Saturday, March 30, 2013
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Breakthrough in U.S. communist newspaper sales
Int’l drive ends with a bang— 600+ subscribe in final week!
BY LOUIS MARTIN
In a truly impressive effort during the final week of an international campaign, Militant readers sold 619 subscriptions, bringing the total sold in five weeks to 1,924. Supporters of the paper in a number of areas are organizing victory celebrations.
All but four areas went over their local quotas. Militant supporters also sold hundreds of books on revolutionary working-class politics, mainly going door to door in working-class neighborhoods. (See ad on page 3 for books on special.)
“Tonight, Militant supporters have successfully completed the campaign in New York. We can look forward to continuing the discussions with readers,” Deborah Liatos wrote late March 19 to volunteers who sold 303 subscriptions to workers there.
“You have been talking about things I have been wanting to talk about,” Alexandra Jean told Militant supporters in Montreal when asked why she decided to join the door-to-door effort. A few weeks ago she bought a subscription and four books from a team that knocked on her door.
Until recently Jean was attending pre-university college. She explained she had volunteered for the Red Cross and other charities, “but they weren’t making a difference. I feel like going door to door is worth it. This message is true.”
“Where does this crisis come from?” Louis Conde asked Militant supporters standing at his door in Philadelphia March 16. “It’s like nobody’s steering the car. Or at least, we’re not. We’re the ones paying for this disaster.”
Conde has been a custodial worker with the Philadelphia public school district for more than 20 years. He described recent cuts in wages and working conditions of school workers, as well as the closing of schools. “The schools are set up to fail. They never give us what we need for the students,” Conde said. He got a Militant subscription and bought The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning: The Fraud of Education Reform Under Capitalism.
Mark Wilson in South London subscribed to the paper after Julie Crawford and Jonathan Silberman came to his house for a follow-up visit he requested a week earlier.
Wilson’s mother, who lives in Jamaica, was cured of cataract blindness by Cuban medical volunteers there. “The Cubans did it for free,” Wilson said. “I don’t know much about the Cuban Revolution, but Jamaicans I know prefer to see Cuban doctors.”
John Naubert reported from Seattle that Louis Vega, 54, a disabled army veteran originally from Puerto Rico, renewed his subscription when Militant supporters stopped by his house.
“I like how the paper tackles issues head on,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about the Cuban Five until it was covered in the Militant. They are fighting the covert operations from the U.S.” against the Cuban Revolution. (See box on page 9.) Vega also bought a copy of Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own.
Naubert also reported that Militant supporters going door to door in Kent, Wash., met Lily Wilson, whose husband was one of the recent strikers at United Natural Food Inc. in Auburn, Wash.
“The Militant is by the people, for the people. We have to come together, everyone is out there for themselves. I want to show this paper to my friends,” Wilson said as she got a subscription.
“Militant supporters in Atlanta sold 35 subscriptions and 17 books in the last eight days,” reported Rachele Fruit.
One of these subscriptions was a renewal to Alfonso Baccay, a building cleaner from the Philippines. Baccay also got a copy of Cuba and Angola. “I like that you can learn the truth about other peoples’ struggles,” he said.
Alyson Kennedy reported that one of the renewals in Chicago last week was from Andre Watson, 30, who drives a forklift in a plant. “The Militant is about building a movement,” he said. “It explains how we are progressing and how the government keeps us oppressed. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
“It is not a race thing,” said Watson, who is African-American. “It doesn’t matter if you are poor Latino, Black or white. They want us to fight each other. If we have a movement in different states, cities and even overseas, we will have a better chance. That’s what we need.”
Jacquie Henderson wrote from Houston that Militant supporters were invited by three construction workers to join a fish fry March 16 to meet their friends, eat freshly caught fish and introduce everyone to the paper and books.
When told that Socialist Workers Party members were planning to run a campaign for mayor and city council in Houston, the new readers volunteered to help launch the campaign. “The campaign was really launched there yesterday,” said Henderson.
Frank Forrestal reports from Minneapolis that Militant supporters picked up four subscriptions, including three renewals, last week from workers in the Red River Valley region of northern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota.
“I like the Militant, but would like to see more promotion of unions and how to get unions started,” said Bill Hauck, one of 1,300 workers locked out by American Crystal Sugar since Aug. 1, 2011, who now works at a potato factory.
The Militant got five “Prisoners” subscriptions last week, bringing our total to 20 for the drive. These include three renewals from Los Angeles, which Militant supporter Jesus Landeros organized to get.
One new subscription was bought by an unemployed worker supporters in Miami met going door to door, who wanted it for her jailed godnephew. And a prisoner in Florida requested to receive the paper.
The international effort to expand circulation of the Militant continues. Bundles of the paper can be ordered by contacting the Militant at themilitant@mac.com or (212) 244-4899.
http://www.themilitant.com/2013/7712/771203.html
Friday, March 22, 2013
Lipstick, powder, rouge, and Marxism
‘Fetish of cosmetics’ bred by social relations under capitalism
Below is an excerpt from Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for March. The selection is from an article titled “The Fetish of Cosmetics,” written in 1954 by Joseph Hansen (1910-79), a leader of the Socialist Workers Party. Copyright © 1986 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY JOSEPH HANSEN
Long ago in analyzing the strange powers of money, Marx called attention to this projection by which human beings see their relations not as relations but as things which they endow with remarkable powers. Indicating the parallel to certain magic objects in primitive beliefs and religions he called it fetishism. What we have in cosmetics is a fetish, a particular fetish in the general fetishism that exists in the world of commodities. The special power that cosmetics have derives from the fact that in addition to economic relations, sexual relations attach to them. That is the real source of the “beauty” both men and women see in cosmetics. …
At a certain age, girls—sometime very young ones—begin trying out lipstick, powder, and rouge. In almost every case, this either causes or is associated with a sharpening of relations with their parents. At the same time they often seem to leap ahead of their age group so far as their former boy associates are concerned. If they can get away with it, they go out with youths considerably older than they are. The reason such girls use cosmetics is to facilitate this by appearing older than they are.
What they seek to say is quite obvious. Through the magic of cosmetics they express their wish to cut short their childhood and youth and achieve the most desirable thing in the world—adulthood. Why they want to be adults can be surmised in the light of how capitalist society treats its youth.
Precisely at the age when the sexual drives begin to appear and an intense need is felt for both knowledge and experience, capitalist society denies both of them. Just when the developing human being must set out to establish normal relations with the opposite sex, capitalist society through the family intervenes and attempts to suppress the urge.
The relation with the other sex thus tends to become distorted and the interest that belongs to the relation shifts to a considerable degree to a symbol. The powers and allure of the relation—some at least—are likewise transferred to the symbol. Lipstick, for instance, comes to signify adulthood; that is, the adult capacity and freedom to engage in activities forbidden to children. By smearing her lips the child says, this gives me the power to do what I want.
Naturally it’s only a wish and an imaginary satisfaction—or at least that’s what most parents imagine it to be or wish to rate it as, and the real power of the drive toward relations with the opposite sex, disguised by the fetish, is not always recognized. The symbol becomes beautiful or ugly, beneficent or malignant. In Antoinette Konikow’s youth [1880s], for instance, lipstick was “indecent.” Today it is a “must.”
This interesting alternation in time of the aesthetics of cosmetics is accompanied by an even more striking duality in its powers. To a child, as we have noted, cosmetics are a means of hiding and disguising youth, a means of appearing to be at the age when it is socially acceptable to gratify the urge for knowledge and especially experience in sexual relations.
Thus the same fetish displays opposite powers at one and the same time—the power to make old women young and young women old. Mother uses cosmetics to hide her age and bring out her youth by covering up the dark circles under her eyes. Daughter uses them to hide her youth and even touches up her eyes with blue shading to bring out her adult beauty.
Now what shall we say of children who use cosmetics because of the social necessity to look old: Shall they be denied that right? My inclination would be to go ahead and use cosmetics if they feel like it. At the same time I would be strongly tempted to explain what a fetish is, how it comes to be constructed, what is really behind it and how this particular society we live in denies youth the most elementary right of all—the right to grow naturally into a normal sexual relationship—and gives them instead the fetish of cosmetics as an appropriate companion to the fetish of money.
The application of Marxist method has thus forced cosmetics to yield two important results. We find ourselves touching two problems of utmost moment in capitalist society—the interrelation of men and women and the interrelation of youth and adults; that is, the whole problem of the family. In addition, we have discovered that these interrelations as shaped by capitalist society are bad, for it is from the lack of harmony and freedom in them that the fetish of cosmetics arises.
Existence of the fetish, in turn, helps maintain the current form of interrelations by creating a diversionary channel and an illusory palliative. Thus we have uncovered a vicious cycle. Bad interrelations feeds the fetish of cosmetics; the fetish of cosmetics feeds bad interrelations.
Our application of Marxist method has given us even more. If we deny that beauty is inherent in a thing, then it must be found in a human relation; or at least its source must be found in such a relation. Doesn’t that mean that the beauty associated with sex is at bottom the beauty not of a thing but of a relation? If we want to understand that beauty we must seek it first in the truth of the relation; that is, through science.
Is it really so difficult to see that in the society of the future, the society of socialism where all fetishes are correctly viewed as barbaric, that beauty will be sought in human relationships and that after science has turned its light into the depths that seem so dark to us—the depths of the mind—the great new arts will be developed in those virgin fields?
http://www.themilitant.com/2013/7712/771249.html
Thursday, March 21, 2013
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