People Before Profit blog

Book Review: A Country Called Amreeka

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:00:00 +0000

A Country Called Amreeka: Arab Roots, American Stories
by Alia Malek
New York: Free Press, 2009

Few books published in the past 10 years or so which deal with the histories and lives of people of Arab descent actually deal with Arabic experiences in America. This fact leaves the impression that Arab people entered the American consciousness only after 2001. And while it is clear that predominant views of Arab peoples are typically distorted, stereotypical and organized to promote violence and animosity toward Arabic countries, many Americans have furthered refused careful examination of the experiences of Americans of Arab descent, both historical and contemporary, in this country. By detailing the lives of a number of different individuals in different contexts and times in America, Alia Malek's A Country Called Amreeka begins to fill in that gap in our collective understanding of our own history.

Alia Malek is a second generation American of Syrian background. She works as a civil rights attorney in Baltimore, but her writing sparkles as she brings to life the men and women who are the subjects of this book. Though Malek provides a space in which 11 men and women tell about their individual lives in Amreeka, the Arabic word for the US, they stand in in some ways for the 3.5 million people of Arab descent in this country. As she notes, these Americans are of Christian and Muslim background (of different sects). They live in all 50 states. Some are new immigrants; some came in the wave of the great migration to the US in the latter part of the 19th century. They are workers, business owners, teachers and students; they are our neighbors, co-workers, friends and relatives. They are voters, consumers, rich and poor.

"The purpose of this book isn't to separate them out," Malek explains, "but to fold their experience into the mosaic of American history and deepen our understanding of who we Americans are."

The book opens with the story of Ed Salem, a football star at the University of Alabama in the 1940s. Salem's family, who were Christians, had moved to the US a generation before from Lebanon and made this country their new home. Almost 100,000 people from Arabic-speaking countries entered the US in this time period, the vast majority of whom were Christians. Like immigrants from Europe, Salem's father, Yussef Salem El Ankar had arrived at Ellis Island. Confused by the pronunciation of his name, authorities there changed it to Joe Salem.

The Salem's moved to Birmingham, Alabama where a thriving Lebanese community existed within the racial hierarchies and violence of the mid-20th century South. When the civil rights movement challenged Southern Jim Crow laws, Salem and the Lebanese community found they were subjected to segregation and racial red-lining in housing.

In each of the stories, Malek sets the individual lives within a global, national and local context that tells as much about the individuals as it does about the communities they live in and the major social and cultural trends at the time. For example, Rabih AbuSahan, whose family sent him off to Iowa State University in the mid-1980s both as a way to avoid the violence that plagued their home country of Lebanon and to help him find more opportunities, struggled with the complexities of being gay, Muslim and from an Arabic country just after the first Gulf War (1991), the first World Trade Center bombing (1993) and the terrorist attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City (1995).

Because he lived and worked as a medical professional in Midwestern cities like Kansas City and Des Moines, Rabih felt isolated, Malek writes. His own religious values promoted a sense of self-hate because of his sexuality, and this combined with fears about how he would be treated by Americans generally as a result of the major confrontations between the US and Arabic countries. Racism, religious bigotry and homophobia seemed to be a powerful web he could only hide from rather than confront.

That is until he met other gay men of diverse backgrounds who had struggled with similar issues. He joined a group called "Men of Colors and Cultures Together" and began to meet and work with gay men who had struggled to reconcile their religious values with their sexuality and the views of their families. He met and worked with men who experienced racism and fought back with slogans like "Black is beautiful!"

While, according to Malek's narration, Rabih never fully resolves all the tensions, contradictions and challenges of being in America, he does finally start to make America his home when he joins the ongoing struggle for equality and erasing the hatreds that are so much a part of this country's history.

These are just two of the stories that make this book a worthwhile read. Richly told and beautifully written, this book is as valuable a contribution to the American story as Malek hopes it will be.

Book Review: The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream?

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:46:00 +0000

Originally from Diary of a Heartland Radical

I am using a text by Robert Perrucci and Earl Wysong called New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) in a course called "The Politics of Capital and Labor." The authors review and synthesize a variety of definitions of class from political theory and sociology.

Their answer to the question of what is class draws upon Marxian notions of relations of production, Max Weber's ideas about persons in various organizational positions, and the more conventional view of class as relating to the distribution of income, wealth, and power.

Using data reflecting their synthetic definition of class, the authors conclude that the portrait of a U.S. class system consisting of a small ruling class, a large "middle class," and a small percentage of economically and politically marginalized people is no longer an accurate way to describe society. The class system of the days of relative prosperity from the 1940s until the late 1960s, which looked like a diamond with a broad middle, has become like a class system looking like a "double diamond."

In this new class society, the first diamond, the top one, consists of the "privileged class" composed of a "super-class," "credentialed class managers," and "professionals." All together these representatives of privilege constitute about 20 percent of the population. All the others constitute a "new working class," some living in relative comfort but most engaged in wage labor, modest self-employment, or part-time work. This is the second diamond representing 80 percent of the population.

Students in my course have been debating some of the formulations but certain elements of the text have been uniformly accepted by them. First, everyone seems to accept the double-diamond metaphor as a way of conceptualizing the distribution of wealth, income, and power.

Those in the top diamond representing privilege are relatively assured that their sources of income and wealth are permanent. Their sustenance and family stability are assured while the other 80 percent, the model suggests, live economically marginal existences and in conditions of precariousness.

My students raise no objections about what Perrucci and Wysong regard as broadly accepted features of this new class system.

First, since the 1970s, there has been increasing class polarization. Gaps in distributions of wealth and income have grown. Real wages of workers have stagnated since the 1970s. In addition, workplace benefits have declined, including pensions. Permanent jobs have been replaced by contingent labor. The percentage of unionization of the work force has declined by two-thirds.

The authors cite a recent study that estimates that only one-fourth of jobs today are "good jobs," paying at least $16 an hour. And, on the other hand, the share of income and wealth accumulated by the top one percent or 10 percent or 20 percent, the entire privileged class, has risen. The rich have gotten richer while the poor poorer.

Second, since the 1980s, workers and their families have experienced downward mobility, that is their social and economic position has declined. This has occurred because stable, well paying jobs have disappeared due to outsourcing, capital flight, and deindustrialization. By any number of measures, the "American Dream" of helping one's children to move up the status ladder has been reversed.

Third, the increasing accumulation of wealth and power through tax cuts, deregulation of financialization, and declining government support for public services have encouraged the privileged to embark on class secession.

Increasingly, the authors suggest, the privileged class withdraws its support for public institutions as it funds its own private schools, libraries, recreational facilities, and additional social services. The rich build gated communities, electrify their fences, hire private guards to protect themselves, and create private institutions to replace public ones.

The authors refer to Robert Reich's "secession of the successful" which they say "combines traditional forms of physical and social separation and increasing numbers of privately provided services with the ideology of neoliberalism, an idea system of free market fundamentalism that encourages and legitimates hostility to public institutions." They conclude that "class secession today involves both a separatist social identity and a conscious secessionistic mentality."

The findings reported in The New Class Society about class in America are profound. Long-term trends in the United States since the 1970s have led to growing wealth and power at one pole and increasing immiseration at the other pole. The idea of a broad middle class is further away from reality than ever.

For the vast majority of Americans economic security is declining. And, most important, the privileged class, which has built its wealth and power on the growing immiseration of the new working class, is physically, financially, and ideologically seceding from the system that historically claimed to provide at least some institutional support for enrichment of the citizenry at large.

The authors also present data to show how the brutality of the new class society particularly impacts on people of color, women, immigrants, and other traditionally marginalized people.

While the task of my course is to study the underlying fundamental features of American society, particularly those bearing on political economy, the implications of this analysis for practical political work seem obvious.

First, progressives need to "make class analysis relevant to our organizing." This includes educating ourselves and those we work with about the ways in which society is divided into classes based upon how people are related to the workplace, the status and power of workers in different organizational positions, the distribution of wealth and income in society and the history of class in America.

Our educational work must show how class relates to race, gender and the environment. In the end we must construct a compelling vision for the abolition of our class divided society.

Second, progressives must articulate in every political setting those experiences of class that vast majorities of the people share.

Years ago Harry Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Capital demonstrated that work was being transformed by the capitalist system; that patterns of control of the minds and actions of workers were being increasingly controlled by a deepening division of labor, and that the work process, whether white collar or blue collar, service or manufacturing, was being homogenized. He and others called this process of work transformation, "proletarianization."

This historic development argues for a political strategy that prioritizes education about the growing commonality of work experience of those in the bottom 80 percent of the work force.

Third, progressives must articulate programs of education and action that seek to deepen understanding of barriers to solidarity resulting from race, gender, and even political ideology. Progressives must be more mindful of the different experiences of class in America, such as the historic role of slavery and immigrant labor, super-exploitation of African Americans and women, and ethnic discrimination.

The articulation of the different experiences of class through race and gender should be used to broaden understanding of how those differences were used to increase class exploitation of all those in the majority.

Fourth, progressives should began to analyze the ways in which many of the new right wing "tea party" activists share a common experience of class. Education and advocacy must more clearly be based upon an understanding of the common interests privileged class Republicans and Democrats share and the reality of interests shared by the new working class majority.

In the end there is no substitute for building what activists used to call "class consciousness." The realities of class exploitation, as Perrucci and Wysong suggest, seem more obvious than ever. They just need to become a central element of our political discourse.

Women in the History of the CPUSA

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:44:00 +0000

From its very outset, the struggle for women’s liberation has had deep connections to the development of the socialist movement. The Utopian Socialist Charles Fourier said famously that a society was judged by its treatment of women. The oppression of women in both work and in the home and the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality were dealt with by Marx and Engels over and over again in their works, not as something separate from the class struggle and the exploitation of the working class by capitalists but integral to it. In a number of European countries, Marxist socialist parties, in the tradition of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which even when it was banned and driven underground by Bismarck’s government, advocated women’s suffrage and women’s rights when liberal and even self-styled radical parties avoided the issue for fear of losing both their capitalist financial backers and male votes.

Women activists were a part of the socialist movement and organizations like the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) before women gained the right to vote, although the leaders of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) were no more militant or focused in their support for women’s suffrage and women’s rights than they were in the support for the civil rights and larger social economic liberation of the African American people. With the formation of the CPUSA and its development after 1919, militant women, like militant African Americans of both genders, were drawn to the CPUSA in far greater numbers than the declining Socialist Party or other groups on the left. These included very well-known activists like IWW leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and labor radical Mother Bloor. Flynn, for whom the martyred IWW people’s singer Joe Hill had written “Rebel Girl,” was to become the most famous CPUSA women leader of the interwar period and would become a Cold War political prisoner in the 1950s. She would end her long and distinguished life as chair of the CPUSA in the early 1960s after her release from prison. Her life can be contrasted with that of Margaret Sanger, a socialist champion of women’s reproductive rights before and during World War I. Both faced state repression. Sanger, though, left the socialist movement and became a founder of Planned Parenthood in the postwar era. While she remained a progressive, she found herself courting business interests and hobnobbing with overt racists, neo-Malthusian reactionaries, and more covert racist eugenicist whose support for birth control was rooted in a desire to limit working class and minority populations.

Women like the West Indian born Harlem activist Claudia Jones became in the 1930s important grassroots leaders of the CPUSA youth organizations and later the CPUSA itself. Mexican-American activist Emma Tenayucca led striking agricultural workers and was called La Pasionaria de Texas in late 1930s San Antonio.

Although male chauvinism certainly existed in the CPUSA, the party was really the only political party which used the concept of male chauvinism in any way and sought to combat it. In this sense it was continuing to develop a concept rooted in both the pre World War I socialist and feminist movements. At times these movements were allies, although often divided over what feminists saw as Socialist leadership’s sellout of women’s rights and male socialists saw as feminists bourgeois orientation, struggling for political rights and entry into elite positions at the expense of the larger working class.

The CPUSA actively bridged these differences, not with complete success by any means but to a greater degree than any other group. Within the women’s labor movement, the number of militant CPUSA affiliated women who became union leaders was from my readings greater in percentage terms than the number of CPUSA affiliated men, although this is very difficult to quantify since the deforming effects of anti-Communist policy meant that CPUSA affiliations were often unacknowledged. For example, in the rightly distinguished documentary, Union Maids, the stories of three 1930s women labor activists is told without, given the crippling effects of postwar McCarthyite repression, once mentioning that all three were CPUSA activist. In reality, they had have had to have been to have the support system to continue their struggles. In the documentary, all three women are asked to say what socialism meant and means to them. While this is done well, understanding the women and their conceptions of women’s rights, racism, sexism, and socialism is significantly reduced without any treatment of their CPUSA context.

Major histories of women in and of the CPUSA have yet to be written, just as systems of national health care, full employment policies, de jure and de facto gender equality, have yet to be established in the U.S. But there is much that we can say about the Communist contribution to gender equality and the negative effects of both anti-Communist ideology and policy in undermining the struggle for women’s rights as it has undermined all people’s struggles.

Even before World War II, Communist affiliated trade union women in the Communist led United Electrical Workers union (UE) established the first contract in which women workers were given a larger hourly increase than men in an attempt to make up for long-term gender inequality, an early practical example of what would decades later be called affirmative action. As the labor movement expanded and millions of new women workers were drawn into war work, Communist affiliated women in the industrial unions especially fought to protect women workers from on the job discrimination and also to support federal legislation to provide public daycare services – legislation which was the first of its kind but which conservative coalition opposition in Congress defunded to the point that it became little more than tokenism.

CPUSA affiliated women who were the wives of military personnel also organized around military bases in the U.S. (the great majority of the 15 million who served in the military did not see service, much less action abroad) to both fight against the effects of military segregation and also to oppose the racist violence that this segregation helped to engender, especially on Southern bases where legal segregation was in effect.

CPUSA affiliated women continued to play a leading role in struggles for labor’s rights, against racism, and for peace during the postwar Cold War era – in some respects an even larger role, given the success of the purges and blacklists and anti-Bill of Rights legislation frightening so many away from exercising their rights to freedom of speech, assembly and association. Communist affiliated women played an important role in the formation of Women’s Strike for Peace in the 1960s and the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) in the 1970s, even though institutional McCarthyism created in these and other organizations a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Earlier women like Mary Licht, whom I had the privilege of knowing through the CPUSA’s History Commission and who had participated nearly 50 years in the South at great risk in the defense of the Scottsboro Nine, dedicated the rest of their lives to the defense and development of the CPUSA. Women like Dorothy Burnham, African American scholar and intellectual whom I had and have the pleasure of knowing in the CPUSA, played important leadership roles. In 1968, when the CPUSA, after nearly three decades of repression and what would be considered internationally persecution, ran its first presidential candidate since 1940, Charlene Mitchell was the candidate at a time where the presidential candidate of any “third party” left or right, was virtually unknown.

The influence of political parties and social movements exists on many levels. Betty Friedan, for example, came from a middle-class Jewish American family in Illinois, attended an elite women’s college during World War II, and then did graduate work at Berkeley. There she became involved with a variety of political struggles, some of which included Communist Party activists, and then went to work for the left labor Federated Press. This media outlet attempted to provide for working class media what the Associated Press did for capitalist media. Friedan later wrote for the UE News and supported the Progressive Party in 1948. Betty Friedan grew up politically in a left movement and culture in which the CPUSA played the leading role. Although the postwar repression ended her career as a left labor journalist, she continued to try to write for women’s publications as she settled uncomfortably into the role of a suburban housewife.

Issues of male chauvinism inside the CPUSA were revived during the early Cold War era and discussed in party clubs and forums as the repression sought to build what French Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre called a ring of fire between Communists and the fellow citizens. Betty Friedan though her early 1960's work The Feminine Mystique played an essential role in articulating what in socialist and later Communist circles was called “the women question.” She always went to great lengths to hide or simply ignore her past as she became a celebrity, and aimed her feminism initially at college educated women frustrated with their lives as housewives whose labor was both unpaid and undervalued.

But one can find in her work an analysis of and resistance to ideologies of oppression that was a foundation of the Communist movement in the period in which she came of age politically. One can also find in her later work as a founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) an emphasis on building broad inclusive organizations and acting politically both inside and outside normal channels. She advocated lobbying for changes in the law, organizing mass protests to advance such changes and preparing the movement for future advances. This kind of strategic and tactical outlook also characterized the Communist Party and the larger left movement of which it was the leading force in her youth.

The relationship between Communists and feminists in the 1950s and 1960s was complex, usually cooperative, sometimes contradictory, as it had been much earlier between Socialists and feminists in the pre World War I era. The ideological straight jacket that Cold War politics sought to trap all Americans in made it difficult to acknowledge and understand those relationships, but understanding them is very important if both the successes and failures of the past are to serve as guides to contemporary struggles.

Angela Davis took a very different path than Betty Friedan. An African American scholar, intellectual/activist, Davis grew up in the postwar left and CPUSA political culture from which Friedan withdrew. She became a CPUSA member and supporter of the Black Panther Party, a teacher of philosophy and a political prisoner whose acquittal in the early 1970s was itself a victory over a generation of political repression. She also worked as an activist against racist and political repression, for comprehensive reform of the criminal justice system and for the full inclusion of African Americans and all other minority peoples in a pluralistic democratic American culture. Although Angela Davis later left the CPUSA, it was in a non polemical way and, unlike some others, she has never to my knowledge lent her name to anti-Communist activities. Davis became an international figure through her membership and leadership in the CPUSA for a generation. Her writings here and abroad reached large numbers with their eloquent portrayal of struggles in the U.S. against racism, male chauvinism, imperialism and war. She also reflected the CPUSA’s internationalist outlook by relating those struggles with peoples movements through the world.

One could go on and on listing the accomplishments of CPUSA and Communist movement affiliated women to peoples movements and struggles, both the famous like Anne Braden and Meridel LeSeur and the many Jimmy Higgins activists fighting in U.S. cities like Jersey City, New Jersey for tenants rights and rent control against condo developers and their political servants, campaigning to get city councils to pass resolutions for single payer health insurance, the establishment of nuclear free zones and nuclear disarmament, withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and the transfer of billions from the present military budget to peoples needs at the grassroots level. Although gender integration has advanced greatly in the U.S. in and through many organizations, the CPUSA remains an excellent example of its success. And the long-term struggles and achievements of CPUSA-affiliated women in the supportive atmosphere the CPUSA established and continues to establish were and are indispensable contributions to the success of the campaigns to advance women’s liberation in both the present and the future.

The FBI’s Surveillance of Congressman Vito Marcantonio

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:41:00 +0000

Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared in Our Right to Know (Fall/Winter 1984-85): 16-18.

Congressman Vito Marcantonio rose in the House of Representatives on January 11, 1940 and declared that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s practice of putting people’s names “on these index cards simply because of the views they may entertain, which may be contrary to the views entertained by Mr. [J. Edgar] Hoover and other people in power… is most dangerous to the constitutional rights of the American people.” He probably could not have guessed that shortly afterward, the FBI would begin to amass an index file on him. By the time he died, in 1954, the file contained 6,000 entries, 946 pages of which have been released under the Freedom of Information Act.

I sought access to this file as a source of information about the Congressman for a study of his remarkable political successes. Apart from learning that his father’s first name was Sanario (not Samuel, as the published sources had it), and that Marcantonio was exactly five-feet, five-inches tall (all other sources simply describe him as “short of stature”), I learned nothing from the FBI files that I had not already discovered from interviews and public documents. However, I did learn some things about the FBI and the state of America in that period.

Throughout his tenure in the House (1934-36, 1938-50), as a member of the American Labor Party representing East Harlem in New York City, Marcantonio’s radical views distinguished him from the vast majority of Congressional representatives. In 1950, his last year in office, he was the only representative who voted against United States participation in the Korean War and against the mounting number of contempt citations being the House Committee on Un-American Activities was by then handing down. His electoral defeat that year after seven terms resulted from a relentlessly prosecutorial campaign against him that began in 1946 and included almost daily vilification in the popular press of a type that would be unthinkable today. In 1947, the New York legislature changed the election laws to prevent candidates from running in the primaries of parties in which they were not registered. This meant that Marcantonio could no longer vie for the endorsement of the Democratic and Republican parties, a prize he won in one or both their primaries. Henceforth, Marc could run solely as the candidate of the American Labor Party, which was steadily being red baited out of existence. In 1950, he was defeated by a coalition candidate, James Donovan (a Tammany Hall Democrat) who ran on the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal party lines.

Marcantonio’s relations with the Communist Party and alleged Party members were close, documented, and open. Nonetheless the FBI deemed it necessary to include in his file an informant’s report that he “apparently has no objection to Communist Party officials appearing at his headquarters. George Blake [the district organizer of the Party for East Harlem] appears at V.M.’s headquarters many times during election campaign and the meetings are made openly with no attempts made to keep others from knowing who Blake is.” (“Blake” was a party name; his actual name was George Charney; he later wrote A Long Journey.) What was the FBI expecting to uncover? What was it attempting to document that was not already known publicly? Certainly not the truth. Information was fed into Marcantonio’s file without any effort to ascertain its veracity. For example, a Rosa Lamattina met with Marcantonio in 1941. This “confidential informant” advised the FBI that Marcantonio “has given up his Communist belief and has awakened to the fact that he is really Italian [and] that he has, if not already, become an active Fascist.” The FBI agents dutifully filed away this inane gossip.

The FBI seemed particularly interested in Marcantonio’s well known deep concern for Puerto Rican independence. When the Nationalist Party leader, Don Pedro Albizu Campos, was released from Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in 1943, Marcantonio arranged for his hospitalization in nearby Columbus Hospital. (Officially opened in 1896 by an order of Italian nuns that included Mother Cabrini, Columbus Hospital’s mission was to serve the Italian immigrants.) In 1944 an FBI memorandum indicated that Albizu Campos had been “warned by one Mother Superior Mary Bartholomew that someone had installed a listening device behind his bed. Vito Marcantonio [came to the hospital and] appropriated the microphone and threatened to produce it on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.” An associate of Albizu Campos told this author that before he ripped the device out from behind the Puerto Rican nationalist’s bed Marcantonio shouted into it a string of choice obscenities.

An FBI special agent-in-charge, listing speakers at a fundraising dinner in 1943 for the Communist Party-sponsored Spanish-language newspaper Pueblos Hispaños, at which Marcantonio was a keynote speaker, took the time to note that “a Pablo Neruda (?) read a poem in Spanish that he composed.” While this Federal bureaucrat did not know the identity of arguably the most famous Spanish-language poet, another seemed unaware of the name of Marcantonio’s opponent in 1950. Quoting an informant to the effect that Marcantonio had said, “Beating Bilbo-Donovan is important,” the entry explains, “It should be noted that in the 1950 election campaign VM’s opponents were BILBO and DONOVAN.” Actually, Marcantonio’s only opponent was the coalition candidate Donovan; Bilbo, of course, was the notorious racist Senator from Mississippi.

The FBI “data” on Marcantonio were supplied by a conglomeration of “confidential informants,” “paid informants,” “reliable informants,” and “unreliable informants” whose collections of false or unverified information became part of a record, which at great cost to American taxpayers’ money, that was leaked to right-wing journalists, and others intent on wrecking the American Left. There was, however, an even more sinister side to this operation. On the basis of the portion of the Marcantonio files that have been released, we know that in 1942, a cablegram from the United Railroad Workers Union of Puerto Rico (for whose members Marcantonio was attempting to obtain a pay increase) was intercepted by the Office of Radio and Cable Censorship; that in 1943, a telegram from Marcantonio to the Daily Worker advising that Francis E. Rivers (the first African American in New York State to run for a municipal court judgeship) was to “make his first appearance… kindly have reporter and photographer present,” was also intercepted; and that Marcantonio was “monitored by electronic devices on several occasions.” All of this occurred while Marcantonio was serving as a duly-elected U.S. Congressman.

On July 19, 1949, the New York World-Telegram published an article to the effect that Marcantonio, “the Red Congressman,” had met in a midtown Manhattan hotel with un-named persons to discuss an offer of $100,000 if he would run against New York Mayor O’Dwyer. Marcantonio promptly filed a libel suit and was successful; the case was upheld by the New York Supreme Court and was filed before the State Supreme Court of the United States. A newspaper reporter fro, the paper then contacted the FBI to ascertain whether “any association of Marcantonio with gangsters and racketeers could be provable by Court Record?” The FBI responded that “all 6,000 index cards were reviewed by a supervisor and over 300 files, felt to be pertinent, were pulled.” A blind memorandum was prepared for the newspaper representative setting forth appropriate public source material that might “help [the newspaper] in regard to the libel suit by Marcantonio.” Thus, the confidential files of a federal agency became a source of information for the defendant in a libel suit brought by a Congressman.

The nature of the FBI’s surveillance of Marcantonio is revealed clearly in the lead sentence of its recommendation for action on the World-Telegram’s request: “We have never conducted extensive investigations to determine conclusively the truth or falsity of the many allegations concerning Marcantonio’s tie-up with hoodlums, gangsters, and the underworld.”

Similarly, when the House of Representatives convened a Special House Committee to Investigate Campaign Expenditures in 1946 to consider whether alleged election-law violations should deprive Marcantonio of his seat (none were ever discovered), the assistant general counsel and chief investigator of the committee, Robert Barker, wrote to FBI Director Hoover: “I wish you would inform me whether or not this information [on Marcantonio’s Communist Party membership], whether negative or affirmative, may be furnished to me for presentation to the committee, since undoubtedly this question will be raised later on if a resolution is offered to bar or exclude Congressman Marcantonio from taking his seat.” Hoover replied that the “information contained in the files of the Bureau are [sic] confidential and cannot be released without the expressed authority of the Attorney General. I want you to know that I am forwarding a copy of your letter to the Attorney General for his information.” The same day that Hoover sent this letter to Barker, he sent a seven-page memorandum to the Attorney General containing information on Marcantonio’s connections to the Communist Party, a memorandum obviously intended for Barker. The House Committee was, of course, mandated to investigate alleged violations of election laws in Marcantonio’s campaign, not his political beliefs and affiliations. Barker reciprocated Hoover’s assistance by later depositing with the FBI a full transcript of the preliminary investigation he conducted for the House Committee.

As a Congressman, Marcantonio was afforded some protection from certain FBI tactics. In August 1948, a former special agent advised the Bureau that he had had lunch with Rep. H. Carl Anderson of Minnesota and that “Anderson had stated that his office was immediately adjacent to that of Congressman Marcantonio and that he would be glad at any time to have the Bureau utilize part of his office space for a mic installation?” An FBI official replied that “it would not be desirable to put any mic installation in a Congressman’s office.”

The primary purpose of the FBI files becomes evident from the following memorandum dated July 28, 1941 from Hoover to Assistant Attorney General Matthew P. McGuire: “I am transmitting herewith for your consideration a custodial dossier which had been prepared concerning Congressman Vito Marcantonio.” McGuire responded: “Being a citizen, the Congressman naturally is not subject to internment as an enemy alien in the event of war. [Therefore] you are advised that a copy of the dossier should not be furnished to the Special Defense Unit.” Marcantonio’s file reveals, however, that not every branch of the Federal government shared McGuire’s opinion. A confidential report from the Office of Naval Intelligence dated February 7, 1941 furnished a list of suspected Communist Party sympathizers for purposes of possible custodial detention. Marcantonio’s name appears on the list followed by the notation, “reported rabid Communist.”

In the postwar period, the question of Marcantonio’s consideration for detention arose once more. Again Hoover inquired, this time of an official of his own Bureau, D. M. Ladd, why Marcantonio’s name was not included in the Security Index, a list of Americans to be interned if the Attorney General declared a national emergency. Ladd replied, “our files fail to disclose any evidence to establish direct proof of Marcantonio’s membership in the Communist Party. It has been the practice of the Bureau not to institute security investigations on members of the U.S. Congress. In view of this, Marcantonio has not been considered for inclusion in the Security Index. It should be noted that Marcantonio is running for reelection this November. It is contemplated that should he be defeated, the Bureau would actively investigate him and consider including his name in the Security Index.” Eighteen days after Marcantonio’s defeat in his 1950 re-election bid, the special agent in charge for New York wrote Hoover that Marcantonio’s file had been changed. After the category “Communist,” an “X” now appeared, and after the category “TAB FOR DECOM” (detain—Communist), another “X.”

Why would the FBI have classified Marcantonio as a Communist when, by its own reckoning, there was no evidence that he was in fact a Party member? Part of the explanation lies in the FBI’s own definition of “Communism.” In a 117-page summary of Marcantonio’s activities and associations compiled in 1948, the first item under the heading “Miscellaneous Activities Reflecting [Marcantonio’s] Adherence to the Communist Party Line” reads “numerous reliable confidential informants and other sources have reported that through the years Marcantonio constantly has vilified and ridiculed the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in line with various smear campaigns of the Communist Party.”

In the final analysis, the conduct of the FBI, at least in the post-war period, was consonant with the law, particularly the McCarran Act, which prescribed penalties not only for Communists, but also for “sympathizers” and individuals and organizations holding views significantly parallel with those of the Communist Party.

Marcantonio spoke with prescience when he said in a speech before the third biennial conference of the International Labor Defense in 1941: “We know that the Fascist pattern which is being followed in this country is similar to that upon which Hitler and Mussolini rode into power, namely by starting with an attack upon Communists and the Communist Party. The road to Fascism begins with the destruction of the rights of Communists and of the Communist Party to function and exist. Consequently, we realize that the first attack on everybody’s freedoms by the native brand of American Fascism is on the Communists and on the rights of Communists, and [ILD] intends to defend the first victims of Fascism in America, the Communists in America and the Communist Party of America.”

Photo: Congressman Vito Marcantonio

Engels on Human Rights and the Abolition of Classes

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:35:00 +0000

In his book Anti-Dühring, Frederick Engels criticizes the social theories of the German philosopher and economist Eugen Dühring. In this article I discuss Engels' critique of Dühring's views on the origin of the concept of equality as well as his method of studying philosophical subjects.

First Engels discusses Dühring's method of analysis. Dühring thinks that by breaking a subject down to its most simple components, one can then, using mathematical axioms, logically deduce what its true nature is. Engels calls this the a priori method. With this method you logically deduce the nature of the object from its concept, not from the object itself. Then you reverse the process. You take your refurbished concept of the object and then judge the nature of the object by means of it instead of just studying the object itself. This is the garbage in, garbage out method.

In discussing equality, Dühring deduces the nature of society by logic "instead of from the real social relations of the people around him," as Engels notes. Dühring states that the simplest form of society consists of just two people. Here you have two human wills and at this stage the two are entirely equal to one another. From this Dühring says we can deduce "the development of the fundamental concepts of right." These two persons, by the way, are men.

Engels calls these two equal men "phantoms," because to be entirely equal they have to be free from any real life distinctions, including sexual distinctions and experiences, and thus become just abstract creations of Dühring's brain, not real people at all.

Now what would justify one person becoming subordinate to another if they are entirely equal? Well, if one of the two wills was, as Engels explains, "afflicted with inadequate self-determination," then Dühring allows for its subordination. In other words, the entirely equal wills are not entirely equal after all. Engels gives two more examples from Dühring in which equality is replaced by inequality and subordination: they are "when two persons are 'morally unequal'" and when they are unequal mentally. Of course, it is Herr Dühring and his followers who decide the moral and mental qualifications.

All this goes to show, Engels concludes, that Dühring has a shallow and botched outlook regarding the notion of equality. But this does not mean the idea of equality does not play "an important agitational role in the socialist movement of almost every country." The issue of human rights is the contemporary version of this debate. Following Engels, I would say that the "scientific content" of human rights "determines its value for proletarian agitation."

The scientific content will be established by studying the history of the idea of human rights (or equality). It took thousands of years to get from the ideas about equality in the ancient world to those that the socialist movement holds, or should hold, today. In the classical world of Greece and Rome inequality was as important as equality (slavery versus Roman citizenship, for example).

Christianity recognized a form of equality – all were equally subject to original sin. There was also, early on, the equality of "the elect." But these were really bogus forms of equality as far as this world was concerned. Then, when the Germans overran the Roman Empire, the ideals of human equality were set back for a thousand years due to the entrenchment of the feudal order.

Nevertheless, within that order a class was growing that would "become the standard-bearer of the modern demand for equality: the bourgeoisie." As a result of the maritime discoveries of the 15th century, markets began to grow and the handicraft industries of the Middle Ages expanded into manufacturing concerns. This economic revolution took place within the political structure of feudalism. The bourgeoisie began to champion the notion of human rights and equality because human labor qua labor was seen as of equal value, a fact recognized in bourgeoisie political economy as the law of value "according to which," Engels writes, "the value of a commodity is measured by the socially necessary labour embodied in it." This connection was first brought to light by Marx in Das Kapital, as Engels notes.

The social contradiction between the new economic order of capitalism and the feudal political order brought about the great revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Engels explains that "where economic relations required freedom and equality of rights, the political system opposed them at every step." It is interesting to note that the bourgeoisie was able to wrest power from the feudalists and is to day's dominant ruling class. The same contradiction on a higher level, this time between the working classes and the bourgeoisie, has not been resolved. But only a revolutionary transfer of political power to the workers can overcome the economic problems, as well as the social questions of war and imperialism, that mark the present period of bourgeois decline.

Engels points out that with the decline of the Roman Empire and the development of independent states, each claiming the same right to nationhood as the others, and being, in the bourgeois world at least, on similar levels of development, the notion of equality gave way to the idea of universal human rights. That "universal human rights" are basically bourgeois rights is illustrated by the fact that "the American constitution, the first to recognize the rights of man, in the same breath confirms the slavery of the coloured races existing in America: class privileges are proscribed, race privileges sanctioned."

The logical extension of the call for the abolition of class privileges by the bourgeoisie is the working class's call for the abolition of classes themselves. There are two aspects to the demand for equality made by working people. The first is a protest against the poverty and oppression of workers as compared to the wealth and power of the rich. This first aspect is spontaneous and "is simply an expression of the revolutionary instinct" of oppressed people. The second aspect is derived from the bourgeoisie's own ideals and demand for equality in face of the feudal order and is put forth "in order to stir up the workers against the capitalists with the aid of the capitalists' own assertions." In both cases, according to Engels, the real demand of the workers is not class equality but the abolition of classes. Any demand other than that, he says, "passes into absurdity."

What Engels has tried to show is that our modern notions of human rights and human equality are not eternal verities that hold true for every time and place. Both the bourgeois and proletarian versions are historical products. So are the views of the Taliban, for example, on the treatment of women and the rights of non-Islamic people, or those of some South Africans on the number of wives a man can have. These views, as well as those we call "modern," by which we mean "Western" in their capitalist or working-class incarnations, developed as a result of "definite historical conditions that in turn themselves presuppose a long previous history."

Those values, therefore, we take for granted are the product of a specific historical trajectory in which they functioned to bring about and stabilize the world capitalist system. Engels says, quoting Marx, if the modern notion of human rights "already possesses the fixity of a popular prejudice," this is due to the continuing influence of the Enlightenment on our times.

The task of socialists today is to agitate for truly effective universal human rights – and these include the right to a living income, to health, to food, housing and education, and to live in a world at peace – attainable once and for all through the abolition of classes.

Marxism, Queer Theory and the Love Debate

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:28:00 +0000

Most debate regarding queer identity is erroneously focused on whether persons who do not conform to traditional gender activity or heterosexual relationships are acting on natural impulses. The only reason this would be of concern is if one is locked into debate within the frame developed by the conservative intelligent design paradigm, in which what is "natural" is synonymous with what is right. Plenty of human activity, such as activity taken as part of philosophical praxis or the most passionate practice of religion, involve the higher mental state of many people and are not criticized for being so complex. Love and life activity belong in this category, and queer identity can transcend the current debate regarding its practice if we regard it properly.

The philosophy of Marxism can provide a new frame with which queer activity can be positively supported.

For the purpose of this article, queer activity will refer to a person's expressing gender and/or sexuality in a way not traditionally linked to his or her biological sex, as defined in queer theory.

Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels had little to say directly regarding queer theory. Personally, both philosophers expressed a disdain for gay relationships. Engels wrote to Marx criticizing the efforts of Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, who worked for gay rights, and Marx wrote to Engels deriding Jean Baptista von Schweitzer, a gay labor organizer, because of his sexuality.

It is wrong to ignore the short-comings of Marx and Engels.

However, it would also be wrong to believe their personal prejudices supercede the emancipation promised by the theory they developed. Many of their own works begin the deconstruction of gender, and Marxism's basic premises are supportive of the realization of queer people's equality.

Fredrich Engels' "The Origin of The Family, Private Property, and The State" provides us with the most comprehensive examination of gender roles in early Marxism. In the book, Engels examines the different roles males and females exhibit depending on the society in which they lived. These gender roles were linked to the division of labor in both society and in the household.

Engels' later additions to the book include anthropological examinations of societies which were at different stages of development than the developed world was at the time, revealing cultures in which female members acted as men did in the developed world, and where males behaved in ways more like the developed world's women.

"The Origin of The Family, Private Property, and The State" revealed that, while male and female biological differences were real, gender was a social construct stemming from the organization of families in specific economic systems.

Another important observation, regarding sexuality, is made in Engels' book. Engels addressed same-sex intercourse in ancient Greece and other Mediterranean cultures. Although he was keen to point out that that intercourse was between adults and minors, and condemned the non-consensual act, he also posited that the practice of same-sex intercourse was, at times, a result of social conditions. This suggests, perhaps inadvertently, the possibility of two consenting adults forming a queer relationship.

Such observations would not be made by such a prominent theorist again in quite some time.

With queer theory's introduction, the implications of "The Origin of The Family, Private Property, and The State" were examined again. Modern Marxist queer theorists have further developed queer theory along lines which allow us to develop a greater argument for the equality of queer people. Perhaps one of the most notable Marxist queer theory works of recent years is Kevin Floyd's "Reification of Desire." The book is incredibly complex, but it is borne from an important observation made by those who have synthesized Marxism and queer studies.

What Marxist queer theorists have done is united Georg Lukacs' idea of reification, in which people forget that things which seem to be natural and static are actually socially created, with the idea of heteronormativity. This unity provides insight as to why many people find it normal to question why queer people exist while not realizing it is equally valid to question why heteronormative people, people who act in traditional gender roles, exist.

The recognition of gender as a social construct, and sexuality as a phenomena many people experience as something more fluid than bound, clashes with the restrictive frame progressives have had to react to thus far in the love debate. The debate grows, leaving what seemed like a controversy about same-sex relationships, and brings into the fold queer identity and sexuality. Not only are female-female partnerships part of the debate, but so are masculine-masculine partnerships, agender and feminine partnerships, and gender queer people, who express gender in ways not tied to their biological sex, as well as others.

The frame constructed by the conservative intelligent design theory is shattered in the face of such complexity.

The debate should not be confined to whether gender or sexuality is biologically determined, as that frame fails to account for the reality of many queer people's experience altogether. Continuing to speak in such terms, or react to such terms by simply taking the opposite position, traps us and keeps us from forming our own, transcendent frame.

How does Marxism provide a new frame with which queer activity can be positively supported?

At Marxism's root is the desire to make real the consciousness of the individual. Human beings are recognized as beings with a consciousness that surpasses other animals, and to have such an exceptional consciousness is what makes us human. Marx states this when he asserts, in his early work "The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844" that conscious activity is our species-activity. Only when human beings are emancipated, and able to unite their will with action, do they feel satisfied.

It was also in that work that he first examined alienation in detail, defining alienation as the process by which a person's will is subverted by engaging in activity which does not match the person's desires.

Heteronormativity, therefor, is a form of alienation. It enforces this alienation among all competent persons, restricting them from the possibility of queer identity and love. Heteronormativity is antithetical to emancipation and the freedom of adults to chose their life-activity.

Regardless of any individual view of gender or sexuality, queer people's experience is real. As a person's being queer does not limit other people's ability to express themselves, the claim that queer activity is unnatural and should be repressed should not be responded to in a way that invalidates the experience of any queer person. As people are queer, and have constructed loving queer relationships that satisfy them, anti-queer organizations cannot justify their position with any sort of appeal to science, but must present a real, pertinent reason queer love is to be forbidden.

If the debate is framed this way, anti-queer organizations must admit their objections are rooted in personal beliefs, such as their interpretation of religion, and the debate becomes more honest. It becomes a debate over freedom, which is what it has really been about all along, and conservative, anti-queer proponents are framed as nothing more than people who chose to be supporters of oppression.

Further, heteronormativity is another form of alienation. It is both exhibited by what institutions do to restrict love, and what people who remain neutral fail to do to include queer people in our social environment. Racism, sexism and classism have continued to exist as forms of alienation in similar ways, and all people who have experienced such oppression share a common struggle with queer people.

The struggle for queer rights is also our struggle.

Tolerance is not enough. Marxism insists society represent all forms of love.

Have a Happy Valentine's Day!

Some Notes on Poverty and the Responsibility of Government

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:09:00 +0000

Over a decade ago Victor Perlo wrote, in his definitive work on Economics of Racism, that: "Poverty is a fully logical feature of capitalism, more completely than in earlier exploitative societies..." Why "more completely"? Because under capitalism the labor power of the worker is subject to the vicissitudes of the market like any other commodity. By and large workers have no right to be employed at a livable wage that would allow them to subsist above the poverty level.

With the era of deregulation, ushered in by President Reagan and the ultra right, there was also deindustrialization that created rust bowls throughout the industrial heartland of our country. Massive movements of capital further aggravated uneven, regional economic development patterns that led to the creation of new pockets of poverty and unprecedented urban deterioration in formerly industrial areas. The plant closings of basic industries brought about a dramatic decrease of the tax base for city governments thus leading to the closing of public schools, hospitals and cut backs in municipal services. Whole working class neighborhoods, in areas like Detroit, were turned into ghost towns of dilapidated buildings. In every major city one encountered untold numbers of abandoned buildings in virtually every block.

Looking at these regions today (after nearly 40 years of trade liberalization, corporate welfare in the form of tax cuts and globalization) over 25 percent of the nation's counties per-capita income is half the national average. Today the number of counties falling below the national average in terms of per-capita income is increasing; and of course so is unemployment, depressed wages and growing dependency on government transfer payments. Particularly hit by this economic distress are areas located in the major industrial centers, in timber, agricultural, mineral and energy resources and regions of the Deep South, the eastern coal belt and along our borders.

The U.S. Census Bureau released in November, 2009 a report on poverty, healthcare insurance and unemployment. This report covers the period the period 2007-2008 and makes the following points:

That there are 39,108,422 people living in poverty in the United States. States with the largest cities are of course the hardest hit. E.g. California has 4,781,201, New York 2,595,816, Florida 2,375,225, Ohio 1,489,314, Pennsylvania 1,454,240, Michigan 1,402,738 and Georgia 1,388,959 people living in dire poverty.

13,240,870 people who live in poverty are under 18. Also living in poverty are 8,549,526 who are five to 17 years old and 4,369,698 who are under the age of five.

Many of those who live in poverty are without health insurance, and this is particularly true of the unemployed. From 2007-2008 health insurance increased to 10.8 percent and 21.3 million persons for non-Hispanic Whites from 10.4 percent and 20.5 million persons in 2007. There was 7.3 million uninsured African Americans in 2008 which was a decrease from 8.1 million in 2007. From 2007-2008 the number of Whites uninsured remained at about 14.6 million. This gives a total of 43.2 million uninsured men, women and children. It is estimated that about 46,000 will die this year because they can't afford to buy health insurance.

Unemployment just dropped below 10 percent but for African Americans over 20 years of age its up by 17.6 percent. Representative Chellie Pingree, Maine's First District Democrat made this comment: "...Instead of bailing out the big banks and Wall Street firms that got us into this mess, we need to focus on the small businesses that actually create jobs in this country. I was pleased that the President last week proposed redirecting money from the TARP program toward community banks to make it easier for them to lend businesses. But there is much more that needs to be done to create jobs...across the country." (Portland News Center, Feb. 1, 2010).

These conditions cry out for a peoples full employment program. Otherwise poverty will increase and working class families will sink deeper and deeper into the mire of social misery. We are not a nation of small shop keepers so while getting the banks to release loans to small businesses will create some jobs it will fall far short of the kind of massive government funded jobs creation programs needed. Dean Baker, director of the Center for Economic Policy correctly noted that we have an unemployment crisis "...because billionaire investors are able to buy their way into and control the public debate..." (See PW article "It's an unemployment crisis, not a deficit crisis," by John Wojcik, Feb. 10, 2010.)

In the last eight years we have seen one of the most massive transfers of wealth from the working masses to the wealthy few in the history of our country, consequently economic reforms must be focused on jobs and job creation as well as instituting anti-trust measures and bringing an end to the rule of the Wall Street barons.

(Photo by Daveybot, courtesy Flickr, cc by 2.0)

Eight Rough and Random Thoughts on Socialism

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 17:25:00 +0000

(1) Socialism has its material roots in the inability of capitalism to solve humanity's problems. Working people gravitate toward a radical critique of society out of necessity, out of a sense that the existing arrangements of society (people don't necessarily call it capitalism) fail to fulfill their material and spiritual needs. It is no coincidence that around the time of the economic meltdown last fall, public opinion polls showed growing support for socialism.

I think this gravitation towards radical change is closely connected to the end of an era in which U.S. capitalism was relatively stable and provided reasonable economic security on the one hand and to the beginning of a new era - of uncertainty, instability, economic crises, and, not least, political possibility on the other.

Economic crises alone, however, do not prepare the soil for revolutionary change, though they're important. The soil is prepared via the cumulative impact of a series of crises (economic, political, social, and moral), taking place over time, which erode people's confidence in capitalism's capacity to meet humanity's needs and sustain life on our planet.

(2) Our vision of socialism is a work in progress. It is shaped by new economic conditions, new technologies (the internet) new dangers and challenges (global warming), new sensibilities (the desire for democracy) and new social forces (new social movements) as well the actual experience of countries trying to build socialism - positive and negative.

At the end of his life, Engels wrote (this was one of a series of letters Engels wrote to friends to undo a dogmatic interpretation of historical materialism on the part of young Marxists of his time), "To my mind, the ‘so called socialist society' is not anything immutable. Like all social formations, it should be conceived in a state of flux and change."

We should take this to heart. Our socialist vision should have a contemporary and dynamic feel; it should be rooted in today's conditions.

Some will say that this means revising or throwing out Marxism's principles and methodology. While that could be a danger, in my view the greater danger is to think that Marxism can stand still, rest self-satisfied, and repeat old formulas in the face of new developments and experience. Such "Marxism" is empty of meaning and irrelevant on the U.S. political scene.

Our task, therefore, is to further develop Marxism in a dialectical and historical spirit, with an eye to bringing everything in line with current realities, trends, and sensibilities. Such a critical posture means modifying and updating our concepts – of socialism, strategy, tactics, and more - in line with today's realities.

(3) In the 20th century the Soviet Union became the universal model of socialism. This universalization came at a price - it narrowed down our ability to think creatively and "outside the box."

Although we always noted the more favorable factors for socialism in our country (no encirclement by hostile powers, high level of economic development, democratic traditions, etc.), in many ways, we still clung to the Soviet model.

Such an approach can't be laid on the doorstep of Marx or Lenin. Lenin on more than one occasion objected strongly to the idea of a universal path to and model of socialism. He insisted that socialism and the socialist road would vary from country to country.

Unfortunately, we failed to fully digest his views, in part because the Soviet Union was the first land of socialism and decisive in Hitler's defeat in World War II, and in part because we had too rigid an understanding of Marxism and its laws (tendencies) of development.

The events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, however, compelled us to reexamine the notion of a universal socialist model. While further study is necessary, one thing is clear: there are no universal models and socialism in one or another country will succeed to the degree that it bears a deep imprint of that country's history, politics, economics, customs, and culture.

If it has a "foreign" feel, people will reject it. Even where our vision includes general features that mirror other socialist societies (for example, public ownership of the means of production), these will be modified in the concrete process of constructing a new society.

Both successful and unsuccessful socialist revolutions offer lessons, but in no case can those experiences be uncritically imported into our context.

(4) The transition to socialism will mark an end to one stage of struggle and the beginning of a new one. In this stage, the struggle is to qualitatively expand and deepen economic security, working class and people's democracy and unity, egalitarian relations (not leveling) in every sphere of life, and human freedom in both a collective and individual sense.

I don't frame the matter in this way to replace the more traditional notion, in which the transition to socialism is distinguished by a revolutionary shift of class power from the capitalist class to the working class and democratic movement. What I want to do is to correct a one-sidedness in our thinking.

A transfer in class power - which will more likely be a series of contested moments during which qualitative changes in power relations in favor of the working class and its allies take place rather than "the great revolutionary/to the barricades day" – is absolutely necessary, but it is not a sufficient condition for a successful transition to and consolidation of socialism.

In fact, a singular emphasis on the question of class power (a means), at the expense of social processes and social aims (economic improvement in people's lives, working class and people's democracy, rough equality, and freedom and solidarity), can lead – did lead – to distortions in socialist societies.

Thus aims and processes have to be organically integrated into and accented at every phase of socialism's development.

(5) Socialism's essence isn't reducible to property/ownership relations and across-the-board socialization. Although those are the structural foundations of socialist society, by themselves they don't constitute socialism.

To put it differently, property/ownership relations and socialization of the means of production create only the possibility for a socialist society. But it fully develops only to the degree that working people exchange alienation and powerlessness for engagement, empowerment and full democratic participation.

In my view, working class initiative and a sense of real ownership of social property, a transformed socialist state, and society are as much the sinew of socialism as are legal ownership of the economy, structures of representation and power, and socialization. The latter without the former leaves socialism stillborn, while the former without the latter is idealism.

Lenin wrote,
"... socialism cannot be reduced to economics alone. A foundation - socialist production – is essential for the abolition of national oppression (in our context racial and national oppression), but this foundation must also carry a democratically organized state, a democratic army, etc. By transforming capitalism into socialism the proletariat (working class sw) creates the possibility of abolishing national oppression; the possibility becomes reality "only" – "only!" – with the establishment of full democracy in all spheres." (my italics sw).

Note the weight that Lenin attaches to democracy in socialist society and working class initiative. Do we share his view? To a degree, but I would argue that a re-centering of the working class and people's democracy at the core of our socialist vision is a necessary corrective.

(6) While the political leadership of communist, socialist and left parties and social movements is vital, in the past, our understanding of our leading role came close to substituting ourselves for the wide-ranging participation and leadership of masses of people and for a vibrant public space in which these same people gather, compare ideas, and take action.

Obviously, if this is so, we should go back to the drawing board. I did and this is what I came up with. Our role in coalition with a broader left will be to deepen our connections to the main organizations of working people, to find timely solutions to pressing problems (transformation and democratization of the state, reorganization of the economy, undoing centuries of inequality, resetting our international relations, global warming and more), to utilize a creative and critical Marxism to analyze concrete developments, to struggle for unity – working class, multi-racial, all people's, and so forth, and to convey in everything we do a complete confidence in the creative capacities and desires of millions of people building a new society.

This last element latter was missing in some of the socialist countries of the 20th century, in no small part because the communists fell victim to a siege mentality, arising from encirclement and cold and hot war. As a result, there was a tendency to "circle the wagons" and turn the working class into a passive, and increasingly jaded observer of socialism, especially when the deeds and performance of communists didn't match their ideals and ideological claims.

(7) The process of radical change is inevitably very messy; pure forms are only found in textbooks. Think of the major turning points in our nation's history – every one was complex and contradictory, from the war for independence, to the Civil War, the Depression, the Civil Rights movement, and more.

The struggle for socialism will be complex too, and will bring a broad and diverse coalition with varied outlooks and interests into motion. And while we fight for the leadership of the multi-racial, multi-national working class in the coalition and for its deep imprint on the political process, we also search for strategic and tactical alliances. At times this dual task will cause tensions, sometimes strongly felt ones, but the resolution of these tensions is condition for radical change.

(8) The economic model of 21st century socialism should give priority to sustainability, not growth without limits. Socialist production can't be narrowly focused on inputs and outputs, nor should purely quantitative criteria be used to measure efficiency and determine economic goals. New socialist production (and consumption) models are imperative. Both must economize on natural resources and protect the planet and its various ecological systems. The future of living things that inhabit this earth could depend on it.

That said, we cannot wait for socialism to address the dangers of climate change and environmental degradation. That must be done now. We are approaching tipping points which if reached will give global warming a momentum that human actions will have little or no control over.

Standing in the way, as you would guess, is right wing extremism and powerful global corporations – energy, military, and otherwise. And only a broad movement of the working class in close alliance with the African American, Mexican American and other oppressed peoples, women, youth, seniors other social movements, and some sections of business – big and small stands a ghost's chance of defeating this entrenched and powerful political bloc and, in doing so, open a road to socialism.