People Before Profit blog

Sandy Hook: Grieving the unthinkable

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 18:54:00 +0000

The Communist Party USA offers its most heartfelt condolences to the parents and families of the victims of the horrendous crime and tragedy which took place today at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut. To say that 20 young children were gunned down in their elementary school as were six adults - teachers, staff and principal - is so unspeakable and heinous it boggles the minds and hearts of our members as it does all Americans. We extend condolences to the entire community of Newtown and the state of Connecticut as all begin the terrible grieving process. Our members grieve with you and offer support today and the many hard days to come.

It should also be said that we recognize the incredible courage of teachers, staff, parents and the first responders, who held it together in order to usher the rest of the children to safety.

The ages of the overwhelming majority of the victims in this mass shooting make this crime particularly heartbreaking and tragic. Yet, too often our country has to grieve and question mass murder by a lone killer armed with guns and assault weapons - just this year in Oregon, Wisconsin and Colorado. Too often mass murder also occurs one by one, day by day on the streets of our cities and towns. President Barack Obama told the nation today, "As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it's an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago - these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children. And we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics."

As the country grapples with the politics and aftermath of Sandy Hook, let us not forget that there are some who profit from the manufacturing and peddling of assault weapons, dealing in fear and offering constitutional and political cover for the unthinkable. We will continue to work for bringing the necessary coalitions together that - through common sense and a common stance - work for a culture, government and country where such tragedies and crimes are indeed unthinkable and unheard of.

Photo: As hundreds stand outside St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church, which was filled to capacity, a couple embrace during a healing service held in for victims of an elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., Friday, Dec. 14, 2012. (AP/Charles Krupa)

Cliff Notes -- No Grand Bargain on the backs of the Working Class

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 05:58:00 +0000

Report to CPUSA teleconference Dec. 4, 2012

Introduction -- We are facing a critical battle. The so-called fiscal cliff, and the possibility of a grand bargain to avoid it, can be a turning point.

A lot of good material is available, though it rarely penetrates the mainstream media. (provide links at the end?)

What is the fiscal cliff -- As a result of legislation passed by Congress in 2011, a number of events are scheduled for January 1:

Ending Bush-era tax cuts and other tax breaks for the rich.
Ending so-called "middle class" tax cuts, including income and payroll tax
Ending federal unemployment benefits for long-term unemployed
Across-the-board discretionary spending cuts of $110B/year split between defense and non-defense spending.

Why is it called a cliff?. If nothing is done, the provisions of the 2011 legislation will result in a new recession. The tax increase on working families will mean cuts in consumer spending. The federal budget cuts, on top of the cuts already taking effect, will cause further suffering, and will impact on state and local governments. Along with the cuts in government spending, the reduced demands for goods and services will cause businesses to cut back and lay off workers, causing a further reduction in demand and lost tax revenue.

Is it an accurate term? No.

It's not a cliff because that won't happen all at once. It will take several months for the effects to gradually kick in. For that reason, the situation has been more accurately described as a slope than a cliff. This should strengthen the hand of the administration and anti-austerity forces.

But for the long-term unemployed, it is a human cliff. Two million jobless will lose benefits at the beginning of next year, and million more by April. (The "human cliff" metaphor comes from Sen. Sander Levin (D-MI), quoted in the Washington Post).

What's a better term? The legislation that goes into effect Jan. 1 has been better described as an austerity bomb.

Most economists agree that this is an austerity crisis -- ie, absent congressional action, $500B-$700B of government spending would be cut in 2013. These cuts in govt spending, whether direct payments for unemployment insurance or food stamps, or spending on goods and services, could trigger a new recession. But the so-called solutions, the grand bargains, focus on "...more austerity... the conversation in Washington tends to focus exclusively on achieving deficit reduction -- even though the economic threat we face in January is too much deficit reduction. " (Ezra Klein)

We should emphasize that last year's budget deals have already led to severe cuts. For example, from an email from the AFGE, the union that represents federal govt workers:

The cliff is high and millions of retirees, survivors, and the disabled are being thrown over it right now...

Cuts to the Social Security Administration core budget – not benefits but the money that keeps the lights on and allows AFGE members to help recipients – are already impacting millions of Americans.

Applications and appeals are backlogged, eligibility reviews are being postponed indefinitely, and offices across the country are being shut down. Americans filing for retirement, survivor, and disability benefits are forced to stretch their savings while sometimes waiting years for their benefits or coverage.

Equally importantly, 9,000 SSA employees will be cut by next summer and tens of thousands are facing furloughs. With 10,000 new people eligible for Social Security each day, we simply can't sacrifice these critical employees or the services they provide.

That's just one measure of the human cost and the economic cost of the budget cuts that are imposed at every level of government.

What to do? Even Republicans admit that austerity is bad -- when talking about the effects of cutting the military budget. Republicans say -- we cant cut military because it would cost jobs. Duh. Guess what? Cutting infrastructure costs jobs. Cutting renewable energy credits costs jobs. Cutting medical and scientific research costs jobs. Cutting safety net programs costs jobs. Cutting unemployment benefits would cost 300K jobs. Cutting the postal service costs jobs. Failing to support state and local governments costs jobs of teachers, firefighters and other essential workers.

Republicans say everything they do -- tax breaks for the rich, ending regulations, undermining health care -- is to create jobs. But their program is even more austerity, which will result in even more lost jobs and a new recession. That is the lesson of US history in the Great Depression. But we don't have to go back 80 years. In the current global capitalist crisis, Britain's conservative government enacted an austerity policy. Their slow recovery stalled, and Britain fell into a double-dip recession. And in continental Europe, the ECB and dominant German banks have imposed severe austerity, especially on the people of Greece and Spain. As a result, not only have the economies of those countries crashed, with 25% unemployment rates, but most of Europe is falling into recession.

The Republicans, fronting for corporate interests, say that if we don't cut the deficit, we will end up like Greece. Their cure is to impose an austerity package that will indeed make us like Greece -- depression level unemployment, no future for youth, massive cuts in health, education and public services, steep cuts in wages and pensions.

There is an alternative. Deal with the real economic crisis -- the lack of good jobs, and the depressed which makes poor use of our country's vast human and productive capacity.

The Obama administration has at least a serious proposal. This reportedly includes:

End Bush tax breaks for the rich.

Continue "middle class tax cuts"

$50 billion stimulus package in FY13

No immediate new spending cuts

Extension of unemployment insurance: (cost: $30 billion)

Increase in the debt limit to avoid requiring Congress to vote to increase

Many progressives argue for more extensive revenue measures, including higher tax rates on multi-millionaires, closing more corporate and loopholes, and a financial transaction tax. Some also argue for a reversal of previous spending cuts, and a much more extensive stimulus package, including substantial aid to state and city governments. Unions, progressive and working class organizations are also unanimous that there should be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

Embodying many of these features, 44 members of Congress have introduced H.Res. 733, calling for (1) no cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security, (2) increased tax rates on the rich and closing corporate loopholes, (3) significantly cutting defense spending and (4) strong levels of job-creating Federal investments in areas such as infrastructure and education. Progressive Caucus chair Keith Ellison says the progressives can only accept a deal that includes these features.

But -- how do we pay for it? What about the deficit?

What deficit are you talking about? We have a real deficit of jobs -- especially useful, productive jobs. We have a deficit of classroom teachers. A deficit of neighborhood health clinics and workers to staff them. A deficit of youth programs. A deficit of renewable energy. Any serious discussion of economic programs should address these deficits.

But OK. Let's talk about the federal budget deficit.

There are three main contributors to the deficit.

1) tax breaks for the rich -- we deal with that by letting those tax breaks expire, and we should go further and close other loopholes enjoyed by the suer-rich and their giant corporations.

2) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the accompanying explosion in all military spending -- we can deal with that by ending those wars and occupations around the world.

3) The deficit really exploded with the economic crisis in 2008 and the continuing depression economy. This is the main reason for the current federal and state deficits and for deficit projections for the next several years!. The depression has caused increased spending for unemployment insurance and other safety net program and, more important for the budget, it has caused a catastrophic drop in tax revenues for the federal, state and local governments.

The depressed economy -- the biggest cause of the ongoing deficits, would be made even worse by austerity budgets and reduced spending. The solution is to spend more now, even though that temporarily increases the deficit. Of course, it matters what you spend money on. Spending on tax breaks for the rich creates relatively few jobs, and the increased sale of yachts, mansions and private jets does nothing for the nation's environment or productivity. Spending on infrastructure, on energy, on protection from climate-related disasters creates more jobs and is doubly effective: it helps put people to work and revive the economy now, and it lays the basis for a stronger and more productive economy in the future.

Don't look at it as government spending. Look at it as investment. This isn't radical. It's business 101. Suppose you own a small construction company that uses a pickup truck to bring supplies to building sites. The truck is old and keeps breaking down, resulting in idle workers, job delays and lost income. So you take advantage of low interest rates and borrow the money for a new truck -- you make the payments out of the money saved on the job.

Robert Reich puts it like this:

If there was ever a time for America to borrow more in order to put our people back to work repairing our crumbling infrastructure and rebuilding our schools, it’s now.

Public investments that spur future job-growth and productivity shouldn’t even be included in measures of government spending to begin with. They’re justifiable as long as the return on those investments – a more educated and productive workforce, and a more efficient infrastructure, both generating more and better goods and services with fewer scarce resources – is higher than the cost of those investments.

In fact, we’d be nuts not to make these investments under these circumstances. No sane family equates spending on vacations with investing in their kids’ education. Yet that’s what we do in our federal budget.

We should remember why the so-called fiscal cliff is a crisis. It is not a deficit crisis. It is not a debt crisis. The crisis is that, starting January 1st, the government will spend too little, and will tax too much. That will reduce the deficit short-term, but will hurt tens of millions of families and will do immediate and long-term damage to the economy.

Right now, the federal government can borrow money at close to zero percent interest. Just ask those of us in the Northeast, after storm Sandy, about the need to put power lines underground, and for stronger defenses against flooding. We have construction workers idle, construction equipment sitting idle, and plenty of work that needs to be done. In New York and New Jersey alone, $80 billion worth of infrastructure repair and strengthening is needed. If the only obstacle is money, this should be a no brainer. Investing in America is the only way to overcome all the real deficits I talked about earlier. And it's an essential part of putting the economy on a sound footing so that government finances can be brought into balance.

If it's a no-brainer, how come it's not happening?

The negotiations in Washington over the January 1 austerity bomb, AKA fiscal cliff, is not a reasoned, academic discussion of economic policy. It is not even a knock-down, drag out political fight about economic policy. This is open, naked class war.

The case for austerity is couched in terms of controlling the deficit. I have already discussed that this is itself counter-productive. The priority right now should be on productive investments in people, infrastructure and environment -- even at the expense of a short-term increase in the deficit.

But let's say you are convinced the deficit is a problem that must be addressed NOW NOW NOW. Then certainly you would support the Obama proposals. They don't provide nearly enough investment, and they are very cautious in increased taxes on the super-rich and the Fortune 500 corporations. But like the Clinton administration in the 1990s, the Obama administration is serious about reducing the deficit -- we would argue it has given too much credence to the deficit reduction goal. And some of the saner sections of Wall Street and the ruling class support the administration approach.

Then look at the proposals put forward by Republican leaders McConnell and Boehner. They avoid tax increases on the very rich, while calling for unspecified loophole-closing. They eliminate mandatory spending cuts, and replace them with unspecified cuts in discretionary spending, which has already been cut to historic lows as a share of GDP. Their proposals to raise Medicare retirement age and charge higher premiums and cut the Social Security COLA hurt seniors but provide only small savings. In total, the Republican plan offers only $800B in savings over 10 years, much of it unspecified.

So the Republican position has little to do with deficit reduction. As Paul Krugman says, "This is pathetic – and these people are definitely not serious."

But of course, they are serious. Not about the deficit, but about their real goals. Their goals are exactly reflected in their proposals: preserve and extend tax breaks for the very rich and biggest corporations, undermine Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, deepen cuts already made in vital programs for education, infrastructure, research, and every other useful government function. And they are anti-tax only when it comes to their wealthy corporate masters. They increase taxes on the working class. And their cuts to federal programs such as education and Medicaid, will force states and cities to cut services and/or raise taxes, which fall most heavily on the working class.

For more than thirty years, they have been shouting, "deficit, deficit," then pursuing policies that increase the deficit, then using the deficit to attack popular programs that are essential for working people and effective government.

As Krugman says in another column, "The important thing to understand now is that while the election is over, the class war isn’t. The same people who bet big on Mr. Romney, and lost, are now trying to win by stealth — in the name of fiscal responsibility — the ground they failed to gain in an open election."

This is not simply partisan politics. I don't pretend to understand the thoughts and motives of congressional Republicans. But they faithfully represent the interests and the ideology of the most predatory sections of the ruling class -- the Wall Street banksters, the vulture capitalists, most of the biggest off-shoring, tax-dodging, outsourcing, union-busting, global-warming, environment-trashing corporations.

For thirty years, they have generously funded academics, think tanks and front groups that have raised alarms about runaway deficits and the future bankruptcy of Social Security. Between their ability to lavishly reward academics and opinion-makers that echo their line, and direct ownership of the mainstream media, corporate forces have made deficits and debt the number one public issue, to the exclusion of the real issues facing the American people.

The latest incarnation is a group of top CEOs operating under the name "Fix the Debt." One of the group is Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs paid the largest SEC fine in history for fraudulently deceiving investors about mortgage-backed securities. “Deficit reduction” and the “fiscal cliff” are in the same tradition of fraud. These CEOs don’t really care about the deficit. What these CEOs really care about is bigger tax breaks – for themselves and their corporations. (parphrased from ourfuture.org blog.)

What about all these projections of zillion-dollar debts crippling our grandchildren, and legions of greedy old people living high on the Social Security hog at the expense of the few working-age Americans? The scare stories are even more fraudulent than those concerning the current federal deficit, though space does not permit elaboration in this article. The propaganda about leaving our grandchildren in debt obscures the real threats to our grandchildren -- threats like global warming, decaying infrastructure, war, apartheid-like education and prison systems.

But in any case, the long-term funding of Social Security, Medicare or anything else have nothing to do with the immediate crisis, which is political, not economic. It is not necessary to solve problems that Social Security may or may not face 25 years from now, in order to agree on a simple resolution to the Jan 1. cut-off of unemployment benefits, payroll tax cuts, and government programs and services.

Summary -- A minimum program to prevent widespread hardship, to begin moving the economy forward, to meet real pressing needs, and to create jobs would include:

Allow Bush tax cuts to expire for the richest 2%, as well as closing their individual and corporate loopholes.

Preserve tax cuts for the 98% including the payroll tax cut.

No cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security,

Immediately renew the federal extended unemployment program and return it to the 99-week limit.

No cuts to domestic discretionary spending that meets real needs.

End wars and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and reverse the last decade's military buildup.

Promote economic growth with strong levels of job-creating Federal investments in infrastructure and education

Eliminate the unnecessary debt limit which has become a tool for economic sabotage

These or similar points are included in the programs being advanced by the AFL-CIO, progressive and human service organizations, peace and environmental groups, and rank-and-file activists who provided the energy that defeated the ultra right in last month's elections. The common focus is on the first three points.

Finally -- the outcome doesn't depend on who is right or wrong. It depends on what side is stronger. The elections were a strong ratification of taxing the most wealthy and not cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But big business, operating through the Republican leadership in Congress, wants to short stop the election mandate.

Large, visible, creative, public demands can have a decisive effect on the outcome. The degree of mass mobilization and organization can set the stage for the future battles throughout the next four years.

One of the most encouraging things about the November election was the mobilization around the Lame Duck session of Congress that began the morning after election day with a call by the AFL-CIO and other unions and progressive organizations resulting in actions that week in over two hundred cities, national call-in days to Congress, and visits to members of Congress by constituents. This mobilization is having an effect in the somewhat firmer position taken by the administration.

Take Action -- The CPUSA supports these initiatives, and has issued a Call to Action: No Grand Bargain on the backs of Working People .

Building on the initial congressional visits and call-ins, actions are being organized across the country on Monday, December 10. The first demands are: No tax breaks for the top two percent! No cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid!

To find the action near you visit the AFL-CIO website America Wants to Work or go to Move On or to The Action and post or find your local December 10 Candlelight Campaign Against Cuts.

In addition, a campaign is underway to get 218 members of Congress to sign a discharge petition that would require the House leadership to bring to the floor HR 15 The Middle Class Tax Cut Act. This act, already passed by the Senate, would extend the Bush tax cuts for the 98 percent.

The incredible organizing that resulted in the election victory must continue and expand to achieve priorities that say no to austerity and no to wars and put working people first. We need jobs not cuts.

Abortion and the 2012 Election: A History Lesson

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 13:17:00 +0000

November 29, 2012

I laughed out loud when Barak Obama won the 2012 Presidential Election, and not just because he won, though I was very happy that he did. I laughed because I had, for more than a year, been following the election through two lenses: that of a history teacher, and that of a seasoned feminist. Obama's victory boosted the power of many American citizens, and offered renewed hope for American women. We are moving in a positive direction as a nation. Here is my analysis.

Early during every term of my World History courses, I give my students some basic terminology. Pointing to Ancient Athens, I explain that Democracy aspires to grant political authority equally to all. Though fundamentally patriarchal and operating within the same stratified societies as other forms of government, democracies offer opportunities for groups without power to find their voices and transform power structures.

I then turn to Ancient Rome, and explain that a republic is a state where most adult citizens play some role in government. I discuss the Roman senate, where wealthy elite presided over a stratified society wherein plebeians had limited political power, and slaves had none. In its most basic form, republican government does not guarantee, or even suggest, equality. More than that, almost all republican governments have been patriarchal, with women of all classes barred from power, at home and in government.

The United States is , at least in theory, a democratic republic. I was amused how closely the 2012 election exemplified the history lessons I have taught my college students for nearly thirty years. Never, in my lifetime, have the lines been so clearly drawn. The Republican Party wanted a republic, wherein a tiny number of wealthy entities controlled both the government and the economy. Voting rights would be limited, and some groups of people would have no rights at all.

The Democrats argued for a democracy, wherein all people have rights, and the function of government is to ensure that (a) people's voices are heard, and that (b) their basic needs are met. Barack Obama wanted a government by the people and for the people. On many occasions he encouraged Americans to e-mail and tweet their Senators and representatives about particular issues. He encouraged community organization and supported labor unions. And, he supported women's right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term.

The fundamental issue of abortion was one of the most pivotal issues in 2012. The Republican platform explicitly banned all abortions, regardless of how a woman got pregnant.
Besides a college teacher, I am a product of the feminist movement of the 1970s and 80s. I cut my political teeth in the National Organization for Women. I attended "consciousness raising" sessions, where I learned that women's control over their fertility is their most basic power. I cheered Roe v. Wade, and assumed that safe abortions would forever be available for women who wanted or needed them. I joined the fight against the "pro-life" movement, which chipped away at Roe v. Wade.

In those days, feminists did not identify with one political party or another, and were skeptical of all male-dominated institutions. There were always a few pro-choice Republican women, and some pro-life Democrats. However, the 2012 Presidential election served as a centrifuge. Most feminists, even some who supported Republicans earlier, gravitated to the Democratic camp. The Democrats were unequivocally the pro-choice, pro-women's rights party.

Obama's message to women was clear on Roe v. Wade: "[T]his Supreme Court decision not only protects a woman's health and reproductive freedom, but also affirms a broader principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters. I remain committed to protecting a woman's right to choose and this fundamental constitutional right." (President Obama's statement marking the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, January 23, 2011).

Republicans who, despite noise about small government by their Tea Party minions, supported an authoritarian government run by rich and powerful men and corporations that would restrict women's power. Indeed, the government they wanted would be very small - consisting of a few very rich entities. It would, however, have tremendous power, and would include mechanisms to control the health care options and personal lives of all citizens under its tutelage.

Such a government would be truly republican in the classical sense, but certainly not democratic. Those on the bottom of the economic pyramid would have no rights or power at all. Women across the board would not control their bodies. The government and its related law enforcement mechanisms would control the economic purse strings of everyone. To make matters worse, they wrap their economic arguments in religious and moral garments to remain above criticism in the public's eyes.

The 2012 Republicans included in their platform an endorsement of the medically unsupported claim that fetuses can feel pain before they are viable. More than that, the platform stated "the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed." (GOP Platform). And, even though some Republicans censured Todd Akin for making insensitive remarks about rape and abortion, they supported a platform that makes no provisions for victims of rape and incest.

The Republicans did not stop with abortion. Their "sanctity of human life" proposal also opposed "the non-consensual withholding or withdrawal of care or treatment, including food and water, from people with disabilities, including newborns, as well as the elderly and infirm, just as we oppose active and passive euthanasia and assisted suicide.... (and) We oppose federal funding of embryonic stem cell research." (GOP Platform) So, not only would women be forbidden to seek abortions, people making end-of-life decisions would be impacted also, not to mention people who might be helped by embryonic stem cell research. According to the GOP, the rights of fertilized eggs supersede those of suffering adults. The same strictures would cover women seeking access to contraception, and couples pursuing in vitro fertilization, all of which would be forbidden if Republican lawmakers prevailed.

The 2012 Democratic victory made sure that, for now, Roe v. Wade will stand. Despite setbacks, women will be able to get legal abortions, although the cost will not be covered by Obamacare. So, why am I talking now? The Democrats, after all, won the presidential election. Obama supports Roe v. Wade, opposes parental notification for young women seeking abortions, and supports Planned Parenthood and embryonic stem cell research. The support of Obama and most Democrats does not, however, guarantee rights to anyone. Republican legislative initiatives will continue, and anti-abortion organizations, such as the infamous "Crisis Pregnancy Centers," will continue to pound their messages into vulnerable women already making difficult choices. There are still plenty of organized pro-life Democrats. As Jo Freeman, one of the first feminist scholars I read in the 1970s and 80s, points out, Democratic women might be forced to curb their commitment to their own agenda in favor of the party's goals, if those goals change from Obama's supportive stance. (Jo Freeman, "Who You Know Versus Who You Represent," http://www.jofreeman.com/polparties/femifluence.htm).

This is not, therefore, a time to bask in the 2012 Democratic victory. It is time to reload. We, the women who want to control our fertility, who demand affordable health care and end of life options, support democracy and all efforts to expand, not constrict ct, political power. We must forge new alliances and find new forums for our voices. We must not allow further er4osion of Roe v. Wade. We must maintain control over our fertility. It is our right, as members of this democratic republic.

Is Paul Ryan Making Americans More Favorably Inclined Toward Socialism?

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 12:17:00 +0000

Frank Zeidler would be delighted.

The last Socialist Party leader of a major American city, Zeider died in 2006 at the age of 93. But, to the end, the man who served three terms as the “red mayor” of Milwaukee always believed that it was only a matter of time before America began to renew its interest in socialism.

It seems that Zeidler was right.

A new Gallup Poll finds that socialism is now viewed positively by 39 percent of Americans, up from 36 percent in 2010. Among self-described liberals, socialism enjoyed a 62 percent positive rating, while 53 percent of Democrats and independent voters who lean Democratic gave socialism a thumb’s up.

Needless to say, this provoked the predictable fine whine of right-wing media. The conservative Washington Timesnewspaper declared: “Yes, Democrats, liberals favor socialism.” The Business Insider website announced: “Everything Republicans Fear About Democrats Is True.” William F. Buckley’s old magazine, National Review, allowed as how there is “much that is peculiar, and much that is worrying” about the new polling data.

That reactionary Republicans get a little hysterical at the mention of the word “socialism” is not news. But the reaction to their reaction is. No two groups of Americans talk so much about socialism in so many public settings these days as Republican candidates and conservative commentators. And this appears to be influencing the discourse.

Indeed, it is fair to say that nothing has done more to promote the cause of socialism than the ranting and raving of Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. It’s not just that the right has spread the word about socialism, raising the ideology’s profile to levels rarely experienced in recent decades—if ever—and associating the ideology with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, President Obama and a lot of other programs and people that Americans actually like. The fact that so many agitated, angry and—at least in some cases—politically toxic characters go apoplectic at the mere mention of the ideology has undoubtedly caused millions of Americans who don’t know much about socialism to say to themselves, “Anything that Paul Ryan does not like must have some merit.”

But I have to agree with the National Review assessment that the Gallup survey information “is worrying”—at least for conservatives.

The most significant increases in sympathy for socialism over the past two years—since the last time Gallup polled on economic and ideological terms such as “socialism” and “capitalism”—have been among self-identified “conservatives” and “Republicans.”

In 2010, only 20 percent of conservatives viewed socialism favorably. Today, the number is 25 percent. That’s right: one-quarter of American conservatives view socialism favorably.

Among Republicans, the increase has been slightly more notable. In 2010, only 17 percent of self-identified Republicans had a positive view of socialism. Now, that number had increased to 23 percent. So if you meet four Republicans, one of them is harboring socialist sentiments.

Shocking?

Not really.

Socialism has deep America roots—going back to when Tom Paine used his final pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, to outline a social-democratic model for establishing a just and equitable society. Socialist communes and political movements flourished in the United States during the first decades of the republic’s history, and the advocates for those movements found a home in the radical experiment that came to be known as the “Republican” Party.

Founded at Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854 by utopian socialists and militant abolitionists, the early Republican Partyincluded many German-American immigrants who arrived in the United States after the European revolutions that stirred in 1848 were repressed. The man who issued the call for that meeting in Ripon, and who is to this day frequently identified as a founding figure for the Republican Party, was Alvan Earle Bovay, a veteran radical who had led militant movements for land reform that urged the poor to organize politically and “Vote Yourself a Farm.”

Among the first Republicans were many allies and associates of socialist causes, and even of Karl Marx. Among their number was Joseph Weydemeyer, a former Prussian Army officer who would continue to correspond with Marx as he rose through the ranks as a military officer during the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln, like most of the leading Republicans of his day had read Marx and Engels in the pages of the Horace Greeley’s New York Herald Tribune (for which the two men wrote for many years as European correspondents). The sixteenth president spoke often about the superiority of labor to capital and was highly critical of concentrated wealth. Toward the end of the Civil War, the White House accepted the congratulations of Marx and his fellow London Communists after Lincoln’s 1864 re-election.

Lincoln was no Marxist. But, like a good many of the initial leaders of the Republican Party, he had been exposed to the ideas of Marx and Engels in the Tribune. In fact, Lincoln chose as one of his closest White House aides (and eventually as his assistant secretary of war) Charles Dana, Marx’s long-time editor. Famously, Dana once declared,“Everyone now is more or less a Socialist.”

In fairness, that’s not the case today.

There are still substantial numbers of Americans who do not view socialism positively, just as there are substantial numbers who do not view capitalism positively. But Americans are less inclined to be troubled by mentions of socialism, or by socialist and social democratic ideas today than in the past—just as Americans are less inclined (according to a recent CNN poll) to be unsettled by the mention of libertarianism, or by libertarian and libertarian-lite ideas. This is healthy. A republic is best served by differing ideas and ideals with regard to economic and social arrangements.

There will always be reactionaries like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan who try to make ideas scary. But when one in four Republicans have a positive reaction to the word “socialism,” it is pretty clear that the reactionaries are not doing any better in framing the economic and intellectual debate than they did on Election Day.

And, yes, that would have made Frank Zeidler, who was at once a great believer in socialism and a believer in the American experiment, a very happy man.

John Nichols is the author of The “S” Word:A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism (Verso).

Armistice Day Address, Blue Hill, Maine

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 12:42:00 +0000

Armistice Day
Blue Hill, Maine
November 10, 2012

Good morning. Thanks for being here. And thanks to Peninsula Peace & Justice for all their work-and, today, in particular for creating this space that serves to remind all who pass by of what our country is doing and what the greatest cost of war has been. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to speak.

I've been asked to speak thanks largely to my military background-not necessarily for my oratory skills or my considerable and undeniable charisma. Any credentials I have that might make my thoughts and words appropriate surely do arise from my military service and who I've become since---which is for better or worse, largely a function of that service. Who or what I have become I attribute to those four years I spent at the Naval Academy, and the four years to follow.

I want to use the occasion to make the case for us to continue, even redouble our efforts to bring real change-represented by turning away from militarism that took the lives of those we commemorate here.

I have a comforting expectation that my words will fall on sympathetic ears. Not so, if this were your typical Armistice Day parade or gathering happening all over the country this weekend. That is because my remarks don't celebrate or glorify the military, which is what we generally hear on this day. Quite the opposite. And, in as much as this is, in essence, a call to arms it also seems antithetical to Armistice Day---but it is not.

I am extremely proud to be a member of Veterans for Peace. Founded 27 years ago in Maine, VFP now has over 5000 members and more than 130 chapters. We are the only veterans' organization that is opposed to all war and we're dedicated to increasing awareness of the costs of war, to counter-recruiting, and to seeking justice for veterans and all victims of war.

We're so out of step that our Seattle Washington chapter had their application to march in the Auburn, Washington Veterans Day Parade denied this year. The Auburn city attorney stated that, "the city has had increasing concerns about Veterans for Peace...in past parades some members have carried peace flags."

Unfortunately, most Americans would be dismissive of VFP, maintaining we're naïve, that man is absolutely inherently violent and that, therefore, war is inevitable. My experience teaching peace has convinced me that, on the contrary, there are many cultures that are peaceful and that war is a matter of choice. We here in America resist that notion, I think, largely, because of our violent history. It is simply too uncomfortable for Americans to accept that wars aren't necessary, or that war often has been closer to our leaders' first option rather than their last. And so our history only contributes to the disheartening resolute march down the same beaten, blood-soaked path.

We Americans need to examine America's record honestly, just as we need to examine the American mythology of exceptionalism. Years ago after beginning to pay attention, I came to the conclusion that Martin Luther King, Jr's stinging rebuke on April 4, 1967, was right on. His country was the greatest purveyor of violence. That distinction is inarguably, I think, just as valid today.

Making the case for the U.S. being among the bloodiest of nations prior to WWII meets with considerable resistance, though it's pretty hard to dismiss the genocide of native Americans, the slave trade, our Civil War, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War to include war in the Philippines where the enemy's death toll was between 300,000 and 500,000, and WWI and II. Could they all be aberrations.

The picture since WWII is too fresh, at least in this septuagenarian's memory to deny. Between six and seven million people died in our three big wars since the "good" one-Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. A total of six to seven million!

Celebrated author and activist Brian Willson's research found that between 1945 and 2008 there have been 390 overt U.S. military interventions. Author William Blum writes that we've bombed 28 countries. When I was teaching I was fond of citing peace teacher Colman McCarthy's quiz. He asked his students how many of those incursions led to the establishment of a democratic government respectful of human rights. The answer not surprisingly is zero.

I have recently been reading John Tirman's, "The Deaths of Others", which addresses the question, "Why are Americans so indifferent to the deaths of others?" Tirman is the executive director of the Center for International Studies at MIT and was responsible for the surveys that found that an astonishing 655,000 deaths were attributable to the war in Iraq by 2006. That discovery prompted his investigation into the evident lack of sympathetic response in America to the bloodshed.

In part, Tirman explains, this callousness can be attributed to a conscious campaign by policy makers to assure the American public of the essential rightness of our wars and their benefits to those populations under siege, never mind the horrific death toll.

The selling of war to the American public is, of course, responsible for the victimization of the mostly young people commemorated here. No doubt, many, probably most, believed they were serving an admirable cause-that they were taking freedom and democracy to dark regions of the planet.

These lives lost, along with the physically and emotionally damaged who have returned represent the highest costs of our wars. As an aside: Can we ignore the suicides-nearly one military suicide a day for the first six months of 2012, 26 attempted suicides by active military personnel in July alone? But, the toll is extensive in many other ways we know.

There's the shear monetary drain and the associated "opportunity costs". Costs of our wars since 9/11 will be over $4 trillion. Trillions down a drain that might better have been dedicated to other problems---world poverty, climate change, renewable energy solutions.

Tirman has brought home to me the costs of wars and our militarism as experienced by others and the associated loss of our international stature. Americans may give little attention to our track record-they may be ignorant or oblivious, but citizens of other countries may not be so clueless.

It is well known in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East that the incidence of abnormal births in Fallujah and Basra is off the charts, though not generally known here. The abnormalities found among the newborn to over half the families recently surveyed in Fallujah included "heart defects, malformed limbs, swollen heads, and other grotesque deformities from which we'd rather turn away. An echo of the legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam where some 2-3 million victims live today, unable to take care of themselves.

In a world connected and informed as it is today, very little is secret. Not these histories in Iraq and Vietnam. Not the torture at the hands of our military, or CIA, or private contractors. Not the renditions, or drone assassinations, or kill lists. Not the crippling sanctions we have imposed on Iran based on totally unsubstantiated claims of a nuclear weapons program. It's all known.

Brian Willson believes that each of those killed at our hands leave behind an average of 5 loved ones who are traumatically conditioned to violence. We should ask what that means and how might those survivors feel about America. A family member of one of our errant drone attacks in Pakistan was quoted as saying, "It is beyond my imagination how they can lack all mercy and compassion, and carry on doing this for years. They are not human beings." We don't want to think about who "they" is.

It is useful to view the consequences of our vast military empire from the perspective of the "other"-through the eyes of the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Pakistanis. I do believe we'd have serious objections if the Chinese were to build a base on a Caribbean island as we are doing on the Korean island of Jeju where our friend Carolyn Coe will soon be going. I do believe there would be "push back" if toxic defoliants were sprayed over Miami. I do believe there would be serious blowback if suddenly Americans were essentially vaporized from above as is happening in Pakistan, and Yemen, and the Sudan, and Mali.

And I believe all these bases around the world cause far more mischief than do they make us safe.

So, yes, my experiences in the military and those years have led me to hate war, as Eisenhower did. For me it is personal. I have sat with and interviewed Inuit from Greenland who were displaced in Trail of Tears-like fashion to make way for Thule AB. I have sat with and interviewed people of Diego Garcia, a remote Indian Ocean island, who were evicted to make way for a gigantic base from which we have launched bombing missions over Iraq and Afghanistan. I have sat with and interviewed Marshall Islanders whose islands became uninhabitable thanks to our atomic weapons testing there. And I have sat with and interviewed Agent Orange victims and family members in Vietnam. The heart-wrenching stories I have heard, without being overly dramatic, have etched searing images. They are us and we are them and we ought to know their anguish.

For me it is personal. I did not know anyone commemorated here. But, I do know former Marine Jerry Stadtmiller, who was shot in the face in Vietnam and is blind, Duane Wagner who lost both legs to a grenade, Allen Hayes another double leg amputee, victim of a land-mine, Artie Guerrero who was shot four times in Vietnam and is confined to a wheelchair with trauma induced MS, Carlos Moleda, a Navy Seal paraplegic who was shot in Panama, Dan Jensen who lost a leg to a land mine. I knew well my three teammates, nine classmates, and my best friend, Don MacLaughlin whose names are all on the wall. I mourn for them. Just as I mourn the loss of these here. All victims of failed leadership. All victims of our failure to redirect our government.

Buffy Sainte-Marie has written, "He's the universal soldier. He's fighting for Canada, he's fighting for France and he's fighting for the U.S.A. He's the universal soldier and he really is to blame." But then, she goes on to say, "his orders come from far away no more. They come from here and there and you and me and brothers can't you see. This is not a way to put an end to war." In a youtube video Sainte-Marie says she suddenly realized that we all must take responsibility-that the soldiers take their orders from the generals, that the generals take their orders from the politicians, but the politicians take their orders from us. These days, more like the 1%; but we can't concede responsibility to them or allow them to prevail.

So I see all those commemorated here to be like you and me. It is right that they be mourned and not forgotten. They are you and me and we all must take responsibility and redouble our awareness and our work to stop what is being done in our names. I realize I'm talking to the choir here, but will say this regardless. We must build coalitions, with Occupiers, labor activists, education activists, with health care activists, marriage equality, women's rights, environmentalists, move to amend, all of us and we must persist and we must know that if not us, then who?

Dud Hendrick
Veterans for Peace
November 10, 2012

President Obama,

I have no illusions that this is other than a fool's errand, but at the urging of friends write regardless.

I am a Naval Academy graduate, a former Air Force officer, a Vietnam War vet, and an extremely proud member of Veterans for Peace. The attached copy of my speech delivered at an Armistice Day gathering in Blue Hill, Maine may be too long for you to read, but, in my immodest opinion, contains a perspective, the validity of which, our country's leadership must consider.

I do not anticipate a response, but would sure appreciate it-however concise-as a beacon of hope.

Sincerely-- a disillusioned American,

Dud Hendrick
P.O. Box 10
Deer Isle, Maine
04627

Defeat for the Right, Victory for the People & Democracy

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:53:00 +0000

We meet on the heels of an enormous people's victory. It was a long and bitterly contested battle in which the forces of inclusive democracy came out on top. The better angels of the American people spread their wings.

An African American president was reelected to the Presidency, the Democrats unexpectedly strengthened their hand in the Senate and House, new progressive voices, like Elizabeth Warren, are coming to Washington, and victories, including for marriage equality, occurred at the state level.

On the other end of the political divide, Romney lost decisively and right wing extremism, while not a completely spent force (and it probably never will be) was greatly weakened. Its candidates and, even more, its ideas were repudiated by tens of millions.

Moreover, the balance of power, that is, the ground on which people will fight shifted in a progressive direction, thanks in large measure to what might be the most notable development in this election - the further emergence (compared to 2008) of a multi-racial, male-female, working class-based electorate - an electorate that has the potential to renew and realign politics for decades to come.

Finally, millions come out of this election with a far deeper political understanding - and on a range of issues: corporate plunder and profiteering, racial and gender inequality, sexual orientation and gay marriage, immigrant, reproductive, and labor rights, the corrupting role of money in politics, global warming, and militarism and military adventures.

All this bodes well for the future.

Main front of the class struggle

The Communist Party said a year ago that the 2012 elections would be the main front of the class and democratic struggle and subsequent events have confirmed that fact.

Indeed, we argued (and not everyone on the left agreed and probably still don't) that defeating right-wing extremism was the key to moving the whole chain of democratic struggle forward.

Conversely, we said that if right-wing extremists came out victors in the elections, they would accelerate to warp speed a capitalist class counterrevolution against people's living standards, rights, and organizational capacities the likes that we haven't ever seen.

But that won't happen due to the fact that the voters - a rainbow coalition of largely working people - in their majority reelected the President.

Notable features

While many things went into Obama's victory, what was notable was the ability of the democratic movement to turn back Republican efforts to suppress the vote; what was of great import was the determination of the people's movement (with labor in the lead) to reach, educate, and turn out tens of millions of American voters on Election Day; what not surprising was the continuing, strategic, and sometimes underappreciated role of the African American people (93 per cent voted for the president) in the front ranks (at the head in many instances) of the struggle for progress and democracy.

What stands out was the resolve of women and especially single young women to defend their rights and democracy generally; what was heartening was the readiness of millions of white workers and trade unionists to stand with the President even in a weak economy and in the face of unrelenting and crude racist appeals.

Of fundamental importance was the dramatic show of strength of the Latino people on the national political stage; what was extraordinary was the turnout of the Asian and Pacific Islander people; what is easily lost sight of is the critical role of the Native American Indian people in Montana and North Dakota; what was encouraging was the continuing support of young and Jewish voters for the President.

What was extraordinary was skill and reach of Organizing for America; what was uplifting was the capacity of the American people to sift through the myriad of lies and deceptions that came from the Republican side; and, above all, what was of enormous significance was, as I mentioned above, the crystallization of a multi-racial, male-female, working class based electorate on a new level.

Mandate for progressive change

The Republicans were quick to say that no sweeping mandate emerges out of this election -- people voted for the status quo. Look at the results in the House, they say.

But apart from the House, where Republicans retained their majority (in part because of gerrymandering), there is no evidence to support their claim.

And if we look underneath the surface metrics of the elections, we find even less evidence. If anything the vote, and here I include more than a sliver of Romney supporters, is an insistent call for action on the most pressing problems facing the working class and people. That is the election's mandate.

This was not a vote in favor of destroying social programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; or rolling back domestic spending; or resolving the budget crisis on the people's backs.

It was instead a vote for jobs, housing relief, health care, withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan, an end to U.S.-led wars in the Middle East, preservation of the social safety net, health care access, reproductive rights, and equal pay for women, infrastructure renewal (an issue that took on greater importance after megastorm Sandy), marriage equality, a larger commitment to public education, a tax system in which the wealthiest families and corporations pay a much larger share, reform of our punitive and anti-democratic immigration laws, a reduction in unconscionable inequality, a legislative and electoral system that isn't awash with corporate money.

It was a vote for an America that stands for tolerance, inclusiveness, and fairness.

Immediate struggles

As I said, the Republicans are not on board with this assessment.

But the bigger problem at this moment is that politicians, including too many Democrats, major opinion makers, the corporate elite, and financial markets are saying that a "Grand Bargain," is called for, beginning with spending cuts and a weakening of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Otherwise the country, the grand bargainers claim, will fall off a "fiscal cliff," threatening the economic recovery, global markets, and the long-term viability of existing social programs.

But is this the case? Progressive and left economists say "No." They argue that the immediate crisis is not a fiscal one, but a jobs and growth crisis. Once people get back to work and once economic activity picks up the nation can turn its attention to the deficit.

In fact, any attempt to resolve the nation's fiscal problems too quickly via deep budget cuts, they warn, could very easily plunge the economy into a nosedive and worsen government finances - much like what is happening in many European countries.

The American people should not be stampeded into a "Grand Bargain" that punishes working and poor people.

Congress should feel compelled to do only three things in the lame duck session.

First, to renew lower taxes for the middle class, while allowing the Bush tax cut for the rich to expire.

Second, to launch a green designed program to rebuild coastal areas destroyed by the hurricane. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed people, skilled and unskilled, could be put to work.

Third, to extend unemployment benefits.

In January when the newly elected Congress convenes, it can give its full attention to the state of the economy. And again, jobs and a robust economic recovery should be at the top of its "to-do list."
In due time the nation's budgetary problems can and should be resolved, and resolved easily, if we go where the money is - the incomes of the wealthy, corporate profits, and the military budget.

Up and running

Without stopping to catch its breath after the long election grind, the AFL-CIO and its allies are organizing for a working-class and people's solution along these lines. But organized labor can't do it alone.

The coalition that mined the country for votes over the past several months and the rainbow electorate that elected the President must spring back into action.

A broad appeal to many who cast their ballots for Romney is in order too. The division in the country that obtained on November 6 should not be seen as some sort of hardened divide.

Moreover, the popular movement must bring its political and numerical weight to bear on Congress - Democrats and Republicans alike.

Not least, President Obama needs to hear from the tens of millions who reelected him. The President is the most popular politician in the country. Nobody has the political and moral authority that he has. He isn't a radical, but by the same token to classify him as a run-of-the-mill capitalist politician doesn't fit either. Of the Democratic Party presidents of the 20th century, none had the deep democratic sensibilities that he possesses. It is crucial that he lead this struggle.

But he can't and won't do it alone. He needs a mass movement that will nudge him forward as well as have his back as he goes up against recalcitrant Republicans, big sections of monopoly capital, and wavering centrist Democrats in Congress in this and in subsequent battles.

Which is where communists, socialists, and left and progressive people come into the picture. Our main task is to build broad people's unity, guarantee the participation of the key social and class forces, counter the right-wing narrative with a working-class and people's narrative, and bring forward an alternative program.

When we differ with the President, we should express our differences in a constructive way, that is, they shouldn't be so sweeping, unbalanced, unforgiving, and de-contextualized that they serve no purpose other than to demobilize people and take right wing extremists out of view.

In other words, political judgments of the president shouldn't be arrived at in a vacuum.

While the immediate struggle over the "Grand Bargain" is largely defensive, we should not lose sight of the fact that the election results create space to move to a more offensive posture in the coming year. Legislative initiatives to address unemployment, infrastructural renewal, immigration, public education, climate change, military conversion, and so forth can be real ground for struggle for millions of Americans.

We may not get everything we fight for; compromises may be necessary, but we make those judgments based on concrete circumstances. The main thing now is to reactivate the millions who went to the polls on Election Day.

Labor on a roll

In the post-election commentary, the most underreported factor is the role of the labor movement. And yet labor's role was critical.

For some time now our Party has recognized powerful progressive trends in the labor movement. In this election, the actions of labor brought these trends to a new level.

Labor had more "boots on the ground" than ever before - in its phone banks, in-plant and workplace organizing, and coalition efforts. Across the country, union members walked picket lines in the morning and joined ‘labor walks' for the President in the afternoon. And labor spent (as it has been doing for some time now) most of its money on building its own infrastructures and campaign organizations.

New and improved were labor's efforts to brings its own ongoing struggles into the election campaign. So, for example, teachers striking in Chicago injected questions of public education into the national election debate. Or to take another example, the national campaign to expose Bain Capital's role in closing a plant in Illinois, where labor helped make clear the choice between vulture capitalism and sound public investment in infrastructure and alternative energy for jobs.

Or to take still another example, unions across the country brought the urgency of jobs and economic recovery to the attention of the electorate as well as the candidates.

Labor's Super PAC "Workers Voice" also deepened its influence in the broader coalition that defeated the far right, allowing it to speak to many working people who are not union members.

No less important is that labor forged broad new ties with most of the constituent groups active in this election. It was not unusual at all to have local unions working shoulder to shoulder with OFA, Moveon, Planned Parenthood, the NAACP and many others in all phases of electoral work.

Finally, labor's election activity revealed its ongoing evolution into a social movement whose mission is to fight for the interests of the entire working class and people. Accordingly, labor's message combined the fight for jobs, the preservation of Social Security and Medicare, taxing the rich and corporations, investment in infrastructure, etc. with issues like racial equality and the fight against racism, women's rights, peace, student debt and education, marriage equality, and economic and social justice.

With the dust barely settled from the elections, virtually every union has hit the ground running. Unlike the 2008 election, labor is determined to continue the momentum of the 2012 election victories into the struggles of 2013, 2014 and beyond.

Dialectics of unity and diversity

What stood out in the election was the power of unity and diversity. That may seem contradictory, but it was the interaction of the two that turned what could have been a defeat into a people's victory.

Had Latinos not voted in such significant numbers in Nevada, Colorado and Florida, it is hard to see the President's path to victory. Had African Americans not turned out in record numbers it is tough to see how the President could have won in most of the battleground states. Had labor not mobilized its membership to vote in Ohio and other Rust Belt states, it's a stretch to see the President emerging triumphant on election night. Likewise, had single young women not cast their ballots in large numbers, it is difficult to visualize his victory.

I could go on, but by now I hope that I have made my point: each of the core forces - the working class, people of color, women and youth - played a decisive role in this election.

At the same time, it should also be said that as powerful as each of these forces undeniably and strategically is, it was the unity of this diverse coalition, stitched together in no small measure by the glue of class, equality, and democracy that, in the final analysis, powered the victory.

As exciting as this is, much still needs to be done to further empower, transform, and unify this diverse movement that moves largely on parallel lines into a mighty political and organizational force for economic justice and advanced democracy. For now anyway, it has nothing close to the messaging power or dense organizational network that the right wing and corporate America have. Herein lies the challenge for left and progressive forces in the labor and broader movement going forward.

GOP: it's more than demographics

While millions are celebrating, the right wing is going ballistic; they saw this election in existential terms.

Given the demographic and political changes taking place countrywide, the election for them was do or die; for many the defeat means that the world as they know it is coming to an end.

Now that may be a little too apocalyptic, but clearly right-wing extremism took a big hit. Some commentators have suggested that its best days are in the rear view mirror, and that it will give way to a more moderate version of the Republican Party.

Such a prognostication is premature, but it is almost inevitable that there will be tensions within the Republican Party and a contest over policy, image, and tone going forward. To simply take the position of unyielding opposition to President Obama will be difficult in current circumstances.

Furthermore, if demographic and political trends continue, old right-wing fortresses like Texas and Arizona will become swing states and Florida, Nevada, and Colorado will become comfortably blue.

Senator Lindsey Graham, no stranger to right-wing politics, put it this way: "The demographics race we're losing badly. We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term."

Steve Schmidt, campaign manager for John McCain in 2008 and MSNBC analyst, put it a little differently: "We have been horrific" towards Latinos, adding that the party needed to start speaking to that rising population with "respect."

What Schmidt and Graham conveniently forgot is that the GOP has been "horrific" and disrespectful toward people of color generally, beginning with African Americans, for a long time.

Its inclination to tone down anti-immigrant rhetoric and soften its position on immigration is to be welcomed, but more than a change in tone and position is necessary to improve the standing of the GOP in the Latino community.

It wasn't simply the harsh anti-immigration rhetoric and positions of Romney and other Republican candidates that turned off millions of Latino voters. It was also their positions on a broad range of issues.

Republican Party strategists forgot that Latinos are overwhelmingly a part of the U.S. multi-racial, multi national working class, albeit one that encounters not only class but racial and national oppression in their daily lives.

Moreover, Latinos in their majority are multi-generational Americans. The ancestral roots of some pre-date the nation's founding.

Thus, any idea that Latinos will bid farewell to their natural allies -African Americans, other people of color, and the labor movement - and make common cause with the GOP based on a few cosmetic changes grossly underestimates Latinos. It is nothing but fantasy, and racist and arrogant fantasy at that.

In fact, the Republicans' new interest in Latinos is nothing more than an updated version of their long-standing racist "divide and rule" strategy.

The Republican dilemma as to how to remain a relevant party in the 21st century will not be easily solved.

White workers and the vote

It is easy to dismiss white people, including white workers, as not only racist, but also backward on a range of issues, such as peace, gun control, reproductive rights, gay marriage, and so forth.

Looking at the white vote in this election provides ample evidence for this claim. The white vote for Romney reached historical highs (nearly 60 per cent), compared to earlier Democratic Party presidential candidates.

Worse still, close to 65 per cent of white men cast their vote for Romney. What motivated them can't be reduced to race alone. A substantial number of white people, I'm sure, bought the idea that in an underperforming economy Romney would be a better steward than the President. And there were other issues that motivated them to vote for Romney as well.

But, at the same time, for many of them, racism must have either taken up the biggest space in or is closely entwined with the bundle of resentments and wrong understandings that accounts for their voting behavior.

That a section of the American people and working class hold such views isn't a reason to feel superior or dismissive. Rather, for Communists and for everyone who hopes for a better future it is cause for profound concern.

After all, at the core of progress, in our view, is the unity of the multi-racial, multi-nation for Communists and for everyone who hopes for a better future al working class. A divided working class is not a serious threat to monopoly capital. It is certainly not the train to bring the country into the socialist station.

But lucky for us, this captures only one side of reality. For while racist ideas, old as well as updated, influenced the white voting patterns far more than we would like, anti-racist ideas among white people were evident too.

And they expressed themselves in the face of a full-throttle racist ideological offensive over the past four years to de-legitimize President Obama.

In Ohio, one of the states that helped to deliver the second term -- and not coincidentally a ground zero of this racist offensive -- the President won roughly 45 per cent of the white vote, and tied Romney among white men with incomes of $75,000 or less.

Racial appeals in other battleground states like Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan didn't resonate to the degree that the Romney campaign had hoped either. And in each state, white workers were a key demographic in Obama's victory.

Then there were other non-battleground states where the majority of white voters cast their vote for Obama.

Among trade unionists, 70 per cent voted for the president. While the union vote isn't broken down along racial lines, it is probably safe to say that white trade unionists voted roughly the same as they did four years ago.

A few weeks before the election, I attended a rally in Cleveland organized by the Teamsters, where many labor leaders and members of Congress spoke of the urgency of supporting President Obama.

One shouldn't generalize from one rally, but I have to say that the support for the President at this gathering of rank and file Teamsters and other trade unionists - the majority of whom where white - was nothing short of enthusiastic. They were ready to go. And I was inspired.

Why? Because these workers had no problem whatsoever in supporting and voting again for an African American to the highest office in the land. From what I could see, they were more than eager to do so. I suspect that many other white trade unionists felt the same way.

All of which underscores the importance of expanding the ranks of the organized working class and ratcheting up the fight against racism. Both are strategic tasks that the entire movement for progressive change should embrace.

The economy

Framing everything in the post-election period is the economy. While some pickup in economic activity has occurred, overall employment and economic growth have been fitful and anemic.

It's hard to see where the dynamism is going to come from without the entry of the federal government on a scale that only a few in Washington are ready to embrace.

The old dynamic of debt and bubble-driven growth, which drove the last economic expansion here and worldwide (1992 -2007), is not an option.

Nor should any help be expected from our global partners. Europe is reeling. And China is not positioned to carry the rest of the world on its shoulders. Its growth too has slowed and it's feeling the contradictions that come from its deep integration into the capitalist global economy.

Crises are supposed to be capitalism's mechanisms to clear away the debris that inhibits a revival of production, profits, employment and growth on a wider scale, but that scenario doesn't appear to be in capitalism's future.

Instead, stagnant growth and high unemployment seem like the "new normal." And, always lurking in the background is the danger of deeper crises.

All of which begs the question: are we entering a new era of capitalist development, characterized by overproduction, hyper-intense monopolistic rivalry, and stagnant growth on a world scale?

My initial read (which requires more in-depth study) is that we are, which would explain why big capital is in such a frenzy to impose a new model of political and economic governance on the working class and people - one that is stripped of social obligations to its citizens, free of unions and a dense network of civic organizations, deficient in full-blooded democratic institutions, and shorn of any barriers to its global accumulation strategy.

The dream of the one per cent is to return to the gilded age when neither the people nor nature had any rights that capitalism had to respect.

The outcome of this election has made the realization of that dream more difficult -- but don't expect capital to throw in the towel.

While it supported Romney, its claws are in the sides of both parties and in every branch of government, as they have been in the past. The state remains a capitalist state.

Faced with this reality, the option for the working class and people in the near and medium term isn't to retreat from electoral and political struggle. But rather to further expand its independent presence in the crucial arena of struggle.

In the longer term, the option is socialism - a society in which Marx's "associated producers" and their allies govern and rule in the interest of the immense majority.

Foreign policy

The present direction of our foreign policy has the country cascading from one crisis to another. And in every instance, it isn't the interests of the American people that are being advanced, but rather the interests of the global corporations and the foreign policy establishment.

There is some reappraisal of the conduct of our foreign policy going on in the Obama administration and the national security state. In all likelihood some changes will occur, not necessarily unimportant ones, but at the same time don't expect
the Obama administration or U.S. ruling circles to give up their global ambitions.

We are still employing harsh sanctions against Iran and the danger of war grows; we are still imposing a half-century-long blockade on Cuba; we are still doing little to support the Palestinian people's desire for national statehood; we are still sitting on our hands as far as finding road to a cease fire and a negotiated settlement between the warring parties in Syria; we are still modernizing our weaponry, while insisting that other countries forgo their pursuit of nuclear armaments; we are still determined to isolate North Korea; we are still at loggerheads with the countries of Latin America who are pursuing their own independent path of development; we are still using drones to prosecute the "war on terror'" even though their use puts us at loggerheads with people in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa; we are still negotiating NAFTA-like trade agreements; and we still cherry picking who we will ally ourselves to in the Arab Spring, that leaves us supporting some of the most backward regimes in the world.

The Obama administration and the foreign policy establishment need to pivot not to the Pacific region, but away from these policies of global domination. Of prime importance is that we walk back our rhetoric and sanctions against Iran. Negotiations not confrontation are needed. A war with Iran would have horrific consequences across the world and negative impacts on the class and democratic struggles at home. There is no desire among the American people for such a confrontation.

No less importantly, the Obama administration has to become a force for a peaceful and negotiated resolution of the crisis in Syria and a more forceful interlocutor of a two-state solution between the Israelis and Palestinians. Netanyahu's intransigence has to be walked back in the interests of both peoples.

But none of this will happen without a "peace surge" across the length and breadth of our country. The economic crisis has turned the attention of the American people inward, but only up to a point. More and more are realizing that a people centered domestic policy is bound up with a foreign policy of peace, cooperation, and disarmament and economic conversion.

Build the Communist Party

We can be proud of our role in the election. Our contribution was both ideological and practical. Nearly every member and leader was involved. Our work gives us much to build on as we throw ourselves into the post-election battles.

In every state and city our political relationships are broader and deeper; our presence and prestige are on a new level.

We come out of this election poised to play a larger role in the unfolding struggles, beginning with the struggle over the "fiscal cliff."

If there is anything that the election revealed about us it is that we are too small in size. Thus we have to grow at a faster pace. Our main audience is not among those who sat out the election struggle, but among those who were in its front ranks.

We should organize meetings with these activists in December and January where they can have the opportunity to get better acquainted with us as people and political activists.

The distance between our positions and the positions of many who worked tirelessly in the campaign is less than we probably think. No longer does the "s" word send shivers down people's spines - in fact, many of today's activists embrace it, according to public opinion polls.

Another requirement to building the Party is that we do more to strengthen it in our traditional centers.

I'm not suggesting that we do any less to bring in new internet recruits, as we are currently doing. But this has to be combined with breathing new energy and life into our Party in the centers where we have had a long-term presence. Every district and club should organize a discussion along these lines.

Still another growth requirement is that we utilize the social media better. This is not to take away from what we have already done. We have websites, online publications, a growing group of writers, and a presence on facebook and twitter. Still the whole Party and YCL are not yet engaged.

In the same vein, we also must make a bigger effort to break into the mainstream media. This is an untapped source that would allow us to get our message out to a much bigger audience. There are still too many misunderstanding and stereotypes, which are big impediments to our growth.

Finally, we can't build the Party and YCL without confidence, spirit, and boldness.

Fired Up and Ready to Go!

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 10:57:00 +0000

The world breathed a sigh of relief and a shout of joy went up clear across the country when Ohio was called for President Barack Obama on election night, putting him over the 270 electoral college threshold to win four more years.

Yet in that shout of joy for a giant people's victory was also the realization that we can't miss a beat going forward in this ongoing battle to wrest the country from the grip of the reactionary, corporate right-wing extremists.

We and the country have been through a remarkable, challenging, grueling, exhausting and exhilarating year, really two years. We have given our all within a maturing, expanding broad electoral alliance and people's movement.

In the process, a new respect and appreciation for the strategy and tactics, team work and vision of the Communist Party and YCL is emerging.

Congratulations are in order!

Our projection that the election was at the heart of the class struggle, that we were at the crossroads for democracy has been born out. Our policy of the need for and commitment to help build a broad united alliance against the extremists is being proven sound.

The election of tea party Republicans to Congress and Governorships and State Houses in 2010, reflecting a racist backlash from the election of the first African American president, brought with it a full blown campaign to undo every democratic achievement ever won by the people of this country. Finance capital was on overdrive to grab every public asset for the private profit of a few at the expense of the many.

The extremes between great hoarded wealth and growing poverty exposed the inequalities of capitalism and gave rise to giant struggles for livelihood and the right to be heard.

Workers in our country also saw the struggles of workers abroad being pushed down in the global economic crisis, and identified with their strikes, uprisings and hard fought elections.

Millions became engaged, many for the first time, from the massive fights for workers' rights in Wisconsin and Ohio, to the dramatic protests of economic inequality by Occupy and at Bainport, to the inspiring actions for social justice by the Dreamers, to courageous stands in defense of women's reproductive rights and marriage equality, to determined fightback against racist voter suppression most notably in Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania, and then the realization, in the wake of Storm Sandy, that yes, we are all in this together.

All these challenges, experiences, and organizing drives laid the groundwork for a historic effort by labor, civil rights, women and youth along with environmental and LGBT organizations. The result is majority repudiation of the politics and policies of the 1%, exemplified by the glimpse into raw class warfare as Mitt Romney dismissed 47% of the people.

Romney's outrageous statement blaming his loss on "Obama's gifts" (like healthcare and student loans) to "certain groups" ramps up the class warfare and disrespect.

The media plays up the idea that the election shows a widening racial divide. In reality, what this election shows is a new level of coming together, of class and social solidarity, of rejecting racism.

It was growing class consciousness that made victory possible for so many progressive candidates and ballot measures which featured anti-corporate arguments in their campaigns.

The high finances and tactics of Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers and company to seize this election did not work. Gerrymandered redistricting, restrictive voting laws, anti-Communist baiting, racist ads, lies and trickery backfired.

These blatant attacks got people's attention. They gave rise to a civil rights style movement in communities across the nation embracing the increasing diversity of our country.

Determination and resolve became the order of the day to overcome all obstacles and get out the largest vote ever. In Ohio the mobilization by African American churches and organizations, refusing to be disenfranchised, filled long lines at early voting stations for a month. On election day, in some precincts the wait was hours long (in Miami-Dade County till 1:30 am!), but people stood it out. In New Jersey and New York, despite the consequences of storm Sandy, voters cast their ballots.

President Obama carried all the tipping point swing states. His electoral college sweep and popular vote win is a tremendous accomplishment made possible by a powerful grass roots on-the-ground effort joining together labor and progressive democratic-minded forces. It set the framework for all the other races.

While the U. S. House of Representatives remains in Republican hands, it is a different House with new dynamics. Republicans won the majority of seats due to gerrymandering, but more votes were cast for Democrats nationwide.

Six tea party incumbents were defeated by progressive democrats. Additional progressives won open seats, although every race was not won. Tea party leaders Alan West, Joe Walsh, Brian Bilbray and Mary Bono Mack are out. Progressives Alan Grayson from Florida, Tammy Duckworth from Illinois, Carol Shea-Porter and Annie Kuster from New Hampshire, Dr. Raul Ruiz from Riverside California, and Mark Pocan, a leader in the Wisconsin walkout, are in.

The composition of the 200 member Democratic Caucus will make history. In the words of Nancy Pelosi, "for the first time in Congressional history -- the majority will be women and minorities. We expect to have 61 women, 43 African Americans, 27 Hispanics, 10 Asian Americans and 6 LGBT Americans in our Caucus."

In the Senate, the Democratic majority has been enlarged to 54. Notorious tea party Republican challengers Todd Aiken and Richard Mourdock went down to defeat. Newly elected progressive women bring the total of women Senators from 17 to 20. Mazie Hirono the first Asian American woman, Tammy Baldwin the first openly gay woman, and Elizabeth Warren who said "the system is rigged against you." Heidi Heitkamp won in North Dakota, Chris Murphy defeated billionaire wrestling mogul Linda McMahon. Sherrod Brown, who was a top target of the right-wing, won re-election in Ohio as did Bernie Sanders in Vermont. Tim Kaine won in Virginia.

A progressive shift was also apparent in several ballot questions including the passage of marriage equality in Maine, Maryland and Washington, and initiatives in California and Oregon to increase taxes on the wealthy and close a corporate loophole to fund public education and services. Spending on education with job creation passed in New Jersey. The Dream Act passed in Maryland. The proposition to limit labor's participation in elections was defeated in California. Emergency Manager was defeated in Michigan. Ballot questions to amend the constitution to abolish Citizens United passed in Montana and 100 cities. San Jose voted to increase the minimum wage from $8 to $10 an hour. And in towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut non-binding ballot questions to cut military spending and increase spending for job creation and human needs passed overwhelmingly.

Missouri, Washington and New Hampshire elected new Democratic Governors in open seats after difficult races. While the struggle to overturn tea party advances in 2010 is still underway, in Minnesota the 2010 takeover of the State Legislature by the religious right was reversed in this election.

In Tucson, a peoples coalition captured the majority on the School Board defeating incumbents who had capitulated to the racist edict banning Chicano studies.

The attempts to minimize the vote for President Obama and the progressive shift in the overall election is a continuation of the vicious racism since 2008. The 2012 victory was definitive despite every possible tactic used by and on behalf of the Romney/Ryan campaign.

The vote was not spontaneous. It was hard fought and unprecedented. It was the result of millions of conversations at doors, at work, on the phone and on social media.

In the last four days alone, AFL-CIO members from 56 unions made 10.7 million door knocks and phone calls. SEIU members knocked on 5 million doors including 3.7 million in battleground states on those final days.

70% of union households voted for Obama in Ohio, and 65% nationwide. The contribution of the labor movement with its multi-racial, male-female, young-old, gay-straight, immigrant-native born membership to this election cannot be over stated. This includes release time given to staff, mobilization of members, and especially in framing the debate around class issues and exposing Romney/Ryan for undermining jobs, not creating them and threatening the future of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

In battleground states, where Workers Voice, the AFL-CIO super PAC was utilized, union members were freed up to speak with all voters and not just other union members. Nearly 400,000 Workers Voice volunteers made 80 million phone calls and knocked on 14 million doors.

Hearing their message helped shift the thinking of white workers who had been for Romney. In these battleground states, white working-class voters rejected racist appeals and supported Obama at a much higher rate than elsewhere. In Ohio, 65% of white union members voted for Obama.

Working America households, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, voted 66% for Obama. In battleground areas where there was extra focus, Working America households voted 74% for Obama.

I'm sure many of us found that a "labor walk" got a much different response than a general door knock. The labor mobilization was important to this election and for the labor movement itself. We need a much larger labor movement in our country, and this campaign has opened the door to go back and organize among the unorganized voters.

Lumping together "white voters" as opposing Obama is misleading and fails to show the growing anti-racism trend exhibited in this election. "White voters" as a category is distorted because it includes the 1% and other well off people who identify with the 1%.

Where a class approach to the election was presented and argued for, the majority of white voters chose Obama. Visiting the homes of union members on 'labor walks" in largely white communities from New Hampshire to Iowa identified many enthusiastic Obama supporters. These lessons are important going forward in the continuing struggle against racism and for class unity.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka gave the lead when he said, if you care about your jobs and health care and social security and the right to vote and sending your kids to college, get rid of your racism and vote for the candidate whose program speaks to your needs, Barack Obama.

The labor movement's unique role in representing the interests of the entire working class came through in this election. It underscores the importance of building up labor's political action structures that can mobilize on the basis of workers' issues year round, pull out the vote in elections, and become strong enough to elect many more union members and working people to public office.

The political structures built up during this election are a potential pathway for independent progressive politics to continue developing and exerting its force.

Side by side and intertwined with the labor movement was the new and growing role of the rising American electorate, which made up nearly half of all voters. African American, Latino, Asian American, Native American voters, women voters, youth voters all were highly mobilized.

Their determination and activism was propelled in part as a response to being targeted and threatened with loss of voting rights. These expanding sections of the electorate have a large working class composition and add to the foundation of the broad electoral alliance.

The NAACP registered 42,000 new voters and engaged 1.2 million people. African Americans voted 93% for Obama, maintaining their historic progressive leadership and refusing to fall for the tactics of division emanating from the Romney/Ryan camp.

The National Council of La Raza registered 97,000 new voters, knocked on 113,016 doors, made 233,897 calls, and sent 257,000 emails and 90,780 text messages reminding voters to cast their ballots early where possible. Latinos voted 71% for Obama up from 67% in 2008. Latino voters made up 10% of the electorate (9% in 2008), and made the difference for Obama in key battlegrounds Nevada and Colorado. Latino voters have emerged as a powerful, progressive force. The number of Latino voters is expected to double in the next 20 years.

Planned Parenthood mobilized 10,000 "Women are Watching" volunteers. Members of NOW and others came out in full force horrified by the meaning of the "war on women" for themselves, their daughters and their mothers. Single women voted 67% for Obama and made up 23% of the electorate.

Youth were written off by the media as being disaffected, but youth organizations registered tens of thousands of new voters on campuses and in communities and made up a large section of campaign volunteers. Youth voted 60% for Obama and were 19% of all voters (an increase of 1% over 2008). Youth turnout was highest in the battleground states, and made a difference in the outcome.

Asian American Pacific Islanders for Obama played a prominent role in the Democratic National Convention. The preparations for grass roots organizing were impressive. Asian Americans voted 73% for Obama, a dramatic shift from the 30% who voted Democrat for Clinton in 1992.

The National Congress of American Indians reached out nationwide to 3 million voters calling turnout "a civic emergency" and made the difference for Senate in Montana and North Dakota, in New Mexico, Arizona and in other local races.

In addition:

Jewish voters went 70% for Obama, despite a highly funded effort by right-winger Sheldon Adelson to separate Jewish voters out on the basis of supporting Israel. Two thirds of Jewish voters said they approve of Obama's handling of the Israeli-Arab conflict and 90% said their main concern is domestic issues.

MoveOn involved its 7 million members on-line through social media and joined with Workers Voice for phone calls to battle ground states. The Sierra Club mobilized 12,000 volunteers across the country. The Alliance for Retired Americans organized 250,000 calls to retirees.

The Obama for America campaign mobilized on a giant scale. The campaign created neighborhood groups and on-line interest groups and utilized social networking, texting and new technology. Over 30,000 volunteers registered 2 million new voters in battleground states, and made 145 million phone calls and door knocks. This has been called the largest grassroots effort ever seen.

Direct voter contact was so important because it allowed the chance for discussion, and the opportunity to break through the lies and rhetoric filling the airwaves. Voters wanted to know what each candidate's program would mean for their lives.

The most powerful contrast was the fact that Romney and Ryan represent the 1% while Obama and Biden were oriented to the problems of middle and low income families. Romney and Ryan wrote off 47% of the country and said "you're on your own." Obama and Biden said government has a responsibility because "we're in it together."

Jobs in the auto industry, health coverage for young adults, increased student loans, aid for the victims of Sandy were concrete manifestations that influenced opinions.

Concepts such as "class struggle" and "tax the rich," -- ideas we have long supported -- emerged in this election and made common sense to millions of people, taking precedence over the Republican cry of "socialist," used as if it were a bad word. The framework of the debate was changed from "deficit reduction" to "jobs not cuts."

In a post-election survey of voters by Democracy Corps, two-thirds say the priority should not be deficit reduction, but "a plan to invest in new industries and rebuild the country and create jobs over the next five years."

Over 60 percent oppose cuts in Medicare and Social Security as part of deficit reduction.

Over 75 percent, including a majority of Republicans, favor both a new higher tax rate over a million dollars, and a tax on overseas profits.

Nearly three-fourths, including 60 percent of conservatives, favor cutting military spending by ending the war in Afghanistan.

In contrast, the big corporate profiteers who control the economic levers are determined to impose an anti-people austerity program. They are chomping at the bit to get their hands on the Social Security Trust Fund under the guise of a "fiscal cliff."

Many sections of Wall St that backed Obama in 2008, backed Romney in 2012.

But the election results, and the loss of Grover Norquist's anti-tax majority, make it harder for extremist Republicans to hold everything hostage to tax breaks for the super rich. Vulnerable Republicans may be pushed to a more moderate position.

The wide agreement on the need for organizing and street heat post-election is a good indication of new possibilities under more favorable conditions.

President Obama himself is asking for grass roots pressure as he prepares for a second term. He urged 30,000 OFA volunteers to stay involved through a new website, theaction.org. "The election is over. Don't rest. Join THE ACTION. :: End the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2%."

The day after election Richard Trumka issued a call to action. Rallies were held in 200 cities that week demanding an end to tax breaks for the top 2% and no cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, the issues of the election.

Clergy speaking out to tax the rich are helping expand the broad electoral alliance while building street heat. This combination of protests like Bainport and door knocking and social media messaging was important to win the election. It will be important to win on every issue going forward.

The coalition that the AFL CIO is part of, Strengthening Americas Values and Economy for All, has produced fliers, talking points, power points and other materials available on-line for local meetings with members of congress and going door to door.

If this immediate battle against the Grand Bargain is won, it can be a factor in breaking the logjam for other legislation for jobs and peoples needs. The necessary extension of unemployment benefits is also at stake, as are cuts to human needs programs versus cuts to the military budget.

In the course of standing up to the tactics of the extreme right-wing many people are thinking more deeply. The votes on ballot questions are an indication. So are the rising number of strikes around the country.

Many are wondering how to transform the economy and change priorities for good jobs and a secure, peaceful and sustainable future - the American Dream.

The issues facing people, jobs in the first place, comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship, universal voting rights and campaign finance reform will shape the battles in the new Congress along with taxing wealth and protecting vital programs. Addressing voter suppression is fundamental to expanding democracy.

Unions are already gearing up their members who were in the thick of the election battle to hold those they helped elect accountable. Many new, young leaders are emerging. They are ready and looking to join forces with groups in the community.

Inside Congress, the Progressive Caucus will be enlarged, and can play a stronger role. But to get a majority vote in the House will need some Republicans.

The most reactionary, racist elements have been delivered a setback in this election, but like Rep Allan West who refused to concede for three weeks and those who are calling for secession, they will do everything they can to continue to distract and obstruct.

The battles to realize the election mandate will not be easy. The amazing organizing that won this election has to be kept up around the immediate needs for jobs with a living wage, education, health care, the needs of youth, cutting military spending and ending the war in Afghanistan. A longterm program is needed to convert to a peacetime, green, sustainable economy and rebuild the infrastructure. The alliances have to keep growing on the ground. In this volatile world, enlarging the struggle for peace will help determine the success of the next four years.

As Sam points out, "the struggle to put the people's needs and nature before corporate profits and war spending will be a long one...The main thing is that the still-emerging multi-racial, working-class based coalition never lose sight of the necessity of deepening and extending its reach, unity, and multi-racial, class based character."

A feature of this election was increased rejection of both racism and anti-communist baiting. The tea party pursued an unsuccessful attempt to isolate President Obama and many progressive candidates for Congress by utilizing anti-communist red baiting. This tactic was carried out around the country in specific instances in an attempt to poison the atmosphere. It did not take hold, which is worthy of note. At the same time we realize that such provocations are bound to continue.

In one example in Riverside, California newly elected Democratic candidate for Congress Dr. Raul Ruiz was attacked with a barrage of radio and television ads for speaking at a rally to free Leonard Peltier and Mumia when he was a student. This red baiting and Mecha baiting by Republican Mary Bono Mack backfired. Hundreds of volunteers for Ruiz were even more fired up. Significantly, the tribes, which are very important in the district, dropped their longtime support for Bono Mack and strongly supported Ruiz, who they knew had put himself on the line for justice for Native Americans.

Communist Party and YCL

We, the Communist Party and YCL, are an important part of the rising electorate. We bring our working class tactics and participation along with our vision for equality and a path to socialism. Building a larger Communist Party and YCL is a unique contribution toward further weakening the extreme right-wing and strengthening working class ideology and action.

The fact that "Democracy at the Crossroads" by Rick Nagin was appreciated so widely in Ohio and elsewhere, especially among union activists, underscores this point. A highlight for me was handing out 400 copies to union member delegates from around the country in Charlotte, knowing they would share them at home. A revised edition, reflecting post-election conditions, will be issued in the beginning of the new year.

Coverage and circulation of the elections in the People's World was an important feature of our work. The editorials, the commentaries by Sam Webb, Jarvis Tyner and others, the news and analysis from the battlegrounds and all over, served to keep us informed, alerted and united and hopefully reached a wide audience.

The People's World averages 3000 readers a day. After labor day, readership went up which Terrie Albano says "reflects our class struggle election coverage." The People's World was the first to cover the struggle of the Sensata workers against Bain Capital and Romney's outsourcing. That plus the Walmart Warehouse workers struggle has led to People's World stories and photos being linked on left news sites like Democracy Now and Truthout in addition to the labor sites that have linked to People's World stories for some time.

Joe Sims indicates, "One of the most important developments in the election period was the creation of a team of 400 circulators of the People's World on Facebook and the growth on Facebook to 22,000 likes."

The paper is an organizing tool off-line as well. The print edition was used starting a year ago in a key election district in Connecticut. The new readers helped get out the vote that defeated the worst anti-labor, anti-communist member of the state senate.

The Political Action Commission has produced an e-newsletter, UNITY, for the past six months. Each edition addresses a key question with news briefs, links to People's World articles and actions. Hopefully it will be useful in the upcoming legislative battles and will be circulated to a broad array of allies and friends as well as our members. Appreciation to the entire political action commission for a lot of intensive work this whole year. The commission added new members reflecting some of the battlegrounds and we are still working on rounding out our composition.

Around the country there are a growing number of progressive elected officials who work closely with the grass roots movements. We should find ways to develop infrastructure required to increase the number of candidates for public office at the local level.

Around the country, there has been a high level of member involvement with the electoral alliance in extensive voter registration, door knocking, phone banking and GOTV. There has been a lot of travel and phone calls into all the key battleground states.

Some special initiatives include. Mommas for Obama in Oakland, the national YCL Trayvon Martin Voter Registration project, the People before Profits team in Connecticut and the spectacular Welcome Angela Davis to Detroit rally of 2,000 organized by the People's World and elected officials, unions and .clergy in Michigan.

Several states reported a good response to Democracy at the Crossroads among campaign volunteers. Several used literature available for download including the Why Vote brochure, the Beware Romney/Ryan White Skin Strategy flier, and the Save Our Nation! Tax Corporations! Tax The Rich! brochure which has an excellent 8-point program that fits the post-election period and should be quickly updated and re-issued.

The New Members Committee contributed to the effort by organizing its outreach to those who joined on-line around the battleground states with visits, phone meetings, suggestions for how to connect with the mobilization, and phone banks to new members.

The progressive shift in this election and in people's thinking creates new conditions for struggle. Our Party and YCL were part of the tremendous experience. We too are changed, and should build on that.

This is a time to think fresh, think bold, and act strategically.

Without delay, we should systematically reach out to the people we met while door knocking, traveling to swing states, phone banking or who joined on-line during the elections. We should get to know each other and invite them to a club meeting and get involved in the local actions, struggles or strikes we are engaged in. There are already some major events and schools planned post election.

The six-week battle to stop the "Grand Bargain" in Congress is a priority. Where there is a campaign in the area of a club or individual member we should get involved. Where there is not, we should urge our members to sign up with one of the sites on-line and get the ball rolling.

The common sense of the people, the solidarity that the vote expresses, and the high level of organization all produced this election victory. Against all odds the broad rainbow alliance stuck together and won. A powerful movement is being born in our nation.

Just a week and a half out, there is still much to examine and draw conclusions about.

Like in the 1930s when the economy was in crisis and people did not know where their next meal was coming from, there was an upsurge. The Communist Party was in the fore. Social Security was one product of the mass marches, rallies and organizing.

Today, we see and are part of the beginnings of a people's upsurge to protect that which was won and to move forward.

We face some fierce battles ahead, but we are fired up and ready to go!

No Grand Bargain on the backs of Working People -- A Call to Action

It is cruel and divisive to whip up hysteria around the so-called "fiscal cliff" crisis. The calls to make benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare go in the opposite direction of the mandate delivered by the majority of voters on November 6. The message of the election clearly was: tax the wealthy more and protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Our country will be stronger by focusing on the real deficits we face. The deficit of jobs, the deficit of health care, of education, the deficit of infrastructure after decades of neglect. The deficit of renewable energy.

All of these deficits can best be addressed by employing 15 million who are without job or working part-time, and putting people to work meeting these real needs. In the first place, hire the unemployed to clean up from the devastation of storm Sandy.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent by the wealthy 1%, through their tax free foundations, to spread lies and panic about Social Security and play on our fears so they can get their hands on the hard-earned Social Security taxes that we have paid.

We support the initiatives of the AFL CIO and many other organizations to demand that the tax breaks which the super rich have enjoyed come to an end, and that no cuts are made to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. We strongly support President Obama's determination that the tax cuts for the wealthy expire. But that is not enough.

We reject any "compromise" that balances very modest taxes on the wealthy with severe spending cuts on top of cuts already made that will affect all working class families, starting with children and youth and the most vulnerable.

Instead, an enhanced version of the American Jobs Act should be put forward as part of a green New Deal to create millions of jobs for infrastructure, renewable energy, education and support to state and local government services. Until these programs take effect, Congress must immediately extend the federal Unemployment Compensation program.

To finance these programs, the expiration of the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy should be only the starting point. We support calls for a financial transaction tax, for closing the capital gains loophole and increasing tax rates on millionaires to the level of the prosperous 1960's, and cutting the level of Pentagon spending in order to meet pressing domestic priorities that create jobs .

The outcome of this battle will set the framework for the next four years and have impact on the lives of ordinary working people for decades to come.

Only the mobilized working people can stop the corporate offensive and begin to meet our needs. The unity of the broad, inclusive and diverse alliance that won this year's election victory should now be directed to reaching out in every community and workplace to bring the message to Congress in a strong and public way. We urge immediate participation in this critical struggle.

Adopted by the National Committee, Communist Party USA, November 17, 2012

Reading Karl Marx with Abraham Lincoln Utopian socialists, German communists, and other republicans

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 10:38:00 +0000

These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people.
-Abraham Lincoln, from his first speech as an Illinois state legislator, 1837

Everyone now is more or less a Socialist.
-Charles Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune, and Lincoln's assistant secretary of war, 1848

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.
-Karl Marx and the First International Workingmen's Association to Lincoln, 1864

ON DECEMBER 3, 1861, a former one-term congressman, who had spent most of the past dozen years studying dissident economic theories, mounting challenges to the existing political order and proposing ever more radical responses to the American crisis, delivered his first State of the Union address as the sixteenth president of the United States.

Since assuming office eight months earlier, this new president had struggled, without success, first to restore the severed bonds of the Union and then to avert a wrenching civil war. Now, eleven southern slave states were in open and violent rebellion against the government he led.

His inaugural address of the previous spring had closed with a poignant reflection on the prospect of eventual peace, imagining a day when the Union might again be touched "by the better angels of our nature." But, now, in the last month of what Walt Whitman would recall as America's "sad, distracted year"-"Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp'd cannons"-the better angels seemed to have deserted the continent. Every effort to restore the republic had been thwarted. There was no room for accommodation with the Confederate States of America. Fort Sumter had been fired upon and the flag of southern rebellion now flew above Charleston Harbor. Virginia, the cradle of presidents, the state of Washington, Jefferson and Madison, had joined the revolt and assembled a capital of the Confederacy less than 100 miles from Washington. Hundreds of Union and Confederate soldiers had died, with thousands more wounded at the First Battle of Bull Run. Armies had been reorganized and generals replaced with the recognition that this was no skirmish. This was a protracted war that would eventually force all Americans to "[throw] off the costumes of peace with [an] indifferent hand."

In the presence of the remaining congressmen and senators who filled only a portion of the seats in the Capitol chamber on that December day, the new president knew that he needed to address the circumstance of a nation that was no longer in any sense united. He did so as an agitated, angered American who spoke no more of angels and instead bemoaned "the disloyal citizens of the United States who have offered the ruin of our country." He warned, ominously, of how "A nation which endures factious domestic division is exposed to disrespect abroad, and...is sure sooner or later to invoke foreign intervention." He fretted about a strained federal budget, expressing hope "that the expenditures made necessary by the rebellion are not beyond the resources of the loyal people." He noted that three vacancies would need to be filled on a suddenly abandoned Supreme Court and observed that "one of the unavoidable consequences of the present insurrection is the entire suppression in many places of all the ordinary means of administering civil justice by the officers and in the forms of existing law."

This was a wartime State of the Union address delivered not so much by a president as a commander in chief. Its purpose was to rally what remained of the House and Senate-after the exodus of the southern Solons who had joined a mutiny against the elected government-and to portray the struggle as not merely one for the preservation of a system of governance but for democracy itself. "It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government-the rights of the people," declared the solemn speaker. "Conclusive evidence of this is found in the most grave and maturely considered public documents, as well as in the general tone of the insurgents. In those documents we find the abridgment of the existing right of suffrage and the denial to the people of all right to participate in the selection of public officers except the legislative boldly advocated, with labored arguments to prove that large control of the people in government is the source of all political evil. Monarchy itself is sometimes hinted at as a possible refuge from the power of the people."

These were the words that might have ended the address, had the president not begged the pardon of his listeners to add: "In my present position, I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism."

There was something more that Lincoln wanted to say to America. He needed to speak of another division, another struggle. The man who so carefully chose his words did not relinquish the podium before devoting "brief attention" to his fears regarding "the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government."

Amid all the turbulence of a burgeoning Civil War, Abraham Lincoln wanted it to be known that he was unsettled by the rising assumption "that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life."

That false construct could not be allowed to take hold in a free country, argued the president. It must be understood, he concluded: "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

To be sure, Lincoln related this observation to the wrenching questions posed by the Civil War. "A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class-neither work for others nor have others working for them. In most of the Southern States a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters, while in the Northern a large majority are neither hirers nor hired."

But Lincoln was speaking now of a broader concern: his fear that the few who were possessed of capital might, in a time of turbulence, seek to bend the rule of law-diminishing the historic respect for the rights of man outlined by Lincoln's hero Tom Paine in order to favor their interests above those of the great many Americans who toiled for wages, or the fees paid farmers. "No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty; none less inclined to take or touch aught which they have not honestly earned," the president warned. "Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost."

Lincoln's insistence that labor guard against the surrender of political power to capital-a point he began to outline before his presidency and would repeat throughout his tenure-is rarely afforded the attention paid to his rhetoric regarding the state of "a house divided against itself," "the proposition that all men are created equal" or the faint hope that: "Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth."

Yet, how can we neglect the words that this most instructive of presidents chose to insert in so critical a commentary as his first State of the Union address?
How can we fail to recognize the echoes of a language which scholars of economic, social and political rhetoric might associate less with the sixteenth president than with one of his contemporaries: a Prussian-born son of the Enlightenment, who was causing a stir on both sides of the Atlantic at precisely the moment when Lincoln was casting about for a language to describe the economic forces that were carrying America from its agrarian roots to its industrial future?

Didn't Karl Marx take an interest in the relation of labor and capital? Was it not the coauthor of Das Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei who observed that: "the essential condition of capital is wage-labor"? And that: "Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the laborer"?

Well, there can surely be no connection, no tangible link between Abraham Lincoln, the log cabin-born, rail-splitting, archetypal nineteenth-century American and founding Republican, and Karl Marx, the bearded, brooding, archetypal "European" and proud socialist plotter.

Unless, of course, we bother to examine the tattered copies of the American outlet for Marx's revolutionary preachments during the period when Lincoln was preparing to leave the political wilderness and make his march to the presidency. That journal, the New York Tribune, was the most consistently influential of nineteenth-century American newspapers. Indeed, this was the newspaper that engineered the unexpected and in many ways counterintuitive delivery of the Republican nomination for president, in that most critical year of 1860, to an Illinoisan who just two years earlier had lost the competition for a home-state U.S. Senate seat. The Tribune is remembered, correctly, as the great Republican paper of the day. It argued against slavery in the south. But it argued as well, with words parallel to Lincoln's in that first address to the Congress, that "our idea is that Labor needs not to combat but to command Capital."

Seven years before he and Lincoln served together in the Congress (during each man's sole term in the U.S. House) Horace Greeley-or "Friend Greeley," as Lincoln referred to the editor in their correspondence-began the Tribune with a stated purpose: "to serve the republic with an honest and fearless criticism." He succeeded, more wholly than any American editor before or after his transit of the mid-nineteenth century, in creating a newspaper that was not merely a newspaper. Greeley's nationally circulated Tribune was, as Clarence Darrow aptly remembered it, "the political and social Bible" of every reforming, radical and Republican household. The Tribune was surely that for Lincoln, whose engagement with the paper would last the better part of a quarter century and eventually extend to wrangling with Greeley about the proper moment at which to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln's involvement was not just with Greeley but with his sub-editors and writers, so much so that the first Republican president appointed one of Greeley's most radical lieutenants-the Fourier- and Proudhon-inspired socialist and longtime editor of Marx's European correspondence, Charles Dana-as his assistant secretary of war.

Greeley's newspaper was the tribune of the agitation that spawned the Republican Party and its successful presidential campaign of 1860. Lincoln would say of the editor: "every one of his words seems to weigh about a ton."

This was as Greeley, an epic figure of American journalism, a political and social reformer who reveled in his ability not merely to report upon but to bend the arc of history, intended it.

After learning the printer's trade at the Northern Star in tiny Poultney, Vermont, Greeley arrived in New York in 1831, during the period when Fanny Wright and her allies were forging explicitly socialist political parties and movements in the city. Greeley came both to make his fortune-and that he did-and to steer the political progress of a young nation. William Seward, the radical Republican whose presidential ambitions were thwarted when Greeley switched his allegiance to Lincoln, celebrated the young newspaper editor as a Whitmanesque figure: "rather unmindful of social usages, yet singularly clear, original, and decided, in his political views and theories."

Greeley was what the British refer to as a "campaigning editor." He started newspapers as platforms to promote ideas-for example, the Jeffersonian was established to advance Seward's successful Whig Party challenge to conservative Democratic governor William Marcy, a hack of the highest order who preached the patronage gospel of "to the victor belong the spoils." Two years later Greeley would edit a national newspaper, the Log Cabin, as the campaign journal of another Whig, William Henry Harrison, who would win and briefly hold the presidency.

With the Tribune, however, Greeley would no longer crusade for candidates-although he certainly had his favorites-but for a set of ideals that would come to define the Whig Party, to which he and Lincoln remained in many senses true loyalists. When the Whigs failed to effectively confront issues of slavery, urbanization and economic transition, however, the Tribune became the prime proponent of a new and more radical political constellation that took as its name the word used to describe proponents of the "constructive treason" that began with a rejection of "the divine right of kings" and with it of the favored position of the propertied classes: "Republican."

"It has been urged as an objection to the Tribune that it proposed to ‘give hospitality to every new thought.' To that profession we shall be constant, at whatever sacrifice," Greeley wrote when the paper's radicalism began to shake some political foundations in the mid-1840s. "Full of error and suffering as the world yet is, we cannot afford to reject unexamined any idea which proposes to improve the moral, intellectual, or social condition of mankind."

Greeley practiced an advocacy journalism that was not cautious about taking sides in the great debates of his day. His first editorial duty, he explained, was to keep "an ear open to the plaints of the wronged and suffering, though they can never repay advocacy, and those who mainly support newspapers will be annoyed and often exposed by it; a heart as sensitive to oppression and degradation in the next street as if they were practiced in Brazil or Japan; a pen as ready to expose and reprove the crimes whereby wealth is amassed and luxury enjoyed in our own country as if they had only been committed by Turks or Pagans in Asia some centuries ago."

That final reference to reproving "the crimes whereby wealth is amassed and luxury enjoyed" might not meet with the applause of the trickle-down economists and laissez-faire fabulists who today guide the policies of what has become of Greeley's Republican Party. But Greeley would never have recognized today's so-called Republicans as heirs to the party he and his comrades forged.

Greeley welcomed the disapproval of those who championed free markets over the interests of the working class, a class he recognized as including both the oppressed slaves of the south and the degraded industrial laborers of the north. In a memorial column that the Tribune published after his death in 1872-at the close of the editor's quixotic "Liberal Republican" presidential campaign-it was recalled of Greeley:

If there was any special class of whom this plain man was the champion, for whom he used all his skill, and his zeal, and influence, it was the class of the poor and the oppressed and the forsaken, of those who were abused and outraged by their fellow men.... [The] sober verdict of history will be that no single man did so much for the overthrow of human bondage in this land as the editor of the New York Tribune. If he did not lay his ax so unsparingly to the root of the tree as some other of the reformers, he destroyed it quite as effectually by steadily hacking away its limbs and tendrils, and ruining so its inner life. That he wished and longed for its destruction, who ever dared to doubt? That he was the enemy of every form of social wrong and iniquity, who ever doubted? You cannot imagine this man palliating or tolerating any custom or traffic which degrades or imbrutes or depraves men. Not to one, but to many, moral reforms his time and heart were given. To education, thorough and universal; to sobriety, in eating not less than in drinking; to cleanliness, with him very near to godliness; to humanity, for beasts not less than for men; to free homes for emigrants; to cordial welcome of exiles from other lands, seeking refuge on these shores; to the liberation of all oppressed and struggling peoples. When was his word of cheer and sympathy wanting? With the weak against the strong, with the abandoned ones, his heart went, and he would give to these more than justice. This made him the friend of Hungarians and Poles and Irishmen, and the defender even of the Pagans against Christians. When the weak and the needy called, he did not stop to ask whether these shared his political or his religious creed, or what his race or his party would gain in befriending them. He obeyed the Divine call, and not seldom was made half a martyr in obedience to his instinct of compassion. His fame for wisdom suffered in the promptness of his sympathetic zeal.
Greeley's sympathetic zeal was that of a distinct breed of nineteenth-century social reformer, who was not satisfied merely with the repair of the breach created when the founders of the American experiment failed to keep faith with their initial recognition of the self-evident truth "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." He was profoundly concerned, as was Lincoln, with the question of how to maintain a measure of economic equality in a time of unprecedented and overwhelming accumulation of wealth-not merely by southern planters but by northern bankers and businessmen. These concerns led him to embrace the teachings of Charles Fourier, the French utopian socialist who complained: "Once upon a time people talked about the infallibility of the pope; today it is that of the merchant which they wish to establish." In Fourier's view, the promise of equality was an idle one unless it was coupled with economic protections for the great mass of working men and women. The French socialist held:
Equality of rights is another chimera, praiseworthy when considered in the abstract and ridiculous from the standpoint of the means employed to introduce it in civilization. The first right of men is the right to work and the right to a minimum [income]. This is precisely what has gone unrecognized in all the constitutions. Their primary concern is with favored individuals who are not in need of work.
Fourier's writing was popularized in the United States by Albert Brisbane, an American who traveled to France in the 1820s, studied with the philosopher and then returned to the United States to spread the socialist gospel. He found a comrade in Greeley, who referred to Fourier's views in the Log Cabin and championed them in the Tribune. Greeley made Brisbane a columnist for the paper and, when the new journal was attacked for spreading such radical views, the editor wrote: "Do not stand there quarreling with those who have devised or adopted a scheme which you consider absurd or impracticable, but take hold and devise something better. For, be assured, friend! that this generation will not, must not pass without the discovery and adoption of some method whereby the Right to Labor and to receive and enjoy the honest reward of such labor, shall be secured to the poorest and least fortunate of our people."
In the mid-1840s, explains historian Roy Marvin Robbins, "Greeley preached a new order of society with Brisbane's socialistic ideas as its basis." Even as the utopian ideals of Fourierism proved difficult to realize in practical form-despite the best efforts of social reformers such as Brisbane and his compatriot Bronson Alcott-Greeley evolved his own advocacy and that of theTribuneto champion land reforms that combined elements of Fourier's socialism and the pioneering ideal. Greeley's famous line "Go west, young man" was the practical expression of a broader vision of distributing open and unsettled land to the poor-even if, at the same time, it shamefully disregarded the Native Americans of the western lands, who both the editor and Lincoln failed to ever fully or even adequately respect or protect.

Attacked by a rival newspaperman in James Watson Webb's Courier and Express-which journalist and historian Francis Brown describes as "a Wall Street paper" that "catered to mercantile interests, to finance, and to shipping, and editorially...voiced the conservative views of the merchant class"-on grounds that he was a "Fourierist, an Agrarian, and an Infidel," Greeley replied:

We admit and insist on the legal right of the owner of wild lands to keep them uninhabited forever, but we do not consider it morally right that he should do so when land becomes scarce and subsistence for the landless scanty and precarious...yes...something will be done, in spite of any stupid clamor that can be raised about "Infidelity" and "Agrarianism," to secure future generations against the faithful evils of Monopoly of Land by the few.
The boldness of Greeley's stances won him a good deal of personal popularity among the radical Whigs of New York and the champions of the nascent "Free Soil" movement, which Greeley urged to "secure to each and all...a really Free Soil!-especially free from the hated speculators." In an 1848 special election, he was sent to Congress as a representative from New York. Greeley served for only a few months, but he used his time in the House to propose and promote an early version of the Homestead Act. Challenged by a western conservative to explain why an urban member was so interested in freeing up rural land for settlement, Greeley countered that he "represented more landless men than any other member" of the Congress. A good line, but unlikely to please a chamber that did not share the editor's radicalism. One of his few allies was the young first-term Whig congressman from Illinois, who Greeley recalled as a comrade with whom he "agreed on the slavery issue as one which must be answered permanently in the course of a few years." The two men spoke on a daily basis during their joint tenure in the nation's capital and formed a bond that would last until Lincoln's assassination seventeen years later.
It was not mere personal acquaintance that linked Greeley and Lincoln, however. By 1848, Greeley's Tribune was already a journalistic and political phenomenon. "Acknowledged the most influential Whig editor in 1844, [Greeley] had by 1850 become the most influential anti-slavery editor-the spokesman not of Whigs merely but of a great class of Northerners who were thoroughly antagonistic to slavery," recalls Frank W. Scott in his study of nineteenth-century American newspapers. As the slavery issue came to a head, the Tribune's influence grew so that it became not just a popular newspaper in New York City but a widely circulated national journal of opinion, distinguished by what Scott characterizes as "some of the most vigorous and trenchant editorial writing America has ever known." In the early 1850s, the circulation of the Tribune's weekly national edition nearly tripled to more than 110,000 copies as it became what another historian, James Ford Rhodes, described as "pre-eminently the journal of the rural districts, [where] one copy did service for many readers. To the people in the Adirondack wilderness it was a political bible, and the well-known scarcity of Democrats there was attributed to it. Yet it was as freely read by the intelligent people living on the Western Reserve of Ohio"-not to mention in Abraham Lincoln's Illinois.

By the late 1850s, the weekly Tribune's Illinois circulation was close to 20,000, making the New York-based journal one of the midwestern state's most widely circulated newspapers. There is no debate that Lincoln was among the most avid of the Tribune's Illinois readers. His correspondence with Greeley confirms this passionate relationship with the paper, as does his more extensive correspondence with his third and last law partner, William Herndon, in which Lincoln would sometimes complain that Greeley's newspaper was not being supportive enough of his political ambitions. It was in one of these fretful notes that Lincoln first expressed the view that "every one of [Greeley's] words seems to weigh about a ton."

Lincoln did not merely consume Greeley's words, however. He devoured the whole of his weekly Tribune, as he did every other newspaper he could get his hands on. "What Lincoln really liked to read were newspapers, reading them, a friend said, ‘more than books,'" writes Lincoln biographer John C. Waugh. "Another friend said he ‘never saw a man better pleased' than when Lincoln was appointed postmaster, because he could read [newspapers from around the country] before delivering them to their subscribers."

In his period of deepest inquiry, the five years after his 1848 departure from Congress as a disappointed Whig and before his return to the political hustings as a champion of what would become the Republican Party, Lincoln devoted himself to examining, debating and ruminating on the reports in the national newspapers that were delivered to his Springfield law office-especially Greeley's Tribune. Keenly aware of the rising tide of liberal, radical and socialist reform movements in Europe, a tide that would peak-at least for a time-in the "revolutionary wave" of 1848 and its aftermath, the young congressman joined other American Whigs in following the development of that year's "Springtime of the Peoples," which saw uprisings against monarchy and entrenched economic, social and political power in Germany, France, Hungary, Denmark and other European nations. For Lincoln, however, this was not a new interest.

Long before 1848, German radicals had begun to arrive in Illinois, where they quickly entered into the legal and political circles in which Lincoln traveled. One of them, Gustav Korner, was a student revolutionary at the University of Munich who had been imprisoned by German authorities in the early 1830s for organizing illegal demonstrations. After his release, Korner returned to his hometown of Frankfurt am Main where, according to historian Raymond Lohne, "he was one of about fifty conspirators involved in an attack upon the two main city guardhouses and the arsenal at the police facility and jail. This admixture of students and soldiers had planned to seize cannon, muskets, and ammunition; free political prisoners accused of breaking press-censorship laws, and begin ringing the great Sturmglocke (storm bell) of the Dom, the signal for the people to come in from the countryside. At that point, the democratic revolution would be announced.... Unfortunately, they were walking into a trap.... Betrayed by both a spy in their midst, and the reluctance of the common people to rise, nine students were killed, twenty-four were seriously wounded, and by August 3, 1833, Gustav Körner found himself riding into downtown Belleville, Illinois."

Within a decade, Korner would pass the Illinois bar, win election to the legislature and be appointed to the state Supreme Court. Korner and Lincoln formed an alliance that would become so close that the student revolutionary from Frankfurt would eventually be one of seven personal delegates-at-large named by Lincoln to serve at the critical Republican State Convention in May 1860, which propelled the Springfield lawyer into that year's presidential race. Through Korner, Lincoln met and befriended many of the German radicals who, after the failure of the 1848 revolution, fled to Illinois and neighboring Wisconsin. Along with Korner on Lincoln's list of personal delegates-at-large to the 1860 convention was Friedrich Karl Franz Hecker, a lawyer from Mannheim who had served as a liberal legislator in the lower chamber of the Baden State Assembly before leading an April 1848 uprising in the region-an uprising cheered on by the newspaper Marx briefly edited during that turbulent period, Neue Rheinische Zeitung-Organ der Demokratie.

Thwarted by military forces loyal to the old order, Hecker fled first to Switzerland and then to Illinois, where he would join Lincoln in forging the new Republican Party and become a key speaker on his American ally's behalf in the 1858 Senate race that is remembered for the Lincoln-Douglas debates. With a commission from Lincoln, Hecker served as a brigade commander in the Union Army during the Civil War, as did a number of other '48ers.

The failure of the 1848 revolts, and the brutal crackdowns that followed, led many leading European radicals to take refuge in the United States, and Lincoln's circle of supporters would eventually include some of Karl Marx's closest associates and intellectual sparring partners, including Joseph Weydemeyer and August Willich. Weydemeyer, who maintained a regular correspondence with Marx and Engels, soon formed a national network of Kommunisten Klubs to promote what the New York Times decried as "Red Republicanism." Weydemeyer then allied with the new Republican Party and the presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln, who would at the start of the Civil War appoint the former Prussian military officer as a technical aide on the staff of General John C. Fremont-the 1856 Republican presidential nominee who became the commander of the army's Department of the West. Later, Lincoln issued Weydemeyer a commission as a colonel of the Forty-First Infantry Missouri Volunteers, charging the German Marxist with the defense of St. Louis. Willich, known as "the Reddest of the Reds," was a leader of the left faction of the German Communist League, which decried Marx's relative caution when it came to revolutionary agitation. As a key commander of the radical Free Corps in the Baden-Palatinate uprising of 1849, Willich chose as his aide-de-camp a young Friedrich Engels. Forced to flee to the United States after the defeat of the uprising, Willich decamped to Cincinnati, where he became editor of the socialist Republikaner newspaper and backed the candidacies of Fremont in 1856 and Lincoln in 1860. At the outset of the Civil War, Willich recruited a regiment of German immigrants and became its first lieutenant, quickly rising to the rank of brigadier general and making a name for himself by having military bands play revolutionary songs such as the "Arbiter [Workers'] Marseillaise"-"A reveille for the new revolution! The new revolution!"

Lincoln did not merely invite the '48ers to join his campaigns, he became highly engaged with their causes. As Lohne notes, "Lincoln was paying attention to these revolutionaries." In his hometown of Springfield, the former congressman rallied support for revolutionary movements in Europe, particularly the Hungarian revolt of Lajos Kossuth. Lincoln's name led the list of signatories on calls for public meetings to discuss the Hungarian revolt that appeared in the Illinois State Register and the Illinois Journal in January 1852. A week later, Lincoln helped to pen a resolution declaring that "we, the American people, cannot remain silent" about "the right of any people, sufficiently numerous for national independence, to throw off, to revolutionize, their existing form of government, and to establish such other in its stead as they may choose."

Lincoln's resolution argued:

That the sympathies of this country, and the benefits of its position, should be exerted in favor of the people of every nation struggling to be free; and whilst we meet to do honor to Kossuth and Hungary, we should not fail to pour out the tribute of our praise and approbation to the patriotic efforts of the Irish, the Germans and the French, who have unsuccessfully fought to establish in their several governments the supremacy of the people.
The proclamation even took a shot at the British Empire, resolving:
That there is nothing in the past history of the British government, or in its present expressed policy, to encourage the belief that she will aid, in any manner, in the delivery of continental Europe from the yoke of despotism; and that her treatment of Ireland, of O'Brien, Mitchell, and other worthy patriots, forces the conclusion that she will join her efforts to the despots of Europe in suppressing every effort of the people to establish free governments, based upon the principles of true religious and civil liberty.
What set Lincoln and his compatriots off? There's no mystery. The Illinois agitators had merely to open their weekly editions of Greeley's Tribune, which was declaring at the time that "of the many popular leaders who were upheaved by the great convulsions of 1848...the world has already definitely assigned the first rank to Louis Kossuth, advocate, deputy, finance minister, and finally governor of Hungary." The great historian of the Tribune's ideological and political battles, Adam Tuchinsky, notes: "Louis Kossuth and the Central European national liberation movements remained familiar subjects in the pages of the paper"-so much so that conservative critics of the gazette objected to its "Kossuthism, Socialism, Abolitionism and forty other isms."
Greeley believed that 1848's European revolts and their aftermath revealed "boundless vistas" along with the outlines of the "uprising which must come." Predictably, his paper covered the revolutionary ferment of Europe with an intensity that made it virtually a local story for radicals in places like Springfield, Illinois. They pored over their copies of theTribunefor the latest from the front in what the paper's editor portrayed as a global struggle for "the larger liberty" of "the Rights and Interests of Labor, the Reorganization of Industry, the Elevation of the Working-Men, the Reconstruction of the Social Fabric."

The Tribune did not urge a "to-the-barricades" moment for the United States. Greeley and most of his editors still believed in the prospect of reform, although their frustration with the spread of the evil they referred to as "the slave power" would at times cause the paper's proprietor to ponder whether "revolution is the only resource left." Ultimately, however, what most excited Greeley and his readers about the stirrings of 1848 were the new and radical ideas that had emerged, and the mingling of those ideas with action that might lead to their implementation.

The Tribune's European correspondent in the early stages of the period of uprisings, Henry Bornstein, admitted in his columns that he was "giddy" at the developments in France, Germany and other countries. "Every day comes fresh news, each thing more astonishing than the next," wrote Bornstein, who spiced his correspondence with exclamations such as: "Hurrah! How gaily it burns!" The Tribune was not just publishing news, Greeley announced, it wanted analysis, "to increase the aggregate of information afforded by our columns." Bornstein agreed, arguing: "Correspondents now have to talk about other topics besides political events because these topics are outdated. Now they have to provide the ‘big picture' about what is going on in Europe. Explain the reason for events to supplement the dry telegraph reports."

Correspondent Bornstein, notes Tuchinsky, was "the paper's link to Karl Marx and a more class-conscious radicalism that would emerge in Europe during the 1848 revolutions and in their aftermath."

But Bornstein's "big picture" reporting style-which he would eventually bring to the United States as an astute observer of the Civil War-was only the start of the Tribune's emergence as the primary source of detailed reporting on international events and ideas that would reshape the way American radicals and reformers thought about their own struggles, against slavery in particular and economic and social injustice in general. No longer satisfied with the pastoral reforms of Fourier and the romantic French communalists, the Tribune now considered more radical responses.

"Ultimately, 1848 would unearth an immense variety of French and European radical discourse; as a result, the Tribune diversified its coverage of socialist ideas," explains Tuchinsky. "But more than that, socialism itself became not simply a mode of reform but also, significantly, of explanation, a way to interpret events. Fourierism was a sectarian movement, and it failed, but along with the revolution it cleared the way for a new language and a new political mentality through which American progressive intellectuals perceived and critiqued their social and political world."

To understand and interpret that new language, Greeley dispatched a recent hire, Charles Dana, to Paris. An idealistic polymath, Dana had for several years in the mid-1840s been a central player in the Brook Farm Association for Industry and Education in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. A utopian experiment in communal living that sought to implement Fourier's ideals, Brook Farm counted among its residents, investors, supporters and allies Greeley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote of the prospect that residents might be "Fourierized or Christianized or humanized," with the observation that "in a day of small, sour, and fierce schemes, one is admonished and cheered by a project of such friendly aims, and of such bold and generous proportion; there is an intellectual courage and strength in it, which is superior and commanding: it certifies the presence of so much truth in the theory, and in so far is destined to be fact."

Dana sought to spread the "build-heaven-on-earth" gospel in the Harbinger, a journal edited by Brook Farm founder (and future Tribune literary editor) George Ripley, where the younger man's writing skills came to Greeley's attention. Impressed with the twenty-nine-year-old wordsmith's intellect and style-and also, perhaps, by the fact that the Harbinger hailed the "indomitable Tribune" as the nation's great newspaper-Greeley began grooming Dana to be the Tribune's managing editor. But the protégé had grander goals. "Dana longed to travel to Europe. More than that, like most members of the Tribune's socialist circle, Dana viewed the European revolutions as a historical turning point and he was anxious to witness them firsthand," observes Tuchinsky. In particular, he was looking for new notions that might propel the socialist discourse beyond the romantic "associationist" thinking of Fourier's followers. Along with Greeley, Dana had just a few years earlier hailed Fourier's ideas as the "last hope of Divine Providence" on earth; now, however, he was anticipating the moment when reformers and radicals would "yield to necessity" and recognize that the "harmonious" agrarian ideal must give way to the barn-burner battle cry of "Free soil, free labor, free speech, free men."

Leaving New York in June 1848, Dana arrived in France just in time to race into the thick of the Parisian turmoil. He penned an immediate report that declared he was witnessing "a glorious chance to do something immortal." While the calculus of how the immortal leap might be made remained indefinite, the ideological impulse was, to Dana's view, certain. "Socialism is thus not conquered nor obscured in France by [the turmoil] but strengthened. It is no longer Fourierism, nor Communism, nor this nor that particular system which occupies the public mind of France, but it is the general idea of Social Rights and Social Reorganization. Everyone now is more or less a Socialist."

Dana's small-"c" catholic approach to the ideological divisions on the ground in Europe allowed him to sample freely from the different streams, to consult broadly and to keep American readers abreast of what seemed to the young writer to be a continent-wide struggle to throw off "the royalty of money...the aristocracy of capital." Still clinging to at least some of his Fourierist ideals, Dana inclined toward the libertarian socialist preachments of the French philosopher and parliamentarian Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who argued for the establishment of workingmen's associations around a "revolutionary program" of "No more governments, no more conquests, no more international police, no more commercial privileges, no more colonial exclusions, no more control of one people by another, one State by another, no more strategic lines, no more fortresses...." In particular, Dana was inspired to turn the Tribune, which had traditionally been friendly toward trade unionism, into an even more explicit advocate for organized labor, arguing editorially that: "we see no other mode in which Labor can protect itself against the overwhelming power of Capital than by this very method of Combination." Lincoln, the voracious Tribune reader, would frequently express such sympathies, not merely in debates and State of the Union addresses but in direct communications to labor groups. To the New York Workingmen's Association, the sitting president would in 1864 observe: "The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds."

But even as he was busy popularizing Proudhonist cures for the ailments of capital-especially the project of creating a popular bank ("banque du peuple") with the purpose of freeing up credit for workers and farmers-Dana was searching for new correspondents for Greeley's paper. In particular, he wanted to identify radical thinkers who could interpret for American readers not just the transitory developments in Germany, France, Holland or Hungary but also the social, economic and political currents that might resolve the great challenge that theTribuneoutlined in an editorial of the era: "[While] no theorist has yet truly solved the great problem of the harmonious and beneficent combination of Labor, Skill and Capital, it is none the less palpable that the problem must be solved, and that Society fearfully suffers while awaiting the solution."

In this search for "alternative strains of socialist thought," Dana made his way to the city of Cologne, where a friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, was working with a radical paper that intrigued the American visitor. The editor of the paper had recently coauthored a much-circulated German-language pamphlet, Das Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, which argued: "The essential condition for the existence and rule of the bourgeois class is the accumulation of wealth in private hands, the formation and increase of capital; the essential condition of capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests entirely on the competition among the workers." To upset that condition, the writers had declared in February of 1848 for a "Communistic revolution" with the words: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!"

The pamphlet would be translated two years later into English as The Communist Manifesto. The editor in question was, of course, Karl Marx, with whom Dana spent a midsummer day in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung-Organ der Demokratie office. Neither Dana nor Marx recorded the details of the meeting, although we are afforded a sense of the man the American writer encountered from a mutual acquaintance, Carl Schurz, the German editor and revolutionary who would flee to Wisconsin, help to form the Republican Party and return to Europe in 1861 as Abraham Lincoln's ambassador to Spain. Visiting Marx during the same long, hot summer of 1848, Schurz observed "the recognized head of the advanced socialistic school. The somewhat thickset man, with his broad forehead, his very black hair and beard and his dark sparkling eyes. I have never seen a man whose bearing was so provoking and intolerable. To no opinion which differed from his, he accorded the honor of even a condescending consideration. Everyone who contradicted him he treated with abject contempt; every argument that he did not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives of him who had advanced it. I remember most distinctly the cutting disdain with which he pronounced the word ‘bourgeois.'" Somehow, Dana and Marx connected. Indeed, they hit it off so famously that Dana would, according to Marx's biographer Francis Wheen, provide the philosopher with "the closest thing he ever had to a steady job."

That job was as one of the most frequently published correspondents for the New York Tribune, with which Dana served a dozen years as managing editor. After Dana returned to New York to take up his new duties, he contacted Marx in London, where he had been forced to flee after German authorities shuttered the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, with an invitation to begin writing for the Tribune. And write Marx did. As Wheen notes, "The Tribune was by far the largest publisher of Marx's (and to a lesser extent, Engels's) work.... The Tribune articles take up nearly seven volumes of the fifty-volume collected works of Marx and Engels-more than Capital, more than any work published by Marx, alive or posthumously, in book form." The "singular collaboration" between Greeley's paper and Marx continued from the early 1850s until the time of Dana's departure to join Lincoln's White House staff. "During this period," according to historian William Harlan Hale's masterly examination of the relationship, "Europe's extremest radical, proscribed by the Prussian police and watched over by its agents abroad as a potential assassin of kings, sent in well over 500 separate contributions to the great New York family newspaper dedicated to the support of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, temperance, dietary reform, Going West, and, ultimately, Abraham Lincoln." The official count of articles published by the Tribune under Marx's byline was 350, while Engels wrote 125 and the duo produced 12 together. But, as the philosopher himself noted, many more articles ended up running as the official line of the Tribune. "Of late, the Tribune has again been appropriating all my articles as leaders [unsigned editorials]," Marx complained in 1854.

Even if Marx did not always get the credit he thought he deserved (and what ink-stained wretch does?), Dana was unstinting in his praise. "It may perhaps give you pleasure to know that [the articles] are read with satisfaction by a considerable number of persons and are widely reproduced," the editor wrote Marx, describing the correspondent as "not only one of the most highly valued, but one of the best-paid contributors attached to the newspaper."

Greeley and Dana were so excited about Marx's contributions, in fact, that they showcased the German's first article in the paper's newly expanded Saturday edition on October 25, 1851. An editorial announced that among the "articles from...foreign contributors that are especially worthy of attention [was a rumination] upon Germany by one of the clearest and most vigorous writers that country has produced-no matter what may be the judgment of the critical upon his public opinions in the sphere of political and social philosophy."

The "worthy" article, "Revolution and Counter-Revolution," appeared over the byline "Karl Marx" (even though it was actually a collaboration written largely by Engels). The language was, well, Marxist:

The first act of the revolutionary drama on the continent of Europe has closed. The "powers that were" before the hurricane of 1848 are again the "powers that be," and the more or less popular rulers of a day, provisional governors, triumvirs, dictators with their tail of representatives, civil commissioners, military commissioners, prefects, judges, generals, officers, and soldiers, are thrown upon foreign shores, and "transported beyond the seas" to England or America, there to form new governments in partibus infidelium, European committees, central committees, national committees, and to announce their advent with proclamations quite as solemn as those of any less imaginary potentates. A more signal defeat than that undergone by the continental revolutionary party-or rather parties-upon all points of the line of battle, cannot be imagined. But what of that? Has not the struggle of the British middle classes for their social and political supremacy embraced forty-eight, that of the French middle classes forty years of unexampled struggles? And was their triumph ever nearer than at the very moment when restored monarchy thought itself more firmly settled than ever? The times of that superstition which attributed revolutions to the ill-will of a few agitators have long passed away. Everyone knows nowadays that wherever there is a revolutionary convulsion, there must be some social want in the background, which is prevented, by outworn institutions, from satisfying itself. The want may not yet be felt as strongly, as generally, as might ensure immediate success; but every attempt at forcible repression will only bring it forth stronger and stronger, until it bursts its fetters. If, then, we have been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the beginning. And, fortunately, the probably very short interval of rest which is allowed us between the close of the first and the beginning of the second act of the movement, gives us time for a very necessary piece of work: the study of the causes that necessitated both the late outbreak and its defeat; causes that are not to be sought for in the accidental efforts, talents, faults, errors, or treacheries of some of the leaders, but in the general social state and conditions of existence of each of the convulsed nations.
It happened that Marx's article appeared at a time of "beginning again from the beginning" for a great many American radicals. The Whig Party, with which Greeley, Lincoln and compatriots of like mind had aligned themselves, was collapsing under the weight of its internal divisions between those who believed in aggressively confronting the spread of the "slave power" and more cautious reformers. Lincoln, who with Greeley had left the Congress in 1849, was practicing law in Springfield and on "the circuit" of county courthouses in Illinois. But he had not left politics behind. William Herndon observed years later that his law partner was in the early years of the 1850s "like a sleeping lion...waiting for the people to call." Biographer John Waugh writes of a future president who "with this tightly disciplined, deeply honed mind he read what he really considered important-newspapers. Now, on the circuit, out of politics, he was reading newspapers more than anything else, reading them aloud, carefully following the rise and drift of political sentiment over the divisive issue of slavery-reading them more closely, [fellow lawyer] Henry Whitney thought, than anybody he knew."
Slavery was an omnipresent issue, but surely not the only issue for Lincoln, whose circle of close compatriots now included a number of the radical '48ers who had turned Wisconsin, Illinois and Missouri into new hubs of agitation. Lincoln watched international developments with frustration following the setbacks of the late 1840s and early 1850s, bemoaning in a letter to Herndon his sense that "the world is dead to hope, deaf to its own death struggle made known by a universal cry. What is to be done? Is anything to be done? Who can do anything and how can it be done? Did you ever think on these things?"

While studies of Lincoln place appropriate focus on his domestic engagements, there has been far too little attention paid to his global interests, especially during the period "in the wilderness" between the end of his congressional term and his return to the political stage. Yet, there can be no doubt that the future president was conscious of and highly engaged with developments in foreign lands-thanks no doubt to his close reading of the Tribune and its most prominent European correspondent-or that the future president made connections between what he read of distant divisions and what he thought about developments at home. Eulogizing his political hero Henry Clay in 1852, Lincoln would make frequent reference to Clay's international interests and involvements, declaring: "Mr. Clay's efforts in behalf of the South Americans, and afterwards, in behalf of the Greeks, in the times of their respective struggles for civil liberty are among the finest on record, upon the noblest of all themes; and bear ample corroboration of what I have said was his ruling passion-a love of liberty and right, unselfishly, and for their own sakes." Lincoln invoked the struggles of the European revolutionaries and denounced "oppression of any of its forms...crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings." He dismissed the rhetoric of his arch-rival, Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, finding it "as bombastic and hollow as Napoleon's bulletins sent back from his campaign in Russia." And when Douglas compromised on the issue of allowing the spread of slavery to new territories, he declared: "Equality in society alike beats inequality, whether the latter be of the British aristocratic sort or of the domestic slavery sort."

Lincoln was arguably at his most radical when he penned those words in 1854. The man whose law partner described him as "always calculating, and always planning" would grow more circumspect as he proceeded from the political backwater of Springfield to the podium at New York's Cooper Union and the prospect of the presidency. In the immediate aftermath of Douglas's betrayal, however, Lincoln's language bore the distinct accent of Greeley's Tribune and its most radical writers.

When Lincoln emerged in 1854 from his self-imposed political exile, it was with the intention of doing electoral battle not just with slavery but with those who stood in the way of the free soil and free labor movements the Tribune had popularized. "Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope," declared the future president in one of his frequent linkages of ideological mantras. As he returned to politics, initially as a campaigner for old Whigs and new Republicans, and then as a contender in his own right for the Senate, Lincoln echoed the ideals and language of the era's fresh and determined radicalism. This is not to say that he embraced all the views of the Tribune's European correspondent; he was never so bold as to argue, in the way that Marx would in Capital-a book that borrowed liberally from his writings for the Tribune-that "in the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded."

But, now "primed" by what his biographer Waugh describes as "all of his newspaper reading...all of his study and thinking and analyzing for all those five cheerless politically deprived years," Lincoln recognized that the most radical promise of America's founding-that "all men are created equal"-was being destroyed in a manner that would thwart progress not merely for Black slaves, but for white workers and farmers who sought their own freedoms. In his remarkable letter of August 15, 1855, to former Kentucky congressman George Robertson, a compatriot of Henry Clay and champion of the old-school Whig hope that slavery would gradually be abandoned, the forty-six-year-old Illinoisan would bemoan the dying of the Founders' faith. Recalling an address delivered decades earlier by Robertson, Lincoln wrote:

You are not a friend of slavery in the abstract. In that speech you spoke of "the peaceful extinction of slavery" and used other expressions indicating your belief that the thing was, at some time, to have an end[.] Since then we have had thirty-six years of experience; and this experience has demonstrated, I think, that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us. The signal failure of Henry Clay, and other good and great men, in 1849, to effect any thing in favor of gradual emancipation in Kentucky, together with a thousand other signs, extinguishes that hope utterly. On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that "all men are created equal" a self-evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim "a self-evident lie." The fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day-for burning fire-crackers!!!
That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery, has itself become extinct, with the occasion, and the men of the Revolution. Under the impulse of that occasion, nearly half the states adopted systems of emancipation at once; and it is a significant fact, that not a single state has done the like since. So far as peaceful, voluntary emancipation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave in America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of a free mind, is now as fixed, and hopeless of change for the better, as that of the lost souls of the finally impenitent. The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.

The letter to Robertson was composed during a period in which Lincoln was arguing to his law partner, William Herndon, that "the day of compromise has passed. These two great ideas (slavery and freedom) have been kept apart only by artful means. They are like two wild beasts in sight of each other, but chained and apart. Some day these deadly antagonists will one of the other break their bonds, and then the question will be settled." What did Lincoln mean when he spoke of freedom as a great idea that stood in conflict with slavery? Was he merely addressing the condition of those physically enslaved by the southern plantation owners-and the political and legal structures that supported them? Or was he speaking of a broader freedom? The answer is found in the records of Lincoln's public addresses from the time.
While much is made of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas first contended in a series of dialogues prior to the election of 1854, which saw Lincoln return to the campaign trail with an energy and earnestness not seen since he made his House race eight years earlier. In the months after Douglas reopened the slavery question with his advocacy of the hated Kansas-Nebraska Act, the sitting senator and Lincoln, the former congressman who suddenly wanted very much to be a senator, clashed rhetorically in cities up and down Illinois. The speeches that Lincoln delivered that fall-several lasting more than three hours-wrestled mightily with the meaning of words such as "equality," "liberty" and "freedom." At Peoria, he tossed his jacket aside on an uncommonly hot October day and delivered an address that Lincoln historian Lewis Lehrman would describe as "a rhetorical and literary masterpiece" that "dramatically altered the political career of the speaker and, as a result, the history of America.'"

A young journalist who covered the session in Peoria recalled both the words and the remarkable passion with which they were uttered. "Progressing with his theme, his words began to come faster and his face to light up with the rays of genius and his body to move in unison with his thoughts," wrote Horace White, the city editor of the Chicago Daily Journal. "His gestures were made with his body and head rather than with his arms. His speaking went to the heart because it came from the heart. I have heard celebrated orators who could start thunders of applause without changing any man's opinion. Mr. Lincoln's eloquence was of the higher type, which produced conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker himself. His listeners felt that he believed every word he said, and that, like Martin Luther, he would go to the stake rather than abate one jot or title of it. In such transfigured moments as these he was the type of the ancient Hebrew prophet as I learned that character at Sunday-school in my childhood."

While Lincoln on that day may have been of "the type of the ancient Hebrew prophet," the "biblical" text to which he turned was not the Old Testament, nor the New. He was relying instead on Euclid's Elements, the philosophical study the former congressman had read and reread during his wilderness years, honing the logical constructs that would less than a decade later prepare him to deliver his best remembered address on a blood-soaked battlefield where the Army of the Potomac and the army of Northern Virginia had over the course of three days sacrificed a combined 7,500 soldiers. As he would in those "few appropriate remarks" at Gettysburg about a country "dedicated to the proposition that ‘all men are created equal,'" Lincoln at Peoria summoned ancient algorithms-and more contemporary rhetorical flourishes-to identify the greatest common divisor of a young republic. It was in Jefferson's promise of a great equality that the debater of 1854 and the president of 1863 would find his moral grounding.

Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the grave, we have been giving up the OLD for the NEW faith. Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a "sacred right of self-government." These principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and Mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other. When Pettit, in connection with his support of the Nebraska bill, called the Declaration of Independence "a self-evident lie" he only did what consistency and candor require all other Nebraska men to do. Of the forty-odd Nebraska Senators who sat present and heard him, no one rebuked him. Nor am I apprized that any Nebraska newspaper, or any Nebraska orator, in the whole nation, has ever yet rebuked him. If this had been said among Marion's men, Southerners though they were, what would have become of the man who said it? If this had been said to the men who captured Andre, the man who said it, would probably have been hung sooner than Andre was. If it had been said in old Independence Hall, seventy-eight years ago, the very doorkeeper would have throttled the man, and thrust him into the street.
Let no one be deceived. The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter.

Fellow countrymen-Americans south, as well as north, shall we make no effort to arrest this? Already the liberal party throughout the world, express the apprehension "that the one retrograde institution in America, is undermining the principles of progress, and fatally violating the noblest political system the world ever saw." This is not the taunt of enemies, but the warning of friends. Is it quite safe to disregard it-to despise it? Is there no danger to liberty itself, in discarding the earliest practice, and first precept of our ancient faith? In our greedy chase to make profit of the negro, let us beware, lest we "cancel and tear to pieces" even the white man's charter of freedom.

Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of "moral right," back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of "necessity." Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south-let all Americans-let all lovers of liberty everywhere-join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.

While Lincoln may have recognized a need to "repurify," he was not himself ideologically or morally pure. The man who as president would stand justifiably accused of mangling civil liberties, disregarding the aspirations and basic humanity of Native Americans and willingly sacrificing principle on the alter of political expediency had learned too well from his fellow Whig Henry Clay, "the great compromiser." Lincoln was an imperfect foe of slavery, as even his most generous biographers now acknowledge. Yet, it is reasonable to suggest that the Lincoln of 1854 was in the process of becoming the president who would-pressured by Greeley-finally sign an Emancipation Proclamation. What he was coming to understand, intellectually and emotionally, was that slavery was an oppression of a kind with other oppressions. And he was not on the side of the oppressors. He was on the side of freedom-not merely as a moral or social construct, but as an economic one.
This was a concept that was hardwired into the Republican Party from the moment of its founding-by followers of Fourier's utopian socialist vision, by German '48ers and especially by the muscular veteran campaigner for radical land reform Alvan Bovay. It was an idea that Lincoln emphasized as he campaigned in 1856 for "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men and Fremont." Slavery was an issue that year, and Frederick Douglass was surely right when he argued that voting Republican was the best way to strike "the severest, deadliest blow upon Slavery that can be given at this particular time." But slavery was not the only issue, as a southern Illinois newspaper, the Belleville Weekly Advocate, noted after Lincoln stumped across the region on behalf of the ticket of General John C. Fremont and former New Jersey senator William Dayton (who had defeated Lincoln for the new party's vice-presidential nomination in a 253 to 110 vote at the first Republican National Convention that summer in Philadelphia). "He vindicated the cause of free vlabor, ‘that national capital,' in the language of Col. FREMONT, ‘which constitutes the real wealth of this great country, and creates that intelligent power in the masses alone to be relied on as the bulwark of free institutions.' He showed the tendency and aim of the Sham Democracy to degrade labor to subvert the true ends of Government and build up Aristocracy, Despotism and Slavery."

Two years later, on October 15, 1858, in the last of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the Republican candidate would frame the issues in the boldest possible terms, linking physical and economic slavery-"It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself "-as he addressed a crowd of 5,000 that had gathered in front of the Alton, Illinois, city hall. "That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles-right and wrong- throughout the world," Lincoln thundered. "They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle."

As he prepared for the 1860 presidential race, Lincoln would align with those who "hold that labor is the superior-greatly the superior-of capital." That line, from one of Lincoln's most striking speeches of the period, his September 30, 1859, address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, was reprised with minor variations throughout the difficult campaign for the Republican nomination. It was a nomination that saw Lincoln prevail with strong support from Greeley, who argued that the Illinoisan's determination to mingle free soil and free labor messages with his condemnations of "the Slave Power" established the right mix for a winning campaign in a country that the editor believed "will only swallow a little Anti-Slavery in a great deal of sweetening." Whether it was Greeley's calculus, the fact of a divided opposition, Lincoln's oratory or Carl Schurz's successful rallying of German-American '48ers and their immigrant communities to fight the "slaveholding capitalists" on behalf of a "society, where by popular education and continual change of condition, the dividing lines between the ranks and classes are almost obliterated"-or, as is always the case in politics, by a proper mingling of all the messages-the Republicans won the opportunity to preside over the conflict.

"The Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the slaveholders at their root," argued Marx in one of his many articles celebrating the rise of the new radical party in the United States-just as he decried "the connivance of the Northern Democrats" (or, as he referred to them, "Slavocrats") with "the Southern Slavocracy." The columnist, often displaying enthusiasms as idealistic as the Republican campaigners of Vermont or Wisconsin, argued that the party's rapid rise offered "many palpable proofs that the North had accumulated sufficient energies to rectify the aberrations which United States history, under the slaveholders' pressure, had undergone for half a century, and to make it return to the true principles of its development." Lincoln's victory was in Marx's view a signal that the workers of the north would not "submit any longer to an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders." That would not sit well with the south, and Greeley's European correspondent explained to readers of the Tribune what they well knew to be the next stage in the history of the United States: "The Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to open struggle between North and South."

The Civil War defined Lincoln's tenure in the White House. The nation's first Republican president was more than a mere warrior, however. He sought, sincerely if not always successfully, to strike the difficult balance between the duties of a commander in chief and a domestic policy maker, a balance he recognized in that first State of the Union address. Just as there were triumphs on the battlefield, there were triumphs in the economic debates that Lincoln had outlined. Chief among these was the enactment of the Homestead Act of 1862, a soft version of the land reforms proposed by Paine-influenced agrarian socialists and social democrats of varying stripes-led by George Henry Evans, who suggested the movement be dubbed "Republican" as early as the mid-1840s, and Evans's aide, Bovay, who would apply the name a decade later when he called the party into being at Ripon, Wisconsin. The act, which promised "land for the landless," allowed any adult citizen (or anyone who had applied for citizenship) to claim a 160-acre parcel of land in the public domain. Greeley hailed it as "one of the most vital reforms ever attempted" and predicted it would usher in a postwar era of economic equity characterized by "Peace, Prosperity and Progress."

Even as they agreed on homesteading, Greeley and Lincoln wrangled over the timing and scope of an emancipation proclamation. The editor joined Frederick Douglass in demanding that the president take steps to make the Civil War not merely a struggle to preserve the Union, but "an Abolition war." Even as Greeley and Lincoln exchanged sometimes pointed letters, the Tribune's longtime managing editor Charles Dana was now working for Lincoln. Officially assigned to the War Department-where he would eventually serve as assistant secretary-Dana's real role was as an aide and adviser to the president on questions of what the former newspaperman described as the "judicious, humane, and wise uses of executive authority." That Lincoln spent much of his presidency reading dispatches from and welcoming the counsel of Marx's longtime editor-like the fact that he awarded military commissions to the numerous comrades of the author of The Communist Manifesto who had come to the United States as political refugees following the failed European revolutions of 1848-is a shard of history rarely seen in the hagiographic accounts that produce a sanitized version of the sixteenth president's story. In the years following Lincoln's death, his law partner and political comrade, William Herndon, complained that Lincoln's official biographers were already attempting "to make the story with the classes as against the masses," an approach that he suggested "will result in delineating the real Lincoln about as well as does a wax figure in the museum."

The real Lincoln was more of a Jeffersonian, and especially a Paineite, than an orthodox Marxist. The president rejected the idea of "a law to prevent a man from getting rich" as an impractical plan that would "do more harm than good." He expected that, while labor was "superior" to capital, there "probably always will be a relation between labor and capital." But if he was something less than a Marxist, Lincoln was also something less than a laissez-faire capitalist-indeed, quite a bit less. Even as he accepted a relationship between capital and labor, he expounded on the "error" of "assuming that the whole labor of the world exists within that relation."

To the extent that sides were to be taken, Lincoln was on the side of labor. He urged working men to "combine" and organize labor unions-"uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds." He wanted "free labor" to be able to make demands on capital, without apology or compromise. He proposed this, not as a young man in a "radical phase," but as the president of the United States. And he said as much when leaders of the New York Workingmen's Democratic-Republican Association arrived at the White House in March 1864, to inform the president that they had elected him as an honorary member of their organization. Lincoln "gratefully accepted" the membership, read the attending paperwork and then responded appreciatively to his visitors: "You comprehend, as your address shows, that the existing rebellion means more, and tends to more, than the perpetuation of African Slavery-that it is, in fact, a war upon the rights of all working people. Partly to show that this view has not escaped my attention, and partly that I cannot better express myself, I read a passage from the Message to Congress in December 1861."

Having recalled his declarations about the superiority of labor, Lincoln spent a good deal more time with the Workingmen, despite a busy schedule that placed on his shoulders all the weight of decisions regarding the war and an impending re-election campaign. The campaign would see Lincoln's supporters distribute handbills in working-class wards of New York and other cities, arguing that the war was a fight not just to free slaves in the south but to free workers in the north from "Slave Wages." The most ardent abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass, had always reasoned that: "Liberty to the slave is peace, honor, and prosperity to the country." But now this message was becoming central to the appeal of Lincoln's campaign to voters in the swing states that would decide whether the president could see the war through to "an Abolition peace" characterized by "liberty for all, chains for none." Emancipation, argued Lincoln's supporters, would allow African Americans in the south to "demand wages that would allow them to live in a decent manner, and therefore would help the poor white man to put up the price of labor instead of putting it down as [slavery does] now."

"Let the workingman think of this and go to the polls and vote for Abraham Lincoln, who is the true democratic candidate, and not the representative of the English Aristocracy, or their form of government, to be rid of which so many have left their native shores, and which form the leaders of the Rebellion are in favor of, in evidence of which we have the fact that in many of the Southern States no people can hold office but a property holder..." went one leaflet's class-based appeal, which was critical to building the majority that would allow Lincoln to carry New York and retain the presidency with a decisive national landslide.

From afar, Marx (who corresponded with Dana and other American compatriots during and after the war) cheered on the campaign, writing to Engels in September 1864 with considerable enthusiasm: "Should Lincoln succeed this time-as is highly probable-it will be on a far more radical platform and in completely changed circumstances."

Marx and Engels had been busy in the fall of 1864 with the work of organizing the International Workingmen's Association-the "First International" of the communist movement and its allies on the left. At the meeting on November 19 of the International's general council in London, Marx presented a letter of congratulation to Lincoln, which the council endorsed. It read:

Sir: We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.
From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counter-revolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution," and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution," indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor," and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice"-then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the pro-slavery intervention of their betters-and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The letter was duly delivered to Charles Francis Adams, Sr., the grandson of John and son of John Quincy, who had since the beginning of the war served in the delicate capacity of Lincoln's ambassador to the Court of St. James. Adams was well acquainted with Marx. A Greeley man, who would campaign for the vice presidency in 1872 on a "Liberal Republican" ticket led by the editor, he had been the subject of glowing accounts by Marx in theTribunesince his arrival in London in 1861. His own son and private secretary, Henry, after attending "a democratic and socialistic meeting" organized by Marx and Engels, had reported approvingly to Washington that the speakers emphasized "that their interests and those of the American Union were one, that the success of free institutions in America was a political question of deep consequence in England and that they would not tolerate any interference unfavorable to the north." Marx, Engels and their comrades suggested the great-grandson of one American president and the grandson of another were among the best friends that Lincoln and the Union cause had in London.
The senior Adams dispatched the letter from Marx and the leaders of the First International in a packet of diplomatic correspondence that was delivered to the State Department in Washington. Secretary of State William Seward promptly replied that "these interesting papers have been submitted to the president." Seward then communicated Lincoln's response, which Adams in turn delivered to Marx and his comrades:

"I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him," began Adams. He went on:

So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.
The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.

Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.

Marx was thrilled by "the fact that Lincoln answered us so courteously," as he was with the rejection of "reactionary" policies and the expression of solidarity with "the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world." No fool, the philosopher recognized, as he wrote during the war, that "Lincoln's principal political actions contain much that is aesthetically repulsive, logically inadequate, farcical in form and politically, contradictory." He did not imagine the president as a revolutionary, let alone a likely recruit to the International. Yet he was inclined to believe, based on his many years of following and commenting upon the economic and political struggles of the United States, that the American erred to the left, and he was certain that "Lincoln's place in the history of the United States and of mankind will, nevertheless, be next to that of Washington!" As such, the organizer in him delighted in the broad reporting of the exchange between the International and the Lincoln White House, which was featured news in the Times of London, along with other British and American papers. "The difference between Lincoln's answer to us and to the bourgeoisie [anti-slavery groups that had also written the president] has created such a sensation here that the West End ‘clubs' are shaking their heads at it," Marx informed Engels. "You can understand how gratifying that has been for our people."
In the decades following Lincoln's assassination, the story of his exchange with the First International was well known and often recounted. Eugene Victor Debs would stop his 1908 presidential campaign train-"The Red Special"-in Springfield to deliver a celebratory address at Lincoln's grave. Years later, in the midst of another presidential campaign, Debs would argue that "The Republican Party was once red. Lincoln was a revolutionary." It is indisputable that the Republican Party had at its founding a red streak. And it is arguable that the party's first president was a radical; his great struggle, rooted in the ideals of the founding, was for "a new birth of freedom" that would be aptly characterized by the historian Charles Beard as the "Second American Revolution, and in a strict sense, the First." The fight, Lincoln argued at Gettysburg, was waged to give meaning to the founding promise that "all men are created equal." This did not, as some of the more excitable revisionists of the 1930s imagined, make Lincoln a communist. The man who clung so tightly in his Gettysburg Address to the Enlightenment visions that birthed the nation kept the faith in "that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found"-as the plaque on display for more than a century near the great Lincoln statue on the University of Wisconsin campus describes it. Lincoln was not a Marxist, but the first Republican president belonged to a time when men such as he were familiar with the writings of Marx and the deeds of the revolutionary circle that spread from Europe to the United States in the aftermath of the 1848 rebellions. He sifted and winnowed the radical ideas of his day. He found truth in notions about the superiority of labor to capital, just as he found important-at times essential-allies among the radicals who shared the view that a dying southern aristocracy was mounting not merely a last desperate defense of slavery but "in fact, a war upon the rights of all working people."

A century after Lincoln's death, and barely five weeks before his own assassination, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., would recall the connection. King's comment came at a celebration of the life of W. E. B. Du Bois, which had been organized by the journal Freedomways at Carnegie Hall. Addressing the issue of Du Bois's radicalism, King used the address to urge a break with the "red scare" thinking that demonized everything and everyone associated with communism:

We cannot talk of Dr. Du Bois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life. Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years. It is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. In contemporary life the English-speaking world has no difficulty with the fact that Sean O'Casey was a literary giant of the twentieth century and a Communist, or that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the greatest [living] poet, though he also served in the Chilean Senate as a Communist. It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.
While King offered a corrective to the casual dismissal of socialists, communists and other radicals, and of those-including American presidents-who might have been informed by them, it was Du Bois, a half century earlier, who offered the perspective on Lincoln that remains the most useful for those seeking a sense of what distinguished the most nuanced of American presidents.
As a product of his times and of the great debates that defined them, as a student of ancient ideas and fresh ones, as an American born in the last weeks of Thomas Jefferson's presidency, when it was still perhaps possible to detect the fading glimmers of the Age of Enlightenment, Abraham Lincoln understood that the best answers to societal challenges were found in "regions hitherto unexplored." This is why he read so widely. This is why he followed the freedom struggles that played out in distant lands so closely-and so passionately. This is why he befriended radicals, many of them refugees from the great revolutions of 1848; and this is why he sampled so broadly from their proposals and platforms-even if the man Du Bois recognized as "big enough to be inconsistent" refused to embrace the whole of any one. "He did not always see the right at first," Du Bois said of Lincoln. But, the scholar noted, America's sixteenth president retained a remarkable "capacity for growth." It was that latter capacity that led Du Bois to suggest that Americans would do well to "take pattern of Lincoln" and emulate his openness to ideas generated in those regions hitherto unexplored-a newspaper office in Cologne, a Springfield meeting organized in solidarity with a Hungarian revolutionary, a Wisconsin schoolhouse filled with Fourierists and "Vote Yourself a Farm" land reformers, a workingmen's club in New York, a gathering in London of the First International. Presidents who choose to dismiss individuals, ideas and ideologies with which they do not fully agree take too many options off the table; in so doing they ill serve the republic. There are points on every nation's arc of history where radical ideas are more than merely interesting, intriguing or perhaps unsettling; they are the "new enlightenments" that enable and encourage the pursuit of "the welfare and happiness of mankind." Jefferson, at his best, recognized this. Paine as well. And, surely, Lincoln, when he observed in the darkest hours of his presidency: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country."