Vidal Sassoon: street-fighting man

Vidal Sassoon, the celebrity hairdresser and one-time militant in the anti-fascist 43 Group, has died aged 84.

Sassoon, dubbed the "anti-fascist warrior hairdresser" by the Telegraph joined the East End-based 43 Group as a 17-year-old trainee hairdresser.

The 43 Group was formed by Jewish ex-servicemen in the wake of World War II who returned home to the UK to see Nazis in Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF) organising openly, and resolved to continue their fight against fascism.

The organisation fought pitched battles, often armed with knives and razor blades, with the BUF and eventually smashed them off London's streets. Sassoon's weapon of choice? Fittingly, a pair of scissors.

In an interview with the Iranian Jewish Chronicle he recounted his involvement in the group:

It was a rather strange situation because the war was over. Before the war there was quite a strong fascist party led by Oswald Mosley and he and his cohorts were put in detention (jail) during the war by Churchill. After the war they came out and immediately started up again with their anti-Semitism and running through the streets and having meetings, it was quite ridiculous. Many truly brave Jewish ex-servicemen started the "43 Group" because there were 43 people at the first meeting they had. These were tough men who had been through the war. Of course volunteers were needed, I was 16 or 17 at the time, most of my friends joined the 43 Group and there were quite a few hundred of us. Truly the fascists were smashed in the streets and yes if you were scared at times because it was scary. But after we saw the pictures that came out and the whole story of the Holocaust, there was actually no way we could allow fascists to run through the streets. I was arrested one night and put in jail, the following day the judge told me 'to be a good boy' and let me go. That was our life in those days, we decided that we were absolutely not going to allow what happened pre-war when Jews were just beat up indiscriminately in the streets. It worked beautifully because of mainly the tough Jewish characters that were in the British armed forces during the war, they were the people that did it. But also there were quite a few gentiles who had seen the camps, the horror of Europe and fought with us.

In a recent BBC documentary he told how he once turned up to work with a black eye after a night of fighting.

"I'll never forget one morning I walked in and I had a hell of a bruise - it had been a difficult night the night before - and a client said to me, 'Good God, Vidal, what happened to your face?' And I said, 'Oh, nothing, madam, I just fell over a hairpin'."

Later in life, Sassoon helped revolutionise hairdressing in the 1960s as his geometric, sharp hairstyles overtook the high maintenance, heavily hair-sprayed styles of the 50s.

For information about the 43 Group I recommend reading Morris Beckman's excellent book, The 43 Group, to which Sassoon wrote the foreword. See also the following documentary on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSNkTnIsWho&feature=player_embedded

  

Obama: empire's overseer

Powerful piece from Black Agenda Report

 

Not Voting for Obama: We're Not Even Buying a Voting Ticket to the Show

by Ezili Dantò

The author supported Obama in 2008, for the sake of Haiti, the U.S. and the world. But no more. "Under the Obama tenure, indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens is lawful in the land of the free and the brave and Haitians are saddled with George Bush and Bill Clinton." When a duopoly rules, voting is a sham. "Susan Rice takes over the role Colin Powell played for the Bushes while Cheryl Mills is out there pushing the Duvalierist agenda in Haiti previously championed by Bill Clinton's commerce secretary, the late Ron Brown."

"A Black man has become number one superpower overseer of the profit-over-people paradigm."

I speak my heart on this. In 2008, Ezili's Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN) supported a vote for Obama, not because we entirely believed the Obama fairytale. (See, The America I Know, 2008.)

We supported a vote for Obama in 2008 for both pragmatic and idealistic reasons. But more so because eight-years of Bush and the application of the Wall Street de-regulation excesses left under from Bill Clinton and others had reached a crescendo point that was shockingly, brutally horrible and demoralizing for the entire world. But we also campaigned and urged a vote for Obama, despite his apparent selection by one-percenter forces, because the symbolic victory and metaphoric narrative of "The Whitehouse: From Sally Heming to Michel Obama" was a powerful and compelling vision we wished to participate in and bring to reality for the human race. (That sentiment was expressed in this essay: I Don't Know this America...But I'm Most Happy to Meet It.)

So, Ezili's HLLN actively campaigned for getting rid of the Republicans that had presided over the 1991 and 2004 unconstitutional regime changes in Haiti. We campaigned so that Obama would give TPS to Haitians, end deportations, stop unfair trade, promote democratic elections in Haiti, value and invest in the Diaspora remittances for reform in Haiti, instead of tied-aid to NGOs, end the US occupation of Haiti behind UN guns, provide relief to Main Street in America, universal health care, social justice, stop torture, end the resource wars abroad. (See, Towards A New US-Haiti Partnership: What Haitian Americans Ask of the New US President and Congress.)

"Obama would soon destroy even the tiny scraps of good he brought with TPS by unleashing Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton on Haiti's head for the duration."

Instead, for instance, it took the earthquake which ended the lives of 310,000 Haitians before Barack Obama deigned to give limited TPS and stop deportations. Then, less than a year later, he re-started deportations even with UN-imported cholera ravages and failed aid to the earthquake victims. But Obama would soon destroy even the tiny scraps of good he brought with TPS by unleashing Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton on Haiti's head for the duration, not to mention the Bush-Clinton partnership for earthquake "relief."

We wrote then our dissent. "Give us a 100 right-wing Republicans to face any day. Keep the namby pamby Democrats or progressive left selling their constituents out in the name of some mythical, so-called bipartisanship. They are the worst and most dangerous enablers of neoliberal globalization masturbating on the poor's imposed pain, poverty and suffering." (See Obama's Offered HOPE is Sweatshop Slavery.)

Today, any politicians who uses the word "hope" and "change" – as in, "I am the change you're looking for" – is unable to waste our time with US perverted elections whatsoever. The whole system is corrupt. Integrating with injustice is no longer an option. Obama was the straw that broke the camel's back for us. Truly, his tenure has hurt our hearts in so many ways. Not least of which is the fact that a Black man has become number one superpower overseer of the

profit-over-people paradigm.

Ezili's HLLN will not be supporting voting for Obama. We suggest conscious folks nix the political theater of the Republicans and Democrats, concentrate on local self-reliance, local community building, local people empowerment, local building of relevant educational, health care, local food sovereignty, local production, local work and local communication self-sufficiency infrastructures. Don't count on any government to "save you." Not happening folks, not with perverted electoral politics, whether you're in US or Haiti.

"Obama was the straw that broke the camel's back for us."

The corporations have bought out the politicians and they're about servicing Wall Street, giving corporate welfare, maintaining their jobs at ALL cost.

Obama's betrayal of core justice values, cuddling Wall Street instead of making it accountable, just to get re-elected cannot sufficiently be offset by general fear of the Republican's Supreme Court nominations. We must speak truth to power, live without fear. And the Supreme Court has presided over a judiciary that disproportionately favors the wealthy, puts more Black man into the prison system for non-violent crimes like being addicted to "inhaling" than anywhere else in the world.

Moreover, what's the Supreme Court done for Main Street lately anyhow? Or, to preserve its objectivity, its reputed sacredness? Like the Democratic and Republican members of Congress, the folks at the Supreme Court are a reflection of the times. They have simply become an arm of the global corporatocracy, giving more human rights to corporations than to human beings. Supreme Court appointments are simply not a sufficiently important issue to vote Democrat.

The old dog – "vote-for-the-lesser-of-the-two-evils" – argument no longer has traction and won't hunt. People, of all ethnicities, are tired of dealing with evil, period. If being a "pragmatist" or a "realist" means choosing only amongst evils, count us OUT.

The US-Euro pragmatic philosophy has a place, brings lots of comfort, but it is also responsible for the myopic resource wars and prevalent loss of the human soul amongst the schooled peoples worldwide, not to mention the rut and perennial impasse we're in with perverted US electoral politics. Fact is, the US voting rights our Ancestors fought and died for, are redistricted out of legitimacy at the whim of the more wealthy and more powerful. And that's LEGAL!

I am envisioning another world.

Not integrating with injustice.

"If being a 'pragmatist' or a 'realist' means choosing only amongst evils, count us OUT."

Obama betrayed the American voters who expected he would not gut the US Constitution. But he has. And, some of us here at HLLN are lawyers.

This writer herself is a member of two US State bars where the oath I made was to protect the US Constitution. Moreover, as a born-Haitian who spent what seems a lifetime advocating against the US destruction of legitimate elections in Haiti, against the US and the wealthy's support of apartheid and ethnocide in Haiti; against US destruction of the 1987 Haiti Constitution with illegal US regime changes in Haiti; as an advocate who has had to deal with the poor Haitians' indiscriminate INDEFINITE DETENTION simply because the US and Haiti's repugnant undemocratic forces suspect these poor voted and supported Lavalas, I find NOTHING redeeming about the Constitutional lawyer, named Barrack Obama.

It's simply unforgivable on so many levels that Barack Obama went further than George W. Bush in denying human rights and social justice to US and world peoples, like Haitians. Under the Obama tenure, indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens is lawful in the land of the free and the brave and Haitians are saddled with George Bush and Bill Clinton to help us become more a democratic and stable Black nation! Susan Rice takes over the role Colin Powell played for the Bushes while Cheryl Mills is out there pushing the Duvalierist agenda in Haiti previously championed by Bill Clinton's commerce secretary, the late Ron Brown.

Yes racism against Obama exist. No doubt. But, Obama ruined his own integrity by betraying the hopeful world who wished respite from empire's invasions, narcissism, resource wars, denial of social justice and land-grabs behind the do-gooder facade. Obama especially betrayed the weary American people who voted for him. Yes, Obama probably will win again over Romney. The powers that be are very satisfied with the pretty Black-family mask of US imperialism and Americans, of all ethnicities, are programmed for the fairytale narrative and for suburban amnesia. They would rather have comfort than liberty. Obama will most likely win again because denial is easier than the hard reality of Obama's betrayal of Main Street and championing of corporate welfare for Wall Street. Under Obama, like it was under Bill Clinton, the one-percenters continued their white supremacist and land/resource grabbing invasions and betrayal of Africa, continued the perennial US war in Haiti, against the poor worldwide, against countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, et al.

"The powers that be are very satisfied with the pretty Black-family mask of US imperialism."

Obama did not bring American soldiers home but started other wars. Both parties are the same. And, in a world of infinite possibilities we choose not between the lesser of two evils. In fact, those of us who are not into denial and work at the human rights front lines prefer to face the Republican snake head-on then the confused and gutless Democrat chameleon whining about being a progressive when they are NOT.

There's no difference between the two US political parties, except one is more direct in their tyranny against the most vulnerable amongst us. The other hides behind pseudo liberalism and gives us Clintonesque deregulation, NAFTA unfair trade and loss of US jobs, gutting Glass-Steagal to serve the Goldman Sachs cadres, Welfare-to-Work when all work has flown overseas where US superpower might makes sure there's no minimum wage, no human rights, unions or respect for Black and Brown life.

Whoever is in charge of the profit-over-people paradigm, Democrat or Republican, Ezili's HLLN will be confronting 24/7. Full time. Frankly we prefer watching the Democrats in the opposition to the Republicans opposing EVERYTHING that they sat by and watch OBAMA preside over. There's much less emotional tie-in for me there. If that means facing Romney, so be it. But there are other choices, like everyone NOT showing up for this theater and nullifying the elections. Envision that. A courageous electorate that stops believing things must stay as they are with the duopoly. Just imagine it. Yes indeed I am a dreamer. Nothing changes without risk. Pragmatism is just a cop-out. Since it doesn't matter who we vote for, best to make a statement. I think that's pragmatic. More so than voting for Obama, the more effective evil.

Human rights attorney, Ezili Dantò, is dedicated to correcting the media lies and colonial narratives about Haiti. A writer, performance poet and lawyer, Ezili Dantò is founder and president of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN), runs the Ezili Dantò website, listserve, eyewitness project, Zili Dlo Clean Water Program, FreeHaitiMovement and the on-line journal, Haitian Perspectives. Website: http://www.ezilidanto.com/zili and http://www.ezilidanto.com/.

http://blackagendareport.com/content/not-voting-obama-were-not-even-buying-voting-ticket-show

"The meaning of life lay in life itself"

Perpetual outsider - - A communist's life under capitalism 

Prabhat Patnaik

   

Georg Lukács, the renowned Marxist philosopher, had remarked that in terms of attitude to life, Vladimir Lenin's position had represented a basic shift from that of earlier revolutionaries. Eugen Leviné the leader of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet republic, who, despite being 13 years younger to Lenin, had typified the earlier attitude, had once famously declared: "We Communists are all dead men on leave!" A communist's life, according to this perception, was always lived under the shadow of imminent death. This did not mean espousing asceticism, and Leviné, who was executed when he was just 36 years of age had been no ascetic, but it did mean the espousal of a personal philosophy where the extinction of life in the revolutionary cause constituted its supreme realization.

Lenin too had been no ascetic. He loved Beethoven, played chess, took long walks in the hills, and liked reading not only the Russian classics but others too, including Jack London. But to him the meaning of life lay in life itself, provided it was devoted to the revolutionary cause. Death was not the supreme sacrifice one welcomed but an end which had to be put off as long as possible, precisely in order to prolong one's service to the revolutionary cause. So, he relished the exuberance of the myriad details of life, from playing with the Zinoviev children in their adjoining Kremlin quarters to being acutely concerned whether Comrade Inessa Armand dressed sufficiently warmly in the Moscow winter.

But no matter how different Lenin's attitude to life might have been from Leviné's, the actual tenor of their lives could scarcely have been very different: being shadowed by secret police, long years of exile in Siberia (Leviné too, born to Jewish parents in St Petersburg, had his baptism in the Russian revolutionary movement), bitter and exhausting arguments with comrades, and the encounter with the horrific violence of civil war. The context today is so different that even a communist who shares Lenin's attitude to life will nonetheless have to live a life that is vastly different from Lenin's. What will such a life be? I am not concerned here with the empirical question of how communists actually live under capitalism, but with the theoretical demands that such a life must make upon them. The political praxis of a communist party having to work within a capitalist society, where there are no imminent prospects of a revolutionary transcendence of the system, has been a matter of much discussion. By contrast, the contradictions confronting the personal life of a communist activist in such a context have been scarcely discussed.

Dedication to the revolutionary cause cannot of course be a "nine-to-five" job like office work. A communist activist cannot simply switch off during certain hours and immerse himself in a world of vegetable shopping, television serials and local addas. Being engaged in an effort to transcend the system requires no doubt a host of fairly routine tasks no different from what an average office-worker engages in. But it requires both the performance of these tasks and what one does during one's "off-task" hours to be informed by a passion for the transcendence of the system that invests even the mundane with a deeper meaning. And such passion must preclude the "nine-to-five" attitude that is symptomatic of an alienated life.

But if this passion, which must distinguish a communist's life and which underlies the attitudes of both Lenin and Leviné (though each gave a different meaning to it), causes a seclusion of the communist activist from the ordinary quotidian life of the people, then he runs the risk of being out of touch with them and hence irrelevant. What the people think, how they perceive their situation is an important input into communist theory, and hence the formulation of communist praxis. Becoming aware of people's daily concerns is thus essential, and for this there is no alternative to one's own participation in quotidian life. Party meetings into which the light of quotidian life of the people does not directly enter, and where only a bunch of committed "theorists" speak to one another are no substitute for it; nor is information acquired through party sources alone, since there is an inescapable tendency for the lower cadre to tell their leaders what they think the latter wish to hear. And reliance on the "public media", which are largely controlled by corporate interests, for assessing the public mood, has consequences for the movement which are obviously adverse.

Even the opinions of sympathetic elements among the elite constitute a shaky foundation for the formulation of appropriate communist praxis. There is an interesting story of a group of Indian revolutionaries, belonging to aristocratic and affluent backgrounds, meeting Lenin to request Soviet help for India's freedom struggle. Having listened to their views for some time, Lenin asked if there was any person of proletarian background among them. The visitors scratched their heads, got into a huddle and finally decided that the person who came closest to Lenin's requirement was the Indian driver of the vehicle that had brought them to Lenin's office. They informed him accordingly and Lenin asked for the driver to be brought in. When the driver entered the room, Lenin turned his back on the rest of the delegation to have a long chat with him on the Indian political situation. Appropriate communist practice requires not just occasional chats of this sort but a continuous interaction with ordinary people. This can come only from the communist activists' participation in a quotidian life that brings them into contact with people.

There is, therefore, a peculiar contradiction that surrounds the life of a communist under capitalism. Being immersed in quotidian life sans revolutionary passion, with revolutionary activities treated as a mere "nine-to-five" job, is inimical to correct praxis. Likewise, being confined merely to a charmed circle of fellow-revolutionaries with little contact with ordinary people in their daily lives, is equally damaging for revolutionary praxis, for it leads either to a substitution of one's own and one's comrades' wishful thoughts about the people's mood for the actual mood itself, or ends up taking the word of the corporate media for assessing the people's mood. A communist therefore needs both to participate in quotidian life, and yet to retain an "outsider's" perspective upon it. This condition is not satisfied by dichotomous conduct, such as the communist activist's engaging intensely with comrades during certain hours of the day, and then withdrawing into a private world to recoup himself; on the contrary, such dichotomous conduct entails a detachment from quotidian life during both periods.

It may be thought that the issue being talked about here is somewhat esoteric, that the problems facing the communist movement in India today are altogether different from those arising from a communist's engagement, or lack of it, with quotidian life in a capitalist society. There can hardly be two opinions on this: the communist movement in India today has to engage with the question of caste and other identities; it has to fashion its political praxis to form a united front among extraordinarily disparate social groups; it has to defend, not just in a contingent fashion, but as an essential link to its vision of socialism, the democratic rights of the people; it has to strive to unleash the creativity of the people, including that of its own cadres; and it has to carry out "rectification" among its cadres, a thing far more elemental than what we have been talking about, where "vices" such as corruption, local "satrapism" and careerism need prior attention.

Nonetheless, while all this is true, the question of a communist's life under capitalism remains a relevant one that cannot simply be wished away. What is more, it is not an issue that has attracted much classical Marxist theorizing. Both Karl Marx and Lenin lived the bulk of their lives under the impression that a European revolution was imminent. Both, as they got disillusioned about the prospects of a European revolution, turned their attention eastwards, but did not abandon the perception of capitalism's days being numbered. This has also been the general perception of the communist movement. This perception may well be more valid today than it has been for quite some time in the recent past; nonetheless the durability of capitalism must not be underestimated, in which case the question of how a communist living under capitalism must engage in quotidian life and yet be outside of it needs to be addressed.

The author is a former professor, Centre for Economic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 

  

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120508/jsp/opinion/story_15461475.jsp

Entrapping the Cleveland 5

Cleveland: FBI plot blamed on Occupy

Occupy's image blown to smithereens: Kevin O'Brien | cleveland.com
http://www.cleveland.com/obrien/index.ssf/2012/05/occupys_image_blown_to_smither.html

The habit of electoralism

The Silly Season: A Caricature of Democracy

from ZZ's blog by zoltan zigedy

We are well into the silly season, the great US national election spectacle that will compete with the other inane entertainments offered by our mega-media; in a real sense, the 2012 Presidential and congressional campaigns are the ultimate reality shows. In fact, they are not far from mimicking the vulgar competitions of American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. Imagine a television show with participants chosen by how much money they can raise from mega-millionaires, shadow boxing over questions prepared by media multi-millionaires, and concluding with an extravagant climax in November, with US voters selecting the winners. And those winners then get to rule the US for the next two, four or six years. And that, without too much exaggeration, is our two-party electoral system. Of course ruling the US should be serious business. And the great tragedy is that this frivolous selection process is anything but serious.

This carnival has evolved. The role of television, for example, has transformed national elections into beauty pageants with $200 haircuts, attractive faces, winning smiles, and cute families superseding issues and programs. But before television, party bosses delivered the votes with patronage and Election Day "services." The common denominator throughout the ages is money. Money, and the effort it buys, have been and continue to be decisive. Merely the ante has changed, growing astronomically until only the super-rich or their friends can vie for the highest offices. Inexorably, the staggering role of money exponentially multiplies the influence of a tiny cabal of the wealthiest in picking winners and shaping policy.

None of this is strikingly new or even seriously deniable. But what is striking and serious is the continued acceptance of this state of affairs by the millions of increasingly desperate citizens who cling to elections as an expression of their interests. Though elections are becoming more and more irrelevant to serving those interests, the cycle continues unabated.

For the "one percent," the electoral circus is an undeserved gift that allows a refreshing of the ruling elites on a regular basis, with little chance of any renegades sneaking into the ruling clique. The pool of reliable candidates is determined well in advance based upon their service to capital and then the populace is allowed to pick from two duly anointed choices (certainly I recognize that in some "liberal" or minority districts better candidates vie, but this is consistently challenged with gerrymandering and hyper-spending geared towards embedding trustworthy and spineless social-liberals with no animus towards corporations).

For the ninety-nine percent, the elections are the meager meal that keeps the pitchforks in the barn and staunches the illusion that the US is a democracy.

While none of this is really disputable or even often challenged by the left, most of the left continues to dutifully climb on board the Democratic Party bus every election cycle. Sure, the thought of electing an ex-FBI snitch, clumsy B-film movie actor as President in 1980 drove most of us to vote for a mediocre Democratic incumbent who had already signed onto the neo-liberal agenda and betrayed his entire 1976 program (Ted Kennedy ran against him in the primary for exactly that reason). We should have known better—the Democrats had secured near-total dominance of the electoral arena after the Nixon fiasco and frittered it away, demonstrating no intention to further a progressive, popular agenda.

Election after election, the Democratic Party mobilizes its progressive base by stoking fears of the wacko-right. And like Pavlov's dogs, the base pulls out all the stops to support well-groomed, corporate-friendly lawyer-candidates who promise, but never deliver. And now—over thirty years after Reagan—the incumbent Democratic Party President is on record as enthusiastically expressing his admiration for Ronald Reagan, the demon who stoked the great fear of the ultra-right. A bitter irony, but an irony lost on a new generation of leftists and progressives who hold their nose and work hard for a Democratic Party victory.

Why is this?

Arguments for repeating the same pattern abound: from future Supreme Justices to ending military occupations and containing economic predation. Yet the ideological disposition of the Supreme Court continually drifts rightward; the wars and occupations overlap from one regime to another; and inequality continues to grow unabated. Clearly, any merits of the "lesser-of-two-evil" tactic are not realized in practice.

What began as a credible tactic—put aside ideology, and deny the extreme right a shot at ruling—has since become an unthinking and unproductive habit, a habit that fails to stop or even slow the rightward drift in US politics. To break this habit, someone must pose, advocate, and work to popularize a new tactic that promises to turn back this vicious trend. To reverse this trend, a new approach is urgently needed.

But it would be naïve to believe that a new approach would emerge from within the Democratic Party. Party leaders have no interest in seeing such a movement arise and have been complicit for some time in smashing any internal insurgency by changing the rules against democracy, by siding with "winnable" moderates and rightists, and by undermining progressive candidacies; it's their party and they're keeping it. Yet many still tilt at these windmills.

Instead, devising a new approach falls upon the left, a left that seems determined to avoid this responsibility. The harsh reality is that the left in the US, even broadly defined, has little to no influence upon electoral outcomes and, therefore, has little to lose in exploring independent answers. That is not to deny that the labor movement in the US does seriously impact elections. But its long standing intimate relationship with the Democratic Party promises little change without a popular movement to show the way. Finding a new approach is one problem, but none will be found unless we begin to look for one.

Standing in the way are the naysayers, the perennial advocates for staying the course. Recently, I read an analysis by a "Communist" who castigated some on the left because they "disparage the electoral battle." He pompously stated that the elections are the "main form of class struggle." Such a view is sheer nonsense and an impediment to advancing both class struggle and class politics. Certainly, elections can be a form of class struggle, but never an effective form, except when influenced by powerful, independent and principled forces. We have known these moments both in the 1930s when the left mobilized millions in opposition to failed economic policies, and in the 1960s, when militant actions supported civil rights and challenged an imperialist war. If the results of the 2008 election (with a Democratic sweep) are a measure of the success of this form of "class struggle", then its success for those on the wrong side of the class divide. If we learn anything from the malignant Tea Party, we should understand the value of not tendering our support unless we get something for it. And if the Democrats don't need our support, then we are foolish to offer it.

Still other pseudo-Marxists justify their electoral obsession and fealty to the Democratic Party by appealing to the writings of Georgi Dimitrov. Dimitrov introduced the notion of a united front against fascism in his 1935 report to the Communist International. On their reading, the left should make common cause with the Democrats to defeat the ultra-right, thought by them to be the contemporary embodiment of fascism. But this is a felony against history: we are not faced with the fascist threat of 1935. Nor do these Marxist poseurs represent Dimitrov's views faithfully. He never advocated surrendering the left's identity to rival political parties; he never advocated fighting the class enemy solely in the electoral arena; and he never endorsed making nice with the Parties of the big bourgeoisie. Certainly US Communists didn't interpret Dimitrov in this fashion when they ran Earl Browder and James Ford in the 1936 election against Franklin Roosevelt.

Another variant on this opportunist "Marxist" theme postulates stages or levels of struggle by anointing collaboration with the Democrats in their electoral bids as an intermediate stage on the road to a distant socialism. With this view, any motion at all towards that distant goal must await the final conflict with the ultra right.

 Except this is not Marxism. Rather it is the pretentious appropriation of Marxist jargon to justify marriage to the Democratic Party. Marxists, first and foremost, recognize the direction of processes. And in the case of marching in lockstep with the Democratic Party, this policy has hardly been a productive process. In fact, it has led, over decades, to a continued rightward retreat under the banner of "the lesser of two evils," a dubious launching pad for a higher stage.

From the perspective of an even lighter shade of red, Bill Fletcher has stirred a lively internet debate with his recent excoriation of those he sees as disdainful of electoral politics. In his "My Frustration with the Left when it comes to Electoral Politics", Fletcher caricatures the debates on the left as between sensible, pragmatic leftists who bring their issues into the electoral arena and wild-eyed, cynical radicals who scorn elections. Like all caricatures, his simplifies and obscures differences and evades a real confrontation with the limitations of electoral politics in the here and now. Fletcher postures the electoral "arena" as a "field of struggle" for "popular power" and a place to "raise issues that have the possibility of gaining greater recognition."

But is it? Certainly, it could be, under specific and ideal conditions—for example, the existence of a left bloc with the temerity and determination of our Tea Party foes on the right. But is the 2012 election such an arena for the left?

The answer is clearly "no." A Democratic victory promises neither "popular power" nor the projection of any new, progressive issues. Surely, the betrayal of the meager program promised by the 2008 Obama victory underscores this point. Fletcher conflates what could be with what is. Elections could be meaningful if we had a class-based or anti-monopoly Party, but we don't. Furthermore, Fletcher scoffs at the idea of building one. Instead, he projects one possibly arising "from an 'insurrection' within the Democratic Party and a major section of its base…" Waiting for this "insurrection" to spontaneously ignite has been a dream for generations, a dream of those blessed with patience, but short of vision and realism.

History teaches a different lesson: from the abolitionists through the anti-war movement of the sixties and today's Occupy movement, change has come from organized forms resolved to press issues regardless of the electoral consequences and independent of electoral maneuvers. Were the abolitionists' strategy to take the focus of struggle solely into the electoral arena, the cause would have languished for decades. Similarly, without labor's independent militancy outside of the electoral arena in the early thirties, workers would have been saddled with the corporate-friendly NRA and the toothless section 7A.

Bringing struggles into the Democratic Party and entrusting it to advance these issues legislatively, as Fletcher suggests, inevitably dilutes, co-opts, and divides popular struggles. Certainly Democratic Party leaders opportunistically and parasitically adopt popular movements when they capture the attention of voters, but they do so to contain, compromise, and exploit those movements. That process was clearly demonstrated in the Obama era, with far-too-many leaders of the anti-war movement passing the cause on to the Administration. As a result, the wars continued to expand and the movement is virtually silent. Today, the Democrats are fervently trying to suck the energy of the Occupy movement into the electoral campaign. Should it succeed, it will eviscerate the movement.

Fletcher is correct to argue that we have yet to build a foundation for a left party in the US. However, we will never build one, if we do not fight to keep our struggles and movements independent of the Democratic Party and outside of a reliance on electoral politics. People should and will vote as they please. But energy spent on working for a Democratic victory in November is energy diverted from building our movements. Movements are the enforcers of ideas and policies. When the left builds its base, it will have something to advance or trade with bourgeois politicians and it will not surrender its support for nothing.

Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

The wonders of capitalist lab science

The article calls out two problems that are compromising the ability to detect drug resistant pathogens.

1. de-skilling of microbiology labs
2. proprietary lab kits whose constituents are kept secret, from the lab workers who use them, to protect manufacturers profits
   

Drug-Resistant 'Superbugs' Go Undetected
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=drug-resistant-superbugs-undectected

Excerpt:

...some researchers think that poor training has left microbiologists unaware of how best to interpret test results. Kenneth Thomson, director of the Center for Research in Anti-infectives and Biotechnology at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, says that an ongoing "de-skilling" of microbiology laboratories in Europe and the United States is problematic. He says that lab directors with PhDs are not being replaced when they leave, and that budget constraints are cutting continuing education for laboratory staff.