"The Unfolding New World Situation" by Jack Barnes [1973]

An international comrade has been motivating me to study the trove of Socialist Workers Party document bulletins on the Marxist Internet Archive.  This has also sent me back to my own bookshelves and files this weekend.

The book Dynamics of World Revolution Today [Pathfinder Press, 1974] contains many documents useful in understanding the international struggle to build communist parties carried out in 1963-1973.  One of the most interesting is the April 1973 SWP National Committee report  "The Unfolding New World Situation" delivered by Jack Barnes.  His summation then remains true today:  "We view the construction of Leninist parties not as a preferable method but as the necessary method to lead the workers to victory and to guarantee that victory.  That is the road we are determined to follow."

George Novack on "negation of the negation"

From the glossary in George Novack's Polemics in Marxist Philosophy

negation of the negation - one of the basic laws of dialectics, flowing from the unity and struggle of opposites and the transformation of quantity into quality.  Every object or condition is characterized by internal contradiction between a positive and a negative pole - that which exists and that which is coming into being.  At the first dialectical leap, or negation, the old framework is broken, the previously subordinate quality or object in the relationship becomes dominant, and a new framework is established with a new set of internal contradictions.  In both Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, this rupture is referred to as transcendence, rather than mere empty negation of the previous status quo, because there is an element of continuity and development as well as destruction.  The concept of the negation of the negation traces this element of transcendence over a longer period of time.  It is the logical means of conceptualizing evolution over time, on the premise that natural and social processes are sufficiently determinate to show long-term cyclical patterns.  Common examples given include the life cycles of living species, where birth represents the breakup of the previous unity of the parent organism for the first negation, with the stage where the progeny reach reproductive age representing the second negation, or the negation of the negation.  In social evolution, a common example is the negation of primitive social property by the rise of private property and class society, followed by the eventual emergence of the proletariat, which moves toward the second stage, the negation of private property and the reestablishment of social property on a higher level, for a negation of the negation.  From these examples  it can be seen that Marx's concept is not purely cyclical but more like a spiral in which the conclusion of the complete process also involved evolution and progress toward a higher level of organic or organizational complexity, and not mere repetition.

from Polemics in Marxist Philosophy [Pathfinder, 1978] page 315.

George Novack on Louis Althusser

George Novack's excellent collection "Polemics in Marxist Philosophy" (Pathfinder, 1978) ends with a thirty page glossary where Novack summarizes many left philosophical personalities untouched in the book's articles.

Whither Ukraine?

Ukrainians defy new law attacking right to protest
Fight against Russian boot fuels ongoing actions 

BY SETH GALINSKY 

Some 100,000 people demonstrated in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, Jan. 19 to demand repeal of new laws that curtail the right to protest. Underlying months of anti-government protests are national aspirations of the Ukrainian people, who — with the exception of the early years of the Russian Revolution — have lived for centuries under Russian domination.

Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovich pushed through the law in an attempt to undercut protests that began in November when he backed out of a deal to sign a trade and “association” agreement with the European Union and instead moved to maintain close economic and political ties with the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At the time hundreds of thousands took to the streets, demanding that Yanukovich resign. A central slogan at opposition demonstrations has been, “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the nation! Ukraine above all!”

The leadership of the protests comprises a heterogeneous coalition of bourgeois parties pressing for integration into the EU. Three of these parties have seats in Parliament: Fatherland, led by jailed former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoschenko; UDAR — punch in Ukrainian — led by Vitali Klitschko, a former heavyweight boxing champion who campaigns on an anti-corruption platform; and ultrarightist Svoboda (Freedom), which scapegoats Jews and has introduced bills to ban abortions and “communist ideology.”

The new law passed by Parliament last week bans the unauthorized public installation of tents or stages and the use of loudspeakers in public and imposes jail terms for participating in “mass disorder” and wearing balaclavas or helmets.

Some protesters who fought with police defiantly wore saucepans and colanders on their heads. Some 1,500 protesters needed medical attention after the clashes.

Centuries under Russian boot
The suppression of national rights in Ukraine goes back centuries. Eastern Ukraine became a possession of the Romanov Dynasty in 1654 and from that time on the feudal monarchy carried out a policy of Russification there. While rule over the western part changed hands between Austria, Poland and Russia over centuries, the tsars banned the Ukrainian language, suppressed the Ukrainian church and promoted Russian colonization, in the areas under its control.

By the early 1900s Ukraine made up 20 percent of the population of the Russian empire, which at the time was comprised in its majority of non-Russian peoples who faced varying degrees of subjugation. It was a “prison house of nations,” in the words of V.I. Lenin, central leader of the Bolshevik Party and 1917 Russian Revolution.

The Ukrainian bourgeoisie remained small and weak. The ruling class and urban middle classes were drawn from Russia and other nationalities. “In the Ukraine and White Russia,” wrote Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky in 1932, “the landlord, capitalist, lawyer, journalist, was a Great Russian, a Pole, a Jew, a foreigner; the rural population was wholly Ukrainian and White Russian.”

At the same time, Ukraine was a key conquest of the empire, serving as a breadbasket for Russia and major source of its coal and iron production.

Among the central tasks of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution under Lenin’s leadership was the emancipation of tens of millions of oppressed peoples — from the culturally more advanced people of the Baltic region to the Muslims of the Caucasus to nomadic tribes of the Far East.

The Bolshevik Party’s championing of the right of oppressed nations to self-determination leading up to the revolution was decisive in uniting, educating and organizing the working class to take political power, which included forging an alliance with the peasant majority from all backgrounds.

The Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party stated in November 1919 that Bolsheviks in Ukraine “must put into practice the right of the working people to study in the Ukrainian language and to speak their native language in all Soviet institutions; they must in every way counteract attempts at Russification that push the Ukrainian language into the background.”

The new policy of Ukrainization helped the Bolsheviks win over the Ukrainian Borotba (struggle) Party, which merged with the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1920.

Stalin murder machine
But by the early 1920s the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party had begun, personified by the rise to power of Josef Stalin after the death of Lenin in 1924. Stalin headed a counterrevolution representing the interests of a growing privileged social layer centered in the increasingly bureaucratic state apparatus. This reactionary caste reversed the Bolshevik’s course and resurrected the Great Russian chauvinism of the empire, including the re-subjection of oppressed people, this time under the false banner of “communism.”

“Nowhere did the purges and repression assume such a savage character as they did in the Ukraine,” Trotsky wrote in 1939.

Russification of Ukraine was revived. From 1959 to 1989 the number of Russians rose from 16.9 percent of Ukraine’s population to 22.1 percent.

When the Stalinist regime in Russia and Eastern Europe finally collapsed under pressure of growing social contradictions in the early 1990s, the new regime continued to dominate Ukraine, whose industry remained closely linked to that of Russia. Moscow supplies 60 percent of gas used in Ukraine and has turned off the spigot twice to force compliance with the Putin government’s demands.

Competing factions of emerging and aspiring capitalists arose following the collapse of the Soviet Union, drawn largely from remnants of the Soviet bureaucracy. In Ukraine, the factional contest was partially based on divisions of east and west, Russian and Ukrainian, orientation toward Moscow and the West. Meanwhile, the national aspirations among Ukrainian working people against the Russian boot remain strong.

At the end of 2004, in what became known as the Orange Revolution, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from the western part of the country took to the streets to oppose the continuing Russian domination of the country and what they saw as a rigged election that gave the presidency to Yanukovich, who was then prime minister.

As a result, a new election was called and bourgeois opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko was elected president, taking office in 2005, but a series of corruption scandals left him with little support by the end of his term.

Today about four out of every six people in Ukraine are ethnic Ukrainians and speak the Ukrainian language. One in six are ethnic Russians who speak Russian and roughly one in six are ethnic Ukrainians who speak Russian. Russian is the main language in much of the eastern and southern part of the country, areas which are more economically developed.

Yanukovich returned to the presidency after winning elections in 2010. In July 2012 his Party of Regions successfully passed a language law that encourages making Russian an official language in some regions.

The Ukrainian Week reported in March last year that the top eight Ukrainian TV stations broadcast less than a quarter of their prime-time content in Ukrainian. Less than 5 percent of the songs on the top six radio stations were in Ukrainian. 

http://www.themilitant.com/2014/7804/780402.html

My blog's readers: by country

This week's readers of Marxist Update, based on the always inaccurate page-view count:

United States	1182
Ukraine	286
Russia	124
United Kingdom	123
Sweden	75
Germany	59
Poland	58
France	47
Canada	36
China	35

The tragedy of Amiri Baraka: A personal view

Who said Bush didn't do enough to prevent 9/11?
Who opposed busing in Boston?
Who supported Obama?
Who opposed Cuba's internationalist missions in Africa?
Who proclaimed his own birthday a High Holy Day?
Who race- and agent-baited during the 2007 Venezuela International Book Fair?
Who said Israel knew about 9/11?
Who? Who? Who?


On 9 January, in the break room at work, I saw the online announcements of Amiri Baraka's death.  In a fit of Facebook bravado, I posted this before returning to my cubicle:
"Amiri Baraka - another Democratic Party Stalinist Jew-hater bites the dust."

A comrade responded, "Brace yourself for a torrent of heart-wrenching memorials from the middle-class left."

Another comrade wrote, "Not classy.... not classy... Baraka was an amazing revolutionary artist."

Two weeks later, the poet has been buried and the obituaries have faded into the ether.  I was surprised by their breadth and scope.  The New Yorker paid attention to the Leroi Jones period.  The middle class left emphasized the career arc of beatnik-to-nationalist-to-Marxist, spending late paragraphs addressing, or failing to address, Baraka's anti-Semitic and conspiracy-mongering 2002 verse "Somebody Blew Up America."

Though I used to write a lot of poetry, and have read some, I am certainly not qualified to comment on the value of Baraka's verse.  Like that of Pablo Neruda, it does not appeal: privledging the verbal, straining after rhetorical effect, its moral overkill is - to put it mildly - unenticing to the eye and ear.  I have been reading Blues People this week, and find it useful as historical revision, but my ignorance of music is a real roadblock to appreciating the book's obvious passion.

Baraka's politics are another matter.  His career in U.S. politics was not unique.  Many radicalized by the mass proletarian civil rights movement that smashed Jim Crow, attracted by the example of the Cuban revolution, and mobilized in defense of Vietnam against Washington's invasion, moved toward communism in the period 19602-1980.  But like the 1930s radicalization, objective limits were imposed on the process: relative stability of the capitalist economy; the profound weight of Democratic Party bourgeois reformism; the misleading and corrosive effects of Stalinism, acting to thwart the development of communist leadership.

Many Black militants, awakening to political consciousness, found the counterfeit of communism, mostly in its Maoist variant.  Those like Baraka, inspired by the Cuban revolution, found themselves on a road that led to condemning Cuba as a colony of Soviet social imperialism.  Those like Baraka, inspired by worker and peasant mobilizations in the  colonial world, found themselves rejecting the revolutionary potential of the multinational U.S. working class, instead supporting the blood-drenched Democratic Party.

Over time this degeneration led to radical poses that obscured middle class reformism.  By 2002 Baraka was in the position to write a poem, "Somebody blew up America," as a hymn to ahistorical moralizing and conspiracy explanations for social reality.  In it, he could castigate George W. Bush for not preventing the 9/11 terrorist attacks, while at the same time claiming Israel knew about the attacks in advance. 

Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion And cracking they sides at the notion

....
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day Why did Sharon stay away?

Who? Who? Who?

From that poem, Baraka was only six years away from embracing Barack Obama. 

But the nadir and summation of his political career may have been his interventions at the 2007 Venezuela International Book Fair in Caracas.  While there he participated in the forum "The United States: a possible revolution."

"Some twenty-two participants addressed the November 10-14 forum, almost all of whom had been involved in various social protest movements and political parties in the United States, " wrote Socialist Workers Party leader Norton Sandler about the event.  "....the majority traveled from North America to take part.  Widely diverging and often sharply counterposed views were debated in the course of what was, with one exception, a model of civil debate for the workers movement.  The exchange achieved an unusual degree of clarity on a number of central political questions.  The resolution of those questions, in the course of far-reaching class struggle, will decide whether the working class in the United States will be able to transform itself into a class with a mass political vanguard capable of successfully leading broad layers of oppressed and exploited toilers in a struggle for power." [cite]

The one exception was, alas, provided by Baraka.

Sandler goes on to detail the forum presentation of Socialist Workers Party leader Mary-Alice Waters:

....a sharpening capitalist financial and economic crisis like that opening today "will intensify the battle for the political soul of the working class" in face of efforts by employers to turn immigrants, workers who are Black and female, and others into scapegoats for mounting joblessness and worsening economic and social conditions.

Working people in the United States "face the same class enemy," Waters said, "and determined struggles on any front tend to pull workers together in face of the attempts to divide us."  More than ever before in history, she emphasized, a fighting vanguard capable of leading a successful revolutionary struggle in the United States today will bring together workers regardless of skin color, national origin, or sex.  As we fight alongside each other, "it becomes harder for the bosses to pit 'us' against 'them,'" she pointed out.  It becomes more possible to see that our class interests are not the same as those of 'our' bosses, 'our' government, or 'our' two parties.

A counterview to this perspective was expressed most sharply by panelist Amiri Baraka, a U.S. writer who has been active in Black nationalist, Maoist, and Democratic Party politics since the 1960s.  Baraka argued strongly that "white privilege" has derailed all potentially revolutionary struggles in U.S. history, including the powerful labor upsurge of the 1930s and the mass movement that brought down the institutions of Jim Crow segregation in the South by the end of the 1960s.  The failure of the "white left" to organize "whites" to fight "white privilege," he said, has spelled the doom of every movement for social change.

In this version of history, race-baiting rears its ugly head, as "white workers," with racist prejudices become the explanation for all defeats.  Missing is the responsibility borne by the Stalinist parties worldwide, from the mid-1930s on, for subordinating struggles by working people and the oppressed worldwide to Moscow's quest for peaceful coexistence with the imperialist rulers.  In the United States that meant diverting the great social movement that grew out of the battle to organize the industrial unions, channeling it toward support for the Democratic Party.  (In her remarks, Waters pointed out that as a result of such Stalinist political misleadership, "The revolutionary potential of the great radicalization in the 1930s was squandered and diverted into support for capitalism's 'New Deal' and then its inevitable successor, the 'War Deal" - the imperialist slaughter of World War II."  With the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she said, that "enormous political obstacle at least no longer stands across the road toward independent working class political action and revolutionary socialist leadership."

Participants in the audience pointed to examples of strikes and other recent struggles in the United States to which the employers have failed to achieve their objectives with divide-and-rule strategies that had long proved effective.  In response, Baraka said he did not share the opinion expressed by others that racial divisions could be overcome through such struggles, because "white leaders" are interested above all in protecting their privileged positions.  In short, "white privilege" is more powerful than common class interests.

....On the closing day of the forum, Baraka ended his presentation by reading his verse about the events of September 11, 2001, entitled "Somebody Blew Up America."  That piece asks: "Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed / Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home that day / Why did Sharon stay away?"

These bigoted, conspiracy-spinning allegations deny not only the facts of what happened on September 11, they conceal the plain truth of how capitalism works.  Above all, they deprive working people of the knowledge and confidence  that we are the makers of history - that our own conscious, revolutionary action, and only that, can remove the capitalist ruling families from power and prevent them from blowing up the world.

Following the initial remarks about the rich and all-powerful Jews, I took the floor to point out that Jew-hatred remains one of the most virulent anti-working class weapons of the ruling classes, as it has been for the past century and a half.  Recalling its ghastly consequences in the hands of Germany's imperialist rulers in the 1930s and '40s, I underlines the deadly threat to the workers movement of refusing to intransigently combat any and all scapegoating of Jews, Latinos, Blacks, gypsies, whites, or any other national or ethnic grouping. 

Agent-baiting was also introduced into the debate - the one departure from civil discussion noted earlier - and it was answered.  Baraka accused one fellow panelist of hiding that he was a "Trotskyite" and another of being an "agent" (of some unnamed power) whose objective was to abet the mobilization of a reactionary student movement in the streets of Venezuela to overthrow the government of Hugo Chavez.

Waters replied to Baraka.  Thanking the book fair organizers for making possible the expression of a broad range of views as part of the forum, she stressed that in order for civil debate to take place, "the poison of agent- and race-baiting" must be condemned by all.

Sandler also recounts Baraka's own political stance on U.S. politics as expressed on the panel:

....If the bourgeois-democratic revolution was incomplete, then bourgeois reform is what's on the agenda.  He laid out his program to complete that task as part of a bloc with sections of the Black bourgeoisie.  The program he spelled out was aimed not at advancing a revolutionary struggle by the working class and its allies to take power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers.  Instead, Baraka advocated rewriting the bourgeois constitution of the United States and replacing the current bicameral Congress with a unicameral parliamentary system similar to what exists in the majority of imperialist powers!

Nothing could have been in sharper contrast to Waters' opening remarks that, "Yes, revolution IS possible in the United States.  Socialist revolution.  To put it in class terms, a proletarian revolution - the broadest, most inclusive social upheaval of the oppressed and exploited imaginable, and the reorganization of society in their interests....

"What's more, a revolutionary struggle by the toilers along the path I just described is inevitable."  What is not inevitable, however, Waters emphasized, "is the outcome of these coming revolutionary struggles.... That is why what we do now, while there is time to pepare - what kind of nucleus of what kind of revolutionary organization we build today - weighs so heavily."

The panelist Baraka attacked for not identifying himself as a "Trotskyite" was ISO leader Lee Sustar.  

Militant correspondent Olympia Newton, attending the sessions where Baraka spoke, reported the event this way:

....He proposed that Blacks and Latinos, including the “progressive” Black bourgeoisie, unite around a program to abolish the electoral college; establish a unicameral parliamentary system; ban “private money” from election campaigns; make voting compulsory; and restore voting rights to felons. Such constitutional reforms, he said, would shift power towards “people’s democracy” in the United States. Revolutionary goals could then be put on the agenda.

What has derailed all previous revolutionary struggles in the United States, Baraka argued, is “white privilege.” He cited the defeat of Radical Reconstruction following the Civil War, the failure of the 1930s labor upsurge to go further, and the decline of the mass movement that brought down Jim Crow segregation as three examples. Moreover, “white privilege” and the failure of the “white left” to fight it remain the primary obstacle to struggles today.

Baraka also renewed his attack on [George] Katsiaficas, who had spoken about Asian student struggles on the panel the previous day. Baraka accused him of being an agent trying to stir up support in Venezuela for student marches against the government of Hugo Chavez.

Baraka concluded by reading his poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” a Spanish translation of which was distributed to participants. Written after September 11, 2001, the poem presents a long list of historical atrocities, interlacing anti-imperialist and anticapitalist rhetoric with conspiracy theories of history and anti-Semitism. “Who decide Jesus get crucified,” the poem asks. “Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed / Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Tower / To stay home that day / Why did Sharon stay away?”

During the opening day of the panel, a participant from Panama had said during the discussion that Jews are the main problem facing working people in the world today because “they have all the money” and control everything. Norton Sandler, a member of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, spoke from the floor the next day and pointed to the danger of scapegoating and Jew-hatred for the working-class movement.

After Baraka’s remarks the final day, Mary-Alice Waters took the floor to thank the organizers of the book fair “for bringing together diverse forces for such a broad variety of views for the discussion that took place here.” She stressed the importance of civil debate, noting that “the poison of agent- and race-baiting should be rejected by all.”

The paths of U.S. Stalinism lead but to the Democratic Party.  A year after the 2007 Caracas book fair, Baraka embraced the candidacy of Barack Obama.  Just as this political evolution is typical of Baraka's generation, so to is a growing reliance on race- and gender-baiting and Jew-hatred.

Jay Rothermel

More than "nonviolence" to defeat of Jim Crow

How Blacks in South defended
themselves against Klan violence
 
BY ARRIN HAWKINS  
In her letter to the editor printed below, reader Wendy Banen asks for examples of armed self-defense by Blacks against the racist violence endemic to Jim Crow. Legal segregation in employment, housing, schools, and other aspects of life was smashed by the mass movement for Black rights in the 1950s and '60s.
Armed defense against racist attacks in the South is a lesser-known part of Blacks' resistance to the Klan, White Citizen councils, and other ultrarightist outfits. Racist violence, condoned by federal and state authorities, was aimed at defending segregation and punishing anyone who opposed it. When faced with Blacks prepared to defend themselves, their property, and the lives of civil rights workers, however, racist vigilantes retreated.

One example is the Union County NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina, led by Robert F. Williams. Blacks there starting in 1957 organized armed "civil defense groups" to counter Klan attacks.

"Since the city officials wouldn't stop the Klan, we decided to stop the Klan ourselves," Williams recounts in his book Negroes with Guns. "We started this action out of the need for defense because law and order had completely vanished; because there was no such thing as a 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution in Monroe, N.C."

In 1965, young fighters in McComb, Mississippi, organized all-night armed patrols to deter Klan "joyrides" in Black neighborhoods. McComb was the scene of some of the heaviest Klan violence against the civil rights movement. While hundreds of civil rights workers were participating in Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964, some 16 bombings occurred in McComb.

Members of the Young Socialist Alliance visiting the town met with some of these militants in McComb. "Armed self-defense was actually initiated by two teen-aged girls," Joel Britton wrote in the March 22, 1965, Militant. "They were fed up with the bombings of Negro homes and churches and took to sitting up nights on the porch with guns. When their parents and other adults discovered how the girls were spending their nights, they decided it was a good idea, but shouldn't be left to the youngsters alone to carry on."

Another militant example is the Deacons for Defense and Justice, which was formed in Jonesboro, Louisiana, to protect Blacks from Klan raids. In July 1964, after Blacks tried to implement the Civil Rights Act in public accommodations, a 30-car motorcade of Klansmen rode through the Black neighborhood escorted by the Jonesboro police. "We decided that if the power structure would do that for Klan, then we had better do something for ourselves," said Earnest Thomas, a leader of the Deacons in Jonesboro.

The Deacons had chapters across Louisiana, including in Bogalusa, Baton Rouge, and New Iberia. The group declined by 1968, as desegregation advanced.

Speaking at a Militant Labor Forum in New York in December 1965, Deacons leader Charles Sims said, "We let him [the Klan] know that everywhere the civil rights workers went, he might not see them, he might not know who the Deacons might be, but somewhere close to him we were there."

Deacons for Defense, a 2003 film directed by Bill Duke that dramatizes the story of the group, shows the Deacons succeeding in desegregating a Louisiana saw mill.

Praising the combative example set by the Deacons, an editorial in the June 21, 1965, Militant said, "The Deacons will help the civil rights movement win further victories, by reducing the terror which helps prevent Negroes from winning new rights and exercising rights already won on paper…. Everyone who is for civil rights and Negro equality should give the Deacons every support and encouragement, and should defend their right to exist and grow, free from government harassment."
 
 
Related article:
Letters  

http://www.themilitant.com/2005/6930/693036.html