A New Website and an Ongoing Struggle

by: Norman Markowitz Saturday 9 October 2010

The new website looks fine--it is one step forward with no steps backward.  Let me catch up with events

The reverberations from last saturday's  rally remain very good, although the mass media aka corporate capitalist media coverage of it – burying it on back pages in the newspapers and either ignoring it completely or relegating it to a short clip and/or half a soundbite on the electronic media – shows the studied opposition that the dominant media has to labor and progressive forces, labor especially which was the leading sponsor of the rally, along with civil rights and peace activists.  You really have to work your way through the Internet to find serious accounts of the demonstration, the speeches, the hopes and aspirations of the participants.
 
Speaking about the internet, there was a funny but at the same time sinister example of what the Republican Right,in its level of ignorance combined with arrogance, represnts  today.  On rightwing websites, Glenn Beck was quoted and others picked this up that the rally was a "Marxist" and Communist rally secretly on Karl Marx's birthday.
 
Along with this, the The old HUAC McCarthey tactic of providing a long list of the rally's sponsor, unions, civil rights and peace organizations was widely used. For HUAC this was a prelude to a blacklist, which the Truman administration gave them in 1947 when it created an "Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations" through the leadership of Attorney General Tom Clark.  Clark was the father very ironically of Ramsey Clark, later Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson who has moved sharply to the left over the decades and who through the peace organization he leads was one of the important people in today rightwing list.

When I read this wacky stuff, I knew that Karl Marx wasn't born on October 2.  He was born on May 5, 1818.  So what was going on in Beck and his neo-Goebbels pals  "minds"when they came up  with this.  Did they simply make this up on the Big Lie premise because they had the media to broadcast it, and who would check?   Did they dream of local committees, little neo HUACs,  asking citizens if they had attended  the rally to celebrate Karl Marx birthday.
 
At first I thought so, but then I discovered that the rally really was on the birthday of a great revolutionary figure in modern history---Mohandas K. Gandhi, leader of the  successfull Indian anti-colonial independence movement. 

How did  Gandhi's birthday become Marx's birthday?

Well, there were British colonialists who considered Gandhi a secret Communist agent.  And after all maybe Beck read that somewhere for the thirty seconds or so that constitutes his attention span.  Gandhi was born 51 years after Marx, 51 is only 6 numbers away from 57,  57 was the number of Heinz soups and Teresa Heinz is the wife of John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate who the right vilified in 2004 for his actions in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which, along with more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, more military spending, a ground level star wars shield along the Mexican border  and a balanced budget amendment makes perfect sense to the right  These are the in the tradition of the sort of conspiratorial connects that the right is famous for making.  After all, decades ago a looney rightist in a pamphlet, Red Star over America, claimed that the Chinese Communist leader Liu Shao-chi was Jewish. I thought this was the ultimate off the wall craziness until a historian of China told me that Liu, who certainly was not Jewish, came from a region of China where China's very small Jewish minority lived – thus carrying conspiratorial connections and guilt by association about as far as they can go.
 
Beck was sort of right on one thing.  Karl Marx would have supported this rally because he saw from the Communist Manifesto on that the battle for democracy, the battle for workers political and social rights in order to empower them, was the first battle that Communist should support and participate in as the struggled to educate workers about the need to abolish capitalism.  This rally was first an foremost an expression of the battle for democracy, which for the ruling class and its "mass media" is always a slogan, a series of restricted political forms without, as far as they can get away with it, social and economic content.  The coming elections  will be a sort of scorecard on the battle for democracy in the U.S.

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  • Brother Markowitz is right on here.
    The battle for democracy,especially economic democracy,with its social and political features,is what the working class is developing in this movement.
    In this movement the advocacy and leadership of the human rights and civil rights icon,W.E.B. Du Bois,the Communist,stands out,once again.
    Many U.S. communist(Communist),yet have not grasped the gravity of the 1963 economics rights march,led by both by Rev. Dr.Martin Luther King Jr.,who was a disciple of both Mohandas K. Ghandi and W.E.B. Du Bois.
    This march,held at the death of W.E.B. Du Bois,served as a kind of a memorial to an end of an era and a start to a new era,a kind of U.S. Communist Manifesto,one written by Du Bois,rather than Marx,and applying to the specific history of the United States.
    This manifesto,can be found in the historic exchange between Gus Hall and W.E.B. Du Bois,started by Du Bois's famous "application letter"to the CPUSA.
    This new era,which all progressives will herald in,puts people of color at center stage,emphasizes U.S. and world democracy,in line with Du Bois's life long literary theme of democracy not only for Europe(including Latinos) and the U.S.,(those of "European" descent)but for African Americans,people of the East,Africans,Asians,and all Islanders of the world,also.
    According to Du Bois,it is only the working class who can usher in this new world,with its allies,the anti-colonialists and anti-imperialists,as Hall quotes Du Bois in the aforementioned exchange-"The morning breaks of the hills.Courage,brothers! The battle for humanity is not lost or losing. The Slav is rising in his might,the yellow minions are testing liberty,the black Africans are withing toward the light,and everywhere the laborer is opening the gates of Opportunity and Peace."
    Todays One Nation Together,led by Du Bois's NAACP,echols this great prophecy by Du Bois,supported by the work of Ghandi and King-and especially the labor movement,the AFL-CIO and La Raza.
    Let us build more and more unity and action for the 2 Nov vote and to reverse the current FBI repression of peace and solidarity groups and movements.

    Posted by E.E.W. Clay, 10/10/2010 8:37am (14 years ago)

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