People Before Profit blog

Kissinger's China Confessions: A Review of "On China"

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:29:00 +0000

On China
by Henry Kissinger
New York, Penguin Press, 2011.

This is a remarkable and insightful volume – though not in the ways the author intended.

It is a memoir cum history of Chinese history and foreign relations, particularly since the earth-shattering revolution of 1949. Given the author’s pre-eminent role in 1971 as National Security Advisor in the White House in thawing the then frozen relations between China and the U.S. and his subsequent role as an interlocutor between the two governments (not to mention the lucrative and handsome fees he has earned opening doors for U.S. corporate interests in China), Kissinger obviously is capable of delivering a helpful perspective.

Thus, first the good news: though hysteria grows apace in the U.S., perceiving that its star is being eclipsed by that of China, the author stands firmly against the launching of a new “Cold War,” this time targeting Beijing. Clearly, there is a rift in the highest ranks of the U.S. ruling elite as to how approach China with some clamoring to enhance their bottom line there while others seek the overthrow of Communist Party rule: this rift in itself is good news since like any class, the U.S. ruling class operates optimally when it is united. (This book is so idolatrous in its treatment of Mao Zedong and so shameless in apologizing for every twist and turn in Chinese foreign policy, it would not be surprising if it were to be used as a teaching text in the Party School in Beijing. Strangely, he seems more willing to criticize Washington’s policy to Beijing – and not the reverse. [see e.g. p. 143])

The bad news – or perhaps, more accurately, the disheartening news – is that with obvious relish, Kissinger tells a depressing story about how China was enlisted in a “quasi-alliance” or a “de facto alliance” against the socialist camp, which not only contributed to the dissolution of then existing socialism in Eastern Europe but, as well, inflicted a devastating blow against national liberation and progressive movements in Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Vietnam (and Indochina generally).

There was something unhinged about Chinese policy toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War; it is difficult to see how even ideological dispute or military threat from the north dictated Chinese hostility. It is similarly difficult to characterize it as simply “nationalism run amok,” since Mao and his comrades delayed national unification with Taiwan in pursuit of Moscow and acquiesced to Japan for the same reason, though it had committed war crimes against Chinese in the 1930s, as Tokyo has been the principal target of Chinese nationalists for decades.

Nevertheless, Kissinger does realize that a key to the spectacular economic development of China in recent decades is an influx of capital from the overseas Chinese community, which dominates economies from Thailand to Singapore to Indonesia to the Philippines (p. 359). This nationalism was recognized most recently by Yale Law School professor, Amy Chua in her first book.

Kissinger in some ways is more perceptive than many “left” analysts who have assayed the collapse of the Soviet Union when he argues, “a coalition of the United States, China, Japan and Europe was bound to prevail against the Soviet Union” (p. 285). Of course, China now finds itself confronting Japan to the east, India to the South and the U.S. from all sides though – ironically – Beijing’s saving grace may be its enhanced relationship with Moscow.

Yet, as it turns out, it is the U.S. ruling class that has been hoist on its own petard by this turn of events. Thus, Communists had argued that October 1917 marked a general crisis of capitalism, a fatal breach from which this system could not escape. Yet, in December 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved, critics yelped that this theory had been disproven and if there was any general crisis leading to dissolution, it was a syndrome that had ensnared world socialism. Yet, it is not difficult to see in retrospect that in order to bring Moscow to its knees, Washington unleashed forces – not only in China but also “Islamic fundamentalism” – that will be bedeviling U.S. imperialism for some time to come; thus, October 1917 did involve a disfiguring breach of the capitalist system – but not in the way that was envisioned originally. As in a adroitly rendered film dissolve, slowly but surely it is dawning on Washington and Wall Street that China was underestimated, that this Asian nation is on track to dwarf the U.S. economy sooner rather than later, which – inter alia – will have enormous import for white supremacy; the ironic result of the anticommunist mania of the Cold War has been to make sure that the 90 million strong Chinese Communist Party, surely the largest and most powerful political organization on this small planet, is presiding over a nation that according to Nobel Laureate in Economics, Robert Fogel, will grow to $123 trillion by 2040 (compared to the U.S.’s of $14 trillion today – with pathetically anemic growth rates in store).

Moreover, by way of analogy it can be argued that 1 January 1804 – the anti-slavery republican revolution in Haiti – marked the onset of the general crisis of the slave system that could only be resolved with its collapse. As in the 20th century, Washington strained mightily to reverse that result and seems to have succeeded when Hispaniola was split – leading to the birth of the Dominican Republic – and Haiti was plunged into a crisis not least because of having to devote so much of the national income to military spending to fend off repeated threats from the “Colossus of the North.” Yet, this development did not prevent a bloody U.S. Civil War leading to the death of hundreds of thousands – and the dissolution of the hated slave system.

Remarkably, Kissinger rationalizes, if not justifies, Mao’s repeatedly blithe indifference to the possibility of nuclear conflagration—though this could have destroyed this lovely planet (p. 155, 167, 287). Simultaneously, the author revels at the discomfort this caused in Moscow in the 1950s when the two socialist giants were still ostensibly allies; similarly, he points out how this apparent insouciance in China, was contradicted in practice by Beijing’s retreat in the face of U.S. nuclear threats.

A turning point in Sino-Soviet relations occurred in 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev unveiled the crimes and blunders of his predecessors, particularly Josef Stalin. Beijing upbraided its soon-to-be antagonist for sheathing the “sword of Stalin” (p. 166). Mao could not be assuaged after that, leading ultimately to charges that the line of “peaceful co-existence” was “revisionist” (which is ironic in that Beijing now stresses the need for “peaceful development,” which sounds suspiciously what was reviled not so long ago [p. 508]). In an equation that ultimately has been applied today to Mao himself, the party chairman averred that 70 percent of Stalin’s contribution was positive and 30 percent negative and that Moscow had gone too far in emphasizing the latter. On the one hand, one can congratulate Mao in that his calculation was at least more balanced than those occurring in Washington, where it is routinely asserted that the much ballyhooed “Founding Fathers” descended from the heavens to uplift us all, with no flaws attached to this pro-slavery clique; on the other hand, future analysts may well seek to re-evaluate Mao himself not just because of the depredations committed against his own compatriots during the disastrous “Cultural Revolution,” but more so due to the devastation he wreaked worldwide after he chose to throw in his lot with U.S. imperialism.

Of all the missteps of Beijing’s during the Cold War, perhaps none was more disastrous than the war waged against India in 1962 – a reality that manages to escape the author, just as he avoids underlining the evidence that this escapade was timed to coincide with the so – called “Cuban Missile Crisis,” as the U.S. and China launched a pincers movement against Moscow and its major allies in Havana and New Delhi. Instead, Kissinger gushes praise about this conflict which is still painfully recalled in India and adds fuel to U.S. imperialism’s contemporary desire to enlist New Delhi in an encirclement of China just as China was once enlisted to encircle the Soviet Union.

It was left to the wily Richard Nixon to take advantage of these evident contradictions in the socialist camp. Strikingly, when he bruited the possibility of an entente with China in 1967, he compared arresting this nation to the then ongoing problem in seeking to curb unrest among African-Americans (p. 203-204). At the time, according to the author, conflict on the Sino-Soviet border was escalating, which was to lead to sharp and deadly clashes.

Both Nixon and Mao were to conclude that Moscow was the most dangerous force confronting both, which drove the two together. (Ironically, I recall having too many conversations at the time with too many U.S. “leftists” seeking to convince that it was actually “white” Washington and Moscow that were collaborating against “colored” China.)

The book accelerates when Kissinger and the U.S. delegation arrive in China on 9 July 1971 for secret negotiations preparing the way for Nixon’s own journey in 1972 which was – as suggested at the time – a game changing event. Here Kissinger prates shamelessly about the skills of his Chinese counterparts, as if he were still angling for more lucrative contracts in today’s Shanghai. Nonetheless, he is accurate in suggesting that this demarche “became central to the evolution of a new global order” (p. 243). The devious Kissinger acknowledged at the time that he and the Chinese leadership “knew that my very presence in Beijing was a grievous blow to Hanoi,” a point made evident when a few years after U.S. imperialism suffered a shattering defeat in Vietnam in 1975, China itself invaded this beleaguered southeast Asian nation.

What Kissinger makes clear is that Nixon’s much heralded visit to China on 21 February 1972 – a day that will forever live in infamy – was all about destabilizing the Soviet Union and national liberation movements (p. 258). Happily, Kissinger recounts conversations where Mao states that he was elated when right-wing forces assumed power across the globe – a point that was to be underscored a few years later when China sided with apartheid South Africa and U.S. imperialism during the anti-colonial war in Angola. “Mao laughed uproariously,” said Kissinger, at the idea that any sane person took his many slogans – e.g. “seize the hour, seize the day” – seriously, slogans that captivated and misled a generation of activists (p. 262). Mao’s comrades advised Kissinger that he should pay more attention to “China’s actions, not its ‘empty cannons’ of rhetoric…” (p. 208).

Kissinger was delighted with this newly minted relationship. “Consultation between China and the United States,” he writes, “reached a level of intensity rare even among formal allies” (p. 273). He adds, “in fact, throughout the 1970s, Beijing was more in favor of the United States acting robustly against Soviet designs than much of the American public or Congress” (p. 277). According to Kisssinger, writing admiringly, Mao “was the quintessential Cold Warrior, American conservatives would have approved of him” (p. 283).

Mao’s passing in 1976 did not end his catastrophic foreign policy. Deng Xiaoping has been accorded substantial credit for the opening of the Chinese economy to massive foreign direct investment – particularly from the U.S. as a kind of payoff for Beijing’s collaboration – which has created the gargantuan economy that threatens to topple the U.S. itself from its leading perch.

Intriguingly, Kissinger sees 1979 – not Nixon’s journey in 1972 – as the turning point in the Cold War onslaught against the socialist camp and he may be correct. For it was then that Deng made a triumphant visit to the U.S., returning home with his pockets bulging with contracts from U.S. corporations – then repaid the favor by invading Vietnam days after arriving back home. Then later than year, Washington and Beijing collaborated once again in the destabilization of a left-leaning government in Afghanistan, with China seemingly ignoring the “blowback” raining down on its own restive Muslim minority and Washington being dragged catastrophically into a conflict from which it has yet to emerge.

The ostensible reason for the attack on Vietnam was Hanoi’s dislodging of the genocidal Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia, interpreted by China and the U.S. as more “expansionism.” The smarmily sly Kissinger manages to besmirch political rival Jimmy Carter as he praises him for collaborating with the murderous Khmer Rouge and their Chinese ally – realities largely absent from the sparse press coverage in the U.S. of the war crimes tribunals of these bandits now unfolding in Cambodia. Kissinger was highly pleased with the new Chinese leadership: “Mao acted like a frustrated teacher, Deng as a demanding partner” (p. 349). Further, “operationally, the Chinese leaders were proposing a kind of cooperation in many ways more intimate and surely more risk taking than the Atlantic Alliance” – or the war-mongering NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, now bombarding Libya and Afghanistan). In his zeal in crushing the Soviet Union and its allies, Kissinger compares Deng to the ancient Roman statesman, Cato the Elder who is reputed to have ended all of his speeches with the clarion call translated as “Carthage must be destroyed”! (p. 364)

Thus, Beijing and Washington worked together in the 1979 invasion of Vietnam, which – he says enthusiastically – “ushered in the closest collaboration between China and the United States for the [entire] period of the Cold War” (p. 371).

With the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Solidarity movement in Poland and impending collapse of the socialist camp, Beijing-Washington relations predictably entered a rough patch – a trend that was exacerbated with the massacres in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Reading between the lines, it is apparent that both Kissinger – and Beijing – felt there was a tendency then in the U.S. to now go after China itself in its hour of weakness; what he does not say is that by that point so many U.S. corporations were so deeply invested in China that the U.S. ruling elite was not united on such a turnabout, which made united action problematic at best. Moreover, the U.S. ruling class was so focused on Moscow as the bête noire of the century, that it was hard to turn its focus elsewhere. “By the fall of 1989, relations between China and the United States were at their most fraught point since contact had been resumed in 1971,” says the author (p. 421). The Chinese leadership, other portrayed as almost other-worldly in their depth of perception, also – shockingly – seemed to be taken by surprise by this frostiness, though in retrospect it was utterly predictable that once Washington brought Eastern European Communists to their knees, they would go after those in Asia – even if they had been avid collaborators.

Thus, he recounts the tense events of the mid-1990s when Washington dispatched two aircraft battle groups to the Taiwan Straits, the U.S. “accidental” bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade a few years later and the Chinese downing of a U.S. spy plane a few years after that. Before the tragic events of September 11, 2001, it did appear that Washington and Beijing were headed for a showdown – or a reckoning – but with U.S. imperialism bogged down in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, this now appears unlikely, not least since the self-proclaimed “sole remaining superpower” has to go with its begging bowl to Beijing to finance its various misadventures.

The September 2008 debacle on Wall Street has “seriously undermined the mystique of Western economic prowess,” says the author understatedly—and has emboldened Beijing, which is now less prone to hide its light under a bushel (p. 501). In retrospect, diplomatic historians – of which Kissinger considers himself one – may well regard the “alliance” between Beijing and Washington as the most disastrous fiasco since London appointed Tokyo its watch-dog in Asia at the beginning of the 20th century, a relationship that ended disastrously on 7 December 1941.

Again, Kissinger is to be hailed for discouraging the notion of a new “Cold War” against its former ally. Yet, one closes this book with a strange feeling: the assisting architect of what may be the most profound diplomatic catastrophe in historical memory, as far as imperialism is concerned, i.e. the “peaceful rise” and ultimate ascendancy of China, does not acknowledge his role in this disaster (for imperialism) or even point to the downside of his handiwork. Is it simply false consciousness on his part? Embarrassment? Whatever the case, despite the bloodiness left in his murderous wake, Dr. Kissinger can be congratulated for his role in accelerating the general crisis of U.S. imperialism.

Photo: U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger meets with Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Trouble with China

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:28:00 +0000

What is the trouble with China? It depends on where you are looking from. As economist Paul Krugman noted in January, the visit of China’s president Hu Jintao to the US triggered a rash of articles trying to make sense of “growing Chinese economic might.” The general drift and tone of the literature in the US is that China’s rapid development is 1) a threat to the US, including to American workers, 2) so rapid that it can not be sustained at its current pace, and 3) a threat to the global environment. A review of recent literature strongly suggests that how our government deals with China and its new status on the world stage remains uncertain and of great interest to American workers.

For instance, on point 1, it has been argued that China’s “manipulation” and “undervaluing” of its currency (the renminbi) takes jobs from American workers. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), if China allowed its currency to rise to its “real” or “natural level” the cost of Chinese exports to the US would increase enough to create over 2 million jobs in the US and reduce our unemployment rate by a full percentage point. Krugman supports this argument contending that China’s policy “seriously damages the rest of the world” because China “by engineering an unwarranted trade surplus, is in effect imposing an anti-stimulus on these [the world’s large] economies, which they can’t offset.”

The viewpoint that cheap Chinese exports pose a threat is not shared by everyone in the corporate community. On point 2 above, we might consider Keith Bradsher’s analysis in the New York Times of May 31, 2011. Bradsher’s concern about whether China can “maintain its double digit growth of the past three decades” appears to reflect the intense interest that western economists show with China’s economic fortunes. He alleges that “the world closely monitors the temperature of China’s economy, so crucial has it become to the health of global business and finance.” For example, the nation’s auto industry, which over the past two years surpassed the US, is thought to be growing more slowly in recent months. Why does such slowing growth in China worry international business? Because China’s “production and demand have helped underpin high world prices for oil, steel and other commodities,” and “the specter of slackening Chinese demand has helped send world prices for industrial commodities like copper falling by 10 percent or more.”

How are we to make sense of all this? A recent opinion piece in the commercial press on June 7 by Professor Steven Conn of Ohio State helps. His argument should be no secret to economists. But we rarely see it stated so bluntly: China’s growth is fueled by government spending. From high speed rail and other infrastructure to renewable energy and scientific research, “public spending on a huge scale” is China’s secret. Conn goes so far as to suggest that US politicians who rail against the Chinese “threat” are not being up-front with their constituents, the American people. The real threat, he suggests, is to “conservatives’ free market orthodoxy,” which has dominated our national discourse. “In the last 30 years, our economic policy has shifted away from public investment and toward enriching big corporations and wealthy individuals through tax breaks and giveaways.”

If conservative politicians and corporate minded economists will not tell the truth, we should tell the truth. China presents a “threat” not because of its size and its growing influence in the global economy, but because it does not play by the rules established by international capitalism. Given the history of European and US imperialism regarding China, this should come as no surprise to the moguls of world banking and finance. The Chinese government is not restricted by the dictates or the mentality of those who worship the private sector and the “free market.”

We should also point out that the Chinese leadership has not been aloof or silent when it comes to proposing solutions to the world wide recession. Chinese premier Wen Jibao in a recent piece in the Financial Times (“How China Plans to Reinforce the Global Recovery”) explains his country’s recent policies in some detail. He argues that “the thrust of China’s response to the crisis is to expand domestic demand and stimulate the real economy, strengthen the basis for long term development and make growth domestically driven.” He concludes by saying that “we should respect different models of development, increase help to least developed countries to enhance their capacity for self development, and promote strong, sustainable and balanced growth of the global economy.” The official Chinese point of view rarely makes its way onto the pages of any news outlets in the US; we should give it consideration.

The response of American workers, therefore, would seem to be best directed at our own government and to using workers’ considerable strength, real and potential, to bring about an early and sizable increase in the level of its public response to our needs. The gutting of budgets for everything “public” except the military – and even the public nature of the military is now in question given the trend toward turning tasks over to private contractors or mercenaries – is moving us exactly the wrong direction. That is what we need to turn around. Would that be too much like taking a page from the Chinese? Maybe, but we also have that in our own history. As Conn points out in his article, “the Chinese are doing what Americans used to do: making large scale public investments ….” Will such a course lead to socialism (GULP?!) Maybe; that will be decided down the road. Conn actually proposes that the opposite could be true, that such investments could stimulate the private market. So we will fight over the gains that public investment brings; that is nothing new. The point is that when investment decisions are left solely in the hands of the private sector, the majority suffers.

Finally, on point 3 above, I recommend an article in the June issue of National Geographic. This interesting piece is, perhaps, more informative for lay readers such as this writer than much of the arcane economic analysis, as important as that is. Author Bill McKibben suggests that China presents a contradictory, fascinating picture. He argues that China is pursuing “green technology” and renewable power sources such as solar energy on a scale that no other nation is matching. On the other hand, China’s rapid growth depends, and will continue to depend, primarily on coal. He says, “China’s green effort is being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the coal-fueled growth.” But here again, the response of the US to China’s growing influence is what should concern us.

The author writes that changing the game as far as carbon emissions go will require attention and “change beyond China – most important some kind of international agreement that transforms the economics of carbon.” In other words, will the US auto industry heed the Obama administration’s urging to significantly increase fuel mileage on new cars by 2020?

What is the "trouble" with China? The trouble is that the existence of a government in control of the most populous nation on earth that refuses to bend to the desires of international finance challenges Wall Street and the US foreign policy establishment to fundamentally alter its world view. Solving the “problem” of China will require negotiating with the Chinese eyeball to eyeball on a basis of equality and mutual respect. Getting them to do that is our challenge.

Photo by Jakob Montrasio/cc by 2.0/Flickr

Global Economic Crisis and a Program for Change

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:25:00 +0000

An economic crisis is sweeping the world; only a few countries are out of its jaws and none of them have the capacity to drag the rest of the world along with them.

This is no ordinary cyclical crisis in which a decline in economic activity is followed by a robust revival that raises income and creates jobs.

Not since the 1930s has the world experienced a crisis of such depth, duration and consequences for working people worldwide.

It is as much structural and institutional as it is cyclical.

The neoliberal model of bubble debt-driven growth and accumulation has come apart at its seams in country after country. Like Humpty Dumpty it can't be put back together again in the same old way.

Most countries and regions are locked into slow growth and stagnation; only a few – China among them – are growing at respectable rates. In the Global South the impact is catastrophic. Deeper poverty is layered onto deep poverty.

And Europe teeters on the edge of disaster. Greece is the immediate epicenter. Its economy is unraveling and the class struggle is intensifying, thanks in large measure to the draconian loan conditions imposed on the Greek people by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. A default on government debt is in the realm of possibility, which in turn could easily disrupt financial markets in Europe and perhaps elsewhere in the world.

It's no wonder there is little evidence that a dynamic and broad upturn on a global level is in the making. If anything, the prognosis for the world economy in the short and long run is not promising.

The only winners so far are the wealthiest families and corporations. Out of this crisis they have emerged with their profits, power and privileges intact. A few have fallen by the wayside to be sure, but only to be swallowed by bigger rivals – as Marx predicted.

For all practical purposes, finance capital, which includes non-financial corporations such as GE, Ford and others, continues to sit at the apex of the economy.

Status of U.S. economy

After a weak and lopsided recovery heavily favoring the capitalist class, the U.S. economy looks to be on the cusp of a new downturn. The much-talked-about double dip is knocking on the door.

The signs are everywhere.

The housing market is in the throes of another slide downward. Both housing prices and startups are down while foreclosures are up.

Consumer spending limps along too, as working people postpone purchases and pay down their debt.

Economic growth rates are paltry, failing to meet earlier very modest projections.

Credit remains tight as banks are reluctant to lend.

Investment lags as businesses, awash in $2 trillion in investible funds and underutilized production capacity, are reluctant to sink money into new plant and equipment as long as demand for goods and services muddles along.

Export markets remain weak, despite the fall in the dollar's value on international currency markets. And there is little hope that this will significantly improve since much of the world — and Europe in particular — is in a similar or worse economic predicament.

Real wages are flat, contributing to the slack in consumer markets.

Worst of all, the jobless rate is 9.1 percent officially. And unofficially, unemployment is roughly 15 percent. All together 25 million people are either unemployed or underemployed.

Behind these economic indicators lie people – real live people facing evictions, foreclosures, dwindling income, a jobless future, homelessness, hunger, worry, insecurity, broken spirits and shortened lives.

Behind these economic indicators lies a crisis that is exacting its worst suffering on the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society.

Behind these economic indictors lie young people who are out of school, out of jobs, and out of luck.

Behind these economic indicators lies the scourge of racial and gender discrimination and oppression. This crisis, while indiscriminate in its destruction, exacts a higher price from people of color and women. This is reflected in every index that measures social and economic wellbeing.

Unfortunately, short of finding a new developmental path that restructures the economy, institutions and power in the interests of the world's working people, it is hard to see how the U.S. and world economy will get their mojo back.

Even mainstream economists see no easy solution to the financial crisis and the Great Recession. In a recent column, Lawrence Summers, the former economic advisor for the Obama administration, writes that we run the danger of a lost decade much like Japan if we don't stimulate the demand side of the economic equation – that is, create jobs and raise incomes of low- and middle-income people.

Thus, an immediate question is: what is required to throw the economy and job growth on an upward trajectory?

An anti-crisis program

We favor a program that combines immediate measures with far-reaching demands. What worked in the early decades following World War II is inadequate now given the nature and scope of the crisis.

Then, working-class consumers were eager and able to buy goods and services, now they are weighed down by household debt; then the housing market was growing in cities and suburbs, now it is contracting. Then the growth curve of mass production industries, led by auto, was upward, now these same industries are smaller and employ far fewer workers; then the U.S. was an unrivaled economic juggernaut worldwide; now global markets are crowded and competition is fierce. Then a social compact existed between capital and labor, now capital has declared war on labor; then confidence in the dollar as a means of payment and store of value was high on international markets, now confidence is eroding. Then U.S. workers enjoyed ample job opportunities in a relatively protected labor market, now U.S. workers find themselves in a labor market that is worldwide, thanks to globalization and the entry of the working classes of China, India, and Russia. Then global warming and the environmental crisis didn't imperil humanity's future; now they do.

In these new conditions, simple Keynesian policies – that is, stimulus spending (pump priming) – will ease the crisis, but won't attack it in a fundamental way. Thus economic stimulus should be combined with a more ambitious program for immediate relief, jobs, equality, sustainability, and peace.

1. Immediate relief

A moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Reset mortgages so payments are affordable. Unemployment compensation from job to job, increase benefits. Increase food stamps, WIC, children's health insurance, and low-income energy assistance. Turn banks and financial institutions into a democratically-run public utility and democratize the Federal Reserve Bank.

Assist deficit-ridden state and local governments so they can preserve services and jobs. Fund "ready-to-go" infrastructure projects.

2. A peacetime, green jobs economy

Enact massive public works job creation to make existing buildings energy efficient, construct new schools, hospitals, affordable housing, mass transit and bridges. Give priority to areas hurt by loss of manufacturing, loss of family farms and highest unemployment areas.

Major projects to increase efficiency and lower cost of solar, wind and biomass electricity generation. Immediate program to cut greenhouse gas emissions and for environmental cleanup. Restore federal energy regulation and encourage public ownership of utilities.

Enact the Employee Free Choice Act to enable workers to form unions without intimidation.

Extend Medicare to all. Fully fund public education from preschool through higher education and technical training. No privatization of Social Security or Medicare. Protect Medicaid. Expand and improve benefits.

3. Restore civil rights, the Bill of Rights and separation of powers

Affirmative action in employment, education and housing. End the "school to prison" pipeline. Outlaw hate crimes.

Preserve Roe v. Wade.

Pass immigration reform with amnesty, a path to citizenship, no militarization of the borders, and no exploitative guest worker programs. Stop the raids and deportations. No human being is illegal.

Repeal the Patriot Act. Restore Habeas Corpus rights. No more torture.

Expand voting rights. Enact publicly-financed elections, same-day registration, and voting rights for ex-felons. Restore the Fairness Doctrine in media.

4. Strength through peace

Complete the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, with no bases or U.S. corporations left behind. Full care for returning veterans. No war on Iran. Withdraw troops from Afghanistan. Assistance to Iraqi people to rebuild their country. End the bombing of Libya and encourage a ceasefire and political solution to the conflict.

Adopt a new foreign policy accenting diplomacy and respect for all nations. Renew commitment to the UN's peace role. End trade policies that enrich corporations while destroying jobs. Ratify climate change agreements.

Enforce nuclear non-proliferation, work to abolish nuclear weapons. Cut Pentagon spending in half, close down U.S. bases around the world.

Of course, we aren't so naive to think that we can win such a program at this moment; the balance of class and social forces doesn't allow it. A necessary, but not sufficient, condition for its realization would be a landslide victory in the 2012 elections.

Photo by apαs/cc by 2.0.Flickr

The Cyprus Problem: A Commemoration of the July 15th Turkish Invasion

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:24:00 +0000

On July 20th 1974 Turkish land, sea and air forces, in flagrant violation of international law, launched operation "Attila." Attila was the code name for the invasion of the independent Republic of Cyprus. The invasion progressed quickly, Cypriot resistance being severely hampered by domestic turmoil taking place at the same time.

Eventually Turkish forces came to occupy over 1/3 of the territory of Cyprus. Some 40,000 Turkish troops remain in the occupied areas, and Cypriot and Turkish forces face each other across a cease-fire line administered by the UN. As an immediate consequence of the invasion churches and cemeteries were desecrated and centuries old artifacts looted.

Over the years, thousands of settlers have been imported from the Turkish main land, displacing not only the previous Cypriot residents of Greek origin but also those of Turkish origin. To this day a major problem, with an international dimension, is that the property of displaced, legal, owners is sometimes 'sold' to unsuspecting buyers by swindlers. In many cases the buyers subsequently lose this land and any money they invested into it. In any event, the continuing occupation, a sinister legacy of 1974 divides an ostensible independent nation, a member of the EU. This is the Cyprus problem. A problem which successive Cypriot governments have worked to solve

In recent remarks, Andros Kyprianou, the General Secretary of the CC of AKEL, the current governing party of Cyprus, has said that the best possible scenario would be if the events of 1974 had never happened, but the unfortunate reality is that they did. This is the reality that now faces all Cypriots who are honestly working to end the Turkish occupation and unify the country. The sad tale of Cyprus, one of treachery, betrayal and big power meddling, goes back to the 1960's, when Cyprus won its independence from Great Britain. To understand the difficulties faced those working to resolve this problem today a survey of this historian is necessary.

Historical Perspective

Human activity on Cyprus goes back to the Stone Age, to around 8000 BC. Over the course of the many centuries that followed Cyprus came to be dominated by a host of foreign rulers, finally coming under British administration in the mid 19th century, and, being formally annexed by Britain after World War I.

Over the coming years, Cypriots struggled for independence from Britain. This struggle came to a head in the years following WWII, the era of decolonization. Although AKEL favored the tactic of mass popular action in pursuing independence others favored an armed struggle against the British, and in 1955 an anti British guerrilla force, EOKA, initiated warfare. The British reacted harshly to the insurrection. They executed EOKA fighters and used the uprising as a pretext to try and crush the left. In 1955 AKEL was banned and its leading members were arrested.

Cyprus finally was granted independence from Great Britain in 1960 and the Archbishop of Cyprus Makarios III became its first President. Unfortunately the new state was saddled with a constitution that was largely dictated by the British and was meant to weaken it via the age-old strategy of divide and conquer.

Ethnically the islands population is overwhelmingly of Greek heritage, but there is a significant minority of Cypriots who are of Turkish heritage. In Cyprus, Britain sought to codify a permanent division between Cypriots of Greek and Turkish background and thus, from the earliest days of the Republic, imperialism worked to undermine the unity and solidarity of Cypriots. Nationalist elements from both communities played into this strategy. The extreme nationalists rallied around parallel concepts. For Greek chauvinists the concept was Enosis, the union of Cyprus with Greece, for the Turkish right the concept was Taksim, the partition of Cyprus between Greece and Turkey.

Leading up to, and after independence, Makarios was considered to be the political leader of the Cypriots. The military leader was Georgios Grivas. Although Cypriot by birth Grivas had a long history as an officer in the Greek army. Politically he was an extreme nationalist, a monarchist and an anti-Communist. Towards the end of World War II Grivas, along with other right-wing Greek officers, formed Organization X, which was called a resistance group, but which was actually armed by the retreating Germans to fight alongside Greek monarchists and the British against the Greek left.

For a time in the 1960’s just after independence, Grivas participated in the Makarios government as the head of the Cypriot National Guard. However, while Makarios came to support an independent, bi-communal Cyprus, Grivas hoped for Cyprus to become a province of Greece. When he was unable to persuade Makarios of this he left his governmental post, went to Greece and plotted against Makarios, after 1967 in concert with the right-wing military junta. In 1969 Grivas founded the extreme right-wing nationalist terrorist organization EOKA B and in 1971 he returned to Cyprus to personally direct its activities. Under the leadership of Grivas, EOKA-B perpetrated various outrages against at the Turkish Cypriot community, murdered leftists and conspired to undermine the elected government of Makarios. TMT was the equivalent Turkish chauvinist terrorist organization. It was affiliated with the right-winger Rauf Denktash. Among other criminal acts it hunted down and murdered Turkish Cypriot members of AKEL. Among its many crimes TMT was responsible for the murder of the famous Turkish Cypriot member of the CC of AKEL, Dervis Kavazoglou, who was killed in an ambush along with Greek Cypriot AKEL and PEO member, Costas Mishaoulis.

Egged on by imperialism and the extreme right in Greece and Turkey the nationalist terror organizations engaged in horrific intercommunal violence, which served as a pretext for an air assault by Turkish forces in 1964. The 1964 bombing raids led Makarios to extend an invitation to the Greek military to help with Cyprus's defense. This proved to be a big mistake! The right-wing Greek officers, who after 1967 came to be associated with the Greek military dictatorship, turned out to be the real threat to Cyprus.

In Greece a right-wing military junta came to power in 1967 by overthrowing the democratically elected government. Almost immediately right-wing violence in Cyprus escalated, both in the form of attacks on leftists and intercommunal violence. Only international pressure kept Turkey from invading in 1967, but in 1974, an even more extreme faction of the Greek junta took over.

On July 2nd, 1974 President Makarios sent a very strong letter to General Gizikis, nominal head of the coup government. The letter was a stern and direct denunciation of the Athens-based conspiracies to murder him and undermine his government. In it Makarios makes it clear that he was well aware that activates of Grivas and EOKA-B were directed by the junta in Athens as were the Greek military units stationed in Cyprus.

The coup itself was initiated within two weeks, on July 15th, 1974. The goals of the coupists were to overthrow Makarios, abrogate Cypriot independence, destroy the Cypriot left and, ultimately, to partition Cyprus between Greece and Turkey. This time Turkey did invade, using the coup as a pretext. Although the Greek junta and EOKA B were directly responsible for the coup attempt, the culpability of the U.S., Britain and NATO in the coup and in the Turkish invasion and occupation is well known and understood by all Cypriots. Recently the Cypriot House of Representatives reviewed the events of 1974 and issued a report. In part the report confirms the treachery of the EOKA B organization and the insidious role played by the Greek junta and the imperialist powers.

At the time of the coup the U.S. and Britain favored a right-wing government on Cyprus, and although, crocodile tears aside, they looked favorably on the then ruling Greek military junta, they considered it to be unstable. Turkey was considered to be a far more reliable right wing puppet and thus they favored a Turkish presence on Cyprus. The U.S. and Britain also wanted to get rid of the Cypriot President Makarios, who they considered insufficiently obedient. Towards this end the U.S. hatched a really cynical plot (we are talking about Kissinger after all). It is no coincidence that the attempt on the life of Makarios came only one year after the murder of Allende in Chile. In Cyprus the imperialist powers stood by and let the Cypriot extreme right stage a coup, while looking the other way when Turkey used the coup as a pretext to invade.

Fortunately Makarios escaped and rallied popular and international support for Cyprus. Meanwhile the military junta in Greece collapsed, the immediate cause being the Cyprus fiasco which had very nearly resulted in war between Greece and Turkey. The coup in Cyprus lasted only eight days, collapsing along with the Greek junta, and democratic rule was reestablished. Not to be denied the Turks launched a second invasion, on August 14th. This phase of the invasion proceeded quickly, (quicker then even the Turks expected), sweeping aside the Cypriot National Guard, which was in disarray due to the participation of some of its elements in the failed coup and due to the fact that, at the time, it was commanded by Greek officers connected with the junta, which itself had disintegrated. However, after the invasions initial success mass popular resistance, in which AKEL played a prominent role, was organized. This, plus international pressure, stopped the Turkish army along what today is known as the 'green' line, the UN patrolled demilitarized zone which divides the island.

From 1974 to the present time

In 1977, only a few years after the reestablishment of democracy in Cyprus, President Makarios began work to reunify the nation. In meetings he held in the 1970’s with Turkish Cypriot strongman Rauf Denktash a four-point agreement was hammered out. Spiros Kyprianou continued the talks in 1978, after the untimely death of Makarios. By 1979 it had been agreed that the unitary state would be transformed into a bi-zonal bi-communal federation, a major concession made by the Greek Cypriot’s. This federal republic would have a single sovereignty, citizenship and international personality. These have been the basic principles that have guided all subsequent negotiations.

In November of 2002, then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan presented a plan that he hoped would settle the Cyprus problem once and for all. Over the next few years this "Annan Plan" would go through several iterations, based on the input of the various Cypriot and external parties. By 2004 the final version, "Annan V," came to incorporate most of Turkey's demands. Although this plan was approved by a majority of Turkish Cypriots, the Greek Cypriot community overwhelmingly rejected it.

In the eyes of the majority, the biggest problem with the solution envisioned by the plan was that it provided for the replacement of the republic of Cyprus by a loose confederation, a violation of the basic principles that had guided the search for a solution since 1977. Another major problem was that it allowed for the continued presence of Turkish troops and gave Turkey the right to intervene militarily. Anyway, the plan was rejected. Afterwards, however, Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos continued to seek some resolution for the problem. Towards that end, in July of 2006, he meet with Turkish Cypriot leader Mehemet Ali Talat and both agreed that the island should be reunified as a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation.

After the ascension to the Cyprus presidency of former AKEL leader Demetris Christofias full-fledged direct negotiations began and lasted until mid-2010 between Christofias and Talat and afterwards between Christofias and Dervis Eroglu, who had succeeded Talat as the leader of the Turkish Cypriot community. In the initial talks between Christofias and Talat good progress was made on certain issues although there were also some areas of difficulty. The new Turkish Cypriot leader, Eroglu, a right wing nationalist and follower of Denktash, has proved more intransigent on certain issues and the talks, although continuing, have been more difficult.

Conclusion

Looking forward, progressive minded people, both inside and outside of Cyprus, are hoping for a peaceful solution. A solution that provides for the territorial integrity of Cyprus, the withdrawal of Turkish military forces and settlers, the right of return and recovery of property for all refugees and, the respect for the human rights and freedoms of all Cypriots. These, along with the basic principles agreed to since 1977 and the relevant UN resolutions will guarantee a just and viable solution.

In addition to working tirelessly at the negotiating table, AKEL is working for rapprochement between Cypriot people of Greek and Turkish heritage, working to achieve the greatest possible unity towards the efforts at reaching a settlement. A recent positive development has been the mass demonstrations of Turkish Cypriots against the right wing Eroglu clique. These demonstrations shook the right and its backers in Ankara! Eroglu and other right wing nationalists could only resort to hysterical denunciations of the demonstrators, calling them, "ungrateful" and, "tools of AKEL". Hopefully this mass anti Eroglu sentiment will militate against any intransigence in the continuing negotiations.

However, besides the efforts of the Cypriots themselves international solidarity is needed, since international pressure on Turkey is critical to achieving a suitable resolution.

Although the Turkish occupation and the positions of the chauvinists in both communities are major obstacles in the way of any settlement; Kyprianou has pledged that AKEL will work tirelessly for a solution.

Photo: Cyprus President Dimitris Christofias and first lady with U.S. President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama (Wikimedia Commons/cc by 2.0).

Revolutionizing Egypt by the Day: An Eyewitness Report

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:23:00 +0000

*Veteran analyst Bob Wing and Egyptian-American activist Hany Khalil recently met with a dozen key revolutionaries and spoke with numerous people on Cairo’s streets, in the cafes and taxis, and in their homes.

June 25: Cairo--The political situation in Egypt is volatile, as all Egyptians and their organizations scramble to find their bearings following the unexpected but historic ousting of former dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Excitement and trepidation abound and colorful revolutionary graffiti fills the public space. New parties, alliances and campaigns are announced one day, only to disband the next. Strenuous debate about the order, rules and content of elections and a new constitution is at the forefront.

Suddenly everyone is a revolutionary and a democrat. But the “leaderless revolution” is still leaderless and thinly organized while the military, the temporary government and the Muslim Brotherhood retain great strength.

The Tunisian Revolution has the workers’ movement as a backbone; the Egyptian Revolution is still searching for an anchor.

18 Days That Shook the World

In the last few years, protests were growing in frequency, especially strikes. But the January 25 actions were called by new, loosely organized youth groups. The actions were unexpectedly transformed into a revolutionary movement by a spontaneous and massive rebellion of an aggrieved population.

The turning point came on Jan. 28 when “millions of demonstrators overwhelmed the stunned internal police security forces throughout the country and, shockingly, this long feared and well armed apparatus literally vanished overnight,” reports journalist and activist Ahmad Shokr.

The Muslim Brotherhood took up the call of the revolutionary youth, adding organized strength to the street actions, followed later by some unions and key professional groups. When the U.S. called for Mubarak to step down and the Egyptian military opted not to attack the demonstrators, the regime collapsed.

In eighteen days Egyptians dispatched from the stage of history one of the most longstanding regimes in the world, one backed to the hilt by the U.S. until its death throes. Unbeknownst to itself or anyone else, the Mubarak government had rotted to its core. One brief but powerful people’s hurricane blew it away.

Revolutionary Street Power

There was astonishingly little organization or political definition to the revolution other than calling for the ouster of Mubarak and his closest cronies. Slogans such as “Freedom, Justice, Dignity” ruled the day, but social and economic demands were very low profile. Ruefully we are told, “Everyone now claims to have been in Tahrir Square.”

At first it is baffling to hear many of the revolutionaries describe themselves as liberals. But we soon learned that liberal democracy is a revolutionary demand in a country that has been ruled by foreigners for two millennia and by military regimes for decades.

Still, a mad scramble to organize and develop further political coherence is now afoot. The Egyptian revolutionaries are struggling to retain their unity and expand amidst emerging new divisions over the future of the revolution.

“The strength of the revolution is its massive street presence: its political definition and organization lag far behind. However, no one knows how long the population will remain mobilized, so this is a very fragile situation,” says Sherif Alaa of the newly formed Free Egypt Party.

Youth as Vanguard

The key street mobilizers still appear to be the middle class youth groups, especially the April 6 Movement, We are All Khaled Said and the Revolutionary Youth Coalition.

The most recent huge action was held on May 27 in protest of continued political repression by the military and the temporary government. Half a million or more Egyptians thronged Tahrir Square despite the expressed opposition of the Muslim Brotherhood and the military.

The youth groups, like everyone else, are in a state of change and flux. Although they are the vanguard of revolutionary action, they are not necessarily radical in their socio-economic vision and have scant organized base.

Mohammed Adel of the April 6 Movement claims his group has an organized and active national membership of 7,000. It has launched a nationwide survey to clarify the people’s opinion about what should be in the new Constitution. April 6 is also trying to unite all the parties and groups behind the presumed presidential candidacy of Mohammed El-Baradei.

Adel believes “the key is to defeat the remnants of the old regime and to establish a transparent liberal political system.” April 6 and others project the remnants of the old regime, including the military, will tacitly back the expected presidential candidacy of Amr Moussa, the longtime foreign minister and Arab League president under Mubarak.

Importantly, some prominent intellectuals and activists, including We Are All Khaled Said just recently launched a “Poor First” campaign, marking the first major entry of class issues into the public debate. In a powerful post entitled “The Poor First, You Bastards,” Mohammed Abul Gheit argues that “the Egyptian revolution cannot be complete without social justice.”

Over the last three years more than 1.5 million workers have struck their employers. Perhaps they, along with the peasants and urban poor, may rise to the fore in the coming period.

Ferment in the Brotherhood

Meanwhile there is frenetic activity to form new political parties that can contest elections. According to veteran leftist and famed journalist Amina Shafik, “Mubarak successfully coopted, tamed or repressed all organized opposition during his reign. Parties that existed prior to the revolution were compromised to the point of now having no future, with the exception of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The Brotherhood is the only party that has wide name recognition let alone organization or mass support. It is a complex and diverse political coalition founded in 1928. Our interviewees estimate that if elections were held today, the Brotherhood would carry between 20 and 30 percent of the electorate.

However, the program and unity of the Brotherhood are increasingly strained by the new forces and ideas unleashed by the revolution. To address the new situation, the Brotherhood has set up the supposedly ecumenical Justice and Freedom Party with a Christian as Vice President.

Still, one of the Brotherhood’s well known leaders, Abdel-Moneim Abul Fotouh, and a significant section of its youth members have split off to form a more liberal, civic-based movement called the Egyptian Current.

Fotouh plans a presidential run while the Brotherhood has promised only to run parliamentary candidates.

The Brotherhood also lost credibility when it refused to back the massive May 27 demonstration. Since then it has been feverishly maneuvering to find its bearings and preserve its unity in the fast changing environment.

Two, Three, Many Parties

Mozn Hassan of Nazra for Feminist Studies told us, “The strongest new political trend appears to be the formation of liberal parties” – parties whose central demand is a transparent, liberal democratic political system but who do not advocate major social or economic change. She describes them as being in “fragile, incipient stages of development,” often largely confined to middle class intellectuals in Cairo.

Our interviewees estimate that the current combined electoral strength of all the parties to the left of the Brotherhood is considerably less than ten percent. Their most ardent partisans hope to gain one-third of the new parliament so that they could block any two-thirds votes by more conservative forces.

Perhaps the party with the most potential strength is the Free Egyptians Party. It was founded by Naguib Sawiris, a Coptic Christian who is one of the wealthiest people in Egypt. His vast empire includes a major newspaper and a leading television station. Sawiris reportedly has no presidential aspirations of his own, but he is rumored to have committed $10 million to build the new party.

Free Egyptians is noteworthy for its strong secularist position, which has won it the ire of the Brotherhood and especially the Salafists, the most radical Islamists. So far it has not advocated for any significant economic or social changes, other than ridding the current system of cronyism and corruption.

The Justice Party is another liberal party backed by some big businessmen. It also eschews major economic change and is considered conciliatory towards the Muslim Brotherhood.

The third main party is the Egyptian Social Democratic Party. It is trying to forge a center-left alternative that is similar to the European socialist parties but is apparently struggling to get off the ground.

In response to what some view as organizational weakness and a lack of internal democracy, a split recently occurred in the Social Democratic Party leading to attempts to build the Free Egypt Party led by Amr Hamzawi, a well known public intellectual.

There are two overtly left parties in formation, but both are considered much weaker than the center-left Social Democratic Party: the Laborer’s Party which is based in a few independent trade unions and has a significant Trotskyist component and the Popular Alliance Party, a new left unity electoral and organizing effort.

Constitution First?

Perhaps the biggest issue currently being debated is the order and relationship of drafting a new Constitution, electing a new Parliament and voting for a new President.

The Brotherhood and, tacitly, the military and temporary government backed a March 19 referendum calling for the parliament to be elected in September, for the parliament to then choose a constitutional drafting committee for popular approval, to be followed by a presidential election.

Despite virtually universal opposition from the principal secular revolutionary organizations and the Coptic Christian community (which constitutes about ten percent of the population), the apparently fair and free referendum carried more than sixty percent of the electorate. Some interpreted this as a vote for restabilization.

Undeterred, revolutionary coalitions have launched a petition campaign, a survey and a mass education campaign in favor of drafting the constitution ahead of elections. Apparently they fear that the Brotherhood and remnants of the old regime are much better organized and could capitalize on early elections.

“We prefer to emblazon the revolution in a new constitution before elections,” says Ahmed Fawzy of the Social Democratic Party. This might also allow the new parties to get organized.

However, cracks in this alliance are now appearing, as some are concerned that conservatives could also dominate a constitution which would be much harder to change than a president or a parliament.

Still others feel that the debate over the order of these processes is overshadowing discussion of the direction and content of the revolution.

In this respect, the Poor First and similar campaigns may be a salutary development both to add substance to the public debate and to rally the popular sectors.

Photo: The world will long remember how 1 million people gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt to demand democracy. (Jonathan Rashad/cc by 2.0/Flickr)

Russell, Mao and the Fate of China

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:09:00 +0000

In 1921 Bertrand Russell, then probably the most famous living philosopher in the world, published The Problem of China [POC]. This book was the result of Russell's being invited to China to give a series of lectures and conduct meetings with leading Chinese intellectuals over a period of about six months. In POC Russell diagnoses the problems facing China as a result of its semi-occupation by European and Japanese imperialism. In the course of the book he also makes several recommendations and predictions concerning the future development of China.

The future leader of China, Mao Zedong, was either present at one of Russell's lectures or read a detailed account of it in the Chinese press. The purpose of this article is to discuss Russell's blueprint for Chinese liberation and compare it to what the Chinese, under the leadership of the Communist Party, actually did. Another purpose is to point out that many of Russell's comments about the role of the United States made over 90 years ago, as well as what was needed in China, are still relevant today.

A word of caution. Russell considered himself a radical and a "socialist", perhaps even a theoretical "communist" (although he was hostile to many of the actions of the Russian Bolsheviks) at this time. After World War II and up to the late 1950s Russell was a cold war anti-Communist, though not a ridiculous mindless one a la Sidney Hook and those in his milieu, before coming to his senses in the 1960s. I am only concerned, in this article, with Russell's political statements and opinions in the early 1920s. Some of Russell's views, while commonly held in the 20s, are completely politically incorrect by today's standards – I will note them with explanation marks (!!) but otherwise I will not address them or pass over them in silence. These are usually remarks dealing with the nature of the "Chinese mind" or "character" as if all Chinese think a certain way.

In trying to understand China, Russell, in his chapter "Questions," expresses the view that he is dealing with a totally alien culture. He is forced to ask himself what his ultimate values are, what makes one culture or society "better" than another, and what ends does he wish to see triumph in the world. He says different people have different answers to these questions and he thinks they are just subjective preferences not amenable to argument. He will merely state his own and hope his reader will agree with him. Russell is no objectivist in morals. The ends he values are: "knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship and affection." He believes in the goals, if not always the methods, of communism (although he is not a Marxist), and thinks a socialist society will best approximate the ends he wants. There are elements in Chinese culture that also reflect his ends better than they are reflected in Euro-American culture.

Russell thinks a nation should be judged not only on how its own people are treated, but also on how it treats others. He finds China, in this respect, better than the imperialist nations of the West. In the following quote Russell uses the word "our" and I want to stress that he does not intend to restrict its meaning to the British Empire but uses it inclusively to refer to the major imperialist nations of Europe and the English speaking world or even to "capitalist" nations thus including Japan.

"Our prosperity," he writes, "and most of what we endeavor to secure for ourselves, can only be obtained by widespread exploitation of weaker nations." The Chinese, however, obtain what they have by means of their own hard work. China is radically different today but I think what Russell says about it is still basically correct and what he says about "us" hasn't changed very much at all.

What happens in China, he says will determine the whole future course of world history. There are tremendous resources in China and whether they are to be controlled "by China, by Japan, or by the white races [!!], is a question of enormous importance, affecting not only the whole development of Chinese civilization, but the balance of power in the world, the prospects of peace, the destiny of Russia, and the chances of development toward a better economic system in the advanced nations."

This remark is as true today as it was some 90 years ago. Chinese civilization, however, is now, at least, much more in the hands of the Chinese, the world balance of power remains in flux, the destiny of Russia is still undetermined, and a better economic system for the West (i.e., socialism) is still a distant dream but may be positively influenced by the economic development of China.

I didn't mention the "prospects for peace" and that is because in the short term Russell was absolutely correct: the civil war and revolution in China, World War II (in the Pacific), the Korean War, and the Vietnam War all had China, in one way or another, as their focus and the hope of eventually controlling her resources as a backdrop. Today as well many circles in the West, associated with international finance capital, see China as a future threat and the US military has contingency plans for a war with her. So, Russell was quite prescient to see the economic resources of China as the focal point of contemporary history.

Bertrand Russell discusses the internal state of China, as he understood it in 1920-21, in his chapter "Modern China" in The Problem of China. He thinks there are only two ways the Chinese can escape from imperialist domination. The first way is for China to become a strong military power. Russell thinks this would be a disaster.

However since "the capitalist system involves in its very essence a predatory relation of the strong towards the weak [a perfectly good Leninist proposition even if clumsily expressed], internationally as well as nationally" he proposes a second way for Chinese liberation. The foreign imperialist powers will have to "become Socialistic." Russell thinks this is the only real solution for the Chinese.

It didn't occur to Russell that China might free itself by military means and work towards socialism at the same time. It goes without saying that the Chinese would be waiting for kingdom come to be liberated if they had taken Russell's advice and expected Europe and America to turn socialist.

Russell, as did many in his generation, expected a major war to eventually break out between Japan and the United States over which would be top dog in the far east, but did not see that war as an opportunity for the victims of imperialism to break free and become independent. At any rate, in respect to his "only" solution to Chinese liberation, Russell was wildly off the mark – despite his Leninist grasp of the nature of capitalism.

Russell did, however, urge progressives to support the fledgling government of Sun Yat-sen which was at this time battling the war lord system. No one at that time foresaw that the Kuomintang would degenerate into a fascist despotism under Sun's successor Chiang Kai-shek, or that the recently founded Communist Party of China would be the eventual vehicle both for Chinese liberation and regeneration.

Russell's next comment was completely correct and was about an issue that, after the success of the revolution, the Chinese took very seriously. Russell wrote that "in the long run, if the birth-rate is as great as is usually supposed, no permanent cure for their poverty is possible while their families continue to be so large."

The introduction of birth control and the one child policy, which was a drastic step and is now being reevaluated, probably helped to considerably contain the population from an unmanageable explosion (not to credit natural disasters and the unintended consequences of policies that turned out to be mistaken with respect to premature industrial expansion and agricultural reforms in the 1950s).

Another problem the Chinese would have to overcome before they could hope to compete with the West, according to Russell, was lack of a modern educational system for the masses. This too the CPC saw as a major problem and immediately after coming to power launched a mass literacy program and built schools and institutions of higher learning throughout China.

This was a prerequisite, Russell said, as Chinese workers would need education and skills in order to command decent wages (he did not foresee a socialist revolution in China). Nevertheless industrialization in China, as in all other countries, would begin to develop by methods that are "sordid and cruel." Intellectuals, he remarked, "wish to be told of some less horrible method by which their country may be industrialized, but so far none is in sight."

Whether you are capitalist or socialist, it appears, if you are starting from a primitive economic base the only way you can accumulate capital to make industrial advances is to take it from the surplus value created by the working class. As we will see Russell thinks state capitalism, or state socialism (they are the same for him), would be the best way for the Chinese to go – but he doesn't envision a revolution.

Russell now hits upon a major problem which I think was responsible for some of the major errors of the Mao era. "There is one traditional Chinese belief which dies very hard, and that is the belief that correct ethical sentiments are more important than detailed scientific knowledge. This view is, of course, derived from the Confucian tradition, and is more or less true in a pre-industrial society."

One would think that Russell, with commitments to science as the basis for correct knowledge of the world, would hold that "detailed scientific knowledge" is always to be preferred; how would a pre-industrial society ever advance to a higher level without also developing science?

In the 1950s and 1960s Mao pushed the line that politics ("correct ethical sentiments") was the correct guide to action and could win out over any objections based on economic (scientific) considerations. This led to the twin disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. There was no basis in Marxism for the views he was espousing even though Mao used Marxist terminology to try and explain his thought. If Russell was correct, this would have been a case of the unconscious Confucian substrata in Mao's world view manifesting itself in Marxist guise.

Mao himself was ant-Confucian at this time so even he was blind to the real origins of the reactionary policies he was peddling in Marxist dress. I should also point out that it was only one wing of Confucianism that held to this view – an Idealist trend that developed in the Ming Dynasty and that there were other wings of Confucianism that were materialistically motivated. Mao had indeed studied Ming Confucianism and was influenced by it in his youth, and, I think, unconsciously after he assumed power.

Russell's chapter, "Present Forces and Tendencies in the Far East" (in The Problem of China) deals with the balance of power in this region in the 1920s and focuses on China, Japan, Russia and America. I will omit his comments on Japan here and concentrate on China's dealings with America and the influence of Russia. Russell points out that the interests of Britain are (leaving India to the side) basically the same as those of America – at least its ruling sector of finance capital and NOT "the pacifistic and agrarian tendencies of the Middle West."

At this time Russell thought that the two most important "moral forces" in the Far East were those emanating from Russia and America. He thought the Americans to be more idealistic than the jaded imperialists running the European capitalist states. However he thought that cynical imperialist views were an inevitability as a nation's power increased and the Americans would abandon their idealism.

We must keep this in mind, he warns us, "when we wish to estimate the desirability of extending the influence of the United States." Today we can see that Russell was right. The United States has evolved into the most cynical and ruthless imperial power in the world, encircling the globe with its garrisons and fleets, and subjecting whole nations and peoples to its bloody domination in search of power, wealth, and resources.

All this, however, was in the future. The benign United States that appeared to Russell was that of the Harding Administration and the Washington Naval Conference, presided over by Secretary of State Charles Evan Hughes. The conference was held from late 1921 to early 1922 and was the first disarmament conference in modern history. It was designed to reign in Japanese aggression in China, limit naval construction, and keep the Open Door Policy in place in China.

Russell thought America's policy at the conference was a liberal one, but only because the outcome of the conference was in line with American interests in the Far East. What Russell really believed was that "when American interests or prejudices are involved liberal and humanitarian principles have no weight whatever." Have we seen anything to contradict this assessment since the days of Warren Harding (or those of George Washington for that matter)?

If American plans for the future economic development of China should be successful Russell thought it would be disastrous for China. It would certainly be good for America and her allies, but would involve "a gradually increasing flow of wealth from China to the investing countries, the chief of which is America [the CPC appears to have reversed this flow]; the development of a sweated proletariat [still a problem]; the spread of Christianity [another great evil]; the substitution of American civilization for Chinese [not yet but McDonalds and KFC have secured beach heads];…. the gradual awakening of China to her exploitation by the foreigner [China was already awake when Russell wrote]; and one day, fifty or a hundred years hence [around 1972 or 2022], the massacre of every white man throughout the Celestial Empire at a signal from some vast secret society."

Well, the great awakening was already at hand when Russell wrote, he was just blind to it. China liberated itself in a little over 25 years, despite the best actions the US and its allies could do to prevent it, and no vast secret society sprang up to threaten every "white man." The Celestial Empire has become a People's Republic.

Well, Russell's vision of the future was off, but the definition he gave of what the West considers "good" government was spot on, even today: "it is a government that yields fat dividends for capitalists." This is still the game plan in the 21st century.

Russell now embarks on some ill founded speculations which, nevertheless, hint at a grain of truth. He predicts, for example "it is not likely that Bolshevism [as seen in Russia-tr] as a creed will make much progress in China." He gives the following three reasons: 1) China has a decentralized state tending towards feudalism whereas Bolshevism requires a centralized state. Russell doesn't seem to understand a successful socialist revolution would reverse this tendency.

2) China is more suitable for anarchism because the Chinese have a great sense of personal freedom and the Bolsheviks need to have (and do have) more control over individuals "than has ever been known before." This is strange. The Chinese had just emerged from an oriental despotism under the Manchus that had regulated everything including dress and hair styles for the population, and had no tradition of anything like "personal freedom" as had developed in Europe.

3) Bolshevism opposes "private trading" which is the "breath of life to all Chinese except the literati." But 90 percent of the Chinese at this time were basically illiterate peasants most of whom were under the control of a feudalistic landlord class. The Chinese masses had more in common with the Russian masses than Russell seemed to realize.

The greatest appeal of Bolshevism, Russell said, was to the youth of China who wanted to develop industry by skipping the stage of capitalist development. But Russia was now engaged in the New Economic Policy and Russell thought this signaled a slow return to capitalist methods which would disillusion the Chinese.

But, Russell said, the fact that as a creed Bolshevism [i.e., Marxism] would not hold any lasting appeal, Bolshevism "as a political force" had a great future. What he meant was that Bolshevik Russia would continue to play the Great Game in Asia and follow in the footsteps of Tsarist imperialism with Bolshevik imperialism since "the Russians have an instinct for colonization" [!!].

Here is where Russell becomes very confused in his analysis. He doesn't really define "imperialism." Marxists at this time defined it as the international policy of monopoly capitalism based on the control of the state by financial capital sometimes allied with industrial capital. In this sense Bolshevik imperialism was a contradiction in terms. As far as "the Russians," lumped together without any attempt at class analysis, having an "instinct" to become colonialists – such general statements are useless in trying to describe social reality.

Regardless, Russell thinks it would not be so bad for Russia to become hegemonic in Asia. The Russians could enter into more nearly equal relations with Asian peoples because their "character" [!!] is more "Asiatic" than that of the "English speaking-nations." English speaking nations would not be able to have the same understanding and ability "to enter into relations of equally" with these strange inscrutable Orientals. As a result an Asian Block of nations would arise as a defensive block and this would be good for world peace as well as "humanity."

Russell recommends that outside powers leave off meddling with the Chinese and attempting to impose their own values on them as the Chinese will, left to themselves, "find a solution suitable to their character" for their own political problems. This idea is of "national character" is quite unscientific and if Russell had understood what he read of Das Kapital and other Marxist writings and substituted some such phrase as "find a solution based on their own historical development and class relations" he would have made better sense. POC would have been better understood, in fact, if "national character" had been replaced by "historical development" whenever it occured along with a brief description of that development.

Russell goes on to predict what the future of China will most likely be. Marxists, as great predictors of the future themselves, especially its inevitable trends and outcomes, understand what a risky business this is and should have great sympathy for Russell's wrong headed prognosis.

Since the US emerged unscathed from World War I it had an excess of available capital to invest and would be the principal nation involved in China's future development. "As the financiers are the most splendid feature of the American civilization, China must be so governed as to enrich the financiers." The US will contribute greatly to building educational institutions in China so that Chinese intellectuals will end up serving the interests of the big Trusts just as American intellectuals do. As a result a conservative anti-radical reform system will be produced and touted as a great force for peace. But, Russell points out: "it is impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear or peace and freedom out of capitalism."

The US will encourage the growth of a stable government, foster an increase in income to build up a market for American goods, discourage other powers besides themselves from meddling in China, and look askance upon all attempts of the Chinese to control their own economy, especially the nationalization of the mines and railroads, which Russell sees as a "form of State Socialism or what Lenin calls State Capitalism." The reference to Lenin is in respect to the New Economic Plan (NEP) in Russia.

The US would also keep lists of radical students and see to it that they would not get jobs, try to impose its puritan morality on the Chinese, and because Americans think their own country and way of life are "perfect" they will do great damage to what is best in Chinese culture in their attempts to make China as much as possible resemble what they call "God's own country."

As a result of all this a "Marxian class-war will break out" between Asia and the West. The Asian forces will be led by a socialist Russia and be fought for freedom from the imperialist powers and their exploitation. These views are very different from those Russell will be representing in his future Cold War phase.

Ever the pessimist, Russell sees this war as so destructive all around that probably "no civilization of any sort would survive it." When the actual war came is was very destructive, but it was a civil war between the bourgeois democratic capitalist powers and the authoritarian fascist capitalist powers into which the Russians were drawn against their will and from which the Chinese emerged as a free and independent people determined to build socialism.

Russell ends his chapter on a socialist note about the evils of the "present "(1920s) system of world wide capitalist domination. Russell's conclusion is almost a perfect description of the world we live in today. "The essential evil of the present system," he says, "as Socialists have pointed out over and over again, is production for profit instead of for use." American power may, for a while, impose peace, but never freedom for weak countries. "Only international Socialism can secure both; and owing to the stimulation of revolt by capitalist oppression, even peace alone can never be secure until international Socialism is established throughout the world."

The last chapter in Bertrand Russell's The Problem of China is entitled "The Outlook for China." Russell, writing in 1922, thinks that China (due to its population and resources) has the capacity to become the second greatest power in the world (after the United States). Today the US seems to be slipping economically so maybe China will become number one in the world sometime in the present century.

Three things will have to about for China to reach its full potential. Russell lists them as: 1.) The establishment of an orderly government [the CPC has accomplished this requirement]; 2.) Industrial development under Chinese control [this too has been brought about by the CPC whether you call it "market socialism" or "state capitalism"]; 3.) the spread of education [ditto care of the CPC].

All three prerequisites put forth by Russell have been attained if not quite in the manner he imagined in his book. Let's look at some of Russell's elaborations on these prerequisites.

First, the problem of orderly government: Russell says that in the 1920s China was functionally anarchic with battling warlords and weak central governments in the north and south of the country. He envisioned an eventual constitutional setup and a parliamentary form of government. But he cautioned that even so the masses of the people (Russell uses the term "public opinion") will have to be guided by what amounts to a Leninist political party using democratic centralist methods.

Here is what Russell wrote: "It will be necessary for the genuinely progressive people throughout the country to unite in a strongly disciplined society, arriving at collective decisions and enforcing support for those decisions upon all its members." That is just what happened under the leadership of CPC.

Second, the problem of industrial development: China, or any country for that matter, to be truly free has to also be economically free and that requires that it has control of its own railroads and natural resources. He thus thinks the Chinese government should own the railroads and the mines of China. He also thinks that state ownership of "a large amount" of the industry in China should also occur. "There are many arguments for State Socialism, or rather what Lenin calls State Capitalism, in any country which is economically but not culturally backward."

Russell thinks that is possible for China, with a strong and honest government, to skip over the stage of capitalism and lay the foundations for socialism. This is tricky business as the Chinese would find out much later. If you skip too far and too fast you can trip and fall on your face. With the right government "it will be possible to develop Chinese industry without, at the same time, developing the overweening power of private capitalists by which the Western nations are now both oppressed and misled." We can only hope that China is heading in this direction.

Third, the problem of education: Russell says that "Where the bulk of the population cannot read, true democracy is impossible. Education is a good in itself, but is also essential for developing political consciousness, of which at present there is almost none in rural China."

By "democracy" Russell then, and almost all Western governments and their intellectual tools today, mean "bourgeois democracy" – i.e., "democratic" institutions and constitutions that guarantee the government will be controlled by, for, and of one of two contending classes that exist in the modern capitalist world, i.e., the capitalist class. Russell proclaimed his belief in "socialism" (Mao even said Russell believed in "communism") but he never transcended the bourgeois concept of "democracy" inculcated in him by the British ruling class by which he was educated.

But the wider, and I believe correct, meaning of "democracy" (rule of the "demos" or people) includes other forms of government than those proclaimed by the bourgeoisie and their lackeys. It must refer to any form of government that objectively rules in the interests of its people i.e., the vast majority of its population composed of working people, called by old time communists "the toiling masses" and historically personified by the "people's democracies" and "people's republics" of eastern Europe and Asia, and by the only completely democratic state in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba.

In just a few years after Russell wrote the above words, hundreds of millions of the peasants of "rural China" would develop a political consciousness that would lead to the overthrow of the rule by landlords and capitalists in China and the establishment, however flawed, of a true people's republic. Then they learned to read.

Russell was both correct and incorrect in saying the following: "Until it has been established for some time, China must be, in fact if not in form, an oligarchy, because the uneducated masses cannot have any effective political opinion [or in the case of the US – miseducated masses]. If that "oligarchy" is a real communist party (not one in name only) it will bring to the masses the correct political opinion that they and they alone control their own destiny and can abolish their subjection to a class that only lives off of their exploitation. The one party state may be the instrument leading to this liberation and its own eventual elimination, along with the state, but it also gives to the masses "effective political opinion" and if it doesn't it may find itself being eliminated ahead of schedule.

Russell hoped the Chinese, by combining "Western" science with their traditional culture, would create a new civilization free of the deficiencies of the capitalist West. What we are seeing now, in the 21st century, in China is perhaps the fulfillment of Russell's vision but it is a synthesis of Marx, left wing Confucianism, and modern science. Hopefully the coming century will see the end of Western "civilization" as we know it, a predatory war based imperialist system attempting to enchain the world, and the establishment of a real new world order. The values of Bertrand Russell will be better remembered and served in such a world.

Epilogue: What Mao thought of Russell's views on China.
Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung
COMMUNISM AND DICTATORSHIP
November 1920. January 1921
[Extracted from. two letters to Ts’ai Ho-sen [1895-1932 a leader of the CPC, arrested in Hong Kong by the British and turned over to the Kuomintang which killed him- tr], in November 1920 and January 1921.]

In his lecture at Changsha, Russell .... took a position in favour of communism but against the dictatorship of the workers and peasants. He said that one should employ the method of education to change the consciousness of the propertied classes, and that in this way it would not be necessary to limit freedom or to have recourse to war and bloody revolution.... My objections to Russell's view point can be stated in a few words: 'This is all very well as a theory, but it is unfeasible in practice' .... Education requires money, people and instruments. In today's world money is entirely in the hands of the capitalists. Those who have charge of education are all either capitalists or wives of capitalists. In today's world the schools and the press, the two most important instruments of education are entirely under capitalist control. In short, education in today's world is capitalist education. If we teach capitalism to children, these children, when they grow up will in turn teach capitalism to a second generation of children. Education thus remains in the hands of the capitalists. Then the capitalists have 'parliaments' to pass laws protecting the capitalists and handicapping the proletariat; they have 'governments' to apply these laws and to enforce the advantages and the prohibitions that they contain; they have 'armies' and 'police' to defend the well-being of the capitalists and to repress the demands of the proletariat; they have 'banks' to serve as repositories in the circulation of their wealth; they have 'factories', which are the instruments by which they monopolize the production of goods. Thus, if the communists do not seize political power, they will not be able to find any refuge in this world; how, under such circumstances, could they take charge of education? Thus, the capitalists will continue to control education and to praise their capitalism to the skies, so that the number of coverts to the proletariat's communist propaganda will diminish from day to day. Consequently, I believe that the method of education is unfeasible....

What I have just said constitutes the first argument. The second argument is that, based on the principle of mental habits and on my observation of human history, I am of the opinion that one absolutely cannot expect the capitalists to become converted to communism.... If one wishes to use the power of education to transform them, then since one cannot obtain control of the whole or even an important part of the two instruments of education — schools and the press — even if one has a mouth and a tongue and one or two schools and newspapers as means of propaganda.... this is really not enough to change the mentality of the adherents of capitalism even slightly; how then can one hope that the latter will repent and turn toward the good? So much from a psychological standpoint. From a historical standpoint.... one observes that no despot imperialist and militarist throughout history has ever been known to leave the stage of history of his own free will without being overthrown by the people. Napoleon I proclaimed himself emperor and failed; then there was Napoleon III. Yuan Shih-K'ai failed; then, also there was Tuan Ch'i-jui.... From what I have just said based on both psychological and a historical standpoint, it can be seen that capitalism cannot be overthrown by the force of a few feeble efforts in the domain of education. This is the second argument. There is yet a third argument, most assuredly a very important argument, even more important in reality. If we use peaceful means to attain the goal of communism, when will we finally achieve it? Let us assume that a century will be required, a century marked by the unceasing groans of the proletariat. What position shall we adopt in the face of this situation? The proletariat is many times more numerous than the bourgeoisie; if we assume that the proletariat constitutes two-thirds of humanity, then one billion of the earth's one billion five hundred million inhabitants are proletarians (I fear that the figure is even higher), who during this century will be cruelly exploited by the remaining third of capitalists. How can we bear this? Furthermore, since the proletariat has already become conscious of the fact that it too should possess wealth, and of the fact that its sufferings are unnecessary, the proletarians are discontented, and a demand for communism has arisen and has already become a fact. This fact confronts us, we cannot make it disappear; when we become conscious of it we wish to act. This is why, in my opinion, the Russian revolution, as well as the radical communists in every country, will daily grow more powerful and numerous and more tightly organized. This is the natural result. This is the third argument.....

There is a further point pertaining to my doubts about anarchism. My argument pertains not merely to the impossibility of a society without power or organization. I should like to mention only the difficulties in the way of the establishment of such form of society and of its final attainment.... For all the reasons just stated, my present viewpoint on absolute liberalism, anarchism, and even democracy is that these things are fine in theory, but not feasible in practice....

Social Media and CPUSA

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:08:00 +0000

The policy of the Communist Party USA is that social media, as tools for building personal organizing relationships, are an integral part of a strategy for growth and consolidation in the digital age. This spring’s national conference (New York City, April 16-17) saw a number of fruitful discussions about the scope and application of this policy, so I would like to briefly recap those discussions for comrades and allies who couldn’t attend and to offer a few reflections of my own.

The principal objection to giving digital organizing a prominent role in Party strategy comes from what one might call a ‘traditionalist’ perspective. In this perspective, organizing depends on solid bonds of trust and dependability, which are held together, as one comrade put it, “with shoe-leather.” Comrades defending this position caution us, moreover, that the use of social media requires technology to which not all members of the working class have access.

Defending the importance of social media, comrades of a more digital bent remind us that the old opposition between ‘real’ reality and ‘virtual’ reality no longer holds, and that Facebook relationships, for example, are not just pale imitations of offline relationships—especially among youth, who seem to experience online social networks as an extension of, rather than an escape from, face-to-face sociability.

It must be emphasized that no one has advocated an exclusive use of one form of organizing or another; rather, discussion turned around the weight or prominence to give to the respective forms. As a part of this dialogue and in the interest of promoting a conscious and informed application of our policy, I would like to offer a few thoughts on the subject from a theoretical perspective.

We have to recognize, I believe, that organizing through online social networks is a tactical necessity. While comrades in cities like New York, Chicago, and St. Louis have the advantage of a strong local club organization, members in smaller clubs or less densely populated areas can use social media to build Party organization without committing to an exhausting and expensive travel schedule. Moreover, online organizing allows an unparalleled sharing of resources and an unprecedented rapidity of mobilization.

At the same time, we must realize that social networking technologies are products and tools of global finance capital, indelibly marked with the stamp of its goals and practices: the dissolution of all barriers to the flow of money and information, the abstraction and homogenization of all social bonds such that, as Marx and Engels say, “all that is solid melts into air.” In the celebration of all that is instantaneous, efficient, precisely personalized and at the same time perfectly assimilable, social media reveal their capitalist heritage in ways that should give us pause.

The thorniest question here involves the relation between being seen and being heard, between being present and having a voice. The supreme challenge to the bourgeois republic and the capitalist order that underwrites it, is the existence of those who go unheard and unrepresented, whose grievances go unremedied, but who persist in the shocking visibility of poverty and marginalization despite all attemps to hide them from view or define them out of existence.

In this sense, online social networks are capitalism’s magic mirror, showing forth the comforting illusion of a society where the unheard and the unrepresented simply do not exist. The forum is open; everyone can participate... except for those who can’t, for lack of training or access to the requisite technologies. In capital’s virtual utopia, to be voiceless is also to be absent or invisible, so that those lucky enough to have a speaking part can carry on their business undisturbed by the spectacle of marginalization.

How then should we, as a revolutionary party of real democracy and equality for all people, approach the dangerous necessity of organizing through social media? One of the central tenets of Marxian thought is that capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction, that it numbers its own days by bringing into existence, populating, and nourishing the class that will overthrow it. Could we say that social networking technologies are another version of the spinning jenny: good for making yarn and profits, but also good for making revolution? A mechanism of social control and indoctrination, an ideological apparatus, that workers can seize, democratize, and transform into a tool of liberation?

In short, yes. Even now, Party members and activist allies are using social media to organize clubs, spread news of rallies, and carry on all the work of peaceful revolution. We have to bear in mind, however, that we never simply use anything. The tools we build with, also build us; they modify our bodies, our behavior, and our thought patterns. As we forge ahead, building effective progressive coalitions with all the tools at hand, let’s keep in mind that we’re changing ourselves even as we transform the social media landscape. In particular, let’s work to expand access to these new technologies of revolutionary class struggle in hopes that seeds sown online will bear fruit in the street and at the ballot box. Solidarity forever!

Podcast: Apartheid Archipelago or Paradise – The Labor Movement in Hawaii

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:08:00 +0000

On this episode we talk again with historian Gerald Horne about his new book Fighting in Paradise, a study of the role of the labor movement and the communist party in Hawaii in the mid-20th century. This is the first of a two part interview.

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Race, Gender and Structural Inequalities in the Great Recession and the Recovery

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:07:00 +0000

Note: An earlier version of this article was delivered to the Working Class Studies Association conference in Chicago, June 25, 2011.

Despite a common belief that Americans live in an era without structural or institutionalized inequalities like racism or sexism, how working families have experienced the Great Recession and the recovery has depended in no small part on their race and gender. The inequity of hardship faced in the recent period resulted from structural inequalities embedded historically into the labor force, specifically, and social life generally. Here I am going to argue theoretically about how these inequalities reveal that race and gender determine in very practical ways specific aspects of economic life in the U.S. I will then look at some data from the past few years that bears those theoretical generalizations out.

Structural inequalities, bolstered by current incarnations of white supremacist or male supremacist ideologies, are key features of the capitalist system, and help to sustain and reproduce it. Still, race and gender are typically regarded as non-class social factors – when they are not downgraded to interpersonal phenomena. Even when viewed systemically or as historically specific systems of material conditions and ideological contradictions, race and gender are typically segregated from class abstractly or identified as derivative. They are viewed as non-class factors because they do not signify relationships of property, i.e. ownership (or lack thereof) of the means of production, extraction of surplus value, or self-conscious capitalist or working-class interests.

The political implications of viewing race, gender and class (or any other system or process of oppression) discretely in this manner, has proven disastrous for the working-class movement.

Historical roots

Thinking back, we can look at the McCarthy period as one historic conjuncture when such divisions were forced into the ways social movements thought about and actively addressed structural inequalities. And we are still living with the consequences today. Historians such as Clarence Lang, Robbie Lieberman, Gerald Horne, Rosemary Feurer as well as others have indirectly or directly argued that one of the great successes of the McCarthy period – from a right-wing, anti-working class point of view – was the forced political split among the social movements which organized political activity around issues of race, class, or gender in the U.S. Of course McCarthyites hated all progressive political movements and saw civil rights activists (who may have ideologically supported capitalism or a least distanced themselves from anti-capitalist movements) as potential subversives.

Still, the outcome was to produce a split in the working-class politics of the popular front period (1930s and 1940s). Without detailing the popular front in all of its complexity and geographical diversity, my general argument is that the working class' main goal in the popular front – political unity of diverse social forces, strata, and demographics – implied the ideological and practical inter-connectivity or intersectionality of determinant social factors like race, class and gender. Here it is worth noting that many leftist objections to the popular front – then and now – aside from the disapproval of the Soviet connection, typically lay in its refusal to exclusively emphasize the class basis of exploitation. Political thinking that insisted on the dialectical inter-connectivity of the the three social systems was regarded as liberal or the revisionist attempt to confuse the class question, potentially in alliance with the ruling class.

Dialectics of intersectionality

This split forced by McCarthyite tactics wasn't simply political, or a split between liberals and radicals, however. It was a theoretical one that wouldn't begin to be remedied until activists and intellectuals in the 1980s and 1990s started again to talk about the intersection of non-class and class social factors, prompting a swift reaction again by the right in the so-called culture wars that included congressional hearings, attacks on universities, red-baiting and so on.

Without delving too much into the theory of intersectionality or tracing its historical formation, I want to emphasize the political implications of what I have described here as determining factors. In academic circles it is common in the cultural studies fields, especially when influenced by leftist politics, to see intersectionality as a basic theory of that discipline. Almost in the same breath, however, it is a well-worn practice to disparage Marxism as little more than economic determinism and view class as limited to a system or process of identity formation.

Criticisms of economic determinism have merit, but practical political experience in Marxist political movements reveals that such a claim is more often a diversion or a "straw man" argument – maybe innocent, maybe intentional. An analysis of capitalism that relies solely on interpreting the world through a class framework exclusively defined as economic, a methodology that is derived from economic determinism, strips the working class of its complexity and agency and discards political activity that is not directly related to relations of property as meaningless. More importantly, economic determinism does not account for social phenomena outside of narrowly defined parameters of property relations. Tactics and strategy derived form such a perspective typically result in sectarian and narrow political activities.

Without worrying about the motives of the critics of Marxism on these grounds, more thorough analysis of materialism and Marx's understanding of capitalist social processes can be found in the work of Marxist scholars like David Laibman (Deep History) and Bertell Ollman (Dance of the Dialectic). They would argue effectively that Marx's famous injunction about the primary determinant under capitalism, most deliberately elaborated in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, was less a definitive and direct concrete statement than an abstraction that described a general process that necessarily must include all of the specific social relations within a particular moment. Simply put, Marx's comment wasn't meant to obscure the complicated interaction of social factors such as those I am attempting to describe in this paper.

Marxist critic E. San Juan, influenced by Gramsci and others, offered a clear way to understand this interaction. Race, i.e., racial formation, is a historical and systemic process. It is a "relatively autonomous effectivity" in which "defining the economic grounding does not adequately nor fully explain how it concretely functions in a specific formation." Race served an ideological/cultural function within a hegemonic strategy "to construct subjects … whose actions will reproduce capitalist relations." It is a compilation of material, ideological and cultural practices that work both as a range and boundary line of common sense and a deliberately designed project. One goal is to produce a coalition, such as the type recently characterized by activist Bill Fletcher as the white nationalist majority Republican Party candidates will be seeking to form in opposition to President Obama.

A similar rethinking emerged in socialist feminist analysis of gender as a historically produced process. For example, historian Stephanie Coontz borrows Marx and Engels' explanation of the transformation of social relationships, or "modes of cooperation," under capitalism into "productive forces." Coontz explains that families, as sites of labor, expropriation, and construction of formative social identities (like gender), work as modes of cooperation. The most important kinds of labor humans do is not traditionally considered productive: nurturing or education, for example. The historical process of gender formation has produced ideological, cultural and material practices known as the gender division of labor, resulting in enduring unequal values and boundaries applied to the labor of men and women.

Thus, in the abstract, gender works also as a relatively autonomous ideological, cultural proactive to produce gendered subjects that will enable the reproduction of both capitalist relations and modes of cooperation that work toward that end. Like race, gender also works to reproduce itself, even when it is in contradiction to capitalist logics, and vice versa.

The Great Recession

How these processes work in the current moment can be in part expressed or understood through a look at the impacts of the Great Recession, a result of contradictions in the economic logic of capital in the current moment – specifically overproduction, anarchy of competition, financialization, or the immateriality of production of value, combined with more or less stagnant wage growth over the past two decades (see figure below).

By measuring the impact of the Great Recession (2007-1010) and the recovery on racially oppressed minorities and on women we can understand two basic features of the current moment: 1) levels of inequality deemed "normal" 2) and levels of inequality as they change during economic crisis. In addition, we should be able to infer how the response to the crisis was organized and whether or not it altered the impact of the recovery. In other words, did the recovery reflect the values, ideologies, cultural practices, etc. of the racial and gender formations prior to the crisis? Finally, we can examine some political implications.

Employment and job loss data, workforce segmentation, wages and benefits, and wealth are key factors that help measure and describe structural inequalities both quantitatively and qualitatively. (Note: underemployment, which officially includes part-time employment and multiple jobs required to make ends meet, adds another dimension to these economic questions but will not be dealt with here.)

To begin, in November 2007, the month before the Great Recession officially began, the national unemployment rate, stood at 4.7 percent; all adult men (4.1 percent), all adult women (4.1 percent), all teenagers (16.3 percent), whites (4.2 percent), Blacks (8.4 percent), and Hispanics (5.7 percent), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. American Indian unemployment stood at approximately 7.7 percent. Total economy-wide unemployment was about 7 million. These obvious structural inequalities preexisted in "normal" economic times.

Though women of workforce age outnumbered men by 8 million that year, men in the workforce outnumbered women by 11 million. (Other surveys taken in 2008 and 2009 give more parity to the two). African American women and Latinas tended to work in higher proportions that white women and the female population as a whole.

The gender wage gap in 2005, according to the 2006/7 State of Working America published by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), stood at 82 percent, i.e. women workers on average earned 82 cents of every dollar men earned. Women typically lose close to a half million dollars over the course of their working life due to the pay and benefits gap. The gap widened significantly when comparing men and women by race, with African American women and Latinas more likely (between one-third and two-fifths) earning in the lowest income brackets. Black families earned 59 cents, Latino families earned 62 cents, and American Indian/Alaska Native families made 59 cents for every dollar in income earned by a white family, according to the Applied Research Center (ARC). These measures of inequality can be extended to a parallel calculation of the receipt of employment benefits like health insurance and retirement savings or pensions and the value of those benefits.

(Black men and women and Latinos/as who were members of labor unions earned a "premium" that added between 2 and 4 dollars per hour to their pay packet, thus providing an economic mitigating factor for gender and racial disparity.)

In terms of wealth, as distinguished from wages or benefits, African American households were more than twice as likely in 2004 to hold zero net wealth than white households, according to EPI. About 30 percent of Black households as compared to 13 percent of whites. The median wealth gap between Black households as compared to whites in 2004 stood at 10 percent, i.e. middle-income Blacks held about 10 percent of the wealth of middle-income whites. EPI did not provide similar figures for Latinos, Asian Americans, American Indians, or racially mixed households. As EPI notes, "The vast and lasting disparity in the distribution of wealth between whites and blacks is indicative of the lasting legacy of discrimination."

In 2007, according to Census Bureau data, poverty in Black and Latino families was 22.1 percent and 19.7 percent, respectively.

The intersection of inequality by race and gender impacted households headed by women most. According to ARC, Almost 44 percent of single-mother headed Black families with children under 18 and 46.6 percent of single-mother headed Latino families with children under 18 were living in poverty, compared to 29.2 percent of similar white families.

Job security and benefits also reflect enormous inequalities. The concentration of people of color and women in certain occupations made them particularly vulnerable to economic crisis, specifically to layoffs, reduced hours, wages or benefits during the recession. According to ARC, 18 percent of people of color have retirement accounts, compared to 43.4 percent of whites. They are also less likely to be insured but more likely to be employed in highly physical work like construction, where injuries are more likely. In 2007, while 10.4 percent of white adults were uninsured, 19.4 percent of Blacks, 18.7 percent of Asians and 32.1 percent of Latinos had no insurance – either private, employer-based or government-sponsored.

Again this data paints a picture of structural inequality in a period of "normal" economic growth.

By October 2009, when unemployment peaked, the unemployment rates for adult men (10.7 percent) and whites (9.5 percent) rose in October. The jobless rates for adult women (8.1 percent), teenagers (27.6 percent), Blacks (15.7 percent), and Hispanics (13.1 percent). Today, total unemployment is double the 2007 figure.

African American unemployment would peak a few months later at 16.5 percent. Though in many African American majority urban areas the numbers would be much higher with few hopes for much improvement, except to leave. According to some estimates, the recession may be fueling a third great migration of African Americans back to the South. Unemployment among Latinos peaked at 13.2 percent; whites: 9.4 percent.

In 2009, official poverty jumped to 25.8 percent and 25.3 percent for African Americans and Latinos respectively. For whites, the poverty rate stood at under 10 percent at its peak, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

While some media reports reflected on a reversal of gender roles as men lost jobs during the recession, the true picture is much more complicated. Yes, women held about only three in 10 jobs in manufacturing and about 13 percent of construction jobs, according to the Center for Economic Policy Research, so they were less affected by the collapse of those sectors which in important ways drove the recession. Women also gained as the disproportionate benefiters of the continued growth of the healthcare sector during the recession, adding about 844,000 jobs, though a significant number in low-wage home healthcare work. In fact, it is worth observing that the one major growth sector during the recession depended largely on the structural inequality afforded by the gendered division of labor and the undervaluing of the work women have been assigned to realize higher profits.

With the health care exception, since the beginning of 2010, 81 percent of the jobs created in the recovery went to men. Men have gained back 263,000 manufacturing jobs and some in construction. When the recession began, CEPR found, men held only 23 percent of jobs in education and healthcare, but have gained 37 percent of jobs create in the past 13 months.

The state of Michigan in 2008 provides an interesting example of how the Great Recession impacted communities unequally. There, African Americans composed 14.2 percent of the auto work force, which at that time comprised about nine percent of the state's work force. The subsequent collapse of auto in the recession and the layoffs of thousands of workers and the renegotiation of contracts to put downward pressure on wages and benefits had a disproportionate impact on Black workers and families, accord to data compiled by the Applied Research Center in 2009. I am still waiting for the data on how the recovery of auto has reversed these numbers, if it has.

ARC also reported that 11 percent of Latinos work in the construction industry, which collapsed in the wake of the housing crisis and the credit crunch.

Significantly, higher proportions of African Americans and Latinos in service-related occupations also meant they were hardest hit by rising unemployment rates. For example, the proportion of Blacks and Latinos more than doubled, even tripled the percentage of whites in occupations like production, transportation, maintenance, construction, and moving jobs, which saw unemployment peak at around 15 and 16 percent. The proportion of Blacks and Latinos more than doubled the percentage of whites in service and low-wage sales and office occupations that peaked at close to 10 percent unemployment in the recession.

In addition African Americans and women are more likely to be found in public sector jobs, a portion of the labor force under vicious attack from right-wing ideologues and Republican Party policy makers. Here's a comment from a recent Department of Labor report on African American workers:

Black workers are more likely to be employed in the public sector than are either their white or Hispanic counterparts. In 2010, nearly 1 in 5 employed blacks worked for the government compared to 14.6 percent of whites and 11.0 percent of Hispanics. Conversely, blacks are less likely than Hispanics and nearly as likely as whites to work in the private sector, not including the self-employed. Few blacks are self-employed – only 3.8 percent reported being self-employed in 2010 – making them about half as likely to be self-employed as whites (7.4 percent).

Likewise women make up 57 percent of the public sector workforce overall, bearing the brunt of the steady losses of jobs in that sector and the political attack by Republicans. Since the recovery began and due to cuts demanded by Republican controlled governments, women lost two-thirds of the 284,000 public sector jobs lost, mostly in education and local government.

Combined with the general stagnation of real wages over the past 30 years, declining bargaining power of workers with the reduction of union density, this severe structural inequality had a huge impact on the onset of the recession in the first place. Analysis from several quarters, including David Harvey and our own Joe Sims linked the onset and severity of the recession to both the corrupt practices of Wall Street and structural inequalities, especially of race, in the economy. Disproportionately, banks targeted Blacks and Latinos for subprime loans. Disproportionately, those loans failed, driving the collapse of housing, credit, stocks, etc.

The "recovery"

CEPR notes that President Obama's recovery act provided some $60 billion in aid to states to prevent the worst budget disasters, and that was followed in 2010 with another $30 billion. Notably, however, Republican controlled state governments manufactured budget crises with both new rounds of tax cuts for the rich and vicious attacks on teachers and public sectors whom they blamed for the crisis. The recovery act also aimed to shore up the collapsing manufacturing sector and the construction sector with new investments in infrastructure, from roads and bridges to broadband and clean energy investments. Small business aid packages also were delivered.

Still, as the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity found, by November 2010, structural inequalities persisted for several months after the recovery officially began in early 2010. Unemployment among African Americans stood at 15.7 percent, Latinos 12.6 percent, whites, 8.8 percent. Women workers of these three racial groups seemed to do better than men, except for Latino women. Structurally lower wages for women workers could account for most of that difference, however.

One important data point, however, is the rate of procurement of government contracts under the recovery act. White business owners got 81.3 percent of the contracts worth 82.5 percent of government dollars. While this is slightly lower then their proportion in the U.S. economy as a whole, Black, Latino, and Asian owned businesses typically won proportionally far fewer recovery act government contracts. For example, while African Americans owned 7.1 percent of businesses in the country (about half of their representation in the population), Black-owned businesses got only 3.5 percent of recovery act contracts available. Latino owned businesses (8.3 percent of all U.S. businesses) got only 5.1 percent of the contracts. Asian American owned businesses (5.7 percent of the total) got a mere 3.3 percent.

Publicly, the general theoretical and political position of the Obama administration has been that a "rising tide lifts all boats." This metaphor typically is used to address class-specific symptomatic problems associated with capitalism's inherent inequalities. If we focus on class specific problems, the claim goes, because racial minorities and women are disproportionately represented in the working class, they will receive the benefits of such policies and white men won't be alienated by affirmative action policies they perceive as harming them or, at best, failing to address their specific concerns first as they are used to having done. Unfortunately, class-focused economic policy leaves structural inequalities by race and gender intact, preserving for the future the likelihood of experiences described above.

In less public settings, White House advisers understood the structural nature of the problem. Former White House economic adviser Christina Romer noted even before the Obama's inauguration that the infrastructure and state aid portions of the recovery act, along with its boost to anti-poverty programs, were designed to fall equally on those impacted by the recession. However, this hasn't been the case, primarily because of preexisting conditions (structural inequality) and because of the low-level of affirmative action embedded into the recovery act. Further, the size of the act was about $400 billion lower than what Romer had advocated during the transition period after the election, according to insider media accounts leaked after her departure.

Jared Bernstein, a former adviser to Vice President Biden, noted that political realism drove much of the economic policy, causing the White House to seek passage of a recovery act, and subsequent policy, it deemed politically possible rather than risking capital for larger or more aggressive interventions. The conditions of "political reality" are important to keep in mind, but also important is an understanding of the fact that inequality is part and parcel of that reality. The election of Obama delivered a blow to white racism and to the white nationalist united front, but it did not end structural inequality.

But if structural inequalities prompted the intensity of the recession (if not the recession itself), they are also driving the anemic recession, maybe even leading to a second dip. I think the focus on the lack of another massive stimulus package as detracted generally from this likelihood.

Structural inequalities require specific response

The political and theoretical implications of this data bears some examination. First, without going into too much detail, the broad movement that confronted and defeated the white nationalist united front needs to be mobilized for more than cosmetic changes. Will the large minority of whites (about 45 percent) who supported Obama's candidacy in 2008 also support structural change? The answer I think is no, and Obama doesn't seem willing to risk that, but an effort to make it happen needs to be made by the labor-led social movements. Structural inequalities have to be addressed. Serious thought has to be given to building popular support for an egalitarian program, avoiding typical leftist isolationism and defeatism and refusing to rely simply on the moral weight of the argument. New strategies and tactics have to be looked into.

Moving to a higher level of abstraction, this contradiction – structural inequality – reveals limits of capitalism that are ideologically and systematically insurmountable. I am not a doomsayer or a predictor of the end of capitalism under today's circumstance. The anti-capitalist movement, though growing in today's climate is fairly disorganized and small. By insurmountable I am suggesting that right-wing ideology and corporate aims are increasingly confronting working-class needs and aims for which few solutions or compromises seem available, as signaled most intensely by the fight over public sector workers, Medicare, Social Security, etc, as well as government paralysis on doing something about the ongoing jobs crisis.

According to labor activist Jonathan Tasini, corporate America is accumulating trillions of dollars waiting for better times and trying to continue to give the impression they are profitable concerns, when that money could be used to create jobs. It seems that sections of corporate America, in conjunction with their Republican allies, are holding the economy hostage for a greater say, greater control over the public coffers, public agencies, etc. Specifically, they may be targeting this administration, joining with Republican members of Congress to stall real action on recovery in order to win a more favorable balance of forces in the seat of power.

It seems increasingly clear that in addition to building and strengthening the anti-racist majority, labor and its social movement allies are demanding structural reforms that more directly challenge the power of corporate America, for example, tax reforms that are more progressive, single-payer health reform, Wall Street speculation taxes, regulations on carbon emissions, alternatives to Big Oil's domination of the energy sector, and more. However, few policies specifically designed to address the structural inequalities of race and gender appear at the top of the agenda.

Photo by PeoplesWorld.org/cc by 2.0/Flickr

Scott Martelle's The Fear Within Illustrates Communist's Humanity

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:05:00 +0000

Scott Martelle's The Fear Within: Spies, Commies, and American Democracy on Trial explains the trial of 12 leaders of the Communist Party USA in the context of the 1940-50's Red Scare. While the book does an excellent job documenting the trial itself, as Martelle cites numerous courtroom battles straight from reporters' notes and trial transcript, it really holds the readers' interest where it describes the lives of the people involved.

The book begins by examining the political atmosphere of the United States' post-World War II society. The period of time in which the U.S. and Soviet Union remained allies was swiftly dissolved by both the exposure of Soviet espionage as well as large corporate lobby groups' efforts to smear returning worker's desire to organize in their unions as a result of communist agitation.

An important observation is made early in the text: while there were members of the Communist Political Association who sought potential spies for the Soviet Union, including wartime Chair Earl Browder, such activity was not part of being a member of the CPUSA. Any illegal activity performed by persons who were communists was used to outlaw everyone's right to be a communist.

This was possible as long as communists were dehumanized, viewed as automatons who were not so much people as expressions of a monolithic "fifth column".

By explaining the trial of the CPUSA's leadership within the context of the Red Scare, The Fear Within shows that it was precisely this view that led to the conviction of the 12 defendants who were rounded up in the summer of 1948. By discounting defendant's testimony and that of several dozen witnesses, the CPUSA leaders were found guilty of advocating the violent overthrow of the government based on nothing more than the simplistic reading of the books they studied for theory.

Never mind the fact that the CPUSA's platform did not advocate violent revolution, or the fact their periodicals stated they fought to defend the people of the U.S., or even the presence of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln's portrait in their national office.

The prosecutors presented book after book, reading aloud from those which could not be submitted as evidence, emphasizing where communist theorists' stated that the governments of their time and place had to be overthrown, all the while neglecting the theory itself. In the face of strong political and economic opposition which bent communism into a menacing caricature, the defendants were unable to effectively communicate who they were as Marxists and how that theory really guided their lives.

In studying how the communists on trial actually lived, one readily identifies with what made them ordinary and finds what made them extraordinary worthy of praise.

One of the defendants, Robert Thompson, was a war hero.

Prior to his arrest for being the chair of the Communist Party's New York district Thompson was a staff sergeant in the U.S. army. He enlisted to fight fascism, something he had experience doing as part of the Abraham Lincoln brigade in Spain.

While deployed in New Guinea Thompson swam across a small river under enemy fire to get to a location where he could find cover and effectively return fire, protecting his patrol of five men who were still scrambling on the bank from which he departed. The others in his patrol were relieved from near constant fire and quickly followed Thompson, securing a bridgehead and surviving the fire-fight.

Thompson earned the Distinguished Service Cross for protecting his service.

Another communist on trial also excelled in struggle, his set in the U.S. south.

Benjamin Davis Jr., an African American member of the New York City Council, joined the CPUSA to continue his fight against racial injustice.

Growing up, Davis helped his father distribute a paper written for Georgia's African American community. When a town's postmaster refused to distribute the paper Davis would help his father deliver it door to door. Davis learned perseverance from his father and went on to earn a law degree from Harvard so he could assist his community from Atlanta. He became politically important and weathered frequent threats and racist vandalism as he practiced law.

Impressed by the CPUSA's post-conviction work in the Scottsboro trial, Davis decided to defend Angelo Herndon, an African American communist who was being tried for insurrection based on an outmoded law designed to thwart slave uprisings.

The trial was lost. The court's reflection of society's prejudices led to Herndon's being convicted for insurrection, and Martelle noted the case itself hauntingly foreshadowed the one which led to Davis' conviction.

One defendant whose life was most widely documented in The Fear Within was CPUSA Illinois Chair Gil Green.

When most of the CPUSA leadership was rounded up Green was vacationing with his family in a cabin in Wisconsin. They heard the news via radio as they sat lakeside at night. As the night progressed Gil, and his wife Lillian, talked quietly between pillows about how their life would change as their three children slept.

The trial was a strain on the family. Martelle used letters between Gil and Lil to show how everyone was affected. Lil was monitored and sometimes had fun making federal agents bake in their suits as her friends sat with her on the beach in the summer, but such playfulness was not common. The Green family was used to having Gil active in entertaining the three youngest members, neighbors remembering how he would play catch with his ten-year-old son, Danny, or give Josie, six, and Ralph, three, rides on the handlebars of his bicycle.

It took strong commitment and frequent letter-writing to keep the family together.

When Gil served his sentence, his youngest son had spent more than half his life without seeing his father. Upon being freed, Gil asked Ralph, then ten years old, "do you recognize me?"

"I think I do, Dad," the boy answered, in an emotional reunion on a New York courthouse's steps.

Martelle's detail is sure to be much appreciated by anyone, but I found this account particularly touching. Only a few days before I read it I was talking with the person who now holds the position Gil had in the CPUSA. I committed to taking notes for him on a conference call because he had a pressing duty as a father – the night of the call he would be supporting his daughter as she played her part in a music recital.

While the period we live in is different from the time documented in Scott Martelle's The Fear Within, ignorance of the most callous sort still persists. Despite all the pain people may have to blame broken and obsolete systems for the target of so many's scorn still remains other people.

It is good to read a book that discusses its subject in such context that it cannot help but teach those who read it a valuable lesson.

Book Review: Woody Guthrie: An American Radical

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 10:25:00 +0000

Woody Guthrie: An American Radical
by Will Kaufman
University of Illinois Press, 2011.

Was a big high wall there/ That tried to stop me;
A sign atop it said: ‘Private Property’.
But on the other side/ It didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me

In the annals of US folk culture, Woody Guthrie stands as both a father figure and an enigma. Composing biting songs of dissent simultaneous to allegories of our nation’s beauty, Guthrie has the distinction of being known today as a legend with a wide following, whereas in his own time he was followed by federal agents who viewed him as part of a folksinging conspiracy. Guthrie dedicated his life to fighting for the poor and working class but must be recalled as one who wandered through his responsibilities to the point of abandoning his first wife and children. While fighting for unions and against Jim Crow, he almost singlehandedly founded the modern protest song genre – but all too often sabotaged relevant components of it’s institutions with his propensity toward restlessness and infighting. The contradictions are maddening; Woody was deeply complex, shrouded in single-minded rebellion and a lifetime of folklore.

While historians of fairer heart than Will Kaufman may choose to focus on Guthrie’s populism and love of the land, in this well-paced and artfully composed biography, we are toured through the revolutionary core of the folk song revival and its leading exponent. The winding, multi-layered Left cultural movement of the 1930s and 40s grew from age-old folk songs before becoming infused with the radicalism of industrial toilers and the guiding hand of Marxism. It produced a relentless, daring body of work that not only protested the greed of capitalist exploitation but rang out in celebration of the workers’ pride. Woody Guthrie lived to create a repertoire exemplifying this fight for the common good and in order to do so thrust himself into the heart of organized labor, the early civil rights movement, the call for peace, the intensive battle against fascism and the struggle against right-wing oppression at home. Guthrie’s writing of both poetry and prose was prolific, almost obsessive, with his dissent nearly always worn proudly, just rude enough to be heard.

Woody Guthrie: American Radical opens with an introduction that offers some rationale for the drive toward Leftism Woody felt, exemplified by some of his song quotes and bits of prose, while also clarifying author Kaufman’s own journey through music and politics (Kaufman, in addition to being a university professor is also a singer and performing musician himself). Of Guthrie’s repertoire, Kaufman wrote: “His songs could have been sung anywhere from Camp Delt to Abu Gharib to the death-row cells of the Polunksky Unit in Texas…Instinctively I’d seized on Guthrie as a link to an almost forgotten America—perhaps an America never existed…”

With a tendency toward seeking out previously unseen lyrics and other rare Guthrie writings, Kaufman produces here a volume of great value to cultural workers and historians of both music and/or the Left. Most profoundly, Kaufman reels out the deep involvement Guthrie had with the Communist Party, initially in order to perform his song “Mr. Tom Mooney is Free,” written to commemorate the pardon of celebrated union activist Mooney who’d been wrongly imprisoned for over twenty years. And shortly thereafter met Will Geer with whom he would engage in much activism on behalf of migrant farmers in California.

Wonderful detail can be drawn from Kaufman’s account of this often cloudy period, particularly Guthrie’s connection to John Steinbeck and the fundraisers they engaged in together, especially ‘the Grapes of Wrath Benefit Concert’. And from the period song notebooks Kaufman examined in his research (he spent considerable time at the Woody Guthrie Archive in NY) one can find lyrics in which Guthrie reached for something often still out of grasp. Kaufman puts into focus the power of “This Land is Your Land” in its original phase: Guthrie’s song, initially called “God Blessed America for Me,” was composed during his anxiety-provoking cross-country trip to NY in the winter of 1939 as he contemplated the hungry and destitute migrants and the plight of a nation in the throes of depression. Irving Berlin’s song “God Bless America” somehow was all the rage. The hit record by Kate Smith blared from every jukebox and roadhouse but Guthrie saw in it not only a dangerous complacency but an even more dangerous blind patriotism.

Viewing Woody Guthrie as both a leader and a follower of the radical times in which he lived, Kaufman offers considerable background on other Communist cultural workers and cites the development of folksong within same. Woody’s devotion to the Party was conflicted at times and Kaufman offers a vision for Guthrie’s rationale about shifts in Party line in this period (i.e., hard-line to Popular Front and back). The presence of figures such as Alan Lomax, Leadbelly, Aunt Molly Jackson, composer Hanns Eisler, writer Dashiell Hammett, poet Walter Lowenfels and of course the Almanac Singers is poignant. In Kaufman’s hands the deeply relevant topical song book ‘Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People’ – a collaboration of Guthrie, Lomax and Pete Seeger—comes to life in these pages and his statement that it’s “reality is its core of anticapitalist anger that translates into Guthrie’s explicit call for socialist revolution,” is not simply telling but unique in the realm of Guthrie biographers.

Woody’s interconnectedness with the CPUSA is clear throughout this biography, well beyond the realm of 1940. Following the fascist invasion of the Soviet Union and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Party activism increased widely and the battle against Hitler was the distinct call. Guthrie’s work on this Second Popular Front is well documented here, his radio broadcasts, journalism, and songs such as “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave”, as well as his struggle with fleeting success and periods out to sea with the Merchant Marines. Kaufman, too, found newspaper articles which offer a contemporary insight into the work of the Almanac Singers, particularly an account by ‘Daily Worker’ columnist Mike Quinn who described a downtown subway ride with the Almanacs as they performed Woody’s song “The Sinking of the Reuben James” for the riders, who soon joined in on the chorus, all too aware of the perils of servicemen from the morning headlines.

Kaufman states, as have most other historians, that Woody Guthrie was never a member of the Communist Party, instead something of a cultural attaché in the best of times, citing that Woody did not have the discipline to be accepted (this reviewer disputes this following contact with Almanac Singer Sis Cunningham in 1998 who stated that the group, shortly after her arrival in NY, went to CP headquarters together to officially join the Party). However he brings to light something quite novel: Woody’s response to the post-1945 split between the hardliners and the group standing by moderate leader Earl Browder who had dissolved the Party into a Communist Political Association as an overture to the Roosevelt Administration during the War. Kaufman demonstrates that Guthrie wholeheartedly sided with the movement to re-establish the Party proper. Woody’s letters illustrate his anger as well as, in the same period, his growing concern about the sharp rightward turn of the nation during the early Cold War. Kaufman walks the reader through the minefield of Guthrie’s encounters with a broken, splintered Left in light of HUAC, the Tenney Committee, a rapidly deteriorating labor movement and the Peekskill Riot (which Guthrie was present for – a vocal opponent of the neo-fascist mob which attacked the concert-goers).

The world within the pages of Woody Guthrie: American Radical begins to close in on Guthrie as he experiences this assault on civil liberties concurrent to the beginnings of Huntington’s Chorea. While one is challenged with such a vivid picture of debilitating illness, it is offered here with the backdrop of the later 1950s through the ‘60s, wherein Woody’s legend began to truly take hold. First-person accounts, snippets of his writings and his diminishing trips beyond institutional walls all bring to the facts an image that is multi-faceted. There is an account of Bob Dylan attempting to mold himself into the second coming, frighteningly incorporating Woody’s jittery, spastic movements into his act at Folk City (!) which fits nicely into the accounts of Guthrie the Myth traveling across the Atlantic and beyond. Some legends are born, some are made. And Guthrie’s legend was both. As the vehicle which brought us from Old Left to the New, his was also wholly necessary.

Book Review: State Power and Democracy

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 10:14:00 +0000

State Power and Democracy Before and During the Presidency of George W. Bush
by Andrew Kolin.
New York, Macmillan/Palgrave, 2011.

In a week where the press is filled with stories of the FBI   preparing to “broaden” the power of its agents pretty much as they please to search for information on individuals and groups – to go through their garbage and put them under various forms as scrutiny that most citizens would consider harassment, Andrew Kolin’s impressive State Power and Democracy Before and During the Bush Administration is of special value and deserves as wide an audience as possible.

A political scientist with an orientation toward both philosophy and history, Kolin has written a narrative connecting the growth of state power in the U.S. with the undermining of the rights of citizens. While he starts literally at the beginning, the work after the first two chapters focuses on the post World War II era, where the Cold War served as the context for the huge expansion of repressive state power at home and abroad, culminating in the Bush administration’s use of the 9/11 attacks to both consolidate and export internationally what Kolin sees as a police state. Kolin’s understanding of the role that ideological and institutional anti-Communism played in the development of what he sees today as a police state is particularly cogent.

Kolin’s work reminds me most of three scholars who have addressed similar issues.

First, his interpretation in many respects echoes that of Randolph Bourne, the Columbia University philosophy student who watched in horror as many of his famous Professors became apologists for World War I and Woodrow Wilson’s definition of it as a war to “make the world safe for Democracy.”

Bourne argued powerfully that “war is the health of the state” and portrayed the state as a self-perpetuating, self-aggrandizing force, as against the nation and the people.

In conjunction with private wealth, Bourne contended that the state seeks to use both fear and avarice to foster a herd mentality that will concentrate its power at the expense of liberty and democracy.

Bourne’s work, in its general rejection of state action, reflected anarchist tendencies. I would say that Kolin does also to some extent, in his minimizing of the positive role of expanding state power in advancing political, social, and economic policies in the interests of the people. But, to be fair to Kolin, the positive role of an expanding government to serve and protect the general welfare has been undermined thanks largely to the militaristic anti-democratic policies he highlights.

Kolin’s work is also similar to that of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States in his debunking of the political power structure, whatever parties or individuals are leading government at a specific time.

Finally, his work reminds me most of a lesser known brilliant text written in the 1970s, Lawrence Wittner's Cold War America which chronicles the devastating effects of an international and domestic cold war consensus on the gains made by working people in the New Deal era and subsequently the devastating effects of the cold war induced Vietnam War on the civil rights movement, the peace movement and all social movements of the 1960s. It its later chapters, State Power and Democracy can be seen as a kind of sequel to Cold War America.

Kolin’s great strength is his accumulation of detailed evidence concerning what the agencies of the U.S. government were doing. As he writes, “though control experiments… and torture to break down the individual’s self worth, employing sensory deprivation to cause the victims to feel they were causing their own suffering” were developed by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, with the assistance of universities and hospital staffs whom the agency generously funded.

The sort of manuals that the press is discussing today have a long and sordid history long before the Bush II administration, appearing and re-appearing in Nixon and later Reagan era policies internationally and domestically.

Nor were the Democratic Party administrations of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton seriously different. Even in the background of the Watergate conspiracy, for example, little was done beyond expose to reign in state repression. In the Reagan years, the government learned to “live” with the exposes of its abuses, to do what public opinion and Congress often opposed its doing through both “private” and state sources of manipulation.

The last three chapters of Kolin’s work, portraying in great detail but the familiar and lesser known abuses of the Bush administration, the institutionalizing I would say of a state terroristic political culture in the name of fighting a “war against terrorism” (more open-ended than the Cold War).

Kolin concludes rather pessimistically, that the Obama administration has so far disappointed those saw it as a major break with the past. “With the Bush administration, America reached a perfected form of police state and while the Obama administration may initiate piecemeal reforms, it won’t disassemble its essence.”

But as the late Randolph Bourne wrote at the end of World War I, America is its people and its culture, not its state/government and those who profit by waving its flag and identifying that flag with the capitalist economic system and global military power.

Kolin concludes very positively with a call for “mass based democracy,” which “could eventually rules for the masses, not political and economic elites.”

But to move toward such a government, one must have both a concrete vision and organizational structure. Socialism in its theoretical/scientific form has been the vision/theory of such mass based democracy in the U.S. and through the world. Trade unions and political parties committed to that socialist vision (the latter more directly than the former) have been the instruments of the struggle for a workers or peoples government.

Although Kolin has little enthusiasm so far for the Obama administration (on the issues he addresses he has little reason to) this is a book that President Obama should read and could profit from. It would provide him with far better advice on the conduct of foreign policy and domestic civil liberties than his Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency and Justice Department advisors. Krolin defines what is a central problem of democracy in the United States and concludes with a call for the kind of government that really would produce "change we can believe in."