"The defenders of the Republic" on the hajib

The Assault On Illhem

By Tariq Ali

Forgive an outsider and staunch atheist like myself who, on reading the recent French press comments relating to Ilhem Moussaid the hijab-wearing NPA candidate in Avignon, gets the impression that something is rotten in French political culture. Let’s take the debate at face-value. A young Muslim woman joins the NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party]. She obviously agrees with its program that defends abortion, contraception, etc, i.e. a woman’s right to choose. She is then told that despite this she does not have the right to choose what she wears on her head. It’s astonishing. There is no Koranic injunction involved. The book says: "Draw their (women's) veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty", which can be interpreted in several ways but is disregarded most blatantly by hijab-wearing Egyptian women I see in Cairo and Karachi wearing tight jeans and T-shirts that contradicted the spirit of the Koranic message.

Patriarchal traditions, cultural habits and identity are what is at stake here and they vary from generation to generation. Pushing people back into a ghetto never helps.

I grew up in a Communist family in Lahore. My mother never wore a veil. She set up a feminist group in the Fifties that worked with working class women in the poorest quarter of the city. Half of them covered their heads in public. It did not affect their activism in the slightest. Similar stories can be told of women in different parts of the world, Muslim and non-Muslim. The Algerian women who fought in the resistance against French republican colonialism did so as anti-imperialists. Some were partially veiled, others not. It did not affect the way they fought or the methods used by the French to torture them. Perhaps the torturers should have been more brutal to the hijabed freedom-fighters to help integrate their progeny better in the Republican tradition.

In 1968-9, the Pakistani students, workers, clerks and women (including prostitutes) fought for three months against a military dictatorship and won: the only victory of those years. The religious groups backed the military. They were isolated and defeated, but many of the women students who fought with us wore the hijab and chanted militant slogans against the Jamaat-i-Islami. Should we have told them they couldn’t participate unless they took off their head-cover? Personally, I would have preferred that for purely aesthetic reasons, but it made nil difference to our struggle.

The anger against Ilhem and the NPA is completely misplaced. The real state of the world leaves the defenders of the Republic completely unaffected: the million dead of Iraq, the continuing siege of Gaza by Israel and Egypt, the killing of innocents in Afghanistan, the US drone attacks in Pakistan, the brutal exploitation of Haiti, etc. Why is this the case?

Several years ago I noticed that French protests against the Iraq war were muted compared to the rest of Western Europe. I don’t accept that this was due to Chirac’s opposition to the war [after all de Gaulle had opposed the Vietnam war even more strongly], but to Islamophobia: an increasing intolerance of the Other in French society, reminiscent of the attitude towards Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The conformism of that period explains the popularity of Vichy during the early years of the war.

Islamophobes and anti-Semites share a great deal in common. Cultural or ‘civilizational’ differences are highlighted to sanction immigrant communities in Europe. The narratives are multiple. No universalist response is possible. Immigrants and the countries to which they migrate are different to each other. Take the United States for a start. This is a territory peopled by migrants, many of whom were Protestant fundamentalists, from the seventeenth century onwards and which has depended on migrations ever since.

In most of Western Europe the first large wave of migrants were from the former colonies of the European powers. In Britain, the migrants were from the Caribbean Islands and South Asia, in France from the Maghreb. Without abandoning their identities, they integrated in different ways and on different levels. The South Asians, principally peasants and a sprinkling of workers, were not treated well by the trades-unions. Despite this, South Asian migrant workers led some of the most memorable struggles for unionization.

The Indians in particular came from a highly politicized culture where Communism was strong and they brought this experience with them to Britain (like the New York taxi drivers today). The Pakistanis were less political and tended towards networking groups reflecting clan loyalties in their villages or cities of origin. The British governments encouraged religion by pleading for mullahs to arrive so that the migrants could be kept away from the racial currents in the working class during the 1960s and 1970s.
In France, there was forced integration. Each citizen was taught that s/he had the same rights, something that was patently not the case. It is material needs and a desire to live better that fuel the rage, not spiritual beliefs. During the eruption of the banlieus in 2005, Sarkozy, then Minister of Interior, like the ultras in Stendhal’s novels, talked of ‘savages.’ I have often pointed out to the discomfiture of even some leftists that the kids who rioted had integrated well by internalizing the best French traditions: 1789, 1793,1848, 1871, 1968. When oppression became unbearable the young built barricades and attacked property. Deprivation, not disbelief, was the root of their anger.

How many Western citizens have any real idea of what the Enlightenment really was? French philosophers undoubtedly took humanity forward by recognizing no external authority of any kind, but there was a darker side. Voltaire: "Blacks are inferior to Europeans, but superior to apes." Hume: "The black might develop certain attributes of human beings, the way the parrot manages to speak a few words." There is much more in a similar vein from their colleagues. It is this aspect of the Enlightenment that appears to be more in tune with some of the Islamophobic ravings in sections of the global media.

Marx famously wrote of religion as the ‘opium of the people’, but the sentence that followed is forgotten. Religion was also ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature’ and this partially explains the rise of religiosity in every community since the collapse of Communism. Compare the young Normaliens trooping in to say Mass today to the horror of their parents. My women friends in the Muslim world complain bitterly when their daughters wear the hijab as a protest against familial norms. It was always thus.


Tariq Ali's latest book, The Protocols of the Elders of Sodom and other Essays, has just been published by Verso. Published in Le Monde on February 20, 2010 and Couterpunch and is reprinted with permission.

Mao under academic eyes

Alain Roux : “Mao Has Survived Maoism”

Translated Monday 1 March 2010, by Gene Zbikowski and reviewed by Henry Crapo

An interview with Alain Roux, the historian and China expert. The author of Casse-tête chinois [Chinese Puzzle] explains the Great Helmsman’s exceptional destiny to us. How Mao, finally come down from his pedestal, has become a historical subject ...

How is one to understand the path of a figure who was both a totalitarian leader, responsible for millions of deaths, and a head of state able to breathe new energy and new pride into his compatriots? Alain Roux [1], as a historian and a China expert, furnishes us with a remarkable biography of the Chinese leader, whom he is careful to situate “in his time and place.”

What led you to work on a biography of Mao Zedong over 30 years after his death ?

Alain Roux: This project is the result of having noted a paradox: for thirty years, China has experienced a capitalist-type development, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to consider Mao as one of its elements of reference, which is even written into the CCP statutes. In other words, Mao continues to survive Maoism, which, however, ended in failure. How has a figure of such dimensions resisted, at least in China, the fallout from all of the disasters of which he was guilty? That was the starting point of my reflections. It turned out that, to think about Mao Zedong as a historian, that is, to treat Mao as an historical subject, the only way of answering this paradox, became possible with the publication of several liberating works. I have in mind the work of Simon Leys (les Habits neufs du président Mao), among the oldest work, or more recently the biography written by Mao’s doctor, Li Zhisui, la Vie privée du président Mao. Other books like that of Philip Short (Mao Tsé-Toung), which I appreciate a lot and which was published just as I began my own work, have confirmed that historical reflection on Mao is possible. In addition, the publication by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (Mao, l’histoire inconnue) gave rise to real questions on my part as to these authors’ approach. Chang and Halliday, who are by the way qualified men, had access to many contacts and sources. They provide previously unpublished information which cannot be ignored any longer, but they simultaneously start from an a priori which, as a historian, I do not accept. To make a monster of Mao from the beginning of his political career is extremely simplistic and disdainful with regard to the Chinese people. In this, one can see a risk of history being used to destroy a legend which endures in China. It is going from a gilded legend which no longer has any reason to exist to a black legend which unnecessarily hinders historical research.

How did you proceed and what were the obstacles you had to overcome?

Alain Roux: I tried to follow the line of the crises and the line of the decisions which had motivated Mao. I don’t pretend to have uncovered new sources – I am specialized in the Chinese labor movement – but, on the other hand, I have tried to use them in an original way. I notably based myself on the research of Stuart Schramm, an American historian and China expert, the best specialist on Mao who, right from 1962-1963, accomplished a determining work for the knowledge of Mao and his ideas. One of the main obstacles that a historian has to get past comes from the Chinese cultural tradition itself. This tradition makes the work both easy and more difficult. In all ages, there has been in China an official and edifying history, which serves to draw political and moral lessons from studies of the great men of the past, even if they were wicked. At the same time, there also is a tradition of a parallel history, which is termed “indiscreet.” It is an “external” history, as the Chinese say, very much centered on stars and idols, in which gossip and scandal are intermingled, but which can also convey a whole series of pieces of information for which documentary data are not yet available. The problem is that these sources cannot always be checked, and their credibility is limited, but they open up hypotheses and perspectives which may later be confirmed by the archives.

Having concluded your research, how do you see Mao? Was he a nationalist? A socialist? How was such a historical character constructed?

Alain Roux: Mao was a patriot, and his first commitment was nationalist. This is due particularly to the humiliation that China experienced in the 19th century. Was he a socialist? What does “socialism” mean to a Chinese? In Chinese, the very word is not clear. It is rather closer to the term “sociology.” For Mao, socialism is related to government control. It consists in making a party-cum-state responsible for modernizing the country from above. With Mao, this government control comes into conflict with his vision of an egalitarian world, one without social classes, races or nations, the Great Harmony, which comes from Chinese tradition. Mao gives the impression that he wanted a less unjust, more egalitarian China. In reality, it is more of a populist project. Unlike the European communist leaders, Mao did not have much confidence in the working class. He was a worker leader who led strikes in Hunan in 1922, but he very quickly became disillusioned with the Chinese proletariat. He told a representative of the Communist International who was passing through his province that he thought the working class was not very combative, corporatist [having a craft mentality), and structured by secret societies. For these reasons, he looked for other social forces to make the revolution. Beginning in 1925, he was thinking of the peasantry. During the winter of 1926-1927, he discovered and praised to the skies the strength of the peasant movement in Hunan province.

Was it then that Mao became a “Maoist?”

Alain Roux: At first, Mao was not a Marxist theoretician. He was a theoretician of guerilla warfare who exploited the link between war and politics. He owes a little to Clausewitz, a lot to Sun Zi and his Art of War, written five centuries before Christ, and still more to robust peasant common sense. He perfected his guerilla warfare and was very lucky. If he had not been sidelined by the CCP leadership in 1934, he would have had to bear the weight of the defeat of the Soviet Republic of Jianxi, like the other communist leaders. Mao was lucky and he was able to take advantage of his luck, like all the great figures in history. He lost power at the right time and then appeared as someone you could fall back on. Under his leadership, the Long March, which was initially flight to escape from deadly encirclement, became an anti-Japanese offensive. Mao felt the need to become a theoretician after the Long March, when he became the top leader of the CCP, between 1935 and 1941. He then established himself as the man who could adapt Marxism to Chinese reality. One can debate his real theoretical contribution, which is often rather fragile. But it is true that the idea, according to which Marxism had to take root in the historical reality of each country, was an innovative idea, not only for China, but for the international communist movement. Mao Zedong Thought – the Chinese communists do not use the expression Maoism – was raised to the level of Leninism, which was perceived as the adaptation of Marxism to Russian reality. In 1945, following a tough campaign to bring the whole CCP into line with his views, Mao made his “Thought” the theoretical basis on which the growing power of the communists rested. It remains that basis.

What pushed Mao to provoke such terrible crises as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution?

Alain Roux: One can see Mao’s vision of the world in the concept of “uninterrupted revolution” that he developed. He was persuaded that the world is made up of an infinity of contradictions which can never result in periods of stability – everything has to be continually called into question. In this way, a sort of metaphysics of the class struggle was created, in which every little private producer of wealth, even a humble coolie, becomes an exploiter to be denounced or eliminated. Even worse, this arbitrary class status becomes hereditary and gives rise to social pariahs, which, in the long term, is politically unmanageable: The population is mobilized continually. Mao presented this concept as a response to the bureaucratization of the Party in the USSR. Right from 1955, he criticized Soviet society, which he saw as frozen and non-dynamic. Mao dreamed of a different type of society. He was obsessed by the danger of the restoration of capitalism and by the risk of seeing a bourgeoisie develop from a bureaucratized communist party. Such fears are not totally wrong! This was seen at the time of the dissolution of the USSR and we are seeing it now in China, where a good part of the bourgeoisie that is forming has its base in the Party apparatus. Mao countered this bureaucratization with the enthusiasm and the mobilization of the popular forces. In his opinion, the masses could do anything. Mao’s state of mind is revealed in the letter he wrote on July 8, 1966, to his wife, Jiang Qing, just before the unleashing of the Cultural Revolution, to explain to her his vision of the big shake-up that he was preparing. He did not believe his power was threatened, but he feared that his successors would fall into the same errors as the Soviet revisionists. He was going to show his strength, to play the “tiger,” but he also used cunning, playing the “monkey”: his errors in the Great Leap Forward furnished him with arms against the very people who aroused his ire for having tried to limit the damage. Roughly every ten years, the masses had to be led against the Party cadres to put them to the test and to prevent the ossification of revolutionary élan.

Has your view of Mao changed upon the conclusion of your work?

Alain Roux: This concept of uninterrupted revolution, linked to the egalitarian project, explains to me why Mao kept repeating his errors. Right from 1949 you can see him setting up a new society on the model of Soviet development, which by the way succeeded in getting the Chinese economy off the ground. After 1955, he started what he defined as an original Chinese path and this was the Great Leap Forward which resulted in a first terrible catastrophe, with from 25 to 30 million peasants dying of starvation in three years. In 1962, you see the appearance of some solutions, which anticipate what is going to happen after 1978, notably with Deng Xiaoping, who initiated a policy of flexibility in the countryside. Mao let him get on with it, and then he suddenly stopped him and prepared the Cultural Revoltion to liquidate the cadres implicated in this political readjustment. A few years later, in the midst of the chaos, he called back Deng, whom he had chased from power, but once again he blocked his initiatives and deposed him in 1976. Why? It is as if he had an intuition that these changes were going to result in the restoration of capitalism in China. This kind of lucidity is tragic and powerless, since in fact it was the crises that Mao provoked that certainly precipitated the changes that he feared. The question that it was urgent for me to answer was to understand why such persistence in error was possible. Mao’s overblown ego, the restoration of national pride, the maneuvering skill of the ruling team and the absence of a credible alternative are not enough to answer the question. You have to look beyond Mao and China, to that dictatorship of a single party merged with the state, outlined by Lenin and generalized by Stalin, which made all-powerful despots of the communist leader or leaders who were in power. Seen from that angle, Mao was a perfectly orthodox Marxist-Leninist. The bloody repression of the peaceful demonstrations in Tian’anmen Square in June 1989 and the recent severe condemnations of Chinese intellectuals, guilty like Liu Xiaobo of demanding freedom of speech and freedom to organize, show that, thus reduced, Maoism as an avatar of police state, bureaucratic socialism subsists to the present time and prevents the Chinese people from fighting against the injustice of which it is a victim, to the greater profit of the Chinese oligarchs and foreign multinational corporations.

[1] Alain Roux is Emeritus professor at the National Insitute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO). Le Singe et le Tigre, Mao, un destin chinois. [The Monkey and the Tiger : Mao, a Chinese destiny] published by éditions Larousse, septembre 2009. 1 126 pages, 26 euros. La Chine au XXe siècle. [China in the 20th century] published by éditions Armand Colin, 2006. Le Casse-tête chinois. [The Chinese Puzzle] published by Éditions Messidor, 1980 (republished and updated under the title la Chine populaire, [People’s China] published by Éditions Messidor. Tome 1, 386 pages, 1983  ; tome 2, 400 pages, 1984.

Anniversary of 1984-85 UK miners strike

How the miners shook Thatcher

Mark L Thomas talks to workers in Doncaster in Yorkshire about the enduring impact of the Great Miners’ Strike on the area

The biggest and longest mass strike in British history ended 25 years ago. Around 165,000 miners struck for a year from March 1984. They were fighting Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s attempts to close pits, sack tens of thousands of workers and smash one of the most militant sections of the working class.

On 5 March 1985, thousands of miners lined up behind their pit lodge banners and marched defiantly back to work. Their heroic strike was over.

Today, the legacy of the Great Miners’ Strike is bitterly contested. Some say that the miners were destined for defeat from the start.

Others argue that Thatcher’s assault destroyed any power that the unions had and any hope of working class struggle.

Both arguments are wrong.

It’s true that the defeat of the miners sent shockwaves throughout the entire working class.

The Tories ravaged pit communities. Many sacked miners never worked again. For young people, shutting down pits destroyed all hope of getting a decent job. Drug use soared.

Stainforth one of the many pit villages that surround Doncaster, South Yorkshire. In 1984 there were 14 pits in the area.

“Stainforth is a very different village today from when the strike started,” says Ann Hird, the wife of a striking miner. “Young people relied on the pit for work. It generated work for the whole area.”

The defeat was devastating. In the years that followed the Tories closed one pit after another.

“It became like a ghost town. Youth crime went up. There was nothing for the kids to do,” Ann said.

Yet resistance to Thatcher had brought communities together and pulled many people into their first political activity. It showed the potential power and resourcefulness of the working class.

During the strike Thatcher mobilised the full force of the state against the miners.

The police laid siege to pit villages – and other working class communities. The Tories claimed that miners received substantial strike pay and cut off social security payments to them.

Solidarity

In fact miners got just £1 a day if they went out picketing. Solidarity was crucial to sustaining the strike.

“Every pit had a city that it twinned with,” recalls John Westmoreland, a local activist and lecturer in Doncaster. “The collection buckets were always full and no one touched the money.

“Yorkshire miners had a high status – because they were standing up to the police.”

Trevor Kirk worked at International Harvester’s factory in Doncaster for 25 years. He was a shop steward in the AEEU engineering union, which is now part of Unite.

“We had collections in the factory every week,” he said. “Many workers were sons of miners or had brothers down the pits. Support was very solid.”

Miners’ wives became centrally involved in sustaining the strike. “We struggled during the strike but there were also happy times,” remembers Ann Hird. “Communities came together.

“Thatcher didn’t think the resilience among the miners was there. The support from miners’ wives shocked her. She thought we wouldn’t get behind the men, but we did.

“The sewing factory over the road from where I lived collected money for the strike. The local supermarkets did collections. There were collections everywhere.”

Ann stresses the difference that solidarity made to the strikers: “At Christmas we got a massive parcel from trade unionists in Hull. It had food, a teddy bear and other presents for my daughters.

“We didn’t know these people, but they sent us things that were luxuries for us, things we hadn’t seen for a year.

“It gave you a feeling of comradeship and community. That’s what socialism is about. Thatcher will never have any idea about that.”

The strike shook up people’s ideas.

Joe Henry was a miner in South Elmsall, near Doncaster, in 1984. “I remember coming back from picketing in Nottingham,” he says. “We had got a hammering from the police.

“The whole journey home was spent arguing about whether we needed the police at all.”

The strike made wider political discussion part of the pits.

“After the strike, in 1988, the Tories brought in Clause 28 that banned the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools., added Sue.

“Members of the Socialist Workers Party at Armthorpe pit moved a motion in the union branch. The first line said, ‘Homosexual love is of equal value to heterosexual love’.

“There was a big row, but the motion was passed.”

Joe says the miners could have won. He points to a couple of weaknesses behind the defeat of the miners’ NUM union:

“The first problem was the failure of other trade union leaders to deliver real support – industrial action – for the miners.

“But there was also a weakness within the union. NUM leader Arthur Scargill wanted mass pickets, but his lieutenants didn’t have the same approach.

“As Scargill said afterwards, the problem wasn’t too much mass picketing, it was that there wasn’t enough.

“When miners struck in 1972 there were 80,000 miners out each day on active picket duty. In 1984 there were perhaps 4,000 involved out of 170,000.”

Neil Kinnock, Labour leader at the time, failed to deliver any real support for the miners. Kinnock said he backed the strikers, because of the depth of support for the strike among Labour supporters.

But he was trying to move the party away from its union roots and was terrified that the miners would win by militant methods.

Thatcher defeated the strike but she didn’t smash the NUM. Andrew Buckley was a miner at the Armthorpe pit during the strike. “In the three years after the strike, miners still had the highest number of strike days of any group of workers,” he said.

“The miners weren’t crushed.”

Those who think that the miners were doomed from the start should look at what Thatcher herself said about the strike. Nine years later she admitted that, “We were in danger of losing everything,” and that the strike “could indeed have brought down the government”.

The miners could have won – but leaders of the labour movement let them down. As we face the possibility of another Tory government, we need to learn the lessons of the strike for the battles ahead.

---

‘We need a bit of that passion and comradeship we saw in the strike back today. Whoever wins the election is going to cut services and they always attack the weakest.

No one wanted to bail out the pits. Thatcher talked about “loss making” and “uneconomic” pits, yet many had huge resources of coal.

The Hatfield colliery in Stainforth has hundreds of years of coal underneath it.’

Ann Hird, wife of a striking miner in Stainforth

---

‘When the strike started the women got together in a pub.

We said we needed to do something and set up a soup kitchen.

“We had about 30 involved in our women’s support group. We went out collecting money.

At the height of the strike we were feeding lunch to hundreds.

It was exciting. You desperately wanted to win and at the beginning that seemed possible. I hated Thatcher anyway, but by the end I hated all the Tories. Everyone did.

By the summer of 1984 we were going picketing ourselves.

We went on a women’s picket at Calverton in Nottingham.

We took the police by surprise – there were 200 of us!

The police corralled us on this piece of grass.

It was mayhem, exactly like what they did at the G20 protests in London last year. They kettled us then arrested quite a few.

The police were swines.’

Joyce Sheppard was married to a miner at Askham

The following should be read alongside this article:
» Photos of the miners’ struggle
» A tradition of militancy remains

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"Anti" what war? Combinations of middle class radical left and right

Organizing Against Empire

Where Left and Right Meet ... Amicably

By PAUL BUHLE

Over a conference table at a Washington hotel on March 20, a couple dozen antiwar activists and intellectuals, yours truly included, met to hash out the beginnings of a most unusual movement. We wanted to end American war and American Empire, against the evident bipartisan determination to keep both of them going.

There never was such a boundary-crossing event before, at least not in my 50 year political lifetime or any historical incident that I can recall.

Not quite true. The Populists, arguably the one literal grassroots movement that most nearly overturned the two party system in a handful of states, brought together a kind of cultural conservatism, bathed in scorn of city life, and political radicalism. The antiwar movement of the 1910s made Republican German- and Scandinavian-Americans of the northern Midwest and Great Plains states turns to the Farmer-Labor movement, under a variety of names, and again, in the middle 1930s, to join campus antiwar activists in resisting the militarization of American culture. Even as Pearl Harbor drew close, Norman Thomas stood on platforms with outspoken conservatives urging some other solution than US entry with the inevitable counterparts of conscription, loss of civil liberties, etc. They were wrong about the war but, at least after Truman came to power, right after all about the doleful consequences of mobilization for war. The big state, with its military-industrial part not at all benign, was here to stay.

Even these past sagas, now relegated to a kind of pre-history, seem very different from the little gathering of magazine editors, journalists, youth activists against war. We live in a time so strange that several nineteen year olds joined us, devotees of maverick Texas congressman Ron Paul, had been at the conservative CPAC convention the day before, on their feet cheering Paul's call for an end to US occupations overseas while neocon elders sat in their chairs, glowering. A time so strange that these kids sat a few seats away from Jon Berger, the SDSer on hand, reminding me of my own SDS days and the historic moment when isolationists joined us against the Vietnam War. The shared sentiment never became a real movement forty years ago, but this time it might.

The editors of The Nation, American Conservative, Reason, The Progressive Review (on line), Black Agenda Report (on radio) and the Veterans for Peace Newsletter were all very much were on the scene, although perhaps not so prominent as notables Ralph Nader or William Greider. The event-coordinator, Kevin Zeese, is director of Voters for Peace but perhaps better remembered as a longtime, prominent figure urging an end to the drug war.

The premise was simple, if difficult to grasp entirely at first: the crisis of empire has generated a wave of distrust, make a sense ofr outrage simultaneous among erstwhile Leftwing enthusiasts of Obama (this writer included) and Rightwingers who get labeled "Isolationist" but cannot be pinned down precisely on issues beyond their opposition to US interventions, occupations and military bases abroad. Well, it does sound simple. Perhaps the real problem has been a lack of trust among varied opponents of war, a combination of the usual Lesser Evil voting and a growing, parallel if not mutual sense of political despair.

There proved ample room for agreement as well as disagreement, summed up for me in one exchange. I proposed a return to the late 19th century title, "American Anti-Imperialist League," set up by Boston Brahmins to oppose the bloody war on the Philippines. A conservative sitting improbably to my left complained that the phrase "anti-imperialist" brought visions to his reader of Jane Fonda, whereas "opposition to empire" would give them a proper perspective. (I was loath to mention what recovered past visions of Jane Fonda might do to, or for, me.) In other words, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan made us both rage and weep, while the remembrance of the 1960s made him rage and me weep … with nostalgia.

We had, however, the same goal: bring the troops home now. And we had better learn to work on that together, somehow or other, if we didn't want rightwingers gulled by Sarah Palin and leftwingers waiting, waiting and waiting hopelessly for Obama to do the right thing globally.

It's easy for either side to project nuttiness in the other. Speaking only for myself, I have a useful yardstick for these particular conservatives' favorite politician: I ask myself whether Ron Paul is crazier than my evangelical relatives. The answer is personally satisfying, even when Paul goes off on a tangent about abolishing the Fed (well, not a bad idea) or something about immigration that I do not like at all.

Veteran peace mobilizers, like Sam Smith, Mike McPherson of Veterans for Peace, and young peace mobilizers, like the SDS activist Jon Berger from the University of Maryland, offered some of the most useful, i.e., practical reflections and questions of the day. How would a multiracial coalition of antiwar conservatives and radicals operate? And how would they overcome what remains a crucial distinction between distaste and disillusion toward a president whose election seemed so promising (alternatively: threatening, at least frustrating) but whose global military strategy was and is dead certain to remain both catastrophically expensive and just plain awful?

There aren't any easy answers, but the route toward them must lie in a better understanding, and that, at least, seems to have been achieved.

At the end of this day, the presence of the van den Heuvel-style mover-shakers on various points of the spectrum might well have been the most impressive fact in evidence. It wasn't, because their affable expressions mirrored something deeper, the ground changing beneath all our feet.

Somehow, the delayed crash of Cold War Liberalism may finally have happened, as it could not happen under either Clinton (the male one) or Bush. It is awfully hard to see what lays on the other side, but as aging Pan African giant CLR James wrote after reading The Gulag Archipelago : "at least we know." The bipartisan military-industrial empire has hit the skids and may be in ruins the day after tomorrow, so to speak. At any rate, their Demo-Republican credibility is gone. Now the rest of us had better speak up and begin organizing alternatives.

Paul Buhle, founder-editor of the SDS journal Radical America in the 1960s, is a historian of the American Left and in recent years, an editor of nonfiction comic books, including The Beats: a Graphic History.

____________________________________

my response (once a book review on MR Zine but now seems to have dropped off the radar):

T h e i r P e a c e & O u r s

excerpts


....One of the problems with pushing forward anti-war work is that not a few pro-war activists infest the anti-war milieu. They say things like “The responsibility of the great state is to serve and not to dominate the world” (Harry Truman) or “There is no evil in the atom, only in men’s souls” (Adlai Stevenson). They mislead themselves and fresh forces attracted to opposing the Wall Street war barons, and they muddy things up just when clarity is priceless.....

....The heart of the heart of middle class sentiment about war is summed up by the incomparable Agatha Christie: “One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing: that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.” What kind of war? Disastrous for whom? We aren’t told, because we don’t need to know; war, whether on the picket line or Stalingrad, or in Flanders, is the problem. Causes and sides matter not to the petty-bourgeois Chicken Littles. Until it is time to turn the guns on the working class, they demand peace at any price.....

....The most effective anti-war movements in the last century, movements that actually stopped wars (Russia 1917 and Germany 1918) are blacklisted. The whole labor-communist anti-war strategy, the fact that one existed at all and drew millions around the world to its banner, is also blacklisted from these books. Marx, Lenin, Connolly, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, and Che are policed out of history by these editors and writers as effectively as if the books had been prepared by the old Dies Committee. This will not surprise socialists, labor militants, latter-day Wobblies, and reds who have attended peace and anti-war planning meetings and conferences. The level of red-baiting, cliquing, and double-dealing in such venues is sometimes of grotesque proportions, and is always aimed at silencing and eliminating rank-and-file voices against war.
....

Video: Excellent Zizek lecture

The Monstrosity of Christ

He covers more than just Christ, thank God. JR

Web Guide useful for Marxists

Marx and Marxism Web Guide

compiled by Ralph Dumain

Resources on the Web

Web resources on Marx and Marxism comprise too huge a category to document comprehensively. The focus here is Marxology and Marxist philosophy, theory, and history, primarily resources in the English language. While these links in turn lead to the widest variety of sources, the concentration here is on general sources and theoretical matters, implying, even with the coverage below, an inevitable slighting of: (1) specific thinkers, schools of thought, traditions, some of which I document separately (e.g. Soviet Philosophy, Frankfurt School); (2) organizations and political parties, political tendencies, journals, newspapers, and other periodicals, presses and publishers, archives, individuals, topical political issues, blogs, online discussion lists; (3) non-Marxist resources on socialism, communism, anarchism, the left, the general labor movement and social movements; (4) non-English-language sources.

March is Women's History Month: Yevgenia Bosch

Revolutionary women: Yevgenia Bosch

Katja Teran
Mon, 08/02/2010 - 22:51

This site, along with www.workerspower.com begins a new series on revolutionary women to highlight their often forgotten role in the communist movement. Katja Teran starts the first in the series on Yevgenia Bosch

Yevgenia Bogdanovna Bosch was born on 11 August 1879 (23 August after the calendar was modernised) in Ochakiv in the Ukraine.

Victor Serge, the communist writer, who was once a supporter of Trotsky’s Left Opposition, called Bosch one of the “most capable military leaders to come to the fore in the early stages of the Russian civil war.”

Although there is unfortunately very little surviving information about her, Serge’s comment shows that Bosch was no insignificant figure in the struggle for soviet power in the Ukraine.

She engaged in political activity from a very early age and quickly began to make a name for herself in the communist movement. She joined the revolutionary social-democrats in 1901 at the age of 22 and took part in political activity, mainly in Kiev. Work at that time was mainly underground. She joined the Bolshevik (revolutionary majority) faction in 1903.

She broke with her husband in 1907 and became one of the leaders of the regional organisation in 1909. In 1912 she was arrested and imprisoned, catching tuberculosis, which severely aggravated her congenital heart and lung condition. Nevertheless she escaped from prison in 1914 and at Lenin’s invitation attended the conference of Russian revolutionaries in Berne in 1915. She opposed Lenin’s support for the right of nations to self-determination and campaigned against his policy.

By the February 1917 revolution, her standing in the movement was such that she was elected as a member of the Kiev Committee of the revolutionary Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, and was a member of the Kiev Soviet. From April onwards she served not only as a chair of the District Committee of the RSDWP in the southwestern region, but was also a delegate to the 6th party conference in 1917 and the 7th All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

Initially Yevgenia opposed the idea that the Bolsheviks should lead the revolution forward to socialist tasks, and her newspaper Social Democratic Voice argued that "We believe that the development of productive forces and social power of the proletariat have not reached the level at which the working class could carry out the socialist revolution”. However, in April she was persuaded of Lenin’s view that the working class should go forward to take the power and break the hold of capitalism.

By September preparations began in earnest for the armed uprising against the capitalist Provisional Government and for the establishment of soviet power in Kiev, Vinnytsia and other cities – and Yevgenia Bosch was at the centre of the action. It was above all for her outstanding military skills that she was elected at the first All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets to be part of its central executive.

After the defeat of Petlyura’s counter-revolution, the first soviet government took power in Ukraine, she took on the post of People’s Secretary for Home Affairs – taking direct charge of the struggle to resist the bosses and landlords’ counter-revolution.

At the January 1918 congress of Ukrainian peasants in Kharkiv she declared:

"The fight must end with the transfer of power into the hands of the working class, which we see in Russia, where power has passed into the hands of workers in their organisations - the Soviets of Workers and Peasants’ deputies. ... We must go on, must stop at nothing and eventually strangle the power of capitalism.”

On the great issue of the Brest-Litovsk Peace of 1918, Bosch initially opposed the peace and supported the position of the ‘left-communists’; she later worked on behalf of the Communist Party’s central committee as a military and state official.

In 1923 she backed the Left opposition of Leon Trotsky against the emerging bureaucratic faction of Stalin, and signed the first official statement of the opposition, the Platform of the 46. Increasingly opposed to the party’s course, suffering from ill-health and great pain from heart disease, cardiac asthma and pulmonary tuberculosis she took her own life on 25 january 1925.