Shame on all those who are currently advocating the censorship of Mark Twain’s masterful The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn and disgraced are they who support such malfeasant censorship. However, one must not be overly worried by the transgression, for America has quite an inspiring tradition of respect and defense for freedom of expression thanks to countless activists, organizations and the right kind of lawyers and judges. Furthermore, in a positive sense, as is often observed, bad publicity is good publicity and when the publicity is for the American treasure Mark Twain and one of the greatest works of American literature it is all the better.
Mark Twain is rightly regarded by many as one of the greatest American writers and as the originator of American literature (influencing later writers of such scope and achievement as T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway) who first developed characters who spoke in the unique and authentic American languages and dialects found in the regions and cultures he wrote about. Ernest Hemmingway claimed that “[a]ll American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn…All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” T.S. Eliot compared Twain’s character, Huck, to other “permanent symbolic figures of fiction” such as “Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet and other great discoveries…” The book is perhaps the best example of Twain’s invention using, as he prefaces the book himself with, “a number of dialects.”
Mark Twain is also known, unfortunately to a lesser extent, for his radical views grounded in a strong and independent moral vision of right and wrong. He was involved with the Anti-Imperialist League with its links to civil rights activism. He was an opponent to slavery and to racism (he was acquainted with Frederick Douglass and married into the abolitionist Langdon family, being the son-in-law to a leading conductor of the New York Underground Railroad) and Huck Finn is an ingenious expression of this.
The current movement by the publishing establishment advocating censorship is due to the fact that the word “nigger” is used commonly throughout the book, as the word was for sure used by such characters at the time, in accordance with reality (the commonplace usage of the word, I also must insist, is by no means yet a pastime).
Through Huck Finn Twain exposed the ugly everyday realities of racist ideology (such as the common use of the word “nigger”) and developed a main character, Huck Finn, who was immersed in such racist ideology, indoctrinated into believing that it was not only right, but God’s Will.
In the story Huck Finn lives with an abusive and alcoholic father and decides to escape by faking his own death and floating down the Mississippi. In the process of so doing he runs into a slave, Jim, who has escaped because he fears being sold and sent to New Orleans and they set off down the river together.
The book is about the adventures of Huck and Jim on the river and contains quite a breathtaking moral statement about racism and slavery. Huck Finn has been indoctrinated into believing that slavery is sanctioned by God and that to help a slave escape is theft (immoral and illegal) because a slave is actually a piece of property the Master rightfully owns and to help in such an escape would earn one an eternity in hell’s burning furnace.
Huck Finn several times faces this moral dilemma. When Huck and Jim first run into each other Huck promises not to tell on Jim: “But mind, you said you wouldn’t tell – you know you said you wouldn’t tell, Huck.”
“Well, I did. I said I wouldn’t and I’ll stick to it. Honest injun I will. People would call me a low-down Abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum – but that don’t make no difference. I ain’t a-going to tell.”
In one instant Huck lies to some people passing them, telling them that his family has smallpox so the men make sure to stay away, saving Jim from being found, caught and sent back. Huck then feels regret for not doing what he was taught he should do, report a runaway slave, but he feels good that Jim was not caught: “They went off, and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a boy that don’t get started right when he’s little, ain’t got no show…Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on; - s’pose you’d ‘a’ done right and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad – I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that.”
Later on Huck begins to think about helping Jim escape and the possible consequences and becomes torn: “The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence…letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time…I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared.”
He recalls that had he gone to Sunday school they would have taught him that the way he was acting now would send him “to everlasting fire.” The thought makes him shiver and he decides to pray but cannot and he realizes he cannot pray of giving up the sin of harboring a runaway slave because it was a lie, he wasn’t going to and he knew it. He decides that he should write a letter to Jim’s owner and then pray.
He writes the letter and feels washed of sin but then begins to think of Jim and their trip down the river, he recalls “a-floating along, talking, singing and laughing” and finds that he is unable “to strike no places to harden” him against Jim, “but only the other kind.” He remembers how Jim would stand Huck’s watch on top of his own so that he could “go on sleeping,” how Jim called Huck “honey” and “do everything he could think of” for him and how “grateful” Jim was when Huck told the lie about smallpox, preventing Jim from being caught and how Jim said that Huck “was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now.”
Huck then sees the letter he just wrote: “I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’ – and tore it up.”
Such a profound situation and moral statement provides the proper context for Twain’s use of the word “nigger” throughout the rest of the book and, after all, it is the context that is most important in matters such as these. The word is most assuredly an ugly, horrible word that conjures images of lynching, slavery, murder and the darkness of America’s past and present or, as Chester Stevens put it, the word “rings out like the sound of rifle fire,” and that is precisely Mark Twain’s point. Twain uses the word almost as a bludgeon by which he beats the heads of the complacent and the unconcerned. He is showing a little bit of the reality in all its ugliness and forcing one to confront it honestly and forthrightly.
It was in this sense that Booker T. Washington wrote that he could “not believe any one can read this story closely without becoming aware of the deep sympathy of the author in ‘Jim’…[O]ne cannot fail to observe that in some way or other the author without making any comment and without going out of his way, has somehow succeeded in making his readers feel a genuine respect for ‘Jim,’ in spite of the ignorance he displays. I cannot help feeling that in this character Mark Twain has, perhaps, exhibited his sympathy and interest in the masses of the negro people.”
Mark Twain has always been controversial and there have always been attempts to censure and ban several of his books, notably Huck Finn. In fact, Huck Finn was first banned just a few weeks after publication in 1885 in Concord Massachusetts due to the dialects used; deemed too course and vulgar and only fit for the slums by the well-to-do bourgeoisie of Concord. As recently as 2000 there was a move in Enid Oklahoma to have the book removed from the local high school’s required reading curriculum. The debate was heated.
Michelle M. Houle writes that “the school district contacted Jocelyn Chadwick” who was a leading Mark Twain scholar and an assistant professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education “to ease some tension.” Houle notes that Chadwick is “an African American whose ancestors were slaves on both sides of her family. Her parents were active in the civil rights movement when she was young, and she says that they gave her Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when she was just a child.”
Chadwick believes that “[t]hrough the controversy surrounding this book alone, Twain brings into schools what all of us in this country desperately need, yet fear, most: discussions – frank discussions – about race, race relations, interracial relations, race language, racial stereotypes and profiling, and, ultimately, true and unadulterated racial equality.”
Eventually the Enid school board voted to keep the book in the curriculum after Chadwick had visited, spoken with people and held a workshop (the workshop “included discussions about the book’s place in history, teaching strategies, and useful resources”).
The move to censor Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essentially the move to efface the stark and dreadful realities of slavery and racism from history and to evade the difficult issues Twain illustrated in Huck Finn to which Chadwick refers to above.
NewSouth publishers has already censored their 2011 editions of the book, replacing "nigger" with "slave" (a change that makes little sense considering Jim, on the escape, is no longer a slave) and erasing the word "injun" altogether. NewSouth holds up Auburn University at Montgomery in Alabama English Professor Alan Gribben as justifying their censorship.
Gribben argues that the censoring places Twain's "ideas" and novel in the 21st century and prevents the book from possibly being banned. The latter argument is an affront to any notion of freedom of expression - you do not prevent a wrong, a book being banned, by committing a perceived lesser wrong, censoring - and should be discarded as nothing more than unprincipled confusion. The former argument is perhaps an even greater affront.
The argument that the censoring brings the book into the 21st century is hopelessly unknowing and misguided. The characters in the book are not 21st century characters driving down the highway in an SUV, they are characters who emerge from and exist within the Antebellum South and float down the Mississippi on a raft (the book is an obvious period piece, documenting a specific region in time).
If Twain’s Huck Finn is to be censored of the word shall then Frederick Douglass’ “Narrative” of his life be so censored as well? The book, being as it is Douglass’ autobiography, obviously contains the offensive word. Oddly enough, Douglass edits such vulgarity as “dumb bitch,” writing instead “d-b b-h,” while leaving “nigger” wholly intact.
The usage and context of the word in Douglass’ work is on a whole far more offensive than in any place in Huck Finn, having been derived from actual events rather than Twain’s sympathetic imagination. For just two such examples one should consult the last paragraph on page 35 and the last paragraph on page 40 that continues onto page 41 (cited in the Barnes & Noble Classics edition).
The examples quoted and recounted by Douglass consist of the true realities of racism and slavery and it is intellectually and morally acceptable to include these realities in a work of fiction that deals honestly with these realities. It is morally misguided and intellectually lost to suggest otherwise.
As observed earlier the word "nigger" is an incredibly offensive racial slur, but so too was the culture of racism and the structure of slavery and Jim Crow within which the word commonly existed. It is to sanitize and diminish the ugliness and terror of these realities to begin erasing the very details that constructed the horrific racist edifice in its totality.
First the ugly language of racism and slavery are erased, then what? Shall depictions of the whipping of slaves be banned or censored? For, certainly, the whipping of a slave, the chaining of slaves together, the selling off of slave children, the hanging of slaves and the whole of violence, murder and terrorism, all integral aspects of the evils of racism and slavery, are all an order of magnitude more offensive than the word "nigger."
The evils of racism and slavery must never be sanitized. Not in any detail. NewSouth must be boycotted and their products never purchased again.
The only thing more disgusting and repulsive than the everyday, commonplace realities of slavery and its aftermath is to compound these horrors by pretending that they did not happen and attempting to efface them from history.
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave
Houle, Michelle M., Mark Twain: Banned, Challenged, and Censored
Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Williams, Tenley, Mark Twain: “The Lincoln of our Literature,” Bloom’s BioCritiques Mark Twain
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Friday, November 05, 2010
The Democratic Debacle
The Republican Party picked up a swath of seats within the House of Representatives and several seats in the senate, although the Democrats retained their Senate dominance, riding a wave of enthusiasm among Republican supporters and taking advantage of the receding crest that is the demoralized and disgusted Democratic party’s progressive base and that is, speaking truthfully, the majority of American citizens.
The corporate press will no doubt spin elaborate and not so elaborate lies about how the Obama Democratic Party was for the most part dismissed in the midterms because the United States is actually a right leaning country and President Obama took the country too far to the left. Nothing could be more ridiculous.
The American citizenry holds social democratic positions on most issues. For example, an overwhelming majority of U.S. voters when polled have supported a universal healthcare system for decades[1] and viewed the lame, pro-corporate “healthcare reform” bill that did little more than mandate people to buy into the outrageously high-cost, dismally low-coverage, privatized, for-profit healthcare industry as a betrayal of trust and a selling out to precisely the same-old Wall Street friendly politics-as-usual apparatchiks that Obama’s campaign opportunistically and deceitfully ran against. The “financial reform” bill tells the same story, as does most of Obama’s policies, that is, when they are not significantly worse.[2]
Perhaps one of the single most painful losses is that of principled and independent liberal Russ Feingold in Wisconsin to Tea Party supported Republican businessman Ron Johnson. Feingold essentially lost by being associated with the status quo Democratic Party and the pro-corporate health care reform bill, an association so unfortunate it is difficult to formulate with concision.
Feingold was party to some of the best legislation and attempted legislation that has appeared in the last several decades. He struggled and achieved the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, along with pre-2004 John McCain, that took seven years to pass in opposition to the overwhelming might of corporate interests. Feingold was opposed to NAFTA and the spate of “free trade” agreements that serve as the foundation for the flood of jobs being outsourced to other countries. He was one of the sole principled opponents to the heinously illegal, anti-democratic, unconstitutional USA Patriot Act and, despite his support for President Obama’s healthcare bill, which he was repeatedly castigated for by Ron Johnson, he has long supported universal healthcare. In 2006 he authored the State-Based Health Care Reform Act that was to act as a “pilot program” for universal health care.
Katharine Seelye quotes Ken Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin at Madison political scientist, for the New York Times observing that “Independents deserted Democrats, period. This was not about Feingold’s record or the money or the advertising. It was about the anger of independents at the status quo.” Seelye observes that “the loss came…despite Mr. Feingold’s record of one maverick vote after another” and despite his independence and principled opposition to the status quo.
This is a distilled expression of John Judis’ observation that while “Obama deserved to lose…the country doesn’t deserve the consequences.” Nothing could illustrate this better than the situation in Wisconsin where one of the rare and unique liberal independents led by principle alone in opposition to moneyed, corporate interests was thrown overboard in favor of a Tea Party supported Republican businessman (sure to be as status quo and reactionary as anyone). The consequences of this alone are already quite unfortunate (although it is not too soon to predict a successful Feingold campaign in 2012).
The bourgeois press, certainly the outrageously partisan Fox News and its minions, are already beginning to churn out nonsense about the American people rejecting President Obama’s liberal agenda and that he must therefore turn to the right in order to regain confidence. However, the reality is that there is always a low turnout for midterm elections, those getting out to vote typically being of the right, there was enthusiasm within the Republican base which manifested itself in high voter turnout in Republican strongholds and there was a significant lack of enthusiasm within the Democratic base, manifested in low voter turnout in Democratic strongholds.
Patricia Elizondo, the Milwaukee International Association of Machinists local president discussed this lack of enthusiasm when interviewed by the New York Times. Elizondo observed that the union was not able to mobilize its members to vote in the same way they had been able to in 2008: “People have been unemployed for two years, and they’re unhappy that the health care bill was not as good as they expected…Two years ago, I had many members going door-to-door to campaign. Now they’re saying, ‘Why should I? We supported that candidate, but he didn’t follow through.’”
The only way for President Obama to regain the confidence of a majority of Americans is to keep to his campaign pledges, to stop being a business-as-usual functionary and to stop caving into some of the most extreme elements and compromising with them on far too important issues, but as any analysis of American political economy reveals, such a departure from within is practically impossible.
Therefore, let the establishment burn. Let this serve as a lesson to those politically coming of age that the left hand of the business party is no more to be trusted than the right hand and that the only way forward is to build an organized socialist movement guided democratically by the participants involved and beholden only to the people united.
[1] Noam Chomsky observes within Failed States that “[a] large majority of the population supports extensive government intervention…An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that ‘over 2/3 of all Americans thought the government should guarantee ‘everyone’ the best and most advanced health care that technology can supply’; a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 80 percent regard universal health care as ‘more important than holding down taxes’; polls reported in Business Week found that ‘67% of Americans think it’s a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27% dissenting’; the Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of Americans favor the ‘U.S. government guaranteeing health insurance for all citizens, even if it means raising taxes’ (30 percent opposed). By the late 1980’s, more than 70 percent of Americans ‘thought health care should be a constitutional guarantee,’ while 40 percent ‘thought it already was.’”
[2]Such as, for instance, his alleged opposition to kidnapping, torture and special rendition that consists in reality of Obama’s Justice Department claiming that prisoners being detained indefinitely without charge or trial at a U.S. prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan have no right to challenge these illegal transgressions through American courts. According to a UN report “ex-Bagram detainees reported being subjected to repeated interrogation involving torture or abuse.(James Cogan)”
The corporate press will no doubt spin elaborate and not so elaborate lies about how the Obama Democratic Party was for the most part dismissed in the midterms because the United States is actually a right leaning country and President Obama took the country too far to the left. Nothing could be more ridiculous.
The American citizenry holds social democratic positions on most issues. For example, an overwhelming majority of U.S. voters when polled have supported a universal healthcare system for decades[1] and viewed the lame, pro-corporate “healthcare reform” bill that did little more than mandate people to buy into the outrageously high-cost, dismally low-coverage, privatized, for-profit healthcare industry as a betrayal of trust and a selling out to precisely the same-old Wall Street friendly politics-as-usual apparatchiks that Obama’s campaign opportunistically and deceitfully ran against. The “financial reform” bill tells the same story, as does most of Obama’s policies, that is, when they are not significantly worse.[2]
Perhaps one of the single most painful losses is that of principled and independent liberal Russ Feingold in Wisconsin to Tea Party supported Republican businessman Ron Johnson. Feingold essentially lost by being associated with the status quo Democratic Party and the pro-corporate health care reform bill, an association so unfortunate it is difficult to formulate with concision.
Feingold was party to some of the best legislation and attempted legislation that has appeared in the last several decades. He struggled and achieved the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, along with pre-2004 John McCain, that took seven years to pass in opposition to the overwhelming might of corporate interests. Feingold was opposed to NAFTA and the spate of “free trade” agreements that serve as the foundation for the flood of jobs being outsourced to other countries. He was one of the sole principled opponents to the heinously illegal, anti-democratic, unconstitutional USA Patriot Act and, despite his support for President Obama’s healthcare bill, which he was repeatedly castigated for by Ron Johnson, he has long supported universal healthcare. In 2006 he authored the State-Based Health Care Reform Act that was to act as a “pilot program” for universal health care.
Katharine Seelye quotes Ken Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin at Madison political scientist, for the New York Times observing that “Independents deserted Democrats, period. This was not about Feingold’s record or the money or the advertising. It was about the anger of independents at the status quo.” Seelye observes that “the loss came…despite Mr. Feingold’s record of one maverick vote after another” and despite his independence and principled opposition to the status quo.
This is a distilled expression of John Judis’ observation that while “Obama deserved to lose…the country doesn’t deserve the consequences.” Nothing could illustrate this better than the situation in Wisconsin where one of the rare and unique liberal independents led by principle alone in opposition to moneyed, corporate interests was thrown overboard in favor of a Tea Party supported Republican businessman (sure to be as status quo and reactionary as anyone). The consequences of this alone are already quite unfortunate (although it is not too soon to predict a successful Feingold campaign in 2012).
The bourgeois press, certainly the outrageously partisan Fox News and its minions, are already beginning to churn out nonsense about the American people rejecting President Obama’s liberal agenda and that he must therefore turn to the right in order to regain confidence. However, the reality is that there is always a low turnout for midterm elections, those getting out to vote typically being of the right, there was enthusiasm within the Republican base which manifested itself in high voter turnout in Republican strongholds and there was a significant lack of enthusiasm within the Democratic base, manifested in low voter turnout in Democratic strongholds.
Patricia Elizondo, the Milwaukee International Association of Machinists local president discussed this lack of enthusiasm when interviewed by the New York Times. Elizondo observed that the union was not able to mobilize its members to vote in the same way they had been able to in 2008: “People have been unemployed for two years, and they’re unhappy that the health care bill was not as good as they expected…Two years ago, I had many members going door-to-door to campaign. Now they’re saying, ‘Why should I? We supported that candidate, but he didn’t follow through.’”
The only way for President Obama to regain the confidence of a majority of Americans is to keep to his campaign pledges, to stop being a business-as-usual functionary and to stop caving into some of the most extreme elements and compromising with them on far too important issues, but as any analysis of American political economy reveals, such a departure from within is practically impossible.
Therefore, let the establishment burn. Let this serve as a lesson to those politically coming of age that the left hand of the business party is no more to be trusted than the right hand and that the only way forward is to build an organized socialist movement guided democratically by the participants involved and beholden only to the people united.
[1] Noam Chomsky observes within Failed States that “[a] large majority of the population supports extensive government intervention…An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that ‘over 2/3 of all Americans thought the government should guarantee ‘everyone’ the best and most advanced health care that technology can supply’; a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 80 percent regard universal health care as ‘more important than holding down taxes’; polls reported in Business Week found that ‘67% of Americans think it’s a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27% dissenting’; the Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of Americans favor the ‘U.S. government guaranteeing health insurance for all citizens, even if it means raising taxes’ (30 percent opposed). By the late 1980’s, more than 70 percent of Americans ‘thought health care should be a constitutional guarantee,’ while 40 percent ‘thought it already was.’”
[2]Such as, for instance, his alleged opposition to kidnapping, torture and special rendition that consists in reality of Obama’s Justice Department claiming that prisoners being detained indefinitely without charge or trial at a U.S. prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan have no right to challenge these illegal transgressions through American courts. According to a UN report “ex-Bagram detainees reported being subjected to repeated interrogation involving torture or abuse.(James Cogan)”
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Discussing Anarchism and Marxism
With Eric Kerl’s recent article entitled “Contemporary Anarchism” in issue 72 of the International Socialist Review we at long last have an example of the ISR putting forth some effort to take anarchism a bit more seriously than in the past. While there is much to be desired and quite a bit lacking from the article, there is acknowledgement of the growing international anarchist movement, the significant influence of anarchism within the global movements and the outstanding call for “Marxists and…anarchists” to “stand shoulder-to-shoulder in every aspect of struggle…” That is a call not seen from the ISR in the past and it is a very welcome one indeed.
There are a few central points Kerl proposes with regards to what he calls “contemporary anarchism.” Principle among them is the claim that contemporary anarchism has drifted from classical opposition to state power and now merely “attempts to resolve the problem of state power by going around it. It claims to do this by creating space independent of authoritarian control by establishing autonomous zones.” Kerl then cites as evidence an excerpt from Hakim Bey’s The Temporary Autonomous Zone wherein Bey essentially calls for the passive retreat into one’s self, what he conceives to be the real revolutionary arena, where one must not only, as Kerl observes, cease waiting for revolutionary transition, but cease wanting it.
While it is true that Bey has become very popular and even, during the 90’s, became something of a Priest of anarchy among certain segments, it is quite open to debate how much influence this tract of lifestylism has had upon the activist anarchist movement. It is certainly without dispute that various anarchists and anarchist groups have roundly critiqued Bey and the TAZ, one of the more notorious critiques, to be sure, being Murray Bookchin’s critique in his polemic Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism that Kerl is certainly aware of considering he cites it within another context.
Rudolf Rocker provides one of the best distillations of the anarchist conception of state power in his Anarcho-Syndicalism wherein he writes that “[a]s long as within society a possessing and a non-possessing group of human beings face one another in enmity, the state will be indispensable to the possessing minority for the protection of its privileges.”
Kerl proclaims that anarchists “wish away the demands of history, as if the state will either simply evaporate or become somehow irrelevant – with no alternative prepared to fill the needs of reconstructing society.” Such a statement indicates a severe absence of knowledge of anarchist history and, in particular, Spanish anarchist history.
Rocker writes that “the problem that is set for our time is that of freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement” and Noam Chomsky, discussing this in his famous Notes on Anarchism, explains that “the method is not the conquest and exercise of state power, nor stultifying parliamentarianism, but rather ‘to reconstruct the economic life of the peoples from the ground up and build it up in the spirit of Socialism.’”
Continuing on the subjects of anarchism with regards to state power and the way in which to dismantle it Chomsky writes that “prior to the outbreak of the [Spanish] revolution, the anarchosyndicalist economist Diego Abad de Santillan had written: ‘…in facing the problem of social transformation, the Revolution cannot consider the state as a medium, but must depend on the organization of producers. We have followed this norm and we find no need for the hypothesis of a superior power to organized labor, in order to establish a new order of things. We would thank anyone to point out to us what function, if any, the State can have in an economic organization, where private property has been abolished and in which parasitism and special privilege have no place. The suppression of the State cannot be a languid affair; it must be the task of the Revolution to finish with the State. Either the Revolution gives social wealth to the producers in which case the producers organize themselves for due collective distribution and the State has nothing to do; or the Revolution does not give social wealth to the producers, in which case the Revolution has been a lie and the State would continue. Our federal council of economy is not a political power but an economic and administrative regulating power. It receives its orientation from below and operates in accordance with the resolutions of the regional and national assemblies. It is a liaison corps and nothing else.’”
During the course of the Spanish Revolution, the so-called Civil War, Gaston Leval documented collectivization and appropriation of land and industry by the revolutionary CNT (Confederacion National del Trabajo) in his Collectives in the Spanish Civil War. In Catalonia three-fourths of the land had been collectivized and workers’ syndicates appropriated the administration of industry. While collectivization existed during the Revolution, essentially while libertarian socialism existed, the state had been rendered superfluous. It was the federal council of economy, manifested through the CNT that became the “economic and administrative regulating power” as Santillan had written.
Kerl commits absolute violence against this history by dismissing the incredible heroism, diversity, nuance and achievement (however temporary) of the Spanish experiment with a few dismissive sentences. Kerl’s only source on this expansive subject appears to be the self-referential, he offers that for more on “the role anarchists played in the Spanish Civil War” we should look up Geoff Bailey’s “Anarchists in the Civil War’ in issue 24 of the ISR. Not a very promising prospect considering the ISR’s previous treatment, or mistreatment, of anarchism and anarchists. One would do much better by reading Murray Bookchin’s The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 and, in particular, the masterful Durruti in the Spanish Revolution by Abel Paz which offers one of the most in-depth accounts available.
Anarchism, in the libertarian socialist tradition, has quite definitive views about State power and how to dismantle it and they go well beyond theory and have in history entered into the realm of action and practice. It is ironically Marxism that never definitively deals with the dismantling of State power, leaving the problem, as with most socialist transformation and social organization within Marxism, to the dim, hazy future. Kerl illustrates this himself when he writes that “Marx once wrote, ‘All socialists see anarchy as the following program: Once the aim of the proletarian movement – i.e., abolition of classes – is attained, the power of the state, which serves to keep the great majority of producers in bondage to a very small exploiter minority, disappears, and the functions of government become simple administrative functions.’”
Marx only ever claims that the State will simply disappear, apparently by itself, with the abolition of classes. He does not explain how or why this is, he merely assumes it. However, the assumption, as Bakunin and others pointed out, was flawed. Bakunin wrote that “[n]o state, however democratic, not even the reddest republic – can ever give the people what they really want, i.e. the free self-organization and administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above, because every state, even the pseudo-People’s State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, through a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves.(quoted in Chomsky’s Notes on Anarchism)”
The left-Marxist Anton Pannekoek (head of education for the international Marxist movement) agreed, writing in his Five Theses on the Class Struggle that “[t]he goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation. This goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers themselves being master over production.” Chomsky quotes one of the better expressions of this view by William Paul (member of the Marxist-De Leonist Socialist Labor Party) writing in The State: its Origins and Function that “[t]he revolutionary Socialist denies that State ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism…Industry can only be democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks industrial administrative committees.”
Anarchists contend that the State exists as Rocker wrote, to serve and secure the interests of those wielding State power and that whether they be the bourgeoisie or the vanguard of the radical intelligentsia they will perpetuate it for their own interests, for, as Bakunin observed, even workers entering into the bureaucracy of the state cease being members of the proletariat.
Preceding Kerl’s claim that anarchists have no alternative to seizing State power is a quote from Leon Trotsky on “dual power” and a quote from Engels asking whether the Paris Commune would have lasted “a single day” if not for the use of authority by the armed people. Kerl here goes awry. Firstly he conflates Bey’s TAZ with an anarchist failure to grasp Trotsky’s insightful analysis and, secondly, he conflates the authority of the collective people of the Paris Commune, presumably, with the State.
Having previously written a flawed review of Staughton Lynd’s and Andrej Grubacic’s Wobblies and Zapatistas and having here cited it Kerl should at least be aware of the notions of counter/dual power that exists within anarchism, that is what the Zapatista program is partially based upon: expanding the floor of the cage (to borrow a concept from Buenos Aires anarchists) while also creating autonomous sociopolitical space and Bey’s amorphous individualist TAZ does not constitute the latter, rather collective villages, municipalities, organizations and so on do. It is something of an irony that Kerl quotes Engels in this capacity for Engels also wrote, due to the fact that the Paris Commune demonstrated the fact that the Marxist notion that the State must first be seized was fallacious (which is what prompted Marx to write, in his pamphlet The Civil War in France, that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes”, among other things), that anarchists have “the thing upside down.” He observes that anarchists “declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state” and that this “must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris commune.” It should be here noted that it was Marx who altered the Communist Manifesto’s position on the State in his The Civil War in France pamphlet, about which Engels later, after Marx’s death, reversed back to the original premise.
Kerl writes that “the fundamentals of Marxism are about full and complete human liberation – not so different from anarchist aspirations…However, political differences do exist, particularly over the means to achieve human liberation, and what social forces or classes can accomplish it.” It is true that the fundamentals of Marxism, conspicuously the writing of Marx himself and the left-Marxist tradition (Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Gorter, Ruhle, Korsch, Mattick, etcetera) consist of complete human liberation and it should further be argued that not only are they “not so different from anarchist aspirations,” they are the same aspirations and actually parallel remarkably (as I have written about with the specific examples of Rudolf Rocker, Anton Pannekoek, Rosa Luxemburg and Paul Mattick). The means to achieve liberation may differ in various ways, conspicuously with regards to seizing state power, although considering Marx’s writing on the Paris Commune, Marx himself came to agree more with the anarchists than many later self-professed “Marxists,” but the differences within the libertarian left (Marxist and anarchist) is more or less superficial and virtually negligible.
The single most significant difference between anarchism and Marxism would be that anarchism derives great strength from being a tradition or tendency that continually evolves, led by specific principles, and views revolutionary struggle as a ceaseless process rather than a doctrine and practice sealed by ideological and tactical limits and commandments. Past anarchist theorists and tacticians are understood to be flawed human beings working within the specific context of their historical and social reality who have offered great insight but who may have been wrong in various ways about a multitude of issues or whose insights may no longer apply to the constant flowing currents of history.
Marxism is similar to anarchism in having various tendencies and strains but is unlike anarchism in that it is defined by a single person, Karl Marx, who was merely a person rather than an omniscient god. In an interview entitled “The Manufacture of Consent” Noam Chomsky explains that “Marx was a major intellectual figure and it would be foolish not to learn from him or to value his contributions properly. He was, like anyone, limited in his perceptions and understanding.” He certainly wrote some of the most revolutionary analysis of capitalist production and relations, but it must be kept in mind that he did so in the 19th century and while much of it remains relevant, some of it is no longer. Treating everything Marx wrote and said as though it were the Gospel of the Lord quite simply has nothing to do with a rational scientific endeavor (Marxism self-proclaims to “scientific socialism”). For a rational science is not built upon a concrete theory set in stone that is not to be deviated from, science is actually predicated upon the attempt to falsify itself and established theory, it proceeds from various principles and axioms and is guided by theory and experimentation, discarding that which is found to be incorrect and misleading and accepting that which is found to be valid and of some pragmatic value.
As John Moore illustrates, instead of “being determined by a set of fixed theoretical and organizational concepts, anarchism develops within an ideological framework susceptible to dynamic and extensive transformations. Hence, while certain conceptual tendencies and continuities are perceptible, these are rarely permitted to ossify into dogmatic or static definition…” Anarchism here bears more resemblance to a scientific endeavor.
Perhaps an equally significant difference is that anarchism places hierarchy and domination at the center. All socially produced hierarchical relations are, unless justified in some fashion, critiqued and found to be in need of dismantling. Indeed, as Graham Purchase observes in his critique of post-modern anarchism, “anti-hierarchical ideology differentiates anarchism from All other major alternative political philosophies and practices.”
In what is perhaps Murray Bookchin’s enduring masterpiece, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, he demonstrates how anti-hierarchical ideology in anarchism differentiates it from Marxism by tracing the socially constructed origins of hierarchy back through patriarchic social constructions and gerontocracy, among other forms. Bookchin defines hierarchy as “the cultural, traditional and psychological systems of obedience and command, not merely the economic and political systems to which the terms class and State most appropriately refer. Accordingly, hierarchy and domination could easily continue to exist in a ‘classless’ or ‘Stateless’ society. I refer to the domination of the young by the old, of women by men, of one ethnic group by another, of ‘masses’ by bureaucrats who profess to speak in their ‘higher social interests,’ of countryside by town, and in a more subtle psychological sense, of body by mind, of spirit by a shallow instrumental rationality, and of nature by society and technology.” To be sure, for the sake of clarity for those unfamiliar, Bookchin was a conscious descendent of the secular Enlightenment and by sprit he meant a deep, conscious-feeling and awareness and contrasted reason with instrumental rationality, the former imparting “meaning and coherence to reality at all levels of existence” while the latter “reduced reason to rationalization…to a mere technique for achieving practical ends.” As the founder of social ecology he was also strongly opposed to anarcho-primitivism and its anti-technics, he insisted upon a rational, humane balance between natural ecology and human social technology.
Whereas Marxism is entirely predicated upon the economic realm of exploitation and oppression, anarchism is an open opposition to all forms of unjustified hierarchy and domination wherever the roots may lie.
Rudolf Rocker summarizes this well when he writes that anarchism “recognizes only the relative significance of ideas, institutions and social forms. It is, therefore, not a fixed, self-enclosed social system, but rather a definite trend in historical development of [human]kind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to become broader and to affect wider circles in more manifold ways. For the Anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him[/her], and turn them to social account.”
The preceding representing differences and disagreements there is actually much of Kerl’s critique of contemporary anarchism that many anarchists would not only agree with but critique just as forcefully.
Coincidentally, while Kerl critiqued the trend in “contemporary anarchism” to espouse post-modern ideas and, in particular, the view that “the working class” is “just another socially constructed identity” with little to no revolutionary agency and potential. Graham Purchase made much the same critique in issue 54 of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review within his “Post-anarchism and other blind spots.”
Kerl critiques the anarchist “black bloc” tactics of protest wherein a group of more or less lifestyle anarchists attempt to reach Bey’s TAZ by forming tight, militant groups for the engagement of property destruction (the smashing of corporate lobby windows, the burning of cars and so on) and street fights with the riot police in order to illustrate to the general public the hegemony of the State. While these tactics may be exciting for the lifestyle anarchists involved and make for good cannon fodder for the bourgeois press, they are wholly disengaged with the goal of attracting sympathy and good-will, raising consciousness and winning over more and more of the public.
Civil disobedience and protests are an integral aspect to any social transition and, in particular, American history. The purpose and utility behind protests is to raise the consciousness of the public, to awaken the mass slumber that is sleeping on various issues and to stir the public to mass action. Property destruction and violence prove to be the worst enemies of such a goal. The Civil Rights movement was incredibly effective because people have a general sympathy and inclination towards the nonviolent when confronted with violence. It is difficult for even a segregation sympathizer to witness the unleashing of police dogs, batons and harsh blasts of fire-hose water upon innocent, nonviolent black children. Conversely, even many of the radical left look upon adolescents throwing bricks through windows, burning cars and openly and aggressively challenging the police with disgust and regret.
While Kerl is correct when he writes that “[s]ometimes, confronting the police is necessary to win, or to defend our movement” and while there is no doubt that if there is ever to be socialist transformation there will come a point in time when the Movement will necessarily have to meet and defeat the reactionary violent retribution of the State, it remains true that unnecessary provocation that alienates and turns off the public and wonton, senseless destruction are nothing more than the self-defeating stuff of the oppositions wildest dreams.
Even the nonviolent, more passive elements of the global movement in many ways pose no real challenge or threat. Purchase writes that “[w]hile carnivals [against capital] may be fun, and certainly contain important elements of self-organization, many have become major tourist attractions that disrupt the normal flow of events (and sometimes assert diversity), but pose no real challenge to capital or the state. If the global capitalist offensive is to be contained and defeated, strategies that strike at its economic heart will have to be developed.”
Therefore many anarchists are in accord with Kerl when he writes that “[r]ather than emboldening and empowering the mass forces whose self-activity are at the heart of any successful struggle, these elitist, provocative tactics accomplish little more than offering an excuse for the state to justify its violence against social movements.”
There are, as Kerl writes, differences and disagreements between Marxists and anarchists on various issues, such as those described here, yet there are also similarities and agreements, far more than many realize. There needs to be a free, open and fair exchange of ideas and a fraternal discussion about differences (Kerl’s article is a worthy effort) and, above all, there needs to be solidarity in the struggle. For as one of the slogans of the Movement goes, “the people united will never be defeated.”
There are a few central points Kerl proposes with regards to what he calls “contemporary anarchism.” Principle among them is the claim that contemporary anarchism has drifted from classical opposition to state power and now merely “attempts to resolve the problem of state power by going around it. It claims to do this by creating space independent of authoritarian control by establishing autonomous zones.” Kerl then cites as evidence an excerpt from Hakim Bey’s The Temporary Autonomous Zone wherein Bey essentially calls for the passive retreat into one’s self, what he conceives to be the real revolutionary arena, where one must not only, as Kerl observes, cease waiting for revolutionary transition, but cease wanting it.
While it is true that Bey has become very popular and even, during the 90’s, became something of a Priest of anarchy among certain segments, it is quite open to debate how much influence this tract of lifestylism has had upon the activist anarchist movement. It is certainly without dispute that various anarchists and anarchist groups have roundly critiqued Bey and the TAZ, one of the more notorious critiques, to be sure, being Murray Bookchin’s critique in his polemic Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism that Kerl is certainly aware of considering he cites it within another context.
Rudolf Rocker provides one of the best distillations of the anarchist conception of state power in his Anarcho-Syndicalism wherein he writes that “[a]s long as within society a possessing and a non-possessing group of human beings face one another in enmity, the state will be indispensable to the possessing minority for the protection of its privileges.”
Kerl proclaims that anarchists “wish away the demands of history, as if the state will either simply evaporate or become somehow irrelevant – with no alternative prepared to fill the needs of reconstructing society.” Such a statement indicates a severe absence of knowledge of anarchist history and, in particular, Spanish anarchist history.
Rocker writes that “the problem that is set for our time is that of freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement” and Noam Chomsky, discussing this in his famous Notes on Anarchism, explains that “the method is not the conquest and exercise of state power, nor stultifying parliamentarianism, but rather ‘to reconstruct the economic life of the peoples from the ground up and build it up in the spirit of Socialism.’”
Continuing on the subjects of anarchism with regards to state power and the way in which to dismantle it Chomsky writes that “prior to the outbreak of the [Spanish] revolution, the anarchosyndicalist economist Diego Abad de Santillan had written: ‘…in facing the problem of social transformation, the Revolution cannot consider the state as a medium, but must depend on the organization of producers. We have followed this norm and we find no need for the hypothesis of a superior power to organized labor, in order to establish a new order of things. We would thank anyone to point out to us what function, if any, the State can have in an economic organization, where private property has been abolished and in which parasitism and special privilege have no place. The suppression of the State cannot be a languid affair; it must be the task of the Revolution to finish with the State. Either the Revolution gives social wealth to the producers in which case the producers organize themselves for due collective distribution and the State has nothing to do; or the Revolution does not give social wealth to the producers, in which case the Revolution has been a lie and the State would continue. Our federal council of economy is not a political power but an economic and administrative regulating power. It receives its orientation from below and operates in accordance with the resolutions of the regional and national assemblies. It is a liaison corps and nothing else.’”
During the course of the Spanish Revolution, the so-called Civil War, Gaston Leval documented collectivization and appropriation of land and industry by the revolutionary CNT (Confederacion National del Trabajo) in his Collectives in the Spanish Civil War. In Catalonia three-fourths of the land had been collectivized and workers’ syndicates appropriated the administration of industry. While collectivization existed during the Revolution, essentially while libertarian socialism existed, the state had been rendered superfluous. It was the federal council of economy, manifested through the CNT that became the “economic and administrative regulating power” as Santillan had written.
Kerl commits absolute violence against this history by dismissing the incredible heroism, diversity, nuance and achievement (however temporary) of the Spanish experiment with a few dismissive sentences. Kerl’s only source on this expansive subject appears to be the self-referential, he offers that for more on “the role anarchists played in the Spanish Civil War” we should look up Geoff Bailey’s “Anarchists in the Civil War’ in issue 24 of the ISR. Not a very promising prospect considering the ISR’s previous treatment, or mistreatment, of anarchism and anarchists. One would do much better by reading Murray Bookchin’s The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 and, in particular, the masterful Durruti in the Spanish Revolution by Abel Paz which offers one of the most in-depth accounts available.
Anarchism, in the libertarian socialist tradition, has quite definitive views about State power and how to dismantle it and they go well beyond theory and have in history entered into the realm of action and practice. It is ironically Marxism that never definitively deals with the dismantling of State power, leaving the problem, as with most socialist transformation and social organization within Marxism, to the dim, hazy future. Kerl illustrates this himself when he writes that “Marx once wrote, ‘All socialists see anarchy as the following program: Once the aim of the proletarian movement – i.e., abolition of classes – is attained, the power of the state, which serves to keep the great majority of producers in bondage to a very small exploiter minority, disappears, and the functions of government become simple administrative functions.’”
Marx only ever claims that the State will simply disappear, apparently by itself, with the abolition of classes. He does not explain how or why this is, he merely assumes it. However, the assumption, as Bakunin and others pointed out, was flawed. Bakunin wrote that “[n]o state, however democratic, not even the reddest republic – can ever give the people what they really want, i.e. the free self-organization and administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above, because every state, even the pseudo-People’s State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, through a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves.(quoted in Chomsky’s Notes on Anarchism)”
The left-Marxist Anton Pannekoek (head of education for the international Marxist movement) agreed, writing in his Five Theses on the Class Struggle that “[t]he goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation. This goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers themselves being master over production.” Chomsky quotes one of the better expressions of this view by William Paul (member of the Marxist-De Leonist Socialist Labor Party) writing in The State: its Origins and Function that “[t]he revolutionary Socialist denies that State ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism…Industry can only be democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks industrial administrative committees.”
Anarchists contend that the State exists as Rocker wrote, to serve and secure the interests of those wielding State power and that whether they be the bourgeoisie or the vanguard of the radical intelligentsia they will perpetuate it for their own interests, for, as Bakunin observed, even workers entering into the bureaucracy of the state cease being members of the proletariat.
Preceding Kerl’s claim that anarchists have no alternative to seizing State power is a quote from Leon Trotsky on “dual power” and a quote from Engels asking whether the Paris Commune would have lasted “a single day” if not for the use of authority by the armed people. Kerl here goes awry. Firstly he conflates Bey’s TAZ with an anarchist failure to grasp Trotsky’s insightful analysis and, secondly, he conflates the authority of the collective people of the Paris Commune, presumably, with the State.
Having previously written a flawed review of Staughton Lynd’s and Andrej Grubacic’s Wobblies and Zapatistas and having here cited it Kerl should at least be aware of the notions of counter/dual power that exists within anarchism, that is what the Zapatista program is partially based upon: expanding the floor of the cage (to borrow a concept from Buenos Aires anarchists) while also creating autonomous sociopolitical space and Bey’s amorphous individualist TAZ does not constitute the latter, rather collective villages, municipalities, organizations and so on do. It is something of an irony that Kerl quotes Engels in this capacity for Engels also wrote, due to the fact that the Paris Commune demonstrated the fact that the Marxist notion that the State must first be seized was fallacious (which is what prompted Marx to write, in his pamphlet The Civil War in France, that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes”, among other things), that anarchists have “the thing upside down.” He observes that anarchists “declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state” and that this “must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris commune.” It should be here noted that it was Marx who altered the Communist Manifesto’s position on the State in his The Civil War in France pamphlet, about which Engels later, after Marx’s death, reversed back to the original premise.
Kerl writes that “the fundamentals of Marxism are about full and complete human liberation – not so different from anarchist aspirations…However, political differences do exist, particularly over the means to achieve human liberation, and what social forces or classes can accomplish it.” It is true that the fundamentals of Marxism, conspicuously the writing of Marx himself and the left-Marxist tradition (Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Gorter, Ruhle, Korsch, Mattick, etcetera) consist of complete human liberation and it should further be argued that not only are they “not so different from anarchist aspirations,” they are the same aspirations and actually parallel remarkably (as I have written about with the specific examples of Rudolf Rocker, Anton Pannekoek, Rosa Luxemburg and Paul Mattick). The means to achieve liberation may differ in various ways, conspicuously with regards to seizing state power, although considering Marx’s writing on the Paris Commune, Marx himself came to agree more with the anarchists than many later self-professed “Marxists,” but the differences within the libertarian left (Marxist and anarchist) is more or less superficial and virtually negligible.
The single most significant difference between anarchism and Marxism would be that anarchism derives great strength from being a tradition or tendency that continually evolves, led by specific principles, and views revolutionary struggle as a ceaseless process rather than a doctrine and practice sealed by ideological and tactical limits and commandments. Past anarchist theorists and tacticians are understood to be flawed human beings working within the specific context of their historical and social reality who have offered great insight but who may have been wrong in various ways about a multitude of issues or whose insights may no longer apply to the constant flowing currents of history.
Marxism is similar to anarchism in having various tendencies and strains but is unlike anarchism in that it is defined by a single person, Karl Marx, who was merely a person rather than an omniscient god. In an interview entitled “The Manufacture of Consent” Noam Chomsky explains that “Marx was a major intellectual figure and it would be foolish not to learn from him or to value his contributions properly. He was, like anyone, limited in his perceptions and understanding.” He certainly wrote some of the most revolutionary analysis of capitalist production and relations, but it must be kept in mind that he did so in the 19th century and while much of it remains relevant, some of it is no longer. Treating everything Marx wrote and said as though it were the Gospel of the Lord quite simply has nothing to do with a rational scientific endeavor (Marxism self-proclaims to “scientific socialism”). For a rational science is not built upon a concrete theory set in stone that is not to be deviated from, science is actually predicated upon the attempt to falsify itself and established theory, it proceeds from various principles and axioms and is guided by theory and experimentation, discarding that which is found to be incorrect and misleading and accepting that which is found to be valid and of some pragmatic value.
As John Moore illustrates, instead of “being determined by a set of fixed theoretical and organizational concepts, anarchism develops within an ideological framework susceptible to dynamic and extensive transformations. Hence, while certain conceptual tendencies and continuities are perceptible, these are rarely permitted to ossify into dogmatic or static definition…” Anarchism here bears more resemblance to a scientific endeavor.
Perhaps an equally significant difference is that anarchism places hierarchy and domination at the center. All socially produced hierarchical relations are, unless justified in some fashion, critiqued and found to be in need of dismantling. Indeed, as Graham Purchase observes in his critique of post-modern anarchism, “anti-hierarchical ideology differentiates anarchism from All other major alternative political philosophies and practices.”
In what is perhaps Murray Bookchin’s enduring masterpiece, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, he demonstrates how anti-hierarchical ideology in anarchism differentiates it from Marxism by tracing the socially constructed origins of hierarchy back through patriarchic social constructions and gerontocracy, among other forms. Bookchin defines hierarchy as “the cultural, traditional and psychological systems of obedience and command, not merely the economic and political systems to which the terms class and State most appropriately refer. Accordingly, hierarchy and domination could easily continue to exist in a ‘classless’ or ‘Stateless’ society. I refer to the domination of the young by the old, of women by men, of one ethnic group by another, of ‘masses’ by bureaucrats who profess to speak in their ‘higher social interests,’ of countryside by town, and in a more subtle psychological sense, of body by mind, of spirit by a shallow instrumental rationality, and of nature by society and technology.” To be sure, for the sake of clarity for those unfamiliar, Bookchin was a conscious descendent of the secular Enlightenment and by sprit he meant a deep, conscious-feeling and awareness and contrasted reason with instrumental rationality, the former imparting “meaning and coherence to reality at all levels of existence” while the latter “reduced reason to rationalization…to a mere technique for achieving practical ends.” As the founder of social ecology he was also strongly opposed to anarcho-primitivism and its anti-technics, he insisted upon a rational, humane balance between natural ecology and human social technology.
Whereas Marxism is entirely predicated upon the economic realm of exploitation and oppression, anarchism is an open opposition to all forms of unjustified hierarchy and domination wherever the roots may lie.
Rudolf Rocker summarizes this well when he writes that anarchism “recognizes only the relative significance of ideas, institutions and social forms. It is, therefore, not a fixed, self-enclosed social system, but rather a definite trend in historical development of [human]kind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to become broader and to affect wider circles in more manifold ways. For the Anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him[/her], and turn them to social account.”
The preceding representing differences and disagreements there is actually much of Kerl’s critique of contemporary anarchism that many anarchists would not only agree with but critique just as forcefully.
Coincidentally, while Kerl critiqued the trend in “contemporary anarchism” to espouse post-modern ideas and, in particular, the view that “the working class” is “just another socially constructed identity” with little to no revolutionary agency and potential. Graham Purchase made much the same critique in issue 54 of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review within his “Post-anarchism and other blind spots.”
Kerl critiques the anarchist “black bloc” tactics of protest wherein a group of more or less lifestyle anarchists attempt to reach Bey’s TAZ by forming tight, militant groups for the engagement of property destruction (the smashing of corporate lobby windows, the burning of cars and so on) and street fights with the riot police in order to illustrate to the general public the hegemony of the State. While these tactics may be exciting for the lifestyle anarchists involved and make for good cannon fodder for the bourgeois press, they are wholly disengaged with the goal of attracting sympathy and good-will, raising consciousness and winning over more and more of the public.
Civil disobedience and protests are an integral aspect to any social transition and, in particular, American history. The purpose and utility behind protests is to raise the consciousness of the public, to awaken the mass slumber that is sleeping on various issues and to stir the public to mass action. Property destruction and violence prove to be the worst enemies of such a goal. The Civil Rights movement was incredibly effective because people have a general sympathy and inclination towards the nonviolent when confronted with violence. It is difficult for even a segregation sympathizer to witness the unleashing of police dogs, batons and harsh blasts of fire-hose water upon innocent, nonviolent black children. Conversely, even many of the radical left look upon adolescents throwing bricks through windows, burning cars and openly and aggressively challenging the police with disgust and regret.
While Kerl is correct when he writes that “[s]ometimes, confronting the police is necessary to win, or to defend our movement” and while there is no doubt that if there is ever to be socialist transformation there will come a point in time when the Movement will necessarily have to meet and defeat the reactionary violent retribution of the State, it remains true that unnecessary provocation that alienates and turns off the public and wonton, senseless destruction are nothing more than the self-defeating stuff of the oppositions wildest dreams.
Even the nonviolent, more passive elements of the global movement in many ways pose no real challenge or threat. Purchase writes that “[w]hile carnivals [against capital] may be fun, and certainly contain important elements of self-organization, many have become major tourist attractions that disrupt the normal flow of events (and sometimes assert diversity), but pose no real challenge to capital or the state. If the global capitalist offensive is to be contained and defeated, strategies that strike at its economic heart will have to be developed.”
Therefore many anarchists are in accord with Kerl when he writes that “[r]ather than emboldening and empowering the mass forces whose self-activity are at the heart of any successful struggle, these elitist, provocative tactics accomplish little more than offering an excuse for the state to justify its violence against social movements.”
There are, as Kerl writes, differences and disagreements between Marxists and anarchists on various issues, such as those described here, yet there are also similarities and agreements, far more than many realize. There needs to be a free, open and fair exchange of ideas and a fraternal discussion about differences (Kerl’s article is a worthy effort) and, above all, there needs to be solidarity in the struggle. For as one of the slogans of the Movement goes, “the people united will never be defeated.”
Friday, May 28, 2010
The Indian State and the Maoists
To set aside for the moment opposition to Maoism itself – an opposition significant enough in principle alone – and to look for now only at practice, specifically, the recent Maoist militia actions, such as the killing “of nearly 40 civilians and trainee special police officers…[a]fter exploding a civilian bus carrying 50-60 persons, they opened fire on those who survived the blast(Nirmalangshu Mukherji),” it is without difficulty to identify the current Maoist strategy as having not only nothing to do with a revolutionary program, but, ominously, with a counterrevolutionary campaign of desperate terrorism.
Revolutionary campaigns consist of, by principle and definition, raising the consciousness of the people, rallying and organizing the masses, educating and preparing them for the responsibilities that form the very foundation for the initiation of a people’s governance. It need not be stressed in detail that bombing civilian buses, killing innocent civilians and waging a campaign of terrorism against the public is intrinsically diametrically opposed to any such effort. One cannot hope to educate, organize and raise the consciousness of those one is inexplicably and indiscriminately killing.
The Indian situation is among the horrors of the world, the tribal situation even more so and it is therefore a shame and a crime that the Maoists have exploited the tribals’ impoverished destitution for their own military centered strategy over and against any serious material improvement in the tribal situation. Mukherji observes that “[i]n an act of palpable cowardice, the defeated maoist leadership from Andhra and Bihar abandoned the struggling people there, and entered the safe havens of Dandakaranya forests. Taking advantage of the historical neglect and exploitation of the tribals by the state - the ‘root cause’ - the maoist leadership ensured the support of hapless tribals with token welfare measures while directing most of the attention secretly to construct guerrilla bases. In the process, they lured a large number of tribal children with assurances of food and clothing. These children have now grown into formidable militia and guerrilla forces. After committing atrocious crimes in the name of ‘revolutionary violence’, these youth brigades are now facing the wrath of the mighty Indian state. It is reasonable to infer that millions of tribals continue to side with the maoists largely because their children are with them.”
The Indian state’s “Operation Green Hunt,” a ruthless and violent campaign initiated by the state consisting of forming paramilitary forces and sending them into the forests in order to murder Maoists, tribals and anyone who will not submit and even many who will - a campaign described as genocidal by some and which will, in effect, include the killing of many children (considering that many of the Maoists’ “guerrilla forces” are young and impressionable tribal children who were offered no alternative) – is nothing short of a crime against humanity and must be identified as such, Maoist terrorism not being a rational justification for such heinous murder (especially when considering that Indian state sanctioned murder predates recent Maoist terrorist actions).
The Vietnam inspired program of Operation Green Hunt has historical roots and parallels. Arundhati Roy writes that “the Salwa Judum was a ground-clearing operation, meant to move people out of their villages into roadside camps, where they could be policed and controlled. In military terms, it’s called Strategic Hamleting. It was devised by General Sir Harold Briggs in 1950 when the British were at war against the communists in Malaya. The Briggs Plan became very popular with the Indian army, which has used it in Nagaland, Mizoram and in Telangana. The BJP chief minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh, announced that as far as his government was concerned, villagers who did not move into the camps would be considered Maoists. So, in Bastar, for an ordinary villager, just staying at home became the equivalent of indulging in dangerous terrorist activity.” This was the program of the U.S. in Vietnam: roll through the country burning down village by village and imprisoning the inhabitants in concentration camps where they could be controlled and restrained from supporting the indigenous political movement that was opposed by U.S. foreign policy when they were not massacred outright or when they had not already been decimated either by aerial fire bombing or chemical warfare. This is the policy taken by the Indian state and now heightened to new levels of violence and murder.
In light of the situation: violence, death and destruction from both sides, a ceasefire need immediately be called, peaceful negotiations taken up and grievances aired and addressed, predominately and centrally those of the tribals who have suffered unspeakable oppression, exploitation and domination for far too long. Here the burden lies upon the back of the treasonous Indian state which at every opportunity has refused such offers from the Maoists (such as in late Februrary when Kishenji challenged the Indian government to declare a 72 day cease-fire, among other immediately important and reasonable demands, such as the ending of “encounter killings” which target not only any Maoists but even “suspected supporters”), stamped upon every chance of ceasefire and negotiation and has spurned on to exponentially greater degree the circular internecine violence that disproportionately injures and maims Indian tribals and civilians.
Terrorism is for the most part and almost axiomatically acts of the desperate, the last resort of those who feel suffocated and left with no alternative and the Maoists, constituted by the most oppressed and neglected in India, the tribals, are just such a demographic. The resolution of any conflict that involves them must be predicated upon improving their horrific plight, acknowledging and including them in the social and political arena in India and rectifying the history of wonton disregard, exploitation and destruction of their lives. They must be offered real, substantive alternatives in order that they are no longer left in disparate villages in the forest hiding from the next paramilitary assault targeting any and everyone in the area, while simultaneously being subject to some of the most naked forms of oppression by the mining and other corporations in India and living every moment of their lives, men, women and children, with targets on their backs.
When the Maoists bomb a civilian bus they are not engaged in revolution, but are instead perpetrating terrorism, however, when the Indian state wages war within its own borders against some of the most impoverished and oppressed human beings on the planet one cannot but expect them to resist and to retaliate by any means necessary. The Maoists have proposed cease-fires, unless the Indian state is determined to exterminate the tribals, to cleanse the Indian forests of their long established inhabitants only in order to strip the forests barren by mining corporations and other business interests, and to show to the world how little life is worth in India, what “free-market capitalism” really consists of at its most naked and unregulated, they shall and must accept such offers. Only then can the ugly history of India be placed within the proper trajectory and only then can light begin to rejuvenate the unspeakably violent darkness of India.
Revolutionary campaigns consist of, by principle and definition, raising the consciousness of the people, rallying and organizing the masses, educating and preparing them for the responsibilities that form the very foundation for the initiation of a people’s governance. It need not be stressed in detail that bombing civilian buses, killing innocent civilians and waging a campaign of terrorism against the public is intrinsically diametrically opposed to any such effort. One cannot hope to educate, organize and raise the consciousness of those one is inexplicably and indiscriminately killing.
The Indian situation is among the horrors of the world, the tribal situation even more so and it is therefore a shame and a crime that the Maoists have exploited the tribals’ impoverished destitution for their own military centered strategy over and against any serious material improvement in the tribal situation. Mukherji observes that “[i]n an act of palpable cowardice, the defeated maoist leadership from Andhra and Bihar abandoned the struggling people there, and entered the safe havens of Dandakaranya forests. Taking advantage of the historical neglect and exploitation of the tribals by the state - the ‘root cause’ - the maoist leadership ensured the support of hapless tribals with token welfare measures while directing most of the attention secretly to construct guerrilla bases. In the process, they lured a large number of tribal children with assurances of food and clothing. These children have now grown into formidable militia and guerrilla forces. After committing atrocious crimes in the name of ‘revolutionary violence’, these youth brigades are now facing the wrath of the mighty Indian state. It is reasonable to infer that millions of tribals continue to side with the maoists largely because their children are with them.”
The Indian state’s “Operation Green Hunt,” a ruthless and violent campaign initiated by the state consisting of forming paramilitary forces and sending them into the forests in order to murder Maoists, tribals and anyone who will not submit and even many who will - a campaign described as genocidal by some and which will, in effect, include the killing of many children (considering that many of the Maoists’ “guerrilla forces” are young and impressionable tribal children who were offered no alternative) – is nothing short of a crime against humanity and must be identified as such, Maoist terrorism not being a rational justification for such heinous murder (especially when considering that Indian state sanctioned murder predates recent Maoist terrorist actions).
The Vietnam inspired program of Operation Green Hunt has historical roots and parallels. Arundhati Roy writes that “the Salwa Judum was a ground-clearing operation, meant to move people out of their villages into roadside camps, where they could be policed and controlled. In military terms, it’s called Strategic Hamleting. It was devised by General Sir Harold Briggs in 1950 when the British were at war against the communists in Malaya. The Briggs Plan became very popular with the Indian army, which has used it in Nagaland, Mizoram and in Telangana. The BJP chief minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh, announced that as far as his government was concerned, villagers who did not move into the camps would be considered Maoists. So, in Bastar, for an ordinary villager, just staying at home became the equivalent of indulging in dangerous terrorist activity.” This was the program of the U.S. in Vietnam: roll through the country burning down village by village and imprisoning the inhabitants in concentration camps where they could be controlled and restrained from supporting the indigenous political movement that was opposed by U.S. foreign policy when they were not massacred outright or when they had not already been decimated either by aerial fire bombing or chemical warfare. This is the policy taken by the Indian state and now heightened to new levels of violence and murder.
In light of the situation: violence, death and destruction from both sides, a ceasefire need immediately be called, peaceful negotiations taken up and grievances aired and addressed, predominately and centrally those of the tribals who have suffered unspeakable oppression, exploitation and domination for far too long. Here the burden lies upon the back of the treasonous Indian state which at every opportunity has refused such offers from the Maoists (such as in late Februrary when Kishenji challenged the Indian government to declare a 72 day cease-fire, among other immediately important and reasonable demands, such as the ending of “encounter killings” which target not only any Maoists but even “suspected supporters”), stamped upon every chance of ceasefire and negotiation and has spurned on to exponentially greater degree the circular internecine violence that disproportionately injures and maims Indian tribals and civilians.
Terrorism is for the most part and almost axiomatically acts of the desperate, the last resort of those who feel suffocated and left with no alternative and the Maoists, constituted by the most oppressed and neglected in India, the tribals, are just such a demographic. The resolution of any conflict that involves them must be predicated upon improving their horrific plight, acknowledging and including them in the social and political arena in India and rectifying the history of wonton disregard, exploitation and destruction of their lives. They must be offered real, substantive alternatives in order that they are no longer left in disparate villages in the forest hiding from the next paramilitary assault targeting any and everyone in the area, while simultaneously being subject to some of the most naked forms of oppression by the mining and other corporations in India and living every moment of their lives, men, women and children, with targets on their backs.
When the Maoists bomb a civilian bus they are not engaged in revolution, but are instead perpetrating terrorism, however, when the Indian state wages war within its own borders against some of the most impoverished and oppressed human beings on the planet one cannot but expect them to resist and to retaliate by any means necessary. The Maoists have proposed cease-fires, unless the Indian state is determined to exterminate the tribals, to cleanse the Indian forests of their long established inhabitants only in order to strip the forests barren by mining corporations and other business interests, and to show to the world how little life is worth in India, what “free-market capitalism” really consists of at its most naked and unregulated, they shall and must accept such offers. Only then can the ugly history of India be placed within the proper trajectory and only then can light begin to rejuvenate the unspeakably violent darkness of India.
Monday, April 26, 2010
The Immediate Situation
As congressional elections loom President Obama has launched the Democrats’ 2010 campaign. The fear within Washington is that the Democrats and President Obama have been so milquetoast, so compromising, so middle-of-the-road, so pro-corporate and have represented so little progressive change that the unprecedented, massive base that swept Obama into the presidency is going to, as they did in Massachusetts, sit the vote out in dejected apathy. This is to be feared and it is to be placed within a more serious context than all of the white-noise being broadcast by the bourgeois, corporate media.
The corporate media have for some time now been parading the tea party movement as though it were of some real significance relating to a “populist uprising” of the disenfranchised working class and that a much broader segment of society either agreed with the movement or identified in some ways with it. However, as recent research derived from national data illustrates, the tea partiers are overwhelmingly rich, white males. 76 percent of them have incomes above $50,000, 59% are males, 75% are 45 or older, 54% are Republican supporters, 66% usually or always vote Republican, 57% have a favorable view of George W. Bush, 66% have a favorable view of Sarah Palin, 92% believe Obama is moving the country towards socialism and, taking the specific example of the Chicago protest, 99% of them are white(Paul Street and Anthony Dimaggio).
The “populist uprising” of the tea party represents nothing even remotely similar to a populist movement, rather, it represents the last, drowning fragments of what remains of the GOP’s base for which was issued the “southern strategy”: predominately rich, white constituents who opposed everything progressive about the sixties and who wished to dismantle “the left hand of the state.”
As Paul Street and Anthony Dimaggio observe: “The Tea Partyers are mainly people of overlapping racial and socioeconomic privilege. They are intent on maintaining that privilege at the expense of disproportionately poor minorities. The ugly message at Tea Party rallies is clear: ‘keep your hands off my money; social welfare is fine, as long as I’m the beneficiary, but if my taxes go to the poor and needy, I’ll scream in the street until they’re cut off.’
This is a toxic brew. It reflects a culture of greed, narcissism, nationalism, white supremacy, and self indulgence. The Tea Party at its heart is a tool of the neoliberal corporate-imperial state, singing praises of ‘small government’ and ‘free markets,’ while quietly demanding massive state welfare subsidies for oneself, and demanding ‘market discipline,’ ‘personal responsibility,’ and ‘rugged individualism’ for the less fortunate. On the global stage, it is worth adding that, as Ford notes, ‘all but a sliver of the Tea Party crowd are belligerent hawks, as racist in their global worldview as in their domestic outlook.’”
This all plays out in the foreground of the looming elections, rather than the background where it so certainly should be. As the reactionary results of the election in Massachusett’s indicates there is serious trouble ahead for everyone if those who voted in 2008 stay at home on election day, as they did in Massachusett’s, ensuring the election of the reactionary and clearly incompetent Scott Brown. Undoubtedly the Democrats are spineless, pro-corporate shills, however, they differ from the other variant of the business faction, the Republicans, and, it should also be noted, it is not simply the standard Republican candidates and party that would be winning in the upcoming elections, it would be the crazed, proto-fascist, reactionary fringe represented by the Tea Party and their mouth-pieces and representatives, unless, of course, the Republican party is so thoroughly broken and splintered by the extremists, as they are now, that they are unable to cobble together enough unity to beat the Democrats. The latter result is a for sure one so long as people take the time to merely go mark a piece of paper and go back to what they were doing, so long as they don’t stay at home stewing in dejection and apathy.
What progressives and activists should be doing and should be preparing to do is, as always, educating and organizing. They should be organizing autonomously from either faction of the business party and building an independent movement that will hopefully eventually forcefully move the Democrats to substantively progressive and rational policy. A popular slogan now heard is “don’t vote, organize.” There is value within the slogan, but there is also, as with any slogan, a simplicity that obfuscates the nuances and complexities of our sociopolitical reality. The value is that one should be organizing, always and regardless, the obfuscation is the call for voter abstention, which, within our current situation, is an implicit endorsement of the opposition, in this case, potentially the reactionary elements manifested through the tea party. Such self-masticating is the content of the opposition’s wildest dreams and is inconsistent with even some of the most thoroughly revolutionary movements in history.
The Spanish Anarchists were certainly some of the most thoroughly principled revolutionary actors in human history, yet even they departed from their doctrine of complete voter abstention in order to secure the death of Spanish dictatorship and the initiation of the Spanish Republic (which they rightly viewed as similarly their antagonist, yet, righty, as one which afforded them more breathing room). Noam Chomsky, the greatest polymath since Denis Diderot, and the greatest revolutionary intellectual, perhaps ever, observes that when the difference is little yet existent nonetheless, a difference as between two factions of the business party when one is boiling over with elements that cannot but recall elements of late Weimar Germany, it is not inconsistent to be educating, agitating and organizing and to also go into a voting booth for a few moments and help to ensure that the more reactionary of the ruling parties does not succeed in securing a position with which to even further severely beat down the efforts one is making autonomously as well as the minor gains that have been won and then return without a moments pause to the very same work. The CNTistas did it in Spain and they did so within a trajectory that directly preceded the fascist revolt and the Spanish Revolution (nothing the least bit counterrevolutionary about that).
The stakes are becoming rather serious. It is not for nothing that serious, sober commentators, many of whom are not in the least given to hyperbole, are discussing analogies of the current condition to late Weimar Germany, analogies of what the Tea Party represents, it’s constituents, it’s mouth-pieces and it’s representatives to that situation and movement that saw to the end of Weimar Germany. Bearing in mind that the overwhelming majority of the Tea Party is made up of rich, while males and recalling, as Street and Dimaggio rightly suggest that we do, Trotsky’s diagnosis of fascism as a reaction of the petty bourgeois, voter abstention is a grave threat that could well ensure the victory of what is now only the swirling detritus of proto-fascism. Everyone who is at all concerned about these things and more should make absolutely certain that they condemn the opposition to its proper place at the fringe of society and make sure that they convince everyone they know to do the same as well. Then, of course, we should all continue to pressure the Democrats to pursue a sane, progressive policy through organizing an autonomous movement beholden only to the communities, workers and people directly involved.
The corporate media have for some time now been parading the tea party movement as though it were of some real significance relating to a “populist uprising” of the disenfranchised working class and that a much broader segment of society either agreed with the movement or identified in some ways with it. However, as recent research derived from national data illustrates, the tea partiers are overwhelmingly rich, white males. 76 percent of them have incomes above $50,000, 59% are males, 75% are 45 or older, 54% are Republican supporters, 66% usually or always vote Republican, 57% have a favorable view of George W. Bush, 66% have a favorable view of Sarah Palin, 92% believe Obama is moving the country towards socialism and, taking the specific example of the Chicago protest, 99% of them are white(Paul Street and Anthony Dimaggio).
The “populist uprising” of the tea party represents nothing even remotely similar to a populist movement, rather, it represents the last, drowning fragments of what remains of the GOP’s base for which was issued the “southern strategy”: predominately rich, white constituents who opposed everything progressive about the sixties and who wished to dismantle “the left hand of the state.”
As Paul Street and Anthony Dimaggio observe: “The Tea Partyers are mainly people of overlapping racial and socioeconomic privilege. They are intent on maintaining that privilege at the expense of disproportionately poor minorities. The ugly message at Tea Party rallies is clear: ‘keep your hands off my money; social welfare is fine, as long as I’m the beneficiary, but if my taxes go to the poor and needy, I’ll scream in the street until they’re cut off.’
This is a toxic brew. It reflects a culture of greed, narcissism, nationalism, white supremacy, and self indulgence. The Tea Party at its heart is a tool of the neoliberal corporate-imperial state, singing praises of ‘small government’ and ‘free markets,’ while quietly demanding massive state welfare subsidies for oneself, and demanding ‘market discipline,’ ‘personal responsibility,’ and ‘rugged individualism’ for the less fortunate. On the global stage, it is worth adding that, as Ford notes, ‘all but a sliver of the Tea Party crowd are belligerent hawks, as racist in their global worldview as in their domestic outlook.’”
This all plays out in the foreground of the looming elections, rather than the background where it so certainly should be. As the reactionary results of the election in Massachusett’s indicates there is serious trouble ahead for everyone if those who voted in 2008 stay at home on election day, as they did in Massachusett’s, ensuring the election of the reactionary and clearly incompetent Scott Brown. Undoubtedly the Democrats are spineless, pro-corporate shills, however, they differ from the other variant of the business faction, the Republicans, and, it should also be noted, it is not simply the standard Republican candidates and party that would be winning in the upcoming elections, it would be the crazed, proto-fascist, reactionary fringe represented by the Tea Party and their mouth-pieces and representatives, unless, of course, the Republican party is so thoroughly broken and splintered by the extremists, as they are now, that they are unable to cobble together enough unity to beat the Democrats. The latter result is a for sure one so long as people take the time to merely go mark a piece of paper and go back to what they were doing, so long as they don’t stay at home stewing in dejection and apathy.
What progressives and activists should be doing and should be preparing to do is, as always, educating and organizing. They should be organizing autonomously from either faction of the business party and building an independent movement that will hopefully eventually forcefully move the Democrats to substantively progressive and rational policy. A popular slogan now heard is “don’t vote, organize.” There is value within the slogan, but there is also, as with any slogan, a simplicity that obfuscates the nuances and complexities of our sociopolitical reality. The value is that one should be organizing, always and regardless, the obfuscation is the call for voter abstention, which, within our current situation, is an implicit endorsement of the opposition, in this case, potentially the reactionary elements manifested through the tea party. Such self-masticating is the content of the opposition’s wildest dreams and is inconsistent with even some of the most thoroughly revolutionary movements in history.
The Spanish Anarchists were certainly some of the most thoroughly principled revolutionary actors in human history, yet even they departed from their doctrine of complete voter abstention in order to secure the death of Spanish dictatorship and the initiation of the Spanish Republic (which they rightly viewed as similarly their antagonist, yet, righty, as one which afforded them more breathing room). Noam Chomsky, the greatest polymath since Denis Diderot, and the greatest revolutionary intellectual, perhaps ever, observes that when the difference is little yet existent nonetheless, a difference as between two factions of the business party when one is boiling over with elements that cannot but recall elements of late Weimar Germany, it is not inconsistent to be educating, agitating and organizing and to also go into a voting booth for a few moments and help to ensure that the more reactionary of the ruling parties does not succeed in securing a position with which to even further severely beat down the efforts one is making autonomously as well as the minor gains that have been won and then return without a moments pause to the very same work. The CNTistas did it in Spain and they did so within a trajectory that directly preceded the fascist revolt and the Spanish Revolution (nothing the least bit counterrevolutionary about that).
The stakes are becoming rather serious. It is not for nothing that serious, sober commentators, many of whom are not in the least given to hyperbole, are discussing analogies of the current condition to late Weimar Germany, analogies of what the Tea Party represents, it’s constituents, it’s mouth-pieces and it’s representatives to that situation and movement that saw to the end of Weimar Germany. Bearing in mind that the overwhelming majority of the Tea Party is made up of rich, while males and recalling, as Street and Dimaggio rightly suggest that we do, Trotsky’s diagnosis of fascism as a reaction of the petty bourgeois, voter abstention is a grave threat that could well ensure the victory of what is now only the swirling detritus of proto-fascism. Everyone who is at all concerned about these things and more should make absolutely certain that they condemn the opposition to its proper place at the fringe of society and make sure that they convince everyone they know to do the same as well. Then, of course, we should all continue to pressure the Democrats to pursue a sane, progressive policy through organizing an autonomous movement beholden only to the communities, workers and people directly involved.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Anarchism and Marxism
The statement which concluded Eric Kerl’s review of Wobblies and Zappatistas – a conversation on anarchism and Marxism, synthesizing the two – in issue 67 of the International Socialist Review, that a synthesis of “Marxism and anarchism, ideas which have repeatedly waged combat with one another, can only offer more confusion and hesitation in the midst of these turning points of human history,” cannot but come off as useless and unthoughtful sectarianism; a recurrent theme, I have found, of the ISR’s distasteful Leninism.
For as I have written in some detail[1], the two tendencies have all throughout history converged and in many instances are virtually indistinguishable: Anton Pannekoek’s council communism and Rudolf Rocker’s anarcho-syndicalism is a vivid instance.
Kerl points out that many anarchists embraced Marx’s analysis of the political economy of capitalism and wants to make this seen as hypocritical or inconsistent in some sense, writing that anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin “appropriated” Marx’s analysis “wholesale for their own program.” Bakunin certainly did champion Marx’s analysis, translating Capital into Russian, but that has absolutely nothing to do with Bakunin’s now almost prophetic criticism of portions of Marx’s tactics, especially with regards to the state as a transitory mechanism (a tactic altered after the Paris Commune and Marx’s address The Civil War in France). Undoubtedly one can accept Marx’s breathtaking analysis of political economy while simultaneously rejecting some of his tactical decisions and premises, there is simply no contradiction there.
Kerl, while making this trifling charge, ignores the fact that Marx was greatly influenced by the anarchism of Proudhon (to later pen a full length polemic against his one time comrade, a recurrent theme of Marx and Engels: viciously and publically castigating former comrades), for, as Rudolf Rocker observes, it was Proudhon’s What is Property? that led Marx to embrace socialism in the first instance. As Rudolf Rocker writes in Marx and Anarchism: “As editor in chief of the Rheinische Zeitung, one of the leading newspapers of the German democracy, Marx came to make the acquaintance of France’s most important socialist writers, even though he himself had not yet espoused the socialist cause. We have already mentioned a quote from him in which he refers to Victor Considerant, Pierre Leroux and Proudhon and there can be no doubt that Considerant and Proudhon were the mentors who attracted him to socialism. Without any doubt, What is Property? was a major influence over Marx’s development as a socialist; thus, in the periodical mentioned, he calls the inspired Proudhon ‘the most consistent and wisest of socialist writers’” (Rheinische Zeitung, 7 January 1843).
It is here that one actually has a case of inconsistency, the early Marx who embraced Proudhon and the later Marx who castigated him, whereas with anarchists such as Bakunin their embrace of Marx’s analysis of political economy and rejection of portions of Marx’s tactical premises are entirely consistent.
Rather than attempting to wedge a superficial divide between the two tendencies one would do much better by working towards just the kind of synthesis that indisputably exists (i.e., Pannekoek and Rocker); considering that one of the most severely debilitating aspects of the left as well as a cause for much failure is the crippling sectarianism that Kerl has decided to become the latest proponent of.
[1] Anarchist-Marxist Convergence: Part 1
Anarcho-Syndicalist Council Communism
For as I have written in some detail[1], the two tendencies have all throughout history converged and in many instances are virtually indistinguishable: Anton Pannekoek’s council communism and Rudolf Rocker’s anarcho-syndicalism is a vivid instance.
Kerl points out that many anarchists embraced Marx’s analysis of the political economy of capitalism and wants to make this seen as hypocritical or inconsistent in some sense, writing that anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin “appropriated” Marx’s analysis “wholesale for their own program.” Bakunin certainly did champion Marx’s analysis, translating Capital into Russian, but that has absolutely nothing to do with Bakunin’s now almost prophetic criticism of portions of Marx’s tactics, especially with regards to the state as a transitory mechanism (a tactic altered after the Paris Commune and Marx’s address The Civil War in France). Undoubtedly one can accept Marx’s breathtaking analysis of political economy while simultaneously rejecting some of his tactical decisions and premises, there is simply no contradiction there.
Kerl, while making this trifling charge, ignores the fact that Marx was greatly influenced by the anarchism of Proudhon (to later pen a full length polemic against his one time comrade, a recurrent theme of Marx and Engels: viciously and publically castigating former comrades), for, as Rudolf Rocker observes, it was Proudhon’s What is Property? that led Marx to embrace socialism in the first instance. As Rudolf Rocker writes in Marx and Anarchism: “As editor in chief of the Rheinische Zeitung, one of the leading newspapers of the German democracy, Marx came to make the acquaintance of France’s most important socialist writers, even though he himself had not yet espoused the socialist cause. We have already mentioned a quote from him in which he refers to Victor Considerant, Pierre Leroux and Proudhon and there can be no doubt that Considerant and Proudhon were the mentors who attracted him to socialism. Without any doubt, What is Property? was a major influence over Marx’s development as a socialist; thus, in the periodical mentioned, he calls the inspired Proudhon ‘the most consistent and wisest of socialist writers’” (Rheinische Zeitung, 7 January 1843).
It is here that one actually has a case of inconsistency, the early Marx who embraced Proudhon and the later Marx who castigated him, whereas with anarchists such as Bakunin their embrace of Marx’s analysis of political economy and rejection of portions of Marx’s tactical premises are entirely consistent.
Rather than attempting to wedge a superficial divide between the two tendencies one would do much better by working towards just the kind of synthesis that indisputably exists (i.e., Pannekoek and Rocker); considering that one of the most severely debilitating aspects of the left as well as a cause for much failure is the crippling sectarianism that Kerl has decided to become the latest proponent of.
[1] Anarchist-Marxist Convergence: Part 1
Anarcho-Syndicalist Council Communism
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Towards Socialism
For those of us who advocate the striving towards a just socialist society free of exploitation, oppression, hierarchy and domination and instead founded upon rational ethical principles such as equality, mutual aid, solidarity, cooperation, freedom and democracy, we certainly do not expect to see such a radical transformation occur overnight. Any rational person looking at existing society could not possibly believe that it is anything like ripe for substantive, foundational socialist change; that would be a ludicrous conclusion. These are for sure long-term goals, although anything can happen at anytime, most unexpectedly.
This being the case, the question arises: what to do? Noam Chomsky stresses that what should drive people working “for change are certain principles you’d like to see achieved,” such as the ones I have cited; people must advance these principles. Chomsky observes that many people refer to such tactics as “reformism,” and that this is more of a baseless “put-down” because “reforms can be quite revolutionary if they lead in a certain direction,” and they can certainly help better lay the foundation and create the material conditions for a more thorough transformation.
The question then arises as to what reforms should be advocated and implemented, what reforms would be likely to help work towards a more just socialist society. In my view some of the immediate tasks should be the reestablishment and reorganization of the unions that have been absolutely decimated from, conspicuously, the Reagan administration throughout every following administration (both Republican and Democratic). Historically unions act as centers furthering democracy, freedom, solidarity, welfare and so on. Noam Chomsky elaborates upon this point in his lecture “Class War: The Attack on Working People”:
“Effective democratizing forces has always been the labor movement, labor unions; history on that is completely clear. In countries that have a strong labor movement there is also a very strong tendency or a strong correlation with a real, live, functioning social contract that includes not only rights for working people, but for people who need help and protection: for the defenseless, for children, for women, for families, for people in need of assistance generally, for the general public in fact. And there’s also a culture that goes along with it: a culture of solidarity and sympathy and mutual aid and support.”
For these reasons it is surely of critical importance to reorganize the unions and to reinvigorate and empower the labor movement. The labor movement is a strong countervailing force for democracy promotion, social justice and the like and must become again a leading social force.
It would also seem practical to form a viable labor party that actually represents working class and regular, ordinary people – rather than being forced with simply two divergent factions of the single business party – seeing as the United States is one of the only, if not the only, “first-world” industrialized nations without such a labor party.
Taking into consideration the effects of corporate globalization – for example, the fact that a multinational corporation, such as a car manufacturing company, can, when labor demands become “too costly” for the company, simply, because it is cheaper, transfer manufacturing somewhere else, from the United States to Mexico or Indonesia, from Germany to Alabama, etcetera, where workers rights have either not been achieved or have been decimated – the reconstitution of the labor movement must truly be international, as they have always made a pretense of. This project can take as a guide the Industrial Workers’ of the World Union’s international unionization of Starbucks baristas where labor actions have taken place in various countries, following the fact that the company is international, so too must be the unionization of it.
Following the subject of internationalism, the Humanist Manifesto 2000, drafted by Paul Kurtz, presents some pragmatic international reforms. A Planetary Bill of Rights and Responsibilities is proposed. “It incorporates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but goes beyond it by offering some new provisions” and goes into detail describing these new provisions, such as economic security, protection from unnecessary injury, danger and death (the inadmissibility of capital punishment), protection from discrimination based upon race, ethnic origin, nationality, culture, caste, class, creed, gender, or sexual orientation, the necessity of the principles of equality (equality before the law, equality of consideration, satisfaction of basic needs, equality of opportunity) and so on.
Discussing “The Need For New Planetary Institutions” it is observed that “[t]o solve problems on the transnational level and to contribute to planetwide development, we need gradually but drastically to transform the United Nations…The most fundamental change would be to enhance the effectiveness of the UN by converting it from an assembly of sovereign states to an assembly of peoples as well.”
The Manifesto cites as some more reforms that “the world needs…to establish an effective World Parliament – and elections to it based on populations – which will represent the people, not their governments.”
The Security Council veto must be abolished due to its having the effect of allowing any permanent Security Council member, such as the United States (the most egregious abuser), to halt any action or policy it wishes, even over and against overwhelming international consensus. As the manifesto states “[t]he basic principle of world security is that no single state or alliance of states has the right to undermine the political and territorial integrity of other states by aggression; nor should any nation or group of nations be allowed to police the world or unilaterally bomb others without the concurrence of the Security Council.”
There must be developed “an effective World Court and an International Judiciary with sufficient power to enforce its rulings.” There needs to be “a planetary environmental monitoring agency on the transnational level” and “the development of global institutions should include some procedure for the regulation of multinational corporations and state monopolies.”
Outside of these broad, international reforms, tactics must vary, being contingent upon specific circumstances, geographic regions and so forth. In this sense local community centers, cooperatives and activist groups should be created in order to address local issues as well as partake in the broader, larger issues; such a reorganization should begin from the ground up.
Elaborating upon these themes Chomsky suggests that “in your local community you want to have sources of alternative action; people with parallel concerns, maybe differently focused, but, at the core, sort of similar values and similar interests in helping people learn how to defend themselves against external power, taking control of their lives, reaching out your hand to people in need, that’s a common array of concerns. You can learn about your values, you can figure out how to defend yourself and so on in conjunction with others.”
Working towards socialist change must be variegated and diverse, manifesting the specificities of the regions, organizations, cultures, issues and peoples working toward such change and such work should begin immediately, where it has not begun already.
This being the case, the question arises: what to do? Noam Chomsky stresses that what should drive people working “for change are certain principles you’d like to see achieved,” such as the ones I have cited; people must advance these principles. Chomsky observes that many people refer to such tactics as “reformism,” and that this is more of a baseless “put-down” because “reforms can be quite revolutionary if they lead in a certain direction,” and they can certainly help better lay the foundation and create the material conditions for a more thorough transformation.
The question then arises as to what reforms should be advocated and implemented, what reforms would be likely to help work towards a more just socialist society. In my view some of the immediate tasks should be the reestablishment and reorganization of the unions that have been absolutely decimated from, conspicuously, the Reagan administration throughout every following administration (both Republican and Democratic). Historically unions act as centers furthering democracy, freedom, solidarity, welfare and so on. Noam Chomsky elaborates upon this point in his lecture “Class War: The Attack on Working People”:
“Effective democratizing forces has always been the labor movement, labor unions; history on that is completely clear. In countries that have a strong labor movement there is also a very strong tendency or a strong correlation with a real, live, functioning social contract that includes not only rights for working people, but for people who need help and protection: for the defenseless, for children, for women, for families, for people in need of assistance generally, for the general public in fact. And there’s also a culture that goes along with it: a culture of solidarity and sympathy and mutual aid and support.”
For these reasons it is surely of critical importance to reorganize the unions and to reinvigorate and empower the labor movement. The labor movement is a strong countervailing force for democracy promotion, social justice and the like and must become again a leading social force.
It would also seem practical to form a viable labor party that actually represents working class and regular, ordinary people – rather than being forced with simply two divergent factions of the single business party – seeing as the United States is one of the only, if not the only, “first-world” industrialized nations without such a labor party.
Taking into consideration the effects of corporate globalization – for example, the fact that a multinational corporation, such as a car manufacturing company, can, when labor demands become “too costly” for the company, simply, because it is cheaper, transfer manufacturing somewhere else, from the United States to Mexico or Indonesia, from Germany to Alabama, etcetera, where workers rights have either not been achieved or have been decimated – the reconstitution of the labor movement must truly be international, as they have always made a pretense of. This project can take as a guide the Industrial Workers’ of the World Union’s international unionization of Starbucks baristas where labor actions have taken place in various countries, following the fact that the company is international, so too must be the unionization of it.
Following the subject of internationalism, the Humanist Manifesto 2000, drafted by Paul Kurtz, presents some pragmatic international reforms. A Planetary Bill of Rights and Responsibilities is proposed. “It incorporates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but goes beyond it by offering some new provisions” and goes into detail describing these new provisions, such as economic security, protection from unnecessary injury, danger and death (the inadmissibility of capital punishment), protection from discrimination based upon race, ethnic origin, nationality, culture, caste, class, creed, gender, or sexual orientation, the necessity of the principles of equality (equality before the law, equality of consideration, satisfaction of basic needs, equality of opportunity) and so on.
Discussing “The Need For New Planetary Institutions” it is observed that “[t]o solve problems on the transnational level and to contribute to planetwide development, we need gradually but drastically to transform the United Nations…The most fundamental change would be to enhance the effectiveness of the UN by converting it from an assembly of sovereign states to an assembly of peoples as well.”
The Manifesto cites as some more reforms that “the world needs…to establish an effective World Parliament – and elections to it based on populations – which will represent the people, not their governments.”
The Security Council veto must be abolished due to its having the effect of allowing any permanent Security Council member, such as the United States (the most egregious abuser), to halt any action or policy it wishes, even over and against overwhelming international consensus. As the manifesto states “[t]he basic principle of world security is that no single state or alliance of states has the right to undermine the political and territorial integrity of other states by aggression; nor should any nation or group of nations be allowed to police the world or unilaterally bomb others without the concurrence of the Security Council.”
There must be developed “an effective World Court and an International Judiciary with sufficient power to enforce its rulings.” There needs to be “a planetary environmental monitoring agency on the transnational level” and “the development of global institutions should include some procedure for the regulation of multinational corporations and state monopolies.”
Outside of these broad, international reforms, tactics must vary, being contingent upon specific circumstances, geographic regions and so forth. In this sense local community centers, cooperatives and activist groups should be created in order to address local issues as well as partake in the broader, larger issues; such a reorganization should begin from the ground up.
Elaborating upon these themes Chomsky suggests that “in your local community you want to have sources of alternative action; people with parallel concerns, maybe differently focused, but, at the core, sort of similar values and similar interests in helping people learn how to defend themselves against external power, taking control of their lives, reaching out your hand to people in need, that’s a common array of concerns. You can learn about your values, you can figure out how to defend yourself and so on in conjunction with others.”
Working towards socialist change must be variegated and diverse, manifesting the specificities of the regions, organizations, cultures, issues and peoples working toward such change and such work should begin immediately, where it has not begun already.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Socialist Organization
One of the most critical issues for the left is the question of organization. For the purposes of this duscussion I would like to focus upon two general tendencies, the decentralized, democratic libertarian left and the centralized, authoritarian vanguard that stems from Bolshevism (a contrast between the libertarian and authoritarian left, if the latter can be considered left at all), although various alternatives presented by others are welcomed.
By way of introduction I would like to present a quote by one Otto Ruhle about social revolution in general, that social revolution, by definition, “is not a party affair; politically and economically it is the affair of the whole working class.” Social revolution is either carried out by society, by the people, the workers and so on, or it is not a social revolution (this is simply a matter of elementary definition).
In the footnotes to Noam Chomsky’s famous “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” he emphasizes that it must be noted “…the ways in which exercise of control over steps of the [early] revolutionary process [in China] was a factor in developing the consciousness and insight of those who took part in the revolution, not only from a political and social point of view, but also with respect to the human relationships that were created.”
Importantly, as Chomsky here emphasizes, integral and direct participation in the revolutionary process is central to the raising of revolutionary consciousness and the further unfolding and expansion of the revolution, leading to its likelier success. Rather than forcing processes upon the people – although, actually, the Bolshevik program constituted the destruction of revolutionary processes, such as the immediate dissolution of workers’ soviets and councils and so on – the people must be in control of the processes themselves. Instead of leading a vanguard party of mostly bourgeois intellectuals, the masses must be the central agent in revolutionary change.
The left-Marxist Anton Pannekoek explained that “belief in the party constitutes the most powerful check on the working class' capacity for action. That is why we are not trying to create a new party. This is so, not because our numbers are small -- a party of any kind begins with a few people -- but because, in our day, a party cannot be other than an organization aimed at directing and dominating the proletariat. To this type of organization we oppose the principle that the working class can effectively come into its own and prevail only by taking its destiny into its own hands.”
Rudolf Rocker, one of the leading proponents of anarcho-syndicalism, concurs writing that “[p]articipation in the politics of the bourgeois states has not brought the labour movement a hairs' breadth closer to Socialism, but, thanks to this method, Socialism has almost been completely crushed and condemned to insignificance. The ancient proverb: 'Who eats of the pope, dies of him,' has held true in this content also; who eats of the state is ruined by it. Participation in parliamentary politics has affected the Socialist labour movement like an insidious poison. It destroyed the belief in the necessity of constructive Socialist activity and, worst of all, the impulse to self-help, by inoculating people with the ruinous delusion that salvation always comes from above.”
It is critical that people realize progress must be made by the whole of the people involved, from the bottom up, democratically, and do not wish for and rely upon a Christ-like savior, someone like Lenin, who is allegedly going to initiate, progress and defend socialist revolution alone with their vanguard party of intellectual and revolutionary betters, for history has clearly shown to us the consequences of such an elitist, authoritarian program: it’s known as the counterrevolution.
By way of introduction I would like to present a quote by one Otto Ruhle about social revolution in general, that social revolution, by definition, “is not a party affair; politically and economically it is the affair of the whole working class.” Social revolution is either carried out by society, by the people, the workers and so on, or it is not a social revolution (this is simply a matter of elementary definition).
In the footnotes to Noam Chomsky’s famous “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” he emphasizes that it must be noted “…the ways in which exercise of control over steps of the [early] revolutionary process [in China] was a factor in developing the consciousness and insight of those who took part in the revolution, not only from a political and social point of view, but also with respect to the human relationships that were created.”
Importantly, as Chomsky here emphasizes, integral and direct participation in the revolutionary process is central to the raising of revolutionary consciousness and the further unfolding and expansion of the revolution, leading to its likelier success. Rather than forcing processes upon the people – although, actually, the Bolshevik program constituted the destruction of revolutionary processes, such as the immediate dissolution of workers’ soviets and councils and so on – the people must be in control of the processes themselves. Instead of leading a vanguard party of mostly bourgeois intellectuals, the masses must be the central agent in revolutionary change.
The left-Marxist Anton Pannekoek explained that “belief in the party constitutes the most powerful check on the working class' capacity for action. That is why we are not trying to create a new party. This is so, not because our numbers are small -- a party of any kind begins with a few people -- but because, in our day, a party cannot be other than an organization aimed at directing and dominating the proletariat. To this type of organization we oppose the principle that the working class can effectively come into its own and prevail only by taking its destiny into its own hands.”
Rudolf Rocker, one of the leading proponents of anarcho-syndicalism, concurs writing that “[p]articipation in the politics of the bourgeois states has not brought the labour movement a hairs' breadth closer to Socialism, but, thanks to this method, Socialism has almost been completely crushed and condemned to insignificance. The ancient proverb: 'Who eats of the pope, dies of him,' has held true in this content also; who eats of the state is ruined by it. Participation in parliamentary politics has affected the Socialist labour movement like an insidious poison. It destroyed the belief in the necessity of constructive Socialist activity and, worst of all, the impulse to self-help, by inoculating people with the ruinous delusion that salvation always comes from above.”
It is critical that people realize progress must be made by the whole of the people involved, from the bottom up, democratically, and do not wish for and rely upon a Christ-like savior, someone like Lenin, who is allegedly going to initiate, progress and defend socialist revolution alone with their vanguard party of intellectual and revolutionary betters, for history has clearly shown to us the consequences of such an elitist, authoritarian program: it’s known as the counterrevolution.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Abortion
For those of you who don’t know, the time of violent male dominance, the Victorian era, the “cult of domesticity,” the notion that a man’s wife is his, such as property, and that others shouldn’t interfere or bother if they may notice signs of abuse – now, thanks to the raising of consciousness brought about by the feminist and social movements, there are domestic abuse call centers for help – that women are inferior to men intellectually and emotionally and so on: all of this is no longer tolerable to socially conscious human beings.
When a woman becomes pregnant after suffering through a violent rape, she is to be in control of her own body and her body’s biological processes. No male authority, no authority period, has the justification for deciding for women what they can and cannot do with their own bodies and biological processes. Even setting aside the all too frequent nightmare cases such as pregnancy through rape and incest, a woman has the right to her own body and control over her own biological processes, regardless.
The hysterical and extremist anti-choice movement (such as the crazed organization “Operation Rescue,” formerly headed by the charlatan Randall Terry) that recently saw to the murder in cold blood of Dr. George Tiller (a brave giant of a man who placed his own life on the line in defense of women’s health and the rights of women everywhere), the fourth victim of the blood-thirsty, death-cult since 1993, has, especially since Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, grown in momentum.
The Bush Presidency saw to the appointing of social conservative, radical Catholic judges to the Supreme Court – John Roberts and Samuel Alito – an aggressively undemocratic political institution that the religious extremists have been attempting to control since at least Reagan’s presidency in recent times; which is one of the reasons Obama’s election came as such a relief, in opposition to the wildly reactionary McCain-Palin horror-show of a ticket.
This reactionary, extremist and murderous cult of death, hatred and oppression must be broken. It is well beyond time for people who believe in women’s health and rights to stand and hold firm to the elementary principles involved in allowing legalized abortion methods.
The claim made by those who act as megaphones for extremists, reactionaries and killers – such as the O’Reilly Factor bully-pulpit that helped foment hysteria about Tiller (“O’Reilly repeatedly attacked Tiller on air, referring to him as a ‘so-called baby killer’” and the clinic he worked in “as a ‘death-mill,’ in segments he called ‘Tiller the Baby Killer,’ O’Reilly hurled wild accusations” such as that “George Tiller…will execute babies for $5,000 if the mother is depressed. And there are rapists impregnating 10-year-olds who are being protected by abortion clinics.” As Nicole Colson observed in the Socialist Worker) – that abortion represents a holocaust of babies is nothing but vulgar propaganda.
If an abortion is performed, it is by definition not the termination of a baby, but rather, even late into the pregnancy, the termination of a fetus. This of course is irrelevant to religious extremists and their anti-legal abortion movement – comprised of the Christian equivalent of al-Qaida organizations, organizations that inspire fire-bombing, the throwing of acid upon human flesh and murder in cold blood – who consider the moment of conception and the tiny cluster of cells that will later develop into a fetus to mark not the beginning, but the full realization of a human person endowed with a “soul” (overtly illustrating that their sociopolitical views are dictated by their religious dogmas, which, observing the separation of church and state, means that they cannot enter into the realm of political and legal discourse on the matter in a society where not everyone is a Christian extremist).
Peter Singer points out that “some opponents of abortion respond that the fetus…is made in the image of God, or has an immortal soul. They thereby acknowledge religion is the driving force behind their opposition. But there is no evidence for these religious claims, and in a society in which we keep the state and religion separate, we should not use them as a basis for the criminal law, which applies to people with different religious beliefs, or to those with none at all.”
Such beliefs are so much white noise and ignorance, the product of religious indoctrination and tyranny (religious institutions being historically patriarchal, women-hating and oppressing and extremely violent and authoritarian). Peter Singer points out in his Practical Ethics (pp. 150-1) that “[t]he weakness of the first premise [it is wrong to kill an innocent human being] of the conservative argument is that it relies on our accepting the special status of human life. We have seen that ‘human’ is a term that straddles two distinct notions, being a member of the species Homo sapiens, and being a person. Once the term is dissected in this way, the weakness of the conservative’s first premise becomes apparent. If ‘human’ is taken as equivalent of ‘person’ the second premise of the argument, which asserts that the fetus is a human being, is clearly false; for one cannot plausibly argue that a fetus is either rational or self-conscious...For on any fair comparison of morally relevant characteristics, like rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, autonomy, pleasure and pain, and so on, the calf, the pig and the much derided chicken come out well ahead of the fetus at any stage of pregnancy – while if we make the comparison of a fetus of less than three months, a fish would show more signs of consciousness.”
Singer suggests “that we accord the life of a fetus no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc. Since no fetus is a person, no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. We have yet to consider at what point the fetus is likely to become capable of feeling pain. For now it will be enough to say that until that capacity exists, an abortion terminates an existence that is of no ‘intrinsic’ value at all. Afterwards, when the fetus may be conscious, though not self-conscious, abortion should not be taken lightly (if a woman ever does take an abortion lightly). But a woman’s serious interests would normally override the rudimentary interests even of a conscious fetus. Indeed, even an abortion late in pregnancy for the most trivial reasons is hard to condemn unless we also condemn the slaughter of far more developed forms of life for the taste of their flesh.”
The argument centered upon the fetus as “potential life” may be more compelling to some, but is as fallacious as any and the refutation of this argument can also be found in full detail in Singer’s Practical Ethics (pp. 152-6).
There is then also the social consequences of making abortion illegal. As A. Faundes and E. Hardy state: “Illegal abortion is responsible for up to half of maternal deaths and consumes a large proportion of health resources in many developing countries, particularly in Africa and Latin America. The legal situation of abortion in a country does not influence the abortion rate, but illegality is associated with a much greater risk of complications and death. To make abortion legal is not enough. Access to safe abortion strongly depends on the capacity and willingness of physicians and the health system to provide safe services, which sometimes are made available in spite of restrictive laws. The abortion rate will drop and the safety of the procedure will improve, parallel to the position women occupy in a given society, and to the level of recognition of their sexual and reproductive rights.”
It is well beyond time for those of us who are concerned for women’s health and rights, for elementary human rights and social justice, to be loud and clear, to hold firm that these rights will not be abrogated by a reactionary movement of religious frauds, hucksters, extremists and killers – the movement must be broken, left without any credibility or illusory moral standing - and that no one will be frightened away by threats of violence and terrorism from supporting what they know to be right and just.
When a woman becomes pregnant after suffering through a violent rape, she is to be in control of her own body and her body’s biological processes. No male authority, no authority period, has the justification for deciding for women what they can and cannot do with their own bodies and biological processes. Even setting aside the all too frequent nightmare cases such as pregnancy through rape and incest, a woman has the right to her own body and control over her own biological processes, regardless.
The hysterical and extremist anti-choice movement (such as the crazed organization “Operation Rescue,” formerly headed by the charlatan Randall Terry) that recently saw to the murder in cold blood of Dr. George Tiller (a brave giant of a man who placed his own life on the line in defense of women’s health and the rights of women everywhere), the fourth victim of the blood-thirsty, death-cult since 1993, has, especially since Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, grown in momentum.
The Bush Presidency saw to the appointing of social conservative, radical Catholic judges to the Supreme Court – John Roberts and Samuel Alito – an aggressively undemocratic political institution that the religious extremists have been attempting to control since at least Reagan’s presidency in recent times; which is one of the reasons Obama’s election came as such a relief, in opposition to the wildly reactionary McCain-Palin horror-show of a ticket.
This reactionary, extremist and murderous cult of death, hatred and oppression must be broken. It is well beyond time for people who believe in women’s health and rights to stand and hold firm to the elementary principles involved in allowing legalized abortion methods.
The claim made by those who act as megaphones for extremists, reactionaries and killers – such as the O’Reilly Factor bully-pulpit that helped foment hysteria about Tiller (“O’Reilly repeatedly attacked Tiller on air, referring to him as a ‘so-called baby killer’” and the clinic he worked in “as a ‘death-mill,’ in segments he called ‘Tiller the Baby Killer,’ O’Reilly hurled wild accusations” such as that “George Tiller…will execute babies for $5,000 if the mother is depressed. And there are rapists impregnating 10-year-olds who are being protected by abortion clinics.” As Nicole Colson observed in the Socialist Worker) – that abortion represents a holocaust of babies is nothing but vulgar propaganda.
If an abortion is performed, it is by definition not the termination of a baby, but rather, even late into the pregnancy, the termination of a fetus. This of course is irrelevant to religious extremists and their anti-legal abortion movement – comprised of the Christian equivalent of al-Qaida organizations, organizations that inspire fire-bombing, the throwing of acid upon human flesh and murder in cold blood – who consider the moment of conception and the tiny cluster of cells that will later develop into a fetus to mark not the beginning, but the full realization of a human person endowed with a “soul” (overtly illustrating that their sociopolitical views are dictated by their religious dogmas, which, observing the separation of church and state, means that they cannot enter into the realm of political and legal discourse on the matter in a society where not everyone is a Christian extremist).
Peter Singer points out that “some opponents of abortion respond that the fetus…is made in the image of God, or has an immortal soul. They thereby acknowledge religion is the driving force behind their opposition. But there is no evidence for these religious claims, and in a society in which we keep the state and religion separate, we should not use them as a basis for the criminal law, which applies to people with different religious beliefs, or to those with none at all.”
Such beliefs are so much white noise and ignorance, the product of religious indoctrination and tyranny (religious institutions being historically patriarchal, women-hating and oppressing and extremely violent and authoritarian). Peter Singer points out in his Practical Ethics (pp. 150-1) that “[t]he weakness of the first premise [it is wrong to kill an innocent human being] of the conservative argument is that it relies on our accepting the special status of human life. We have seen that ‘human’ is a term that straddles two distinct notions, being a member of the species Homo sapiens, and being a person. Once the term is dissected in this way, the weakness of the conservative’s first premise becomes apparent. If ‘human’ is taken as equivalent of ‘person’ the second premise of the argument, which asserts that the fetus is a human being, is clearly false; for one cannot plausibly argue that a fetus is either rational or self-conscious...For on any fair comparison of morally relevant characteristics, like rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, autonomy, pleasure and pain, and so on, the calf, the pig and the much derided chicken come out well ahead of the fetus at any stage of pregnancy – while if we make the comparison of a fetus of less than three months, a fish would show more signs of consciousness.”
Singer suggests “that we accord the life of a fetus no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc. Since no fetus is a person, no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. We have yet to consider at what point the fetus is likely to become capable of feeling pain. For now it will be enough to say that until that capacity exists, an abortion terminates an existence that is of no ‘intrinsic’ value at all. Afterwards, when the fetus may be conscious, though not self-conscious, abortion should not be taken lightly (if a woman ever does take an abortion lightly). But a woman’s serious interests would normally override the rudimentary interests even of a conscious fetus. Indeed, even an abortion late in pregnancy for the most trivial reasons is hard to condemn unless we also condemn the slaughter of far more developed forms of life for the taste of their flesh.”
The argument centered upon the fetus as “potential life” may be more compelling to some, but is as fallacious as any and the refutation of this argument can also be found in full detail in Singer’s Practical Ethics (pp. 152-6).
There is then also the social consequences of making abortion illegal. As A. Faundes and E. Hardy state: “Illegal abortion is responsible for up to half of maternal deaths and consumes a large proportion of health resources in many developing countries, particularly in Africa and Latin America. The legal situation of abortion in a country does not influence the abortion rate, but illegality is associated with a much greater risk of complications and death. To make abortion legal is not enough. Access to safe abortion strongly depends on the capacity and willingness of physicians and the health system to provide safe services, which sometimes are made available in spite of restrictive laws. The abortion rate will drop and the safety of the procedure will improve, parallel to the position women occupy in a given society, and to the level of recognition of their sexual and reproductive rights.”
It is well beyond time for those of us who are concerned for women’s health and rights, for elementary human rights and social justice, to be loud and clear, to hold firm that these rights will not be abrogated by a reactionary movement of religious frauds, hucksters, extremists and killers – the movement must be broken, left without any credibility or illusory moral standing - and that no one will be frightened away by threats of violence and terrorism from supporting what they know to be right and just.
Monday, May 04, 2009
President Obama: Reflections Upon the First 100 Days
The victory of Obama’s campaign over the hysterical, reactionary, rabid and racist elements of the McCain-Palin campaign came with an indescribable sense of joy, relief and validation to innumerable people (myself included) and celebration was justifiable. However, with the election also came a sort of intoxication and as with any intoxicant there were blinding effects (such as that Obama represented real, substantive change rather than mere cosmetic alterations and improvements). I along with everyone on the left worthy of mention knew and predicted ahead of time that real substantive change was not going to be freely offered by Obama over and above the will and power of the corporate business world (with the backing of the federal state system) without serious, organized and sustained grass-roots mobilization.
Any self-delusion that Obama was going to introduce sweeping and substantive change immediately dissipated when he began to assemble his administration. His economic team almost down the line are all former Clinton personnel, the very same people who helped to orchestrate the gross deregulation of the financial system that sunk the world economy. “Summers, Bernanke, Geithner, Furman, Rattner…what are they, if not the long-caricatured ‘executive committee of the bourgeoisie’?” Mike Davis rhetorically asks. Obama has pledged billions and trillions of dollars to help bailout and rescue the private banking system, continuing a central policy of Washington: socialism for the rich and free-market discipline for the poor.
In a society that values social justice a failed banking system run by corruption, well connected insiders, avarice and deceit wouldn’t be rewarded by their gross failure – which has resulted in millions of people being thrown out of their homes and into the streets by the very same hucksters who fished them into shyster deals, while those hucksters are now being rescued and even given bonuses by the very public they swindled – with public subsidy (the public paying trillions of dollars in order to save the shadowy banking system and those who helped to destroy it).
Instead, everyone who was in a position of private and managerial power within the banking industry, within the failed banks, would be rightfully fired, replaced by those whose capital was rescuing the system (the public). The public has paid, they should now own. The banking industry in any sane and fair society would be fully nationalized (rather than forcing the public to pay for the banks losses while keeping those who were responsible for the losses in their positions of management and power, those responsible for the losses should be either fired or indicted or both and managerial power should be in the hands of those who came to the rescue). However, Obama and his team of free-market fundamentalist Clinton carry-overs are doing nothing of the like, quite the opposite. They are doing precisely what you would expect those who are part of the failed system and responsible for its failure to do: saving their own interests and the interests of their connections and associates (simply review Paulson’s Goldman Sachs connections and the way in which he decided who was to be bailed out and rescued: read, who were his friends and accomplices? The same holds for Geithner as well as the rest of the usual suspects).
While Obama’s horrific position within the economic realm may be the most blatant, it certainly isn’t unique among his positions. Militarily Obama has committed the country to possibly even more war than McCain. Obama has certainly crossed over, very quickly and without hesitation, to the imperial ambitions of state: in Afghanistan and Pakistan, most conspicuously, as elsewhere. With his decision to keep at the helm Robert Gates, Obama has signaled that he doesn’t intend to substantively alter Washington’s imperial and hegemonic foreign policy; it may now have a more diplomatic and gentler quality about it – changes may be made, progress may occur – but it remains militant and ruthless nonetheless and holds onto the general ideology that begins from the absurd and violent premise that the United States owns the world. Obama represents and has assumed the “realist” tradition within the government, the very same tradition that is responsible for an almost infinite index of invasions, occupations and international terrorist actions. No one should be surprised when Afghanistan and Pakistan turn into an even worse nightmare of atrocities. Obama has adopted the Bush Doctrine that the United States can and should wantonly bomb Pakistan (there have been a slew of such bombings). As Noam Chomsky observed on Democracy Now!: “There has been for example a great deal of chaos and fighting in Bajaur province, which is adjacent to Afghanistan and tribal leaders – others there – have traced it to the bombing of a madrassa school which killed 80 to 95 people, which I don’t think was even reported in the United States, it was reported in the Pakistani press of course.”
Obama’s silence on Israel’s terrorism in Gaza – as well as his appointing for Chief of staff, Rham Emmanuel (who, among many other horrors, helped set a record for supporting Tel Aviv’s political assassinations of Palestinians) – outside of being a moral disgrace also serves as yet more evidence of heinous continuity. His treatment of the Middle East generally is yet to prove much different from any of his predecessors as well as his treatment of Latin America. While the left in the South remain open to normalizing relations with the United States – Chavez, Morales, etcetera – Morales points out that “[i]n Bolivia… one doesn’t feel any change. The policy of conspiracy continues,” and he says this within the context of a brutal opposition in Bolivia (an opposition of corrupt, dangerous, ultra-right, protofascist party leaders and wealthy corporate CEOs and so on over and against the populace, many supported by the CIA) that has recently even plotted to assassinate Morales and secede from the state.
While thankfully repudiating the criminal and internationally illegal use of torture methods used in the Inquisitions and as prosecuted by the United States when used by the Khmer Rouge and others, Obama has left open whether or not any Bush administration officials (such as the moral slug of a former attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, who referred to the content of the Geneva Conventions in relation to torture as “quaint,” as I pointed out in my post about humanism and the occupation of Iraq) will even ever be prosecuted; once again proving that the “rule of law” is in reality the rule of concentrated capital and power and it is a real shame (although it was predicted by everyone on the left worthy of mention) that Obama has assumed the leading role in such rule.
While repudiating the use of torture, Obama plans to continue the system of military commission trials for some Guantanamo prisoners. As Tom Eley reports: “The articles, which are based on anonymous White House sources, and statements by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Attorney General Eric Holder appear designed to prepare public opinion for a revival of the trials, which were temporarily suspended in an order issued by Obama on the day of his inauguration. The suspension is due to end May 20.
In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee Thursday, Gates was asked whether the Guantánamo military commission system would be shut down, to which he responded, ‘not at all,’ and added that ‘the commissions are very much still on the table.’
At a news conference last week, Holder said that ‘it may be difficult for some of those high-value detainees to be tried in a normal federal court.’”
As for the big ado about Obama’s war budget and the significant cuts called for, there is little substance behind the smoke screen. As Jeff Leys writes: “At first glance, it is easy to conclude that the proposed 22 percent reduction in war spending from 2008 to 2009 represents a significant shift in war strategy and is indicative of a drawing down of the twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sadly, such a conclusion would be wrong…In October 2006, England [Deputy Secretary of Defense] directed the military to submit spending requests to not only cover the incremental costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also to include any new costs attributed to the so-called “long war on terror”.
Procurement appropriations exploded, jumping from $22.9 billion in 2006 (the fiscal year immediately prior to England’s directive) to $45.4 billion in 2007 (the first fiscal year under the new directive), and then to $64.9 billion in 2008.
Thus, it is likely that the reduction in Procurement monies to be appropriated in 2009 simply reflects a reversal of England’s directive, with a shift back to a more normative budgetary process which seeks to limit new “emergency” procurement requests to those incremental costs directly related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than being reflective of significant shifts in the direction of the overall war strategy.”
There are also the myriad of issues upon which Obama has staked out a triangulatory opportunist, compromised and intolerable position: gay marriage rights, single-payer nationalized healthcare, possibly even EFCA and so on. As Patrick Martin writes: "The wage cuts imposed on auto workers at Chrysler and General Motors at the insistence of the Obama administration demonstrate the class strategy that American big business as a whole is carrying out: to impose a reduction in the living standards of American workers on a scale unprecedented since the Great Depression."
It is now the task of everyone concerned for social justice, freedom and equality to oppose such unjust policy, to offer, demand and work towards more just alternatives where people are not lorded over and huckstered by elite, well connected insiders and highly concentrated capital, where promises of change do not amount to mere cosmetic redecorating and general continuity and where the interests that dominate are not those of the rich and well connected few (corporations, conglomerates, corporate paid and supported political lackeys and corrupt and failed banks and all those subservient to said power), but rather by the many through direct forms of democracy creating in embryo what is to be the future just society while at the same time putting pressure on President Obama, the Congress, the Courts and so on to support real, effective, substantive change.
Any self-delusion that Obama was going to introduce sweeping and substantive change immediately dissipated when he began to assemble his administration. His economic team almost down the line are all former Clinton personnel, the very same people who helped to orchestrate the gross deregulation of the financial system that sunk the world economy. “Summers, Bernanke, Geithner, Furman, Rattner…what are they, if not the long-caricatured ‘executive committee of the bourgeoisie’?” Mike Davis rhetorically asks. Obama has pledged billions and trillions of dollars to help bailout and rescue the private banking system, continuing a central policy of Washington: socialism for the rich and free-market discipline for the poor.
In a society that values social justice a failed banking system run by corruption, well connected insiders, avarice and deceit wouldn’t be rewarded by their gross failure – which has resulted in millions of people being thrown out of their homes and into the streets by the very same hucksters who fished them into shyster deals, while those hucksters are now being rescued and even given bonuses by the very public they swindled – with public subsidy (the public paying trillions of dollars in order to save the shadowy banking system and those who helped to destroy it).
Instead, everyone who was in a position of private and managerial power within the banking industry, within the failed banks, would be rightfully fired, replaced by those whose capital was rescuing the system (the public). The public has paid, they should now own. The banking industry in any sane and fair society would be fully nationalized (rather than forcing the public to pay for the banks losses while keeping those who were responsible for the losses in their positions of management and power, those responsible for the losses should be either fired or indicted or both and managerial power should be in the hands of those who came to the rescue). However, Obama and his team of free-market fundamentalist Clinton carry-overs are doing nothing of the like, quite the opposite. They are doing precisely what you would expect those who are part of the failed system and responsible for its failure to do: saving their own interests and the interests of their connections and associates (simply review Paulson’s Goldman Sachs connections and the way in which he decided who was to be bailed out and rescued: read, who were his friends and accomplices? The same holds for Geithner as well as the rest of the usual suspects).
While Obama’s horrific position within the economic realm may be the most blatant, it certainly isn’t unique among his positions. Militarily Obama has committed the country to possibly even more war than McCain. Obama has certainly crossed over, very quickly and without hesitation, to the imperial ambitions of state: in Afghanistan and Pakistan, most conspicuously, as elsewhere. With his decision to keep at the helm Robert Gates, Obama has signaled that he doesn’t intend to substantively alter Washington’s imperial and hegemonic foreign policy; it may now have a more diplomatic and gentler quality about it – changes may be made, progress may occur – but it remains militant and ruthless nonetheless and holds onto the general ideology that begins from the absurd and violent premise that the United States owns the world. Obama represents and has assumed the “realist” tradition within the government, the very same tradition that is responsible for an almost infinite index of invasions, occupations and international terrorist actions. No one should be surprised when Afghanistan and Pakistan turn into an even worse nightmare of atrocities. Obama has adopted the Bush Doctrine that the United States can and should wantonly bomb Pakistan (there have been a slew of such bombings). As Noam Chomsky observed on Democracy Now!: “There has been for example a great deal of chaos and fighting in Bajaur province, which is adjacent to Afghanistan and tribal leaders – others there – have traced it to the bombing of a madrassa school which killed 80 to 95 people, which I don’t think was even reported in the United States, it was reported in the Pakistani press of course.”
Obama’s silence on Israel’s terrorism in Gaza – as well as his appointing for Chief of staff, Rham Emmanuel (who, among many other horrors, helped set a record for supporting Tel Aviv’s political assassinations of Palestinians) – outside of being a moral disgrace also serves as yet more evidence of heinous continuity. His treatment of the Middle East generally is yet to prove much different from any of his predecessors as well as his treatment of Latin America. While the left in the South remain open to normalizing relations with the United States – Chavez, Morales, etcetera – Morales points out that “[i]n Bolivia… one doesn’t feel any change. The policy of conspiracy continues,” and he says this within the context of a brutal opposition in Bolivia (an opposition of corrupt, dangerous, ultra-right, protofascist party leaders and wealthy corporate CEOs and so on over and against the populace, many supported by the CIA) that has recently even plotted to assassinate Morales and secede from the state.
While thankfully repudiating the criminal and internationally illegal use of torture methods used in the Inquisitions and as prosecuted by the United States when used by the Khmer Rouge and others, Obama has left open whether or not any Bush administration officials (such as the moral slug of a former attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, who referred to the content of the Geneva Conventions in relation to torture as “quaint,” as I pointed out in my post about humanism and the occupation of Iraq) will even ever be prosecuted; once again proving that the “rule of law” is in reality the rule of concentrated capital and power and it is a real shame (although it was predicted by everyone on the left worthy of mention) that Obama has assumed the leading role in such rule.
While repudiating the use of torture, Obama plans to continue the system of military commission trials for some Guantanamo prisoners. As Tom Eley reports: “The articles, which are based on anonymous White House sources, and statements by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Attorney General Eric Holder appear designed to prepare public opinion for a revival of the trials, which were temporarily suspended in an order issued by Obama on the day of his inauguration. The suspension is due to end May 20.
In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee Thursday, Gates was asked whether the Guantánamo military commission system would be shut down, to which he responded, ‘not at all,’ and added that ‘the commissions are very much still on the table.’
At a news conference last week, Holder said that ‘it may be difficult for some of those high-value detainees to be tried in a normal federal court.’”
As for the big ado about Obama’s war budget and the significant cuts called for, there is little substance behind the smoke screen. As Jeff Leys writes: “At first glance, it is easy to conclude that the proposed 22 percent reduction in war spending from 2008 to 2009 represents a significant shift in war strategy and is indicative of a drawing down of the twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sadly, such a conclusion would be wrong…In October 2006, England [Deputy Secretary of Defense] directed the military to submit spending requests to not only cover the incremental costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also to include any new costs attributed to the so-called “long war on terror”.
Procurement appropriations exploded, jumping from $22.9 billion in 2006 (the fiscal year immediately prior to England’s directive) to $45.4 billion in 2007 (the first fiscal year under the new directive), and then to $64.9 billion in 2008.
Thus, it is likely that the reduction in Procurement monies to be appropriated in 2009 simply reflects a reversal of England’s directive, with a shift back to a more normative budgetary process which seeks to limit new “emergency” procurement requests to those incremental costs directly related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than being reflective of significant shifts in the direction of the overall war strategy.”
There are also the myriad of issues upon which Obama has staked out a triangulatory opportunist, compromised and intolerable position: gay marriage rights, single-payer nationalized healthcare, possibly even EFCA and so on. As Patrick Martin writes: "The wage cuts imposed on auto workers at Chrysler and General Motors at the insistence of the Obama administration demonstrate the class strategy that American big business as a whole is carrying out: to impose a reduction in the living standards of American workers on a scale unprecedented since the Great Depression."
It is now the task of everyone concerned for social justice, freedom and equality to oppose such unjust policy, to offer, demand and work towards more just alternatives where people are not lorded over and huckstered by elite, well connected insiders and highly concentrated capital, where promises of change do not amount to mere cosmetic redecorating and general continuity and where the interests that dominate are not those of the rich and well connected few (corporations, conglomerates, corporate paid and supported political lackeys and corrupt and failed banks and all those subservient to said power), but rather by the many through direct forms of democracy creating in embryo what is to be the future just society while at the same time putting pressure on President Obama, the Congress, the Courts and so on to support real, effective, substantive change.
Monday, April 13, 2009
The Left and the LGBT Movement: Past, Present and Future
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
The current grass-roots mobilization and politicization of the LGBT rights movement has been emboldened rather than set back by the recent spate of anti-gay ballot initiatives (dating from virtually time immemorial through the Clinton era DOMA, Defense of Marriage Act, legislation to the recent passage of Proposition 8 in California).
With victories in Iowa, Vermont and so on and accounting for certain future set backs the mounting successes continue to come and will only further lay the foundation for and help ensure ultimate victory.
Many separate yet contingent factors have led to the politicization of young people and the further and deeper politicization of many others. A prominent, arguably the most prominent, among them is Obama’s election (the campaign through the inauguration) an historical event still worthy of celebration in and of itself. As Issue 63 of the International Socialist Review writes: “Many feel they played a part in Obama’s election; they were politicized by the experience, and are ready to take action to make sure they get the things they want.”
Very unfortunately for the LGBT movement, the event was bitter sweet for several reasons. To begin with, Obama, though coming out unambiguously for gay marriage rights – along with, presumably, all others – during his 1996 senate run, as reported by Windy City Times newspaper (President Obama’s answer to a 1996 Outlines newspaper question on marriage was: “’I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.’ There was no use of the phrase ‘civil unions’.”), has transparently because of his Presidential Campaign and real and/or perceived political dependencies and obligations reversed his position and now claims that he “disagrees” with gay marriage – the very same reactionary conservative bigotry euphemistically manifested in disingenuous arguments about the “definition of marriage” as related to religious extremism – because, as is the conventional wisdom in Washington, gay marriage is politically risky at best and possibly suicidal. So, ignoring the for the most part open depravity of the McCain-Palin position on such matters, among innumerable others, Obama’s position was a politically opportunist compromise (predictable and possibly understandable yet unethical as well as intolerable). Then there was the devastating passage of the heinously anti-gay Proposition 8 in California (which restricts the definition of marriage to opposite-sex couples and eliminated same-sex couples’ right to marry).
Setting aside for now the absolutely grotesque and evil involvement of the Mormon racket in the Prop 8 campaign and passage, which was also possibly illegal (as alternet.org reported “[a]ctivists claim that money from the Mormon Church was the deciding factor in passing Proposition 8 in California - banning gay marriage. The church claims to have only spent a few thousand dollars on the campaign, but ANP has uncovered evidence that may expose a gaping hole in that claim. Also, the IRS forbids religious organizations from "substantially" lobbying for political legislation. Did the Mormon Church violate this law?”) there is now considerable frustration and anger “at the corporate driven strategy of the No on 8 campaign that,” as Sherry Wolf writes in the ISR, “disastrously misled the Prop 8 battle.” Wolf agrees with Rolling Stone writing that the proposition “was down seventeen points only two months before the election. The reversal wasn’t inevitable, it was unwittingly orchestrated by corporate-driven, Democratic-Party beholden interests who ran a tepid and defensive campaign of euphemisms obscuring the stakes in the fight.” Alongside of this was the racist and class antagonistic atmosphere of local organizers – that led some to form independent organizations, such as Love Honor Cherish – that was also evidenced “[i]n Sand Diego and San Francisco…Upper-middle-class gays who led the local No on 8 ‘fight’ sequestered the movement inside trendy gay ghettos while the working-class neighborhoods and non-white ethnic groups were written off,” whereas the obscenely Mormon financed Yes on 8 campaign “was in evidence as every gridlocked crawl through LA’s notorious traffic revealed Spanish and English language ‘Yes on 8’ stickers adorning bumpers of pick-ups and Mercedes alike.”
Obama’s campaign wisely directly engaged the online community, a generally younger demographic, and it is these online networks, such as Facebook, that have helped to organize and politicize the protests against Prop 8 nationally. For instance, as Jason Farbman and Lonnie Lopez from Seattle write to Socialist Worker, “[t]wenty-one-year-old Kyler Powell – a gay Mormon – had never organized or even attended a protest before spearheading the anti-Prop 8 march in Seattle. Due largely to Facebook and word of mouth, it drew nearly 10,000. The turnout was a testament not just to the fierce opposition to the second-class citizenship of gays and lesbians, but to the willingness of many outside the gay community to take action.”
The nascent movement that is emerging from these spontaneous grass-roots protests (and the organizing necessarily involved), politically, is strikingly pro-labor and anti-corporate. Sherry Wolf writes that “…new movement activists, students and socialists organized a gay marriage forum in Chicago on December 11, one day after the historic victory of the Republic Windows and Doors factory occupation in that city. Fresh from winning nearly $2 million in severance and vacation pay for the multiracial group of factory workers, Raul Flores addressed the crowd brilliantly, saying that our struggles are united and we must be too. ‘Our victory is yours,’ he said, ‘Now we must join with you in your battle for rights and return the solidarity you showed us.’ The day before, hundreds of gay protesters rallying for equal marriage rights as part of the national Day Without a Gay initiative linked their march with the Republic Workers’ protest outside Bank of America. Trade Unionists, immigrant rights activists, and gays rallied together in the most eloquent display of genuine rainbow power Chicago has witnessed in decades. One Chilean immigrant described the day’s action as ‘a school for struggle.’”
It is for these reasons that Sherry Wolf writes that “[t]he release of Gus Van Sant’s brilliant biopic of gay activist elected San Francisco Supervisor in 1977, Milk, has arrived in theaters at a crucial teaching moment in the struggle. The film alludes to a key aspect of the successful gay-labor struggles against Coors beer and the 1978 Briggs Initiative that would have banned LGBT teachers and their allies from ‘advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting’ homosexuality in California’s classrooms.” The initiative would have banned anyone who was gay from teaching and fired all those who were already. “By uniting with Teamsters in the Coors battle and forging lasting alliances with blue and white-collar workers in the Briggs initiative, Harvey Milk along with tends of thousands of activists advanced both the fight for gay civil rights and for labor unity." Rob Epstein’s documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk goes into these areas more thoroughly which helps further illustrate all of this.
In the late sixties, when the gay rights movement began to really take off after the Stonewall riots and groups such as the Gay Liberation Front were formed, the radicalization of the movement was already clearly existent. The very name of the GLF was a tribute to the South Vietnamese Liberation Front, at the time fighting the United States military forces in Southeast Asia. Sherry Wolf observes that “[t]he influence of small radical groups in the GLF was evident in its statement to one underground newspaper the Rat: “We are a revolutionary homosexual group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished. We reject society’s attempt to impose sexual roles and definitions of our nature. We are stepping outside these roles and simplistic myths. We are going to be who we are. At the same time, we are creating new social forms and relations, that is, relations based upon brotherhood, cooperation, human love, and uninhibited sexuality. Babylon has forced us to commit ourselves to one thing…revolution.”
The Chicago chapter of the GLF, writing in the Gay Flames pamphlet, as Wolf quotes, wrote that “because of the rampant oppression we see – of black, third world people, women, workers – in addition to our own; because of the corrupt values, because of the injustices, we no longer want to ‘make it’ in Amerika…Our particular struggle is for sexual self-determination, the abolition of sex-role stereotypes and the human right to the use of one’s body without interference from the legal and social institutions of the state. Many of us have understood that our struggle cannot succeed without a fundamental change in society which will put the source of power (means of production) in the hands of the people who at present have nothing…But as our struggle grows it will be made clear by the changing objective conditions that our liberation is inextricably bound to the liberation of all oppressed people.”
The last line about gay liberation being “inextricably bound to the liberation of all oppressed people” is a central tenet of socialist and anarchist thought – the great syndicalist unions dominant principle and slogan was and is that “an injustice one is an injustice to all” – and Martin Luther King Jr. – who associated with socialists and trade unionists, such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, who both helped organize the unions for the famous march on Washington – proclaimed that “an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.”
The current and immediate struggle for gay marriage rights should be variegated and diverse, certainly not wholly tied to and dependent upon larger anti-capitalist struggle, lest it be burdened with reactionary red-baiting and general, infantile anti-left hysteria and slowed down or defeated by such rabid ideological reactions. However, the general LGBT movement as such must emphasize the fundamental struggles interwoven and shared in common with all oppressed people, the power of social movements lies in the organizing, consolidating and solidarity of these movements. There must be forged and strengthened lasting alliances among the LGBT movement, the labor movement, the feminist movement, the immigrant rights movement, student movements and so on.
Real and effective change must be demanded immediately, going through every route available (the judiciary, the legislature, the executive and the streets). Opportunism and compromise must be adamantly opposed, for there is no opportunity in compromising with bigots, the ultra-right and religious extremists and there is simply nothing about freedom and equality that can ever be conceded; one either supports and works towards the fuller realization of freedom and equality or one does not and the movement can no longer afford any of the latter.
Anyone who believes in freedom, equality and civil rights must now take a stand and hold firm: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” that all are created equal, regardless of sexual orientation. The people united will never be defeated.
The current grass-roots mobilization and politicization of the LGBT rights movement has been emboldened rather than set back by the recent spate of anti-gay ballot initiatives (dating from virtually time immemorial through the Clinton era DOMA, Defense of Marriage Act, legislation to the recent passage of Proposition 8 in California).
With victories in Iowa, Vermont and so on and accounting for certain future set backs the mounting successes continue to come and will only further lay the foundation for and help ensure ultimate victory.
Many separate yet contingent factors have led to the politicization of young people and the further and deeper politicization of many others. A prominent, arguably the most prominent, among them is Obama’s election (the campaign through the inauguration) an historical event still worthy of celebration in and of itself. As Issue 63 of the International Socialist Review writes: “Many feel they played a part in Obama’s election; they were politicized by the experience, and are ready to take action to make sure they get the things they want.”
Very unfortunately for the LGBT movement, the event was bitter sweet for several reasons. To begin with, Obama, though coming out unambiguously for gay marriage rights – along with, presumably, all others – during his 1996 senate run, as reported by Windy City Times newspaper (President Obama’s answer to a 1996 Outlines newspaper question on marriage was: “’I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.’ There was no use of the phrase ‘civil unions’.”), has transparently because of his Presidential Campaign and real and/or perceived political dependencies and obligations reversed his position and now claims that he “disagrees” with gay marriage – the very same reactionary conservative bigotry euphemistically manifested in disingenuous arguments about the “definition of marriage” as related to religious extremism – because, as is the conventional wisdom in Washington, gay marriage is politically risky at best and possibly suicidal. So, ignoring the for the most part open depravity of the McCain-Palin position on such matters, among innumerable others, Obama’s position was a politically opportunist compromise (predictable and possibly understandable yet unethical as well as intolerable). Then there was the devastating passage of the heinously anti-gay Proposition 8 in California (which restricts the definition of marriage to opposite-sex couples and eliminated same-sex couples’ right to marry).
Setting aside for now the absolutely grotesque and evil involvement of the Mormon racket in the Prop 8 campaign and passage, which was also possibly illegal (as alternet.org reported “[a]ctivists claim that money from the Mormon Church was the deciding factor in passing Proposition 8 in California - banning gay marriage. The church claims to have only spent a few thousand dollars on the campaign, but ANP has uncovered evidence that may expose a gaping hole in that claim. Also, the IRS forbids religious organizations from "substantially" lobbying for political legislation. Did the Mormon Church violate this law?”) there is now considerable frustration and anger “at the corporate driven strategy of the No on 8 campaign that,” as Sherry Wolf writes in the ISR, “disastrously misled the Prop 8 battle.” Wolf agrees with Rolling Stone writing that the proposition “was down seventeen points only two months before the election. The reversal wasn’t inevitable, it was unwittingly orchestrated by corporate-driven, Democratic-Party beholden interests who ran a tepid and defensive campaign of euphemisms obscuring the stakes in the fight.” Alongside of this was the racist and class antagonistic atmosphere of local organizers – that led some to form independent organizations, such as Love Honor Cherish – that was also evidenced “[i]n Sand Diego and San Francisco…Upper-middle-class gays who led the local No on 8 ‘fight’ sequestered the movement inside trendy gay ghettos while the working-class neighborhoods and non-white ethnic groups were written off,” whereas the obscenely Mormon financed Yes on 8 campaign “was in evidence as every gridlocked crawl through LA’s notorious traffic revealed Spanish and English language ‘Yes on 8’ stickers adorning bumpers of pick-ups and Mercedes alike.”
Obama’s campaign wisely directly engaged the online community, a generally younger demographic, and it is these online networks, such as Facebook, that have helped to organize and politicize the protests against Prop 8 nationally. For instance, as Jason Farbman and Lonnie Lopez from Seattle write to Socialist Worker, “[t]wenty-one-year-old Kyler Powell – a gay Mormon – had never organized or even attended a protest before spearheading the anti-Prop 8 march in Seattle. Due largely to Facebook and word of mouth, it drew nearly 10,000. The turnout was a testament not just to the fierce opposition to the second-class citizenship of gays and lesbians, but to the willingness of many outside the gay community to take action.”
The nascent movement that is emerging from these spontaneous grass-roots protests (and the organizing necessarily involved), politically, is strikingly pro-labor and anti-corporate. Sherry Wolf writes that “…new movement activists, students and socialists organized a gay marriage forum in Chicago on December 11, one day after the historic victory of the Republic Windows and Doors factory occupation in that city. Fresh from winning nearly $2 million in severance and vacation pay for the multiracial group of factory workers, Raul Flores addressed the crowd brilliantly, saying that our struggles are united and we must be too. ‘Our victory is yours,’ he said, ‘Now we must join with you in your battle for rights and return the solidarity you showed us.’ The day before, hundreds of gay protesters rallying for equal marriage rights as part of the national Day Without a Gay initiative linked their march with the Republic Workers’ protest outside Bank of America. Trade Unionists, immigrant rights activists, and gays rallied together in the most eloquent display of genuine rainbow power Chicago has witnessed in decades. One Chilean immigrant described the day’s action as ‘a school for struggle.’”
It is for these reasons that Sherry Wolf writes that “[t]he release of Gus Van Sant’s brilliant biopic of gay activist elected San Francisco Supervisor in 1977, Milk, has arrived in theaters at a crucial teaching moment in the struggle. The film alludes to a key aspect of the successful gay-labor struggles against Coors beer and the 1978 Briggs Initiative that would have banned LGBT teachers and their allies from ‘advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting’ homosexuality in California’s classrooms.” The initiative would have banned anyone who was gay from teaching and fired all those who were already. “By uniting with Teamsters in the Coors battle and forging lasting alliances with blue and white-collar workers in the Briggs initiative, Harvey Milk along with tends of thousands of activists advanced both the fight for gay civil rights and for labor unity." Rob Epstein’s documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk goes into these areas more thoroughly which helps further illustrate all of this.
In the late sixties, when the gay rights movement began to really take off after the Stonewall riots and groups such as the Gay Liberation Front were formed, the radicalization of the movement was already clearly existent. The very name of the GLF was a tribute to the South Vietnamese Liberation Front, at the time fighting the United States military forces in Southeast Asia. Sherry Wolf observes that “[t]he influence of small radical groups in the GLF was evident in its statement to one underground newspaper the Rat: “We are a revolutionary homosexual group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished. We reject society’s attempt to impose sexual roles and definitions of our nature. We are stepping outside these roles and simplistic myths. We are going to be who we are. At the same time, we are creating new social forms and relations, that is, relations based upon brotherhood, cooperation, human love, and uninhibited sexuality. Babylon has forced us to commit ourselves to one thing…revolution.”
The Chicago chapter of the GLF, writing in the Gay Flames pamphlet, as Wolf quotes, wrote that “because of the rampant oppression we see – of black, third world people, women, workers – in addition to our own; because of the corrupt values, because of the injustices, we no longer want to ‘make it’ in Amerika…Our particular struggle is for sexual self-determination, the abolition of sex-role stereotypes and the human right to the use of one’s body without interference from the legal and social institutions of the state. Many of us have understood that our struggle cannot succeed without a fundamental change in society which will put the source of power (means of production) in the hands of the people who at present have nothing…But as our struggle grows it will be made clear by the changing objective conditions that our liberation is inextricably bound to the liberation of all oppressed people.”
The last line about gay liberation being “inextricably bound to the liberation of all oppressed people” is a central tenet of socialist and anarchist thought – the great syndicalist unions dominant principle and slogan was and is that “an injustice one is an injustice to all” – and Martin Luther King Jr. – who associated with socialists and trade unionists, such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, who both helped organize the unions for the famous march on Washington – proclaimed that “an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.”
The current and immediate struggle for gay marriage rights should be variegated and diverse, certainly not wholly tied to and dependent upon larger anti-capitalist struggle, lest it be burdened with reactionary red-baiting and general, infantile anti-left hysteria and slowed down or defeated by such rabid ideological reactions. However, the general LGBT movement as such must emphasize the fundamental struggles interwoven and shared in common with all oppressed people, the power of social movements lies in the organizing, consolidating and solidarity of these movements. There must be forged and strengthened lasting alliances among the LGBT movement, the labor movement, the feminist movement, the immigrant rights movement, student movements and so on.
Real and effective change must be demanded immediately, going through every route available (the judiciary, the legislature, the executive and the streets). Opportunism and compromise must be adamantly opposed, for there is no opportunity in compromising with bigots, the ultra-right and religious extremists and there is simply nothing about freedom and equality that can ever be conceded; one either supports and works towards the fuller realization of freedom and equality or one does not and the movement can no longer afford any of the latter.
Anyone who believes in freedom, equality and civil rights must now take a stand and hold firm: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” that all are created equal, regardless of sexual orientation. The people united will never be defeated.
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