrainian cats-paws like Yanukovych today in the name of defeating "US/EU-backed Ukrainian fascism."]

*

Ukraine - workers and middle class elements in the streets fought [using their own mass methods] austerity, the growing capitalist social crisis [an international phenomenon], the Kiev government's anti-democratic and oppressive laws, and the Kiev government's latest capitulation to Moscow [yet another chapter in 300 years of national oppression by Russia in Ukraine.] 

This mass action was not a de facto endorsement of any program or banners or slogans of any self-identified "leaders" of the Maidan protests.

*

There is no "third way" between the dictatorship of capital and the Leninist strategy of building proletarian communist parties, the "road to workers power."

[n.b. Germany and Spain in the 1930s, Indonesia in 1965 are tragic confirmation of this.]

Capitalist Putin is not a stand-in for working class leadership today because the Russian bourgeoisie finds itself cross-wise to Washington  today.

*

n.b.: Mass action opposing austerity, national oppression, capitulation to Russian suzerainty, and attacks on democratic rights
is progressive.

*

As a friend on Facebook summed up:

For the defeat of U.S. imperialism everywhere! And Stalinist and proto-Stalinist great nation chauvinism and national oppression as well!

Jay
3 March 2014

World World Party defends Great Russian chauvinism in Ukraine

Workers World Party's unconditional defense of Great Russian chauvinism against the oppressed Ukrainian nation continues. Again they liquidate the national question of the Ukrainians. Not even lip service is paid.

Can anyone imagine this party talking about the class struggle in the United States and not mentioning the oppressed Black nationality?

But for Workers World Party politics begin with support for any regime that for whatever temporary or episodic reason finds itself opposed to  Washington's policies. They do not follow the class lines on these questions. Instead they promote a pragmatic geopolitics of "great powers."

This is not an academic question.  Rather, it is the kind of unprincipled politics that led to workers and peasants to defeat in Indonesia in 1965. [Not to mention Germany in the early 1930s.] Workers, farmers and oppressed nationalities must rely on our own class forces, whatever the level of their leadership or consciousness.  The Putins of the world will not defend us any more than the Assads, Obamas, or DeBlasios. 

The Ukrainian national question was never "solved" for all time during the lifespan of the USSR.  No wonder there are people in Ukraine willing to die for their oppressed nation and fight (with whatever illusions and whatever caliber of leadership) for its liberation,  just like Kurds and Palestinians.

[Previous generations' communist leaders understood the social weight of the Ukrainian national question very well, as can be seen here and here.]

Ebonics, Marxism, and the debate on ‘Black English”

Obama: Right in form, Right in essence

Yesterday on Carl Davidson's Keep On Keepin On pro-Democrat/"Nobody but Obama" blog we had his Trayvon Martin article, which is actually only another anti-Republican article.

What went unstated, and has remained unstated in all the liberal and social democratic commentary about Martin's murder, I summed-up in a comment appended to the blog article, which is, in its entirety:

Bush & Obama, leaders of the bipartisan war party, have killed more Afghan, Iraqi and Libyan kids Trayvon's age in the last 12 years than can be grasped.

Obama is not the lesser evil in 2012.

Those in 2008 who sold Obama as somehow progressive need to be held to account for this.

Those who support Obama after four years of his bloody leadership at home and abroad have shown us what side they are on.

Any call for another vote for Obama represents their further complicity.

U.S. SWP on OWS, BHO, progressivism, and populism

The current issue of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party newspaper The Militant features a line article by John Studer entitled "Obama 2012 stump speech: big gov’t and populism". It features an analysis of President Obama's 6 December 2011 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas.

I encourage everyone to give it their full attention, and at least one re-reading. The article contains many important formulations of the SWP leadership about the current conjuncture and the presidential elections.

Studer writes:

....In his speech Obama presented himself as an advocate for the “common man,” saying the U.S. should be a “country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement.”

Early in the talk he pointed to the widening gap between the incomes of working people and “those at the very top [who] grew wealthier from their incomes and their investments—wealthier than ever before” while “everybody else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren’t…. The average income of the top 1 percent has gone up by more than 250 percent to $1.2 million per year.”

He reached out to the “people who’ve been occupying the streets of New York and other cities,” and their protests against the banks and the greedy “1 percent.” The classless populist themes that characterize the Occupy groups, the fact they turn their fire on “the rich” and the banks, not the capitalist class and its government, offers fertile soil for Obama’s election strategy with a more populist image.

Obama calls for bigger government

The moral of this story, according to Obama, is the need for the guiding hand of ever bigger government by the wise and “enlightened,” regulating out-of-control speculators and bank executives, and expanding programs that force you to help yourself, like taxes on soda pop to reduce obesity. He calls for higher taxes on the 1 percent to finance his plans.

...Obama’s speech was long on populist rhetoric devoid of concrete proposals that could improve conditions for “the working people.” He calls for increased government investment in education, so people can learn skills to replace “disappearing” manufacturing jobs. He urges more “diversity,” drawing Blacks, women and others into the meritocratic federal bureaucracy, dictating endless rules and regulations. And he calls for unleashing “daring entrepreneurs” to advance U.S. capitalism.

Obama’s pro-“working man” rhetoric conflicts with the record of his administration. He has presided over a deepening bipartisan assault against Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. He has greatly expanded the use of drones, special forces and targeted assassinations to defend U.S. imperialist interests. He has blocked any significant public works program to provide jobs for those thrown on the street by capitalism’s crisis.

And he continues to press for more government, to regulate, spy, police and imprison those who challenge his “enlightened” vision of capitalist rule.

In my reading a few things jump out. Studer's characterization: "classless populist themes that characterize the Occupy groups, the fact they turn their fire on “the rich” and the banks, not the capitalist class and its government" in particular struck me as a forceful summation. But it is also, all proportions guarded, not the final word Marxists will be writing about the #ows this year. Perhaps many OWSers will be won to Obama's rhetoric, but I think the challenge for Marxists is to mix it up with the most politically curious and hungry parts of these groups, presenting them with our perspective: the road to workers power outlined first in the Communist Manifesto in 1848.

Much as activists would like to see OWS as a unified and coherent revolutionary movement, it is not. Finding within its ranks the communists of the future is the task of Marxists: showing them how in the current conjuncture it is working class resistance and solidarity that is at the center of U.S. politics.

Jay Rothermel
20120114

Welcome, new visitors!

Thanks to all the visitors last week! I am particularly glad to see Germany on the list. A long time coming!

South Korea is a pleasant surprise, and I hope readers who came for the DPRK articles will come back for future visits.

United States 1,191

Sweden 292

Australia 194

United Kingdom 161

Germany 156

Russia 118

Canada 114

France 89

India 77

South Korea 44 Comradely, Jay

Reply to a reader: the bearded ones

My notes posted here a few weeks ago on the Al Jazeera Opinion piece "Zizek and Gaddafi: Living in the old world" by Columbia University Professor Hamid Dabashi have generated a few reader responses. Sadly, most take me to task for the lack of clarity about the quotes I used, and the points I was trying to make. These criticisms were, alas, correct; the initial piece I posted has gone through several revisions and reductions already.

* * *

Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi

The fact that Professor Dabashi's article was carried by Al Jazeera is indicative. Al Jazeera has been a cheerleader on the US-NATO-TNC side in the Libyan civil war. Professor Dabashi equates the Libyan civil war with other popular uprisings in the region earlier this year:

Arab Spring is the renewed ground zero of history, the sight of a world that is beginning to reveal itself, precisely at the moment when the European philosopher sees the world "worldless" because it is not his world - just like Colonel Gaddafi - a world in which he cannot imagine himself, for he has been imagining the world for everyone else. The Arab Spring is the opening horizons of a hope of emancipation, of a renewed reading of world, of worlds. But Zizek does not see it because this is not the world of his making, the visage and force of a world Hegel had delegated to pre-History, non-History. Zizek has already recited the obituary of the Arab Spring, while what appears as a worldless world to the European philosopher is a world he cannot fathom, as it is being inhabited by others he cannot not read.

You Know Who

A couple of points need to be made here. Perhaps in making them, I will also clarify some of the deficiencies in my previous post.

1. The only "ground zero of history" involved is the objective historical and social contradiction today between various particular imperialist states in relation to various particular semicolonial states. The role played by Washington within this context, and the devastating impact of the world economic crisis on semicolonial peoples, is a central contradiction in world politics today.

2. The term "Arab Spring" might be used at AlJazeera and Columbia University, but it obscures more than it illuminates. The long-term uneven economic development and conjunctural combining effects of today's economic crisis manifest themselves in different ways in different states. In Tunisia these factors led to an urban rebellion, sparked by the self-immolation of an economically ruined young street vendor. After several weeks of prevarication, the Tunisian ruling class changed its head of state to prevent greater popular mobilizations. In Egypt, where in recent years trade union struggles have continually overflowed the limits established by Mubarak's rule, Mubarak himself was deposed after weeks of militant popular protest. In Libya and perhaps Syria the uneven and combined contradictions have erupted into civil war, with Washington and its allies unafraid to take sides against leaderships traditionally hostile to imperialism's aims in the region.

3. The popular uprisings in North Africa and the Near East are spontaneous in character, as was the UK rebellion of August 2011. Spontaneous rebellions are powerful but ultimately passing events. To the extent that they do not produce leaderships capable of carrying forward demands that resolve contradictions in favor of the working class and its oppressed allies, they are fleeting and demobilizing as much as they are bold and inspiring. Only in this context can "obituaries" be understood. Zizek himself points this out with this comment about the Greek uprisings: "even in Greece, the protest movement displays the limits of self-organisation: protesters sustain a space of egalitarian freedom with no central authority to regulate it, a public space where all are allotted the same amount of time to speak and so on".

4. The real struggle is ahead of our class in Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, and the UK. This is the point Zizek is making in his own superbly infuriating and half-understandable way. London is already tightening the criminal justice screws to prevent the speedy floodtide of future riots. [In many US cities, large assemblies of oppressed youth are already illegal.]

Professor Dabashi also writes,

....just like Gaddafi, Zizek is stuck in his old ways. He cannot believe his eyes, he cannot believe what is happening to him: that his world has ended, not the world; that he (embodying a European philosophy at the losing end of its dead certainties) lives a worldless world, not the world.

Slavoj Zizek

Dabashi seems motivated by anxiety that, for all his Hegelio-Lacanist rhetoric and persiflage, Zizek has put a finger on the central contradiction of these "springs." Zizek and Qaddafi "cannot get hip" with the new reality because there is nothing new about it: nothing new about the class forces involved, and nothing new about the all too brief interregnum of political space after the rebellions. Whether workers in Egypt, Tunisia, and the UK can carve out enough space to take their struggle to the next level will determine whether the 2011 events can be termed a "Spring" or a "Spring Break."

The UK rebellions in August demonstrated the devastating consequences of nearly 35 years of austerity and union-busting. but unless the rebel youth who conducted those magnificent actions can develop a leadership and join with broader forces, their sacrifice and militancy will be lost. The fact of spontaneous rebellion is not a program, or a replacement for program and strategy. Whatever we think of Zizek's LRB article,

Does Professor Dabashi wish we would just go meekly down on our knees, unquestioning before the accomplished fact of "Arab Spring"? If so, he well serves the Qatari plutocrat who funds Al Jazeera, as much as his employers at Columbia University; none of them wanted a spring, and are happy today to use that moniker while playing their role in the US-NATO-TNC war against Libya.

Jay Rothermel
09/15/2011

Spontaneous rebellion and the subjective skepticisms of Slavoj Zizek

Passages à l'acte?

Confessions of a Zizek cultist
by Jay Rothermel



If Zizek is looking for the material basis for the UK's rebellion, he need look no further than the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mVxJUeN2TFk

The class reality it expresses needs to be understood as existing for - let us say - a century in every city, town and borough. The experience is as much a part of the life of oppressed nationalities, and especially the youth, in the US and UK as knowing in one's bones that the sun will rise in the morning. Yes, society knows I am its enemy, and society's cops are not taking any chances: they will go out of their way to keep reminding the youth.

These social explosions erupt every few decades because that is all the longer unorganized and un-lead [in any more than an ad hoc sense] fury and rage at powerlessness can build up steam before release. When SZ says the "protest demanded nothing" he is only correct to the extent that the rebel populace had not nailed their demands to the city hall door or run their candidate for office or printed their manifesto in their own newspaper. Capitalism today has no spatial capability to allow a constructive rehearsal and demonstration of such grievances against the foundations of an abominable social system. And today there is no leadership to shape it, and to raise up a broader consciousness of independent class or national struggle. The laughably opportunist MPs for the UK rebel zones despise their electors, and know they are there in a social worker or parole officer capacity to keep the lid on things one day longer.

I agree with SZ when he writes that rebellions such as those earlier this month in the UK emerge from a "....society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out." But this is only a surface appearance. When he writes, "Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative...." I could not disagree more. There is an articulation, and it follows a class dividing line. The UK's capitalist ruling families see the realistic alternative to rebellion in further repression: incarceration of the culprits and the enforced eviction of their families. Were the outrage of this response by the UK rulers not so outrageous, one could write it off as simply cynically Dickensian. And what of a "realistic alternative" on the other side of the class divide? Well, there's the rub. Today there are many activists ready to organize protest, many ready to try to bring the wheels of injustice to a grinding halt. But the solution to the UK rebellion does not lie in more sympathetic policing or the election of new local council members and MPs. It lies in a vanguard organizing and shaping the courageous, ambitious, and selfless energy of rebel youth in Tottenham and all over the UK to end the dictatorship of capital.

According to SZ, the "left faces the problem of 'determinate negation': what new order should replace the old one after the uprising, when the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment is over?" Unless a revolutionary party has won the trust and confidence of the rebel masses, any struggle will crest and subside without sustaining energy. Revolutionary parties provide leadership, education, development of cadre, and the bridge to sustain spontaneous energies over the long term. A mass movement for socialism, for workers power, under the leadership of a revolutionary party that had won the allegiance of the masses, could have radically altered the relationship of class forces in the UK over the last 24 months, and created a political climate where the depredations of cops and broader ruling class austerity drives would not be permitted.

The material basis of spontaneous rebellion, from Tunisia to Egypt, from Greece to the UK, will breed new rebellions. Building mass revolutionary socialist parties to transform these struggles must be the starting point for Marxist-Leninists today. Our irreplaceable role is not so much helping organize and publicize each individual struggle or motion of resistance, but uniting and generalizing the lessons and leadership of such struggles. And figuring out what to do next on the road to workers' power. It is only in this way that the enormous sacrifices by rebels will not be squandered, as they were thirty years ago in the UK, or in 1992 during the LA rebellion in the United States.

SZ's article on the UK rebellions is a series of subjective and skeptical footnotes to an objectively significant and heroic chapter in the spontaneous mass resistance against cop brutality and broader prerogatives of capital. He spends time shaking his head over the short-fall of spontaneous struggles that did manage to move forward dramatically in Tunisia, Egypt, and Greece, but have so far not had the organizational continuity and vanguard class consciousness to truly alter the terms under which the bourgeoisie seeks to rule today. In the end he can only hope and keep his fingers crossed: "one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness." The wish for a "strong body" smacks of putchism, and expressly underlines the gulf between a developing rebel mood among the most marginalized portions of the proletariat, creating for the first time in decades the possibility of rebuilding vanguard communist leadership, and the hand-wringing of the radical petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, which can only hypothesize communism.









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Labor's defeat in Wisconsin and the specter 2012

Labor's defeat in Wisconsin and the specter 2012 by Jay Rothermel

On March 9, 2011 Republicans at the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin approved governor Scott Walker's

bill ending most collective bargaining rights for union-organized state employees. The capitol had been occupied for over a month by unionists, students, and their supporters who were opposed to the bill. This was the first mass labor upsurge of the 21st century in the United States, coinciding with an increased tempo of resistance by workers against unemployment, hunger, austerity budgets and union-busting throughout Europe and North Africa.

March 9 was the turning point in the Wisconsin struggle. Labor and its allies would either take the struggle to a higher level of rank and file activism and leadership [a general strike], for which there was very fertile ground, or the resistance would be pushed back, shunted, and demobilized by the official union leadership and the Democratic Party.

Five months later, the defeat of the mass movement in Madison are clear to see, for all who will see. Labor tops and Democrats after March 9 carried out a successful strategy of emptying the state house of protesters and channeling their righteous anger and energy into the dead end of the ballot box. Democrat and union fakers spent all summer talking up the attempt to recall six of the Republican state representatives who voted for Walkers bill. Unsaid was the fact that Democrats and labor leaders in Wisconsin were begging Walker to let them continue forcing concessions down their members throats, so long as the dues kept rolling in.

In a February public meeting in New York City, Workers World Party leader Larry Holmes told an audience that labor leaders would have no choice but to embrace and help lead the new rank and file fightback movement; otherwise they would lose pelf and place and end up on the unemployment line along with their members. This was a happy and scientific insight into the material forces creating a contradictory and very uncomfortable situation for the public employee union leaders. But said Wisconsin leadership saw it a little differently; they realized there was still a little more space to shuck and jive and retreat; forty years of retreat and give-backs had taught them all the ins and outs, and these tribunes of the people launched the recall like they were storming the Bastille.

Between national elections in the US there is always a gap of about two years where electoralism is not being presented as the only permissible form of political expression. Within this window, by February 2011, resistance to state government austerity budgets and attempts to roll-back collective bargaining in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states reached a tipping point, and Wisconsin started to tip. But the "genius of the two party system" was able to arrest the tipping process. Rank and file leadership did not have a chance to develop, spread, and interlink with other struggles around the country in time to prevent the organization of defeat.

The recall campaign successfully demobilized, confused, and distracted; the false hopes it raised and cruelly dashed underline the cynicism and brutality of its architects. Today, campaigns for presidential nomination by Republicans, and BHO's slight veer to the rhetorical left, have closed the window

The US ruling class knows how high the stakes are for them in pushing through these union-busting austerity budgets. The first Black president was elected precisely to liquidate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; he came very close during the debt ceiling debate, and had those programs [actually a portion of the social wage funded by the labor of workers themselves] on offer on the chopping block when Republicans retreated from negotiations. 

In Wisconsin the marshaling of huge national political resources by capitalist party machines and foundations, creating a recall campaign "wall of sound" to drown out a class struggle perspective, was just as effective as the media hysteria/stampede around the debt ceiling debate. 

As these detours and distractions played out. mass demobilization allowed Democrats to continue their 200 year old impersonation of a party looking out for the "middle class." It allowed labor to set up an aggressive fundraising and electoralist structure for 2012, and prime its financial pump. And it greased the skids for a further drive toward open and undemocratic semi-Bonapartist rule in Washington with the creation of a bipartisan Congressional committee to decide unilaterally which social programs can be de-funded [and how quickly], and which losing imperialist wars can be wound-down to a less publicly obvious level of debacle.

Contradictions in this period of world recession, flowing from a classical crisis of overproduction, will create more resistance to state and federal budget austerity in the US. It will also create more opportunities for rank and file fightback, and the development and integration of various local struggles into something larger on a national scale. 

In every part of the movement we work in, and in every circumstance where political discussion is able to patiently and constructively flourish, we need to raise very starkly the class lines these crises and defeats exposed. Reformists, liberals, and leftists in the petty bourgeois milieu are all taking up the banner of "bail out the people not the banks" in order to herd the skeptical into the Nobody But Obama Movement. And Obama, as the months go along, will start dog-whistling Keynesian and WPA signals to get his 2008 supporters to forget about the reality of the last four years. His myrmidons will start scare campaigns about the Michelle Bachmann-Rick Perry axis of crypto-fascist evil. [These are the same types of operators who brainwashed me into voting for Walter Mondale in 1984 because Helen Caldicott and Carl Sagan had me convinced Ronald Reagan's reelection would bring about nuclear winter.]

What none of them have, what we communists do have, is the class line. Democrats and Republicans, regardless of the persiflage and bloviation and the ravings of their media glove puppets, have increasingly converging plans to resolve their crisis of profits by dramatically lowering wages and altering even further in their favor the relationship of class forces in the United States. If they cannot accomplish that in the bourgeois electoral arena as it exists today, we can anticipate moves toward capitalism's historically "grand solution" to these recurring crises: a march toward fascism and war.

But before any of those scenarios begin to germinate, our class and its oppressed allies in the US and around the world will have their chance. The energy behind all the rebellions and eruptions of mass struggle in the US, Europe, and Africa in the last year are testament to a class-wide popular appetite to resist and act now. But these spontaneous struggles must be lifted to a higher class organizational level, and that is where communists, as part of a broad rank and file vanguard in becoming, can play the best and most concrete role.

With patience and humility, and without giving an inch to the headwinds of electoralism and its media tsunamis, we can move from an age of defeat to an age of revolutionary advances.

Jay
08/16/2011
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Revolutionary roads

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Below are my notes on Mike Ely's presentation at the Platypus Affiliated Society's 2011 convention, which occurred over the May Day weekend in Chicago. It is entitled, "Throw open windows: Begin a fresh communism".

I originally posted the talk on my blog, Marxist Update, back in the spring without any notes. Coming from a completely different tradition than Maoism and the RCP, I am always uncomfortable and more than a little dismissive about the momentous and sentimentally poetic language used in many formulations [radical, deep, new, counterintuitive, et cetera] of the US Maoists.

My political education contained no such vocabulary. In the U.S. Socialist Workers Party we were trained to check current political trends, events, openings for intervention against the summations and continuity of our revolutionary heritage. We checked ourselves against previous party decisions, conventions, and leaders; previous international leaders; then the Bolsheviks in Lenin's time; and finally against Marx and Engels. Of course every night was not library night, and the process was not as fustian as I have summarized. Party-wide and branch-wide educational classes went on regularly, and our party newspaper always had [and still has] articles about past struggles related to current events. The object was, in saying we stood on the shoulders on giants, to really embody that concept.

A communist education in a Leninist party is a thing of the past for most young people today. They read here and there on the web, but the web' s wealth of Marxist material makes it hard to maintain a focus. Still, the goal of communist study is not to win on Jeopardy or bore people who no longer wish to be your friends. It is not even to fill up space in the blogosphere. Rather, it is, by reading the classics, to learn to think like a communist: to evaluate reality and decide, at each new turning point or opportunity, what is to be done.

In his article, Mike Ely writes: "those under thirty perceive the world around them with eyes that can sharply see what is new, distinct and rising." That is the tremendous lever against which communists today can put their shoulders. Youth under 30 have not internalized 35 years of defeat, deflection, collapse, treason, surrender, and exhaustion. They are more clearly able to see what is new, and they certainly have "more bounce for the ounce."

There are some phrases and formulations in Mike Ely's talk that I would disagree with. But regardless of what shade of chinoiserie Mike chooses to clothe his thoughts, I agree with him that we need to present the "maximum" program in the most arresting way we can.

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reading notes:

Throw open windows: Begin a fresh communism

by Mike Ely

the liberations of the bourgeois revolution are ground up into the makings of new horrors under this system.

for common abundance, radical equality and realization of countless human potentials.

wealth of modern capitalism has accreted and accumulated professional pigs, killers and corrupted agents at a unprecedented rate.

communist project is almost invisible. And what is visible is often not communist.
....Is that extreme weakness the end of communism, or is it a beginning?
.... we have a great occasion for a new accounting. And, we should take up our work through a new presentation.

.... there are ways in which we are on the ground floor, and thinking through (again) the forms of organization and approach that are appropriate for times when socialist revolution still lies over the horizon for most of us.

....retool our communist project, reinvent our modes of presentation, radically re-metabolize our experiences, and forge something new in a new century.

with a particular mix:

1. ....radiate a profound sense of the real: a profound and penetrating critique of capitalism in its current forms, and a materialist sense of what could replace it. Not a nostalgic clinging to this or that model. Not a pretense that things haven't changed.

2. ....radiate a culture of profound engagement, listening, and even humility – a democratic sensibility — without which no one will give communism a second hearing.

3. ....embody a militant, even shocking negation of everything that torments humanity – uncompromising, unafraid, righteous enough to topple and pursue the oppressors.

energetically treat many so-called settled questions as fresh problems for solution.

strip them back down – with great attention to our goals and our times.

restudy a verdict

We cannot and will not engage a new generation of radicals, if they don't come in at the ground floor of such a creative process, or if existing communist circles make uncritical acceptance of orthodoxies the price of admission.

"The final goal is everything, the movements for getting there remain to be charted."

we all have together before us a great creative work.

strategies in a country like this are unknown. Uncharted. We have lots of experience to sum up

inherent in revolutions that the major creative work can't be pre-done, and just imported (or applied) to "local" conditions.

where we stand (meaning in the U.S.) the key task is no longer creating a great human engine of economic development and modernization.
....Our goals are much more about radical community, a society of solidarity in the place of dog-eat-dog cannibalism and capitalist atomization. We are seeking a sustainable society out of a past of great waste and meaningless stuff. And we are seeking to end imperialism — by striking within the belly of the beast — for a global order that can end the domination of a few countries and the wars that they unleash….

Who can still believe that the world is divided into "two kinds of countries" — when those 1950s categories can't discuss a South Korea, or an Argentina, or a Bangalore, or the regional roles of Turkey, Israel, India, Brazil or China.

40 ago, in the high tide of Vietnam War and Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party said "revolution is the main trend in the world today." Is such an assessment a permanent verdict?

Our world society is not somehow inherently "ripe" – just waiting for a particular socialist turn. World capitalism is not "stuck" (in some generalized crisis of paralysis and decay). On the contrary it is quite dynamic

error here: in the assumptions that we can find all the basic answers we need by simply applying locally in this or that particular, existing and universalized form of Marxism.

revolutions will prove to have been like snowflakes – each one unique, not an archetype.

needs to draw from the communists of the past, from our elaborate experience with socialism in the last century, and also from those who have been working, in parallel, in some different row of grapes in these same vineyards.
....Badiou (and with him Zizek) have done important work bringing communist ideas to a new generation of students – who have otherwise been taught it is simply a dead letter....
....Leninism has led us to study the materiality of crisis – its roots in capitalist rivalry, economics, the manyness of capital, war, depression, and more....Badiou ....how contagious new truths erupt from a seeming void, in unexpected ways, and like hose sprays of antimatter corrode away the exhausted and compromised.
....Badiou ....he is operating unconstrained by the continuity with Hegel and Bebel, and I find the novelty exhilarating and thought-provoking – even when I don't agree. Because he is working on the problems we all need to be working on.

shocking new truths forge cadre and sweep the field.

....truths in the sense that they explode to reveal the old as dated and suddenly repulsive.

think through how to get out of this hole, and how to be part of the next waves of novelty that our intensely dynamic world will throw up.

Hasten and await is a discussion of preparing for revolutionary opportunities. Well, I think Badiou is raising important things about what hastening might mean, and what exactly we are awaiting.

reject the old sectarian strategies of forming tiny mini-parties, whose programs we fantasize will be picked up (in a telescoped way) by a grateful population in great crises. That is a grandiose and misleading fantasy which will just guarantee irrelevance in the actual conjunctures.

a century of communism and revolution have left us a great body of work, theory and experience to build upon. And in particular I think that the best of Maoism forms a key platform for our work –– specifically in its mass line and its radical reconception of the socialist transition period.

To reconceive we have to have a deep sense (and even appreciation) of the earlier communist conceptions (which many newer revolutionaries have not had much access to, and which we are trying to provide on Kasama).

....against the idea (that is both prevalent and marginalized) that there is an existing universal theory (as a kind of closed and complete system or orthodoxy) that merely needs to be "applied" to specific moments – i.e. tweaked for local conditions.

....much less interested in a discussion that asks "what is the real Marxism" than I am in a much more contemporary discussion of what do we believe, and what are we going to do?

do it in ways that at every stage draw in the new – new people, new discoveries, new realities, a new generation of radical youth the best of whom will not tolerate being spoonfed old truths.

those under thirty preceive the world around them with eyes that can sharply see what is new, distinct and rising.

mass line – popular agency

I'm a student not a follower these days. But I think these are questions worth engaging.

there is nothing agnostic going on here.

We need a shocking, counterintuitive proclamation of the communist project – classless society, overthrow of all existing conditions, the whole over the self, a literally planetary world view….

a new political culture of mutual respect and collaboration, of modesty and experimentation.

it is possible that the alienation, despair, energetic anger, and determination can arise a radical de-legitimization of what is – and then new ways of using human genius and productive power to emancipate.

That's the revolutionary road.

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