Political cynicism: bulwark of bourgeois rule

Cynicism and American Politics

Written by Mark Rahman

When Bill Maher, the comedian turned political commmentator, was recently asked on CNN if he thought Sarah Palin has a future as a presidential candidate he opined, “I don’t know about a presidential candidate, but I would never put anything past this stupid country.” When angry callers asked Maher to clarify what he meant by his statement they were met with the curt response: “I don’t need to clarify, it is!”

Sadly Maher’s sentiment finds echoes among many who identify themselves as “liberal” and “progressive.” Paradoxically it is a view that is utterly reactionary, unscientific, and elitist to its core. After all, like everyone else in the mainstream media, Bill is no Marxist. As he once put it, “Of course Capitalism is good, I am not a Communist.”

Cynicism is a very useful tool for those in power. Although it inherently expresses a sense of dissatisfaction, it offers nothing as a way out. The charade of the two-party system has done a lot of damage to American workers’ perception of politics in general, and created a situation where cynicism and apparent apathy is widespread. Just listen to a little bit of the late, great, George Carlin and you’ll see just how deep-rooted it has become.

The two-corporate-party setup in the US tends to churn up a lot of political confusion. The lack of a fundamental difference between the two parties reduces much of the political discussion to extremely petty issues.

Writer Gore Vidal expressed this quite well when he said: “We only have one political party in the US, and that is the property party, which essentially is corporate America, which has two right wings, one called Republican and one called Democrat. I can’t say I like either of them.” We couldn’t have said it better -- no wonder most American workers are alienated from politics!

When the elections roll around, the decision as to which politician to support often boils down to their personality traits rather than their platform. Incredibly, polls show that Americans have consistently elected the presidential candidates that they would rather have a beer with since Reagan. In the case of Sarah Palin this is all too true. Being the first woman and “regular hockey mom” to come so close to the Presidency, she is of serious symbolic importance to many women, who rightly are disgusted by the glass ceiling for women under this system.

The same is true of Barack Obama. What he symbolizes for millions of poor and working class Americans, and especially minorities, is extraordinary and cannot be underestimated. If the mainstream narrative is to be believed, his Presidency ushers in a “post-racial” era in US politics. But has there really been any fundamental stray from the policies of Bush? The fact is, despite the color of Obama’s skin, he and the Democratic Party represent the very same people behind the Bush presidency.

One major reason for the current apathy is that millions of people feel that they have nothing to vote “for.” After all, as Michael Moore once put it, the lesser evil is still evil! Many people have given up on simply voting “against” the “other” party.

What is needed in the US is a party that represents working people. Such a party could be the political expression of the labor movement to combat the attacks of both the Republicans and Democrats. Such a party would go far in combatting the cynical and apathetic attitudesof many toward politics, as there would finally be a force led by workers in the interests of workers, particularly the most exploited sections of society, minorities, immigrants and women.

What excuse would anyone have to be apathetic or cynical if such a party existed? Of course, many mass labor parties around the world have had time to develop a strong bureaucratic crust on top, which acts against the interests of the workers they are supposed to represent, but their power is increasingly being challenged by the rank and file. An American mass party of Labor would be forged in flames that most careerists and bureaucrats are terrified of, the flames of struggle!

A Labor Party would drastically change the dynamics of American politics. American workers would quickly reclaim the militant traditions of labor battles that once shook the country. This may seem like ancient history to some, especially those like Bill Maher, but history has a funny tendency of repeating itself on an even higher level than before.

Folks like Bill Maher, while being astute commentarists on the absurdities of the system, have no faith in or even the remotest conception of the potential power of the working class to change society. Once American workers have a mass political party of their own, Maher and co. will have to find other things to joke about.

For communists the question is always "What is to be done?"

Defenders of "True American Values":
The Communist Party in North Carolina

by Mary E. Triece

a review of

Gregory S. Taylor. The History of the North Carolina Communist Party. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 258 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57003-802-0.

The History of the North Carolina Party by Gregory S. Taylor offers a window into the efforts of the North Carolina Communist Party (NCCP) and further dispels stereotypes that early twentieth-century Communists were dangerous radicals bent on destroying everything American. Rather, Taylor illustrates, they were "a small group of dedicated activists who sought to undermine the plutocratic dominance and expand the benefits of the state's progressivism" (pp. 2-3). The book begins with the Communist Party's initial foray into the state in 1928 and continues through its disappointing demise by the early 1960s. Taylor's purpose is to offer the "first in-depth assessment of the North Carolina Communist Party, its successes, its failures, and its impact on the state and nation." He explains that members "did not see themselves as enemies of the nation but rather as heroic fighters defending true American values by standing against perceived fascist threats to freedom, liberty, and the American way of life" (p. 5). Taylor concludes the book with an assessment of the efforts of NCCP activists as "laudable," if not heroic (p. 215).

Taylor's study is significant for its detailed chronology of the Communist Party's efforts in North Carolina, particularly the organization's involvement in the 1929 strike in Gastonia and its civil rights and student activism. Taylor covers the Gastonia strike in greater depth than previous studies by accessing Comintern files recently made available to the public. Relying on reports written by African American party organizers John H. Owens and Otto Hall, Taylor sheds light on the challenges of organizing black workers during the Gastonia strike. In his short visit to Gastonia, Owens met with black mill workers to discover why they were not involved in the strike. He found that since white workers had not included blacks in the union, they "feared striking would be equivalent to quitting" (p. 29). Black workers also informed Owens that after three of them had initially joined the union, "mill security forced them back to work at gunpoint" (p. 29). Taylor illustrates the similarly frustrating experiences of Hall by drawing on the organizer's report of his experiences: "The attitude of these cracker strikers toward the Negro has not been changed a bit. Our comrades down here have retreated before them on the Negro question and have let them have their way" (p. 34). According to Hall, African American workers' resistance to the strike was understandable and indicated a failure on the part of party organizers.

Taylor's coverage of the challenges faced by the NCCP as it took up civil rights activism reminds readers of the Communist Party's place at the forefront of this issue. Taylor details the NCCP's anti-lynching campaigns, demonstrations, and an anti-lynching conference held in October 1930. At a September 1930 demonstration, three thousand gathered to hear Communist Party candidates speak about their commitment to end lynching. Drawing on Comintern files, Taylor provides a cursory discussion of party pamphlets, flyers, and a small booklet, "Down with Lynch Law" distributed to those gathered. Also insightful is Taylor's reliance on the lesser-studied Communist Party publication Southern Worker as he documents the NCCP's involvement in the case of the Scottsboro boys. Racism remained a stubborn obstacle for the NCCP and as Taylor's research illustrates, often stood in the way of organizing workers for tangible gains.

Taylor extends our knowledge of student radicalism with his examination of Communist Party activism at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, in particular the efforts of individuals such as Junius Scales and Hans Freistadt. Taylor draws on insightful documents such as the Communist Student Bulletin, found in the Junius Scales Papers at UNC, and the North Carolina Labor Youth League's publication Fightin' Words, located in the North Carolina Collection at UNC. Remarkable among the activists' efforts were those to achieve integration at UNC as early as 1949. Taylor asserts that the NCCP was a "noted, vocal, and early advocate of integration," and the Labor Youth League and its publications likewise worked to promote this goal (p. 195). The party's paper, Fighter for Peace, also directed criticism at Jim Crow and, as the Korean War heated up, "attacked militarism on campus" (p. 197). Of the paper, Taylor writes, these "masterpieces of Communist propaganda brilliantly used issues dear to the hearts of the mostly white student body and wove those issues in with concerns dear to the Communist Party" (p. 197). Taylor's account of the NCCP's efforts at UNC also highlights the injustice and red-baiting faced by faculty and students alike who spoke out in support of issues like world peace and civil rights.

Taylor's carefully written narrative of the NCCP legitimates the hard work and valiant efforts of Communist activists in the South. Its strength comes from Taylor's use of numerous archival materials, including the recently-made-available Comintern files, and lesser-known publications, which enable him to explore the NCCP through all of its ups and downs. Taylor also resurrects small but significant newspapers such as the Chadwick-Hoskin Worker, the shop paper of the Chadwick-Hoskin Mill, and Textile Workers Voice, published for Erwin Mill workers, which detail rhetorical attempts by activists to reach workers. Taylor provides description of the papers' contents, but falls short on deeper analysis, leaving unexplored the party's symbolic efforts to achieve workplace justice. For instance, Taylor describes the efforts of the "popular" Textile Workers Voice to address strike issues and the problem of segregation. The Chadwick-Hoskin Worker provided the "Communist vision of capitalism" (p. 77) and took up the issue of militarism. Left wanting is an analysis of the strategies used by the papers to gain adherence to issues; that is, the description needs to be deepened by asking "how" and "why" questions. What images were relied upon and why? What metaphors were employed and why? How did the paper appeal to readers? How did the paper define the "enemy" and the "hero?" What connections, if any, were made between workers' concerns and the Communist Party? Exploring some of these questions would lead to a fuller understanding of the ways that organizations attempted to persuade individuals and prompt action. Rather than conclude, as Taylor does of the Textile Workers Voice, that the "impact of the paper was minimal" (p. 173) due to the fact only a few workers joined the party, exploring the questions suggested above would provide insight into the ability of activists to draw from a storehouse of symbolic resources to win converts and convince their audience to take risks; a formidable task for any activist.

Furthermore, providing such an assessment necessarily requires the author to make judgments regarding historical efforts at social change, something that historians need not shy away from. Taylor does a fine job relating the strengths and weaknesses of the NCCP with clarity, if not scholarly detachment. His narrative would come to life, however, with assessments of the party that go beyond simply labeling strengths and weakness. For instance, Taylor's introduction initiates a potentially insightful analysis of Junius Scales's skills at persuasion, where he mentions Scales's use of the myth of Horatius to describe Communist Party efforts. Taylor might usefully have taken up the use of particular myths, common storylines, or vivid imagery by activists in an effort to assess not only what worked and what did not, but also why efforts succeeded or failed. In this way, Taylor and other historians might make their scholarship useful not only in uncovering previously ignored efforts, but in providing insights for those who continue to struggle for justice today.

Most notable in Taylor's narrative is his resurrection of the indefatigable efforts by ordinary people to obtain such basic goals as safe housing, decent education, unemployment insurance, hot lunches for school children, and the right to organize in a state marked by rural poverty and deep-seated racism. Some of these individuals, like balladeer Ella Mae Wiggins, sacrificed their lives. Others, such as Junius Scales, spent time in jail, while Hans Freistadt's academic career in the United States was threatened. Such efforts were more than laudable; they were indeed heroic.
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Mary E. Triece is Associate Professor at the School of Communication of University of Akron. She has published two books, On The Picket Line (University of Illinois Press, 2007), which won the Bonnie Ritter award, and Protest and Popular Culture (Westview Press, 2001). This review was first published by H-Southern-Industry (October 2009) under a Creative Commons license.

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De-revisionist Harvey Klehr weighs-in here.

Edgar A. Poe (1809-1849) A Marxist View

Poe was born 200 years ago, and died 160 years ago this week. He is an "acquired taste", and is usually acquired by teenage boys who grow up to become critical theorists.

Poe's truth goes marching on. Had he been born 30 years later, he might have had the career of a Hearst, or at least a William Dean Howells. His idea of a national monthly literary magazine had only to wait for the organization of a nation-wide capitalist market after the U.S. Civil War.

For all the politics, my thoughts this week about Poe's work are about those aspects of it that have always thrilled the teenage boys: the cyphers, the social disasters, the frustrated carnalities, the grandiose rhetorical flourishes. And of course the great moral point groped-toward by the Antebellum southern intelligentsia: It is later than we think...

Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America. By Terence Whalen. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, c. 1999. Pp. xii, 328. $55.00

reviewed by SCOTT S. DERRICK
Rice University

excerpts:

Terence Whalen's impressive Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses is an important and carefully researched book on Poe, and it should appeal to a broad range of academic readers. Whalen is a remarkably well versed Poe scholar in terms of both primary and secondary texts. His elegantly and lucidly written book contains a broad array of historical discussions, all of which come to have consequences for U.S. literary production in general and for Poe's writing in particular. This book is sure to crucially influence the future shape of Poe studies. It offers important commentaries on such topics as Poe's relations to antebellum racism, northern literary hegemony, cryptology ....

Whalen works to demonstrate the determining power of relations of production ....
....For Whalen, in some ways a refreshingly old-fashioned Marxist critic, such relations mark most of social life. As a consequence, his book profitably focuses attention on such diverse topics as U.S. currency debates, on the role of information in the antebellum U.S. economy, and on the crucial need to develop more contextually responsive understandings of both northern and southern racism. The scope of these discussions will make the book valuable for readers not actively engaged in Poe scholarship. Though the book does delve into quite specific debates in Poe criticism, Poe becomes, in some sense, the text's representative subject as much as its final focus.

Because Whalen's fusion of wide-ranging antebellum history and Poe's professional agonies is such a generally successful one, the book is of methodological interest in terms of its account of the relation of literature and culture. The idea that figures such as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, and, later, Henry James were traumatized by the literary marketplace is certainly not a new one. Whalen's contribution lies in his success in making questions of literary production internal to so many issues in Poe criticism and to so much of Poe's literary output. In ignoring many conventional biographical concerns in Poe scholarship as matters of "mere intimacy," Whalen produces a case worth considering for the perhaps scandalous proposition that, "from the standpoint of the commercial writer, nothing is more intimate than production" (p. 22). It remains to be seen how successfully this argument might be extended to other nineteenth-century figures whose relation to the market seems less abjectly unsuccessful. Whalen's vision of Poe as generally a captive figure obsessed....

I am also struck by the near total absence in the book of references to gender, which mediates in important ways the relations of most nineteenth century male writers to the market. The implications of gender can be psychological and belong to what Whalen dismisses as "intimacy," but gender also operates, I would argue, like race, as a material, public fact. Absense gender considerations, though perhaps not totally unexpected in the context of a Marxist analysis, strikes me as a troubling feature of a generally fine and compelling book that I recommend with enthusiasm. ---

The table of contents from Whalen's book gives a good sense of its breadth and usefulness:

Pt. 1 Capitalism and Literature
Ch. 1 Introduction: Minor Writing and the Capital Reader
Ch. 2 The Horrid Laws of Political Economy
Ch. 3 Fables of Circulation: Poe's influence on the Messenger
Ch. 4 Poe and the Masses
Pt. 2 Race and Region
Ch. 5 Average Racism: Poe, Slavery, and the Wages of Literary Nationalism
Ch. 6 Subtle Barbarians: The Southern Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe
Pt. 3 Mass Culture
Ch. 7 The Code for Gold: Poe and Cryptography
Ch. 8 Culture of Surfaces
Ch. 9 The Investigating Angel: Poe, Babbage, and "The Power of Words"

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Amateur video tour of Poe's Baltimore house on Oct. 7, 160th anniversary of his death.

Requiescat in pace

Eyewitness Report: 9/24 G20 Protest Actions in Pittsburgh

The following special report was written by Dante Strobino from Raleigh Fight Imperialism, Stand Together (FIST) youth group who attending this Day 5-Sept. 24 protest:

Over a thousand people gathered in Arsenal Park in Pittsburgh to resist the G-20 countries meeting in the David L. Lawrence Convention Center downtown. Young activists representing struggles against racism, gentrification, imperialist wars, gender oppression and environmental destruction gathered together in an effort coordinated by the Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project. Protesters began their march through a working class neighborhood of Lawrenceville towards a bridge to get into downtown. The march continued down Liberty Avenue in an unpermitted demonstration taking over the streets with banners that read “No Hope in Capitalism”, “No Bailout, No Capitalism” and “No borders, No banks”.


Protesters were eventually stopped at the bottom of the street by police who confronted them with high frequency sound blasts and orders to disperse. Protesters then redoubled back and confronted cops again in the middle of a residential community. As resistance continued to mount up, anarchists grabbed a dumpster on wheels and hauled it down the hill directly into the police barricade, not harming anyone. The police reacted with more violence by attacking the entire neighborhood with several canisters of OC gas, Oleoresin Capsicum, a new police weapon meant to cause temporary blindness and breathing pain. From then on many different groups broke away in different directions and some marched together back towards Oakland, the neighborhood which houses University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.


Police had been bused in from dozens of states including states as far away as Arizona and Florida, along with National Guard and SWAT units. Armed guards with camouflage humvees were stationed at every exit of the beltline around the city, blocking off entry. Most all businesses downtown including cell phone stores, apparel store, banks and restaurants were completely boarded up following Mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s suggestions, putting many workers out of work for the two days while the G-20 meets. At the universities and museums all monuments were also boarded up or covered with bags to continue to promote an atmosphere of fear. Police had to be hauled around town in several city and school buses to head off protesters. Department of Homeland Security and police helicopters have been roaring overhead the city since Wednesday night.

On their way back to Oakland through the Birchwood neighborhood a few windows were broken by protesters including a cop car window, a window at a PNC bank, BNY Mellon bank and at a BMW dealership, all of which symbolically represent institutions that are responsible for the economic crisis. A few hundred protesters continued to take the streets and make their voices heard throughout the evening. At one point, the protesters stopped the police with a stream of projectiles. Police responded with brutal blows of bean bags, causing injuries. Protesters defended themselves by blockading the street with a large chain link fence obstructing the road.

At 10 p.m. BASH BACK! organized a protest for LGBTQ liberation in Oakland near Carnegie Mellon University. Nearby at University of Pittsburgh students were gathered close to the bridge to Schenley Park, where Obama had earlier visited Phipps conservatory.

Heavy-handed police repression ensued, including the usual electronic dispersal order and tear gas, but this only attracted more and more protesters and onlookers, and soon the crowd numbered up to 1000. Reports described students with t-shirts wrapped around their faces chanting “beer pong!” and “LET’S GO PITT!”


Through the next couple hours cops were chasing students into their dorms, attacking people leaving the bars and arresting folks who were not earlier participating in protests. By the end of the night more than 60 were arrested.


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Товарищ Х on Pittsburgh G20 Protests & Marches

Товарищ Х, a local Cleveland comrade of mine, was able to attend the 9/20 demo in Pittsburgh. He initial notes after returning home are below. His Twitter posts on Pittsburgh and other issues related to building independent labor political action can be found at:

http://twitter.com/tovX

Товарищ Х - 9/20 at the G20

“The most stirring speeches came not from the the several labor leaders, not from the politician (who did, however, take Obama to task for his words to the G20 that belittled mass demonstrations), not from the clergy (though they too were militant more than they were sermonizing), but from workers in the thick of the fightback against, global exploitation (there was a clear sense of the need for global solidarity among workers to fight these conditions in many of the speeches), low pay, job loss and eviction.

“One of the speakers drew a comparison between this event and the early stages of the mass movement in Guadeloupe. I find this particularly apt. When Élie Domota spoke here in Cleveland recently, one of the union organizers in the crowd asked him how he had been able to organize a demonstration that brought one fourth of his country's population into a single mass demonstration. He said that they started from an event that had 5 speakers at the podium, with 2 in the chairs out front " and one of those was a cop." Our event seemed, very much, a later stage in this same process.

There was a clear will, through all of the proceedings, to bring Guadeloupe's party to our streets. Our folks will be back to the streets, in ever greater numbers, ever more militant, until we have the strength to overturn the unjust system that oppresses us.“Another activist remarked that while he thought this an impressive event, he had expected numbers approaching 3000 (we made the number of marchers, at the start, at something more than 200). I pointed out that our March for Jobs was a prelude to the general G20 protest which would be forming up over several days and would, most likely, peak on the 25th. He agreed that this was a more likely time to look for the large numbers that he hoped for.“There were cops everywhere with cameras, fancy rigs with telephoto lenses. Mostly they were content to photograph us from the streets that lined the route of the march, perhaps also from their helicopter that circled overhead. I turned my sign ["FREE TROY DAVIS/ FREE LEONARD PELTIER" on one side "FREE MUMIA ABU JAMAL" on the other] side-to-the-sky several times so they might get a better picture of it. One or two of the cops passed through our ranks, camera in hand, at the Tent City before the march, and at the square where we assembled at the end of the march. Clearly there is something more afoot than a sudden great surge in the number of photo enthusiasts in the local constabulary. [I recall that the same sort of photos were used to direct the home invasions, and roundup of protestors and journalists, at the DNC and RNC in the run up to the last two presidential elections.]

“The "combat ready battalion" from the national guard, assigned to Pittsburgh for the event, was not to be seen. Neither were the cops as heavily armed as the often are, in this city, when they are not cultivating their interest in the photographic arts.“I by the way lost it in an argument with a person that I believe to have been one of the ACLU stool pigeons assigned to the G20 protest. He drew me into a heated argument over the role of the ACLU before I noticed that he was recording our conversation with his cell phone. Several of our number had earlier filled out about 6 pages of a blue interview questionnaire, and I mentioned to two of them, with the interviewers still present, that the ACLU had published its plan to share such information with the Pittsburgh cops. Later, in the course of the march, some character proffered a couple of leaflets to Frances. I stowed these for her. He later returned and asked to have his leaflets back. After retrieving them from me he left again, then returned to chat me up on the ACLU. Pressed on my views, I launched into a tirade against the published ACLU plan to circulate among the workers at this event taking interviews that they proposed share with the Pittsburgh cops, suggesting that he not take my word for it but instead should check out their website, where I learned of the plan. He pressed on with "why would the ACLU want to do such a thing." I replied, "To fulfill their historic role. If there's a correct spelling of Quisling in American English, it's A-C-L-U. The organization was founded buy an Anarchist, a Communist and a Socialist, yet in the 50's, they refused to defend the Communists." It was quickly downhill from there, with him pointing out that the arrests that they might be enabling were not yet happening, to the point where I noticed his recording device, pushed him away on his last approach, and told him to go "interview" somebody else. With very little more provocation I would have decked the son-of-a-bitch. Reflecting back on this, I think what steamed me more than his provocative probing was the surreptitious recording in the context of all that police surveillance and of the ACLU program to aid that surveillance as best they might.”

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Today Товарищ Х reports:

There is this grudging acknowledgement from the bourgeois media:

Massive 'Peoples' March' Touches Oakland, Downtown, North Side - Pittsburgh News Story - WTAE Pittsburghhttp://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/news/21114242/detail.html