Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

January 2, 2012

The Company Men

Filed under: Film,financial crisis,unemployment — louisproyect @ 10:10 pm

I shied away from “The Company Men” in 2010 because it sounded too much like “Up in the Air”, the repellent George Clooney vehicle about corporate downsizing. Both films were far more concerned about the unemployed executive than the average factory worker, but clearly we are in a different period than when John Ford made “Grapes of Wrath” (Ford was a Republican.)

But after seeing “Margin Call”, another movie about rich white guys losing their jobs, I decided to give “Company Men” a try since “Margin Call” had persuaded me that a decent film can be made about such people. After all, I was a well-paid victim of downsizing at Goldman-Sachs–sort of a three percenter–and I am not that much of a prick, at least most of the time.

I watched “The Company Men” last night on Showtime, a premium cable station (it is also available from Netflix) and can report that it is very good, even if it pulls its punches at the end. This review contains spoilers throughout so if you haven’t seen the film, read no further.

Set in 2009, “The Company Men”, like “Margin Call”, begins with men and women learning that they are being terminated. Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck) is one of those affected. As a sales manager for a shipbuilding firm that is suffering declining profits, he is to be sacrificed at the altar of quarterly earnings reports.

At an executive committee meeting, Gene McClary, a senior vice-president played by Tommy Lee Jones, lashes into the CEO James Salinger (Craig Nelson) for not having a long-term view of the company’s mission and breaking the social compact made with the employees in more prosperous times. He is the same kind of character played by Kevin Spacey in “Margin Call”, a firm believer in the fiction that capitalism is a system that can work for the benefit of exploiter and exploited alike.

Craig Nelson, who is the veteran of a thousand b-movies and television shows, is cast perfectly here. A victim apparently of a coup d’age who I did not even recognize, he has just the right combination of gravitas and CEO imperiousness to lend his character the proper believability.

Soon to go after Bobby Walker is Phil Woodward, a long-time employee in his early 60s who started out as a welder on the factory floor. Chris Cooper, one of Hollywood’s finer actors and an outspoken liberal like Ben Affleck, plays Woodward.

In many ways, I could not help but think of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” when watching this film. Miller, a committed Marxist, understood the depths of the illusions that “company men” (salarymen in Japan) had in the system. In that unforgettable scene between Willy Loman and his boss (who I played in a high school production mounted by Fred Madeo, a radical who taught English there), Willy cries out, “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away – a man is not a piece of fruit.”

The same kind of scene takes place between Woodward and Salinger, some months after Woodward’s firing. Woodward pleads with his old boss to give him a job as international sales rep at a huge pay cut. Salinger tells him that he is too old and urges him to retire and enjoy days at the beach or playing golf. When Woodward replies that he can’t afford to, Salinger tells him that is too bad. His Board of Directors would not allow him to hire Woodward for the job. A few days later Woodward locks himself in his garage and turns on his engine to commit suicide through carbon monoxide poisoning, the same way that Willy Loman went.

A good twenty-five years younger than Woodward, Ben Affleck’s Bobby Walker has a lot more going for him it would seem, especially in his own view. As the owner of a Porsche, membership in a country club, and all the other accouterments of a job paying $180,000 per year, he assumes that things will fall into place. When his wife demands that he sell the Porsche, he reluctantly accedes. Later on, when she stops paying dues to the country club without his knowledge, he is whisked from the golf course unceremoniously. When he confronts his wife about her action, she defends herself by saying that he had refused to drop his membership voluntarily so what else could she do? They needed to pay the rent (they had lost their McMansion) and put food on the table. He remonstrated: without the country club membership, he would be less than a man.

The scenes involving an unemployed Woodward and Walker on job interviews have amazing authenticity—trust me, I’ve been there. These are a couple of guys who despite being on the lowest rungs of the totem pole still expected to be treated with kid gloves. During an interview with an outplacement specialist provided by his former employer, the woman keeps referring to Woodward as “Phil” until he asks her if she knows him. Looking at him quizzically, she asks why. He replies that since they have not been properly introduced, he wonders why she is calling him by his first name.

Walker is even less inclined to suffer such slights. After being kept waiting for two hours by an overweight female African-American interviewer who while sipping on a soft drink tells him that he is probably not what they are looking for, he explodes. He curses her out and tells her to lay off the soft drinks because she needs to lose 25 pounds.

Director and screenwriter John Wells, who has a background as executive producer of TV shows like “The West Wing” and “ER”, understands how people like Bobby Walker tick. The character graduated from Penn State and used his good looks and charm to advance rapidly in the business world. This is exactly the sort of person who would be outraged by an African-American woman having power over his economic position and his racism is palpable.

The film ends on an unaccountably upbeat note. After losing his own job, Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones) decides to start his own boutique shipbuilding company and hires Walker as his top sales guy. The film ends with them looking out the window on the piers hopefully. This Capraesque touch makes no sense at all since not only did the economic crisis make such a venture unlikely, it also assumes that the U.S. can be returned to its gloried past as a manufacturing power.

Back in 2008 I wrote about my experiences at Goldman-Sachs after the 1987 financial crisis left me in a precarious situation not unlike these characters:

In 1988, after about two and a half years on the job at Goldman-Sachs, I received a zero percent salary increase. I heard through the grapevine that if you didn’t get a raise, it would be a good idea to dust off your resume.

After getting my zero percent increase, I resigned from Goldman and consulted for a couple of years until I crash-landed at Columbia University, where I have been for about 18 years. In my first year at Columbia, I was picking up a coffee and muffin in the Business School cafeteria when I was stunned to see Jimmy Primavera sitting at a table in blue jeans, work boots and a flannel shirt. Jimmy had been the manager of trading systems at Goldman, where he had worked for 20 years or so. Like a lot of Goldman veterans, Jimmy had no college degree and joined the firm right out of the army. Not long after Rick Adam arrived, word went out that they were trying to get rid of managers with last names ending in a vowel. During a job interview at Bear-Stearns, I had run into another manager who had gotten the boot from Goldman and who was there interviewing as well. He was a Greek-American who felt like he had been stabbed in the back. Guys like him and Jimmy used to work 60 hours a week and were gung-ho believers in the firm.

When I asked Jimmy what he was doing at Columbia, he said that he was washing windows and without missing a beat added that he was not kidding. [He had suffered the same fate as the Ben Affleck character.] He told me about the bloodbath that had left him and the Greek-American jobless.

One morning they came in and tried to log into PROFS, an IBM mainframe email system that predated the Internet. If the word PROFS rings a bell, that’s because it is what Oliver North used for communications during the Iran-Contra conspiracy. The Senate Investigating Committee subpoenaed the PROFS tapes and got the goods on Reagan’s boys.

Jimmy and about a dozen other managers and senior employees found that their login wasn’t working. What could be wrong? They soon found out. One by one, they were called into personnel to discover that their services were no longer needed and were then escorted back to their desk by security guards. After they put their belongings into cartons, they were escorted out of the building and put into a long string of town cars and driven home.

At some point, everybody who has been through such humiliating and economically devastating experiences will band together and make the one-percent of America responsible for them pay for their actions. Since the 99 percent is much more humane than the bastards who run this country, we will be much more merciful toward them and will probably adopt the measures proposed by Leon Trotsky in “If America should go Communist”:

As to the comparatively few opponents of the soviet revolution, one can trust to American inventive genius. It may well be that you will take your unconvinced millionaires and send them to some picturesque island, rent-free for life, where they can do as they please.

January 1, 2012

Public opinion polls and the left

Filed under: anti-capitalism,financial crisis,press,psychology — louisproyect @ 6:40 pm

On December 12th the Gallup Poll issued a press release about their latest findings: fear of “big government” was at a near record level. And even more strikingly, Democratic voters represented the largest uptick since the last poll was taken. In 2009 32% of Democrats told Gallup that they were afraid of big government, now the number is 48%. As might be expected, conservative pundits embraced these findings as proof that the country was tired of Obama, tired of liberalism, tired of socialism, etc. David Brooks, the oleaginous NY Times op-ed contributor, wrote:

The members of the Obama administration have many fine talents, but making adept historical analogies may not be among them.

When the administration came to office in the depths of the financial crisis, many of its leading figures concluded that the moment was analogous to the Great Depression. They read books about the New Deal and sought to learn from F.D.R.

But, in the 1930s, people genuinely looked to government to ease their fears and restore their confidence. Today, Americans are more likely to fear government than be reassured by it.

According to a Gallup survey, 64 percent of Americans polled said they believed that big government is the biggest threat to the country. Only 26 percent believed that big business is the biggest threat. As a result, the public has reacted to Obama’s activism with fear and anxiety. The Democrats lost 63 House seats in the 2010 elections.

My first reaction to all this was to laugh at the idea of using a pejorative term like “big government” in a poll. This of course is the commonly used buzzword of Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the talk radio right. Like a bell being sounded with Pavlov’s dogs, who would not salivate?

Even more laughable is the idea of getting a clear idea of what the term means to different people being polled. For example, one of the hallmarks of “big government” are entitlement programs such as social security. But according to a Lake Research Partners poll taken in November 2010, 67% of all Americans oppose cutting Social Security to help make the government more solvent with 51 percent of Tea Party supporters being opposed.

A few days later those of us who were disheartened by the findings might have been convinced to come down off the ledge after hearing from Pew Research that young people are more positive about “socialism” — and more negative about “capitalism” — than are older Americans.

My first reaction to this was to wonder what young people think of when they hear the word socialism. Back in the 1960s, when I used to sell subscriptions to the Militant newspaper door-to-door in college dormitories, my opening pitch for a “socialist newsweekly” elicited more often than not the query “you mean like in Sweden or Israel?” That in fact is what the word meant to most young people. I guess we could have called the newspaper “communist” to avoid confusion in the same manner that the SWP eventually began to refer to itself but wiser heads back then understood that the choice of such a word would have resulted in the incredible shrinking party, something that its Wise Leader evidently intended.

Polling dominates the political sphere since it serves as entrails for those of us with a soothsaying bent. Back in the 60s SWP members would fixate on every poll taken about the Vietnam War, looking at the numbers as closely as a physician looking at a patient’s chart. Part of the problem in interpreting such numbers is that the question attached to them was often phrased in such a manner as to undercut the antiwar movement. While not quite using the words “Do you favor a precipitous withdrawal in order to guarantee a communist victory that will lead to gulags in Indiana”, they often were nearly as bad.

David Moore was a vice-president of Gallup for 13 years and knows the tricks of the trade. In 2008 the leftwing Beacon Press published his “The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls”, the first chapter of which can be read on their website. As it deals with the war in Iraq, it has many of the same lessons I learned about polling during the Vietnam War. Moore writes about an experiment he conducted with a fellow Gallup professional about the way that the polls were being used to create a war hysteria:

In the February 2003 poll, we asked a standard version of the question that all the other pollsters asked, “Would you favor or oppose sending American ground troops to the Persian Gulf in an attempt to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq?” And like the other polls, we found a substantial majority in favor of the war—59 percent to 38 percent, a 21-point margin. Only 3 percent said they did not have an opinion. We followed up that question with another, which essentially asked if people really cared that their opinion might prevail. And the results here revealed a very different public.

To people who said they favored the war, we asked if they would be upset if the government did not send troops to Iraq. And to people who opposed the war, we asked if they would be upset if the government did send troops. More than half of the supposed supporters and a fifth of the opponents said they would not be upset if their opinions were ignored. The net result is that 29 percent of Americans actually supported the war and said they would be upset if it didn’t come about, whereas 30 percent were opposed to the war and said they would be upset if it did occur. An additional 38 percent, who had expressed an opinion either for or against the proposed invasion, said they would not be upset if the government did the opposite of what they had just favored. Add to this number the 3 percent who initially expressed no opinion, and that makes 41 percent who didn’t care one way or the other.

These results from the follow-up question reveal the absurdity of much public opinion polling. A democracy is supposed to represent, or at least take into account, the “will” of the people, not the uncaring, unreflective, top-of-mind responses many people give to pollsters. If people don’t care that the views they tell pollsters are ignored by their political leaders, then it hardly makes sense for pollsters to treat such responses as the Holy Grail. Yet, typically we do, making no distinction between those who express deeply held views and those who have hardly, if at all, thought about an issue.

Maybe it is because of my unrepentant nature, I have stopped paying attention much to polls ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascendancy of Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. Frankly, I could care less if I was the last person in America who thought that the capitalist system was insane. My inspiration would remain Henry David Thoreau who when jailed for refusing to pay taxes that would have supported a war with Mexico was visited by Ralph Waldo Emerson who asked him what he was doing in there. Thoreau’s reply: “And what are you doing out there?”

It has taken two decades but a good portion of America has come to conclusions similar to my own, especially the young people who braved cold weather, discomfort and police brutality to demonstrate their opposition to the One Percent. They had the good sense to occupy Zuccotti not on the basis that a Gallup Poll thought it would be a good idea but because social justice demanded it. And once they started raising hell, the poll numbers reflected sympathy for their action.

In an article titled “Polling Prejudice” in the American Prospect, Taeku Lee wrote:

Some of the earliest public-opinion polls in the 1940s found that an overwhelming majority (about two-thirds) of whites were willing to support segregated schools. By the mid-1990s (the last time questions on school segregation were asked), only one out of every 25 whites held to the same view. Similarly, on interracial couples, polls from the late-1950s and early-1960s found nearly universal disapproval among white Americans; by the 1990s, only a small fraction of whites favored anti-miscegenation laws and a majority actively indicated their support of interracial marriages. Over an even shorter time period, the prevalence of invidious stereotypes of African Americans as less intelligent and less industrious than whites declined between the early-1990s and the mid-2000s.

What do you suppose accounts for the declining poll numbers for racism? Isn’t it obvious that the bold and determined action of civil rights activists is key? Like the OWS, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other groups threw caution to the wind and went into the belly of the beast to confront Jim Crow. Their actions galvanized public opinion and made it inevitable for voting rights and desegregation to prevail.

In order to challenge the capitalist system, we have to assume that we are swimming against the stream. With a superstructure controlled by the rich, “public opinion” will inevitably reflect that of the dominant class as Marx wrote in the German Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

However, when the “dominant material relationships” begin to fail, more and more people will be open to alternative ideas about the social order.  That time has arrived. With support for the political classes in Washington at an all-time low, this is an invitation for us to raise all kinds of hell. And when Gallup reports that such support continues to slide, you can bet that I will take them at their word.

December 31, 2011

On the historical experiences of IS and SWP with factions

Filed under: revolutionary organizing,socialism,sectarianism — louisproyect @ 2:22 pm

Another negative feature of party life is the total lack of a space in which criticisms of the political line of the organisation can be raised internally. Rather than being able to articulate their views in a regularly published Internal Bulletin comrades are often reduced to grumbling in corners after branch meetings with the result that they become seen as conservative elements or worse. Indeed the raising of questions at branch meetings is often frowned on by a section of the comrades who would appear to see any kind of questioning as disloyalty to the organisation and its politics. This attitude is as much a result of the training comrades have received and can be painlessly changed for the better.

What then needs to be done to make our party more democratic in order that it can more sensitively respond to an ever changing class struggle and make it more attractive to a rising generation repelled by mainstream politics parties, especially those of the left, which are not democratically controlled by their members? Most importantly we need to discuss the nature of the problems that many comrades are raising and in this way change the internal culture of the party into one that is tolerant and inclusive of those who question. There has never been a better time for such an enterprise given that the spirit of democracy has swept the globe in 2011 and not far beneath the surface has been the spectre of workers democracy waiting only to be made explicit and here in Britain that is exactly the process that N30 began. It is our task to seek to become of the developing forces that seek to progress beyond bourgeois society and we are best able to do so if we too possess an organisation that is democratically centralized and eschews commandism.

full: http://splinteredsunrise.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/guest-post-on-the-historical-experiences-of-is-and-swp-with-factions/

December 29, 2011

The anti-imperialist Egyptian army?

Filed under: Egypt,mechanical anti-imperialism — louisproyect @ 9:41 pm

Michel Chossudovsky on the protest movement in Egypt:

The slogans in Egypt are “Down with Mubarak, Down with the Regime”. No anti-American posters have been reported… The overriding and destructive influence of the USA in Egypt and throughout the Middle East remains unheralded.

The foreign powers which operate behind the scenes are shielded from the protest movement.

No significant political change will occur unless the issue of foreign interference is meaningfully addressed by the protest movement.

The cooptation of the leaders of major opposition parties and civil society organizations in anticipation of the collapse of an authoritarian puppet government is part of Washington’s design, applied in different regions of the World.

The process of cooptation is implemented and financed by US based foundations including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and  Freedom House (FH). Both FH and the NED have links to the US Congress. the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and the US business establishment. Both the NED and FH are known to have ties to the CIA.

* * * *

New York Times December 29, 2011

Egypt’s Forces Raid Offices of Nonprofits, 3 Backed by U.S.

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and

CAIRO — Egyptian security forces stormed 17 offices of nonprofit groups around the country on Thursday, including at least three democracy-promotion groups financed by the United States, as part of an investigation that the military rulers say will reveal foreign hands in the recent outbreak of protests.

In Cairo, heavily armed men wearing the black uniforms of the central security police tore through boxes, hauled away files and computers and prevented employees from leaving offices of two of the American groups, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which are affiliated with American political parties and financed by the United States government. The security forces also raided the offices of the Washington-based Freedom House.

The raids were a stark escalation in what has appeared to be a campaign by the country’s military rulers to rally support by playing to nationalist and anti-American sentiment here.

“General prosecutor & central security stormed N.D.I. office in Cairo & Assiut,” an employee of the National Democratic Institute wrote in a text message from inside its offices. “We are confined here as they’re searching and clearing out office.”

A man, who identified himself as an official with the public prosecutor’s office but declined to give his name, stood outside the offices of the International Republican Institute in the Dokki neighborhood. He refused to answer questions about the raids but said, “Don’t worry, we’re not going to arrest them.”

The raids come of the heels of an investigation by the Egyptian government into foreign financing for nonprofit organizations operating in the country. The military has suggested that such funding has played a role in fomenting protests with goal of bringing down the Egyptian government.

The raids also coincided with the acquittal of five police officers in the deaths of protesters during the revolution that ousted the country’s autocratic president, Hosni Mubarak. An Egyptian court found that the police officers had either not been at the scene or, in the case of two of the men, had fired in self-defense, state media reported, a ruling likely to further inflame opponents of the country’s military rulers.

Human rights advocates have urged the Egyptian government to drop its investigation into foreign funding of civil society, which prosecutors have described as treason. A September report by state security prosecutors identified what it said were more than two dozen unregistered groups receiving foreign funding and operating in Egypt. By the country’s law on associations, the violation is punishable with imprisonment.

The Republican and Democratic institutes have worked openly since 2005 and had been assisting with election monitoring during the country’s parliamentary vote.

In separate statements on Thursday, the two groups said they were troubled by the sudden raids on their offices. “Cracking down on organizations whose sole purpose is to support the democratic process during Egypt’s historic transition sends a disturbing signal,” the N.D.I. president Kenneth Wollack was quoted as saying.

The statement from the International Republican Institute was even more direct. “It is ironic that even during the Mubarak era I.R.I. was not subjected to such aggressive action,” the group said.

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo and J. David Goodman from New York.

December 27, 2011

The Iraq war in retrospect

Filed under: imperialism/globalization,Iran,Iraq,Libya — louisproyect @ 7:47 pm

The latest issue of Frontline, a leftist Indian newspaper, has an article by Vijay Prashad titled “Exit America” that deals with the question of whether the war in Iraq was “dumb”, an allusion to then State Senator Barack Obama’s comment in 2002:

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

Forced by circumstances of his elevation to supreme representative of the American ruling class, Obama no longer uses words like “dumb” and tries to put the best possible spin on how things turned out. Vijay writes:

Obama, who had made his own position clear in 2002, could not revisit them in 2011: he is now the Commander in Chief and would find it awkward to belittle the sacrifices of troops who were sent to fight a false war. At most Obama could acknowledge the debate before the war, with the lead-up “a source of great controversy here at home, with patriots on both sides of the debate”. The Iraq war was not perfect, he accepted, but its outcome was good, with the troops leaving behind “a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people”. American liberalism is not capable of any more than that.

Meanwhile, the notion that the troops have left behind a “sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq” has been demolished within hours after Obama uttered these words. The Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has ordered the arrest of his Sunni vice-president, Tareq al-Hashemi for supporting “terrorist activity”. Al-Hashemi then fled to sanctuary in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the north, an act that prompted al-Maliki to brandish threats against the Kurds as well.

As it turns out, al-Maliki’s crackdown was in part a reaction to intelligence he received from an apparently friendly government in the region. Now your first reaction would be to conclude that Iran or Syria furnished this information as part of their membership in the Shia “axis of good” network in the Middle East, the last bastion of resistance to the imperialist/Sunni cabal made up of Qatar, al-Jazeera, Saudi Arabia and the CIA. Well, it turns out that al-Maliki’s informer was none other than Libya, as the NY Times reported: “The Iraqi government said the arrests had been prompted by a tip from Libya’s transitional government that said documents revealed Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was working with insurgents to stage a coup.”

What the fuck? I thought that the Libyan government was made up of Sunni jihadists. That’s the point made by MRZine when it published a photo showing al-Qaeda flags on a courthouse in Benghazi. Hasn’t Pepe Escobar proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the “revolution” against Qaddafi was a plot hatched by French intelligence and jihadists? All this is beginning to sound murkier than a John le Carré novel, don’t you think? And what the hell was Qaddafi doing, making alliances with Sunni insurgents who he had tortured in Libyan prisons as part of his obligations to the CIA?

Now it can turn out that all that intelligence was nothing but bullshit designed to justify al-Maliki’s crackdown. But it is not bullshit to say that the political elites in Libya are on fairly good terms now with Iraq’s:

Head of the Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC), Mahmoud Jibril, arrived on Thursday to Iraq in a short surprise visit. Jibril met with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki, French Foreign Minister Hosheyar Zebari and a number of Iraqi officials. During the meeting, Maliki discussed the reconstruction of Iraq, a source told Alsumaria.

Jibril stated that he agreed with Maliki to exchange ambassadors between both countries as soon as possible and benefit from Iraqi expertise especially in the oil sector.

Of course someone with a proper anti-imperialist training would point out that what Jibril and al-Maliki have in common is that they got where they are courtesy of American military power. What further proof can you have that someone is an agent of imperialism if Cruise missiles were pointed in the direction of their enemies?

Things get a bit more complicated, however, when you consider that al-Maliki has also targeted the MEK camp in Iraq, a presence that the government Iran considers deeply inimical to its own security.  We are obviously compelled to support al-Maliki in this initiative considering what Rostam Pourzal told MRZine readers in 2006:

In Iran, where the militia has been known since its inception in 1965 as Mojahedin, or jihadists, MEK lost all credibility after it became a proxy of Iran’s archenemy, Saddam Hussein, in 1986.  Anne Singleton, a former insider and now an advocate for penitent MEK activists in Europe, has labeled the militia “Saddam’s private army” in her book-length memoirs by the same title.

A day before the Berkeley forum took place, the far-right daily Washington Times was busy promoting MEK’s annual convention in the US capital.  Perhaps you remember a similar cozy relationship the Moonie newspaper had with Nicaragua’s Contra mercenaries and with UNITA, the rebel army that terrorized Namibia on behalf of the Reagan Administration and apartheid South Africa.  A Reagan-era Pentagon official and leading architect of the Iraq invasion, Richard Perle, was the keynote speaker at MEK’s 2004 convention.

And, of course, any anti-imperialist worth his or her salt would have to back al-Maliki’s crackdown on a friend of the Baathist Party in light of the fact that Richard Perle spoke at their convention.  To really succeed in this brand of politics, it is necessary to put a minus where someone like Perle puts a plus. And for those stodgy old Marxists hung-up on dialectical contradictions, the only advice is to wise up and get with the program.

Now it is a possibility that the left makes a mistake by thinking in these terms, I am afraid. I have vivid recollections of those arguments made on behalf of the Sunni guerrillas some years ago, when the slogan “support the resistance” became a kind of litmus test.

In 2005, ISO’er Sharon Smith wrote an article titled “The Right to Resist Occupation” that claimed:

SUPPORT FOR the right of Iraqis to resist occupation must extend beyond an abstract principle for the U.S. antiwar movement.

While recognizing “the right of the Iraqi people to resist as a point of principle,” Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies–in widely circulated notes for a speech to the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) on December 18–argued, “We should not call for ‘supporting the resistance’ because we don’t know who most of them are and what they really stand for, and because of those we do know, we mostly don’t support their social program beyond opposition to the occupation.”

To be meaningful, however, supporting the “right to resist” must include support for that resistance once it actually emerges.

To be fair to the ISO, they were not half as bad as someone like George Galloway who in his debate with Christopher Hitchens described the Sunni guerrillas as some of the greatest patriots since the days of the heroic NLF.

Unfortunately, nobody on the left could have guessed how willing the Sunni fighters would have been to cut their own deals with imperialism in a pacified Anbar Province:

Much of the local population here has always wanted the US to give them handouts, but it’s different now, American officials say. Over the past few years, the strategy here was to clear an area of danger and then swoop down with reconstruction projects in an attempt to win over the populace. That was because Anbar was still dangerous, still peppered with Al Qaeda and other Sunni extremists. The US would see a project finished, only to be destroyed.

Now, say Marine officials, they’ll only spend money on a project that tribal sheikhs want only if those sheikhs get buy-in from the local and provincial governments that will ultimately own and maintain it.

“We don’t want this to be about us spending American money for the sheikhs,” says Brig. Gen. John Allen, who oversees political and economic reconstruction for Multi-National Forces-West. “We want this to be about American money that makes a difference in bringing government along and making the sheikhs part of the government.”

In other words, the Sunni resistance melted away as soon as the imperialist pocketbook opened up.

Back in the 1960s, the SWP resisted every effort made by SDS or independent leftists to make slogans like “Support the NLF” part of a mass mobilization. Primarily, the thinking was that anything that kept Americans from participating on the basis, for example, that the NLF was trying to kill their draftee son, was objectively against the interests of the NLF. A demonstration of 200,000 under the banner of “Out Now” was far more effective than one of 20,000 around the slogan “Victory to the NLF”. When you stop and think about it, such a slogan made little sense since it was not directed against the American government. It functioned more as an emotional expression of how you felt about imperialism—clearly understandable given the tenor of the times. Surely we should be capable of more nuanced thinking nowadays.

Returning to the original question posed by Vijay, maybe the best way to look at things is not from the perspective of “dumb” or “intelligent”. Looking at how things turned out in retrospect, they certainly seem dumb. Iraq appears destined to be as close to Iran as the U.S. is with Britain. A war against Iran likely will spark economic and military retaliation by the Shia states.

If you think, however, in terms of how Wall Street operates, the foreign policy calculations of Washington make a little bit more sense. Did Jon Corzine make a dumb decision when he bet that the EU would be forced to back up the government bonds of a Greece or a Spain? If he were correct, then MF Global would have been catapulted to the ranks of a junior Goldman-Sachs. If he weren’t, then the worst outcome would have been MF Global coming to an ignominious end. That would have not gotten in the way, however, of Corzine getting his golden parachute worth $12 million (even though he would have been last on line getting paid by the defunct hedge fund.)

Imperialist foreign policy is the same kind of high stakes casino as well but one that allows you to hedge your bets. You seed the Egyptian army with billions of dollars while simultaneously funding some of the activists who organized the Tahrir Square protests through the NED and Soro-type NGO’s. You back Qaddafi until the signs become abundantly clear that the movement against him has achieved the critical mass necessary to topple him, just as the case with al-Assad.

The only way to throw a monkey wrench in this kind of operation is to build our own movement globally that seeks to promote working class and revolutionary oppositions that cannot be so easily bought off. That requires breaking with bourgeois oppositions to imperialism, even as we organize to defend their countries from imperialist attack. As daunting a task as this might seem today, it is the only intelligent course of action open to those who want to live in a world of peace and plenty, namely the 99 percent globally.

December 26, 2011

A festival of lights–or blood?

Filed under: Jewish question,religion — louisproyect @ 6:21 pm

http://thebusysignal.com/2010/12/01/rethinking-hanukkah-the-dark-history-of-the-festival-of-lights/

Rethinking Hanukkah: The Dark History of the Festival of Lights
2010 December 1

by J.A. Myerson

OK, so: there’s a civil war. On one side is a group of reformers, who break from divine-right totalitarianism to design a society based on reason, philosophy, comity with national neighbors and religious moderation. On the other is a violent group of devout fanatics who engage in terrorist warfare in their quest to institute religious law that includes ritual sacrifice and compulsory infant genital mutilation. Which side are you on?

And if the second group defeats the first, returns the land to theocratic despotism, institutes a program of imperial conquest and declares the abolition of secular thought, isolating itself from the rest of the civilized world for a century, do you celebrate their victory?

Easy answers, surely, if this scenario were situated in the Muslim world of the 21st century. But, starting tonight, a great many Jews the world over, including—or perhaps especially—secular American Jews, will light candles and sing prayers in observance of Hanukkah, which commemorates the historical incident aforementioned. The sectarian factions were traditionalist Jews and their Hellenized brethren. The location was Jerusalem. The year was 165 BCE.

(clip)

December 25, 2011

Starbucks Occupation in Bogazici University

Filed under: imperialism/globalization,Occupy Wall Street,Turkey — louisproyect @ 9:18 pm

The best Hitchens obit

Filed under: obituary — louisproyect @ 6:25 am

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2011/12/christopher-hitchens-and-end-of.html

December 24, 2011

Christmas Truce of WWI

Filed under: antiwar — louisproyect @ 8:01 pm

 

Christmas truce

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A cross, left near Ypres in Belgium in 1999, to commemorate the site of the Christmas Truce in 1914. The text reads:
1914 – The Khaki Chum’s Christmas Truce – 1999 – 85 Years – Lest We Forget.

Christmas truce was a series of widespread unofficial ceasefires that took place along the Western Front around Christmas of 1914, during the First World War. Through the week leading up to Christmas, parties of German and British soldiers began to exchange seasonal greetings and songs between their trenches; on occasion, the tension was reduced to the point that individuals would walk across to talk to their opposite numbers bearing gifts. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, many soldiers from both sides – as well as, to a lesser degree, from French units – independently ventured into “No man’s land“, where they mingled, exchanging food and souvenirs. As well as joint burial ceremonies, several meetings ended in carol-singing. Troops from both sides had also been so friendly as to play games of football with one another.[1]

The truce is seen as a symbolic moment of peace and humanity amidst one of the most violent events of modern history. It was not ubiquitous, however; in some regions of the front, fighting continued throughout the day, whilst in others, little more than an arrangement to recover bodies was made. The following year, a few units again arranged ceasefires with their opponents over Christmas, but to nothing like the widespread extent seen in 1914; this was, in part, due to strongly worded orders from the high commands of both sides prohibiting such fraternisation.

The truces were not unique to the Christmas period, and reflected a growing mood of “live and let live“, where infantry units in close proximity to each other would stop overtly aggressive behaviour, and often engage in small-scale fraternisation, engaging in conversation or bartering for cigarettes. In some sectors, there would be occasional ceasefires to go between the lines and recover wounded or dead soldiers, whilst in others, there would be a tacit agreement not to shoot while men rested, exercised, or worked in full view of the enemy. However, the Christmas truces were particularly significant due to the number of men involved and the level of their participation – even in very peaceful sectors, dozens of men openly congregating in daylight was remarkable.

December 23, 2011

What kind of party do we need? A reply to Ahmed Shawki

Filed under: democratic centralism,revolutionary organizing — louisproyect @ 6:36 pm

Ahmed Shawki

I am not exactly sure why the ISO reprinted a 2006 speech by party leader Ahmed Shawki on “What Kind of Party We Need” in their latest newspaper but it seems to be a retreat from Paul LeBlanc’s more recent thoughts on the subject that partially reflected the insights of scholar Lars Lih and others working through the problems of “Leninism”.

Mostly Shawki tries to communicate the idea that party-building concepts have evolved since the days of Karl Marx, almost in a Darwinian fashion. There are still lots of dinosaurs around but survival of the fittest—implicitly understood in terms of a superior program—will sort things out.

He says that Marx was too preoccupied with theorizing about capitalism to really give much thought to organizational questions:

Marx himself had placed some emphasis on the attempt to build political organization. But you were talking about a period of the rise of capitalist social relations, and therefore, in large part, the bulk of Marx’s own personal activity lay in developing theory rather than political organization.

Outliving Marx and ostensibly past the thorny problems of theorizing capitalism, Engels was more directly involved with such nitty-gritty efforts:

Engels participated much more effectively in the construction of the Second International and played a formative role in the construction of what was to be the model socialist organization of the day–the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), an organization that produced, after a period of illegality, dozens of newspapers, a mass membership, elected officials. The SPD was led by a man called Karl Kautsky who was described at the time as the Pope of Marxism–that was supposed to be a good thing as opposed a negative thing.

Understanding that “What is to be Done?” is quite clear about Lenin’s insistence that the German party was a model for what he advocated in Czarist Russia—allowing for the need to develop ways to fend off repression—Shawki tries to draw a distinction between Kautsky and Lenin that is a bit lost on me:

I’m not saying that Lenin was identical to Kautsky. You can go back and read Kautsky, for example, where he says clearly in the period of the late 1800s that the German Social Democratic Party is a revolutionary party, but not a revolution-making party. In other words, we’re a party that seeks the transformation of society, but we’re not about to make a revolution.

Lenin insisted always on the revolutionary character of the Bolsheviks, in part because they operated under Tsarism and in part because of events after the writing of What Is To Be Done?

Perhaps there is a subtle distinction that requires a higher level of dialectical insight than I can muster at this point, but the difference between a “revolutionary party” and a “revolution-making party” was not obvious to me at first blush. But after consulting chapter five of Kautsky’s “The Road to Power“, it all became clear to me. In fact Kautsky is simply warning against Blanquist schemas and trying to explain that revolutions cannot be “created”. They are the products of profound crises that serve as imperatives to fundamental change:

The Socialist party is a revolutionary party, but not a revolution-making party. We know that our goal can be attained only through a revolution. We also know that it is just as little in our power to create this revolution as it is in the power of our opponents to prevent it. It is no part of our work to instigate a revolution or to prepare the way for it. And since the revolution cannot be arbitrarily created by us, we cannot say anything whatever about when, under what conditions, or what forms it will come.

One surely hopes that comrade Shawki does not object to the idea that “the revolution cannot be arbitrarily created by us”.

Furthermore, a strong case can be made that Lenin viewed Kautsky’s “Road to Power” as exemplary long after “What is to be Done?” had been written and even after he had broken with Kautsky over WWI. In the latest issue of “The Weekly Worker”, the organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain (a group devoted to fresh thinking about such matters even if does tend a bit toward scandal-mongering, a reflection of the bad habits of the British press no doubt), there’s an article–”Lenin, Kautsky and the ‘new era of revolutions‘”–by the redoubtable Lars Lih that documents Lenin’s respect for Kautsky’s book, couched as it was in anger at Kautsky’s subsequent evolution:

In autumn 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Lenin wrote to his associate, Aleksandr Shliapnikov: “I hate and despise Kautsky now more than anyone, with his vile, dirty, self-satisfied hypocrisy.” This pungent summation of Lenin’s attitude toward Kautsky – an attitude that remained unchanged for the rest of Lenin’s life – is often cited. Ultimately more useful in understanding Lenin’s outlook, however, is another comment, made around the same time to the same correspondent: “Obtain without fail and reread (or ask to have it translated for you) Road to power by Kautsky [and see] what he writes there about the revolution of our time! And now, how he acts the toady and disavows all that!”

Lenin took his own advice. He sat down a few weeks later, flipped through the pages of Kautsky’s Road to power, and came up with a page-and-a-half list of quotations that he inserted into an article entitled ‘Dead chauvinism and living socialism’. He then commented: “This is how Kautsky wrote in times long, long past, fully five years ago. This is what German Social Democracy was, or, more correctly, what it promised to be. This was the kind of Social Democracy that could and had to be respected.”

While I certainly agree with Lars on the need to see the continuity between the pre-WWI Kautsky and Lenin, I sometimes wonder if he tends to go overboard on all this. That continuity is certainly of immense interest to Lenin scholars but the more burning issue for revolutionists today is not the relevance of Kautsky’s turn-of-the-century socialist party but the kind that we need today. Breaking down the misconceptions about “Leninism” is of course important but unless we begin to think creatively about our tasks today—as both Kautsky for a time and Lenin did—we will not solve what Leon Trotsky described as: “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.” Trotsky might have been in error about the solution but he certainly got the problem right.

Which brings us back to comrade Shawki’s speech:

At this point [after 1914], Lenin begins to develop ideas about organization which I think are much more important and relevant to us–focused not on the question of illegality and professional revolutionism and so on…

He concludes that you have to begin by grouping together militants and activists–because we’re not talking here about commentators and writers, but people who are involved in the actual struggle against capitalism–into a party that can lead politically other sections of the working-class movement through the ebbs and flow of the working-class struggle.

He used the term vanguard for this, to mean people who are in advance [sic] in consciousness–that is, who are enemies of capitalism, rather than half opposed and half accepting. This isn’t an insult–it’s the reality for most people, that they hate the system, but don’t know what else you can put in its place.

There’s only one problem with this. After 1914 Lenin never writes about organization as such, something Shawki virtually admits when he states: “That idea became enshrined into the history of the revolutionary movement for one reason–it wasn’t Lenin’s writings so much as Lenin’s doing.” Yet there is no evidence that his ideas about the “vanguard” were any different than they were in 1903, ideas we must insist are exactly the same as the European social democracy. Furthermore, it is a bit problematic to extract party-building concepts out of “Lenin’s doing” especially since the party that came into existence in 1903 operated on the same basis as it did 14 years later.

There were no organizational “innovations”. Instead he is preoccupied with uniting the antiwar left internationally first of all and then seizing power in Russia, matters that involved strategy and tactics rather than new thinking about how a “vanguard” is constructed. Try as you may, the Marxist Internet Archives will reveal nothing along the lines of “What is to be Done?” between 1914 and 1917.

Once Shawki moves forward in time to the 1960s, things don’t get much better I’m afraid. He states:

Today, there is an idea that the construction of a socialist organization is in itself a flawed project. In short, it’s been there, done that–we tried it in the 1960s and ’70s, and this model of organization doesn’t work.

It is not exactly clear what this is a reference to. In my view, what was tried in the 60s and 70s is something I refer to as Zinovievism, a mechanical version of “democratic centralism” that led to sect and cult formation in the Trotskyist and Maoist movements. By this period, the CP’s had transformed themselves into something much more like the social democracy so they were out of the running in the race to construct “vanguard” parties.

Shawki does seem to recognize that the party-building methodology was flawed:

I think that there’s a reaction that we can sometimes have to say you just did it wrong–which is a good answer to a been-there-done-that kind of remark.

But I think the more sophisticated answer would be that not only did the left in the 1960s inherit models of organization from the past, but it was itself dislodged from its historic role and placed outside of the working-class movement. And this is despite valiant efforts of many sections of the left to reconnect with the working class, which should be applauded, not derided.

Now it would be useful to get his thinking on inheriting “models of organization from the past” but to my knowledge this is just something that never gets explored much in ISO publications. Unless there is something about the ISO that I have missed, the methodology is pretty much the same one that they inherited from the British SWP, their one-time mother ship. For about as succinct a presentation of their ideas on “democratic centralism” as can be found, you can read Todd Chretien’s article on “Lenin’s Theory of the Party“  that appeared a year after Shawki’s speech. I should say at the outset, however, that Lenin had no theory of the party. Tony Cliff did, and that’s where Todd’s ideas come from basically. He writes:

So what is democracy? It’s not a happy-go-lucky-everybody-gets-a-say kind of thing for the sake of fairness. Instead, democracy, if it works, has to be a contentious, active, participatory, argumentative, organized process. We have formal votes on agendas, delegates, leaders, actions, policies, etc. In fact, I’d venture a guess that the ISO is one of the most democratic organizations in the world. So, yes, there have to be formal mechanisms of democracy within the party, but more than that, democracy has to be active and participatory. Why? In order to confront the beast we are up against, you need to have as many people as possible looking at the problem, studying the problem, engaged in trying to get rid of the problem…

The second part is centralism, because if the ISO is not a utopia, it’s also not a talk shop. We don’t have academic conferences. Now there are some very good academics, but there are also many academic conferences where everyone talks and nothing comes out of it because no one ever expected anything to come out of it. The ISO is not a talk shop. We want to act. We want freedom of discussion to have our debates out, but then we want to take a vote. Whichever side wins will be put into practice and then we’re going to see if it works. If our decision is wrong, then the people who opposed it can come back and say, “See that was wrong.” But the only way to test things in practice is to make a decision, have all members try to implement that decision to the best of their ability, and then assess the outcome. If members don’t take decisions and actions seriously, then you never know if it was your tactics that were wrong, or it was in the implementation that went wrong. In other words, giving something a half-assed try is no test at all.

I doubt if any veteran of the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. or the RCP et al would have described how it was put to them as a new recruit any differently, and that’s the problem.

This business about a “talk shop” is something I heard when I joined the SWP in 1967. It meant that you could talk until you were blue in the face during preconvention discussion but once the party made up its mind about a given orientation, then you had to switch gears and to into action mode. As we know today, this is not really the way that the Bolsheviks operated in real life, no matter how hard Zinoviev tried to give that impression. They did not designate special periods when party members could debate with each other behind closed doors. Their debates were held in public.

If you want proof of this, just read John Reed’s “Ten Days that Shook the World” where there is a reference to divided votes among party members over key questions such as whether to expropriate the bourgeois press. At a November 17th 1917 mass meeting, Lenin called for the confiscation of the capitalist newspapers. Reed quotes him: “If the first revolution had the right to suppress the Monarchist papers, then we have the right to suppress the bourgeois press.” Reed continues: “Then the vote. The resolution of Larin and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries was defeated by 31 to 22; the Lenin motion was carried by 34 to 24. Among the minority were the Bolsheviki Riazanov and Lozovsky, who declared that it was impossible for them to vote against any restriction on the freedom of the press.“

So during the heat of battle, not only do you have “Bolsheviki” arguing against Lenin, they vote against him in public. Neither was expelled. In fact not a single Bolshevik was ever expelled except Bogdanov and I probably would have voted for that myself.

Finally, I want to address myself to the key political question in Shawki’s speech that he formulates as follows: “there isn’t much space for a broad, anti-capitalist party in the United States.” Now since this was written 5 years ago, it is understandable that he might not have anticipated what has transpired over the past few months. But with that in mind, I strongly recommend that the ISO comrades pay careful attention to Pham Binh’s article “Occupy and the tasks of socialists“, especially the conclusion:

The most basic and fundamental task facing socialists is to merge with Occupy and lead it from within. Socialist groups that insist on “intervening” in the uprising will be viewed as outsiders with little to contribute in practice to solving Occupy’s actual problems because they will be focused on winning arguments and ideological points rather than actively listening to, joining hands with, and fighting alongside the vanguard of the 99% in overcoming common practical and political.

One difficulty the socialist left faces in accomplishing this basic and fundamental task is the divisions in our ranks that serve in practice to weaken the overall socialist influence within Occupy, thereby strengthening that of the anarchists. They have their Black Bloc, but where is our Red Bloc? Where are the socialist slogans to shape and guide the uprising’s political development?

Out of clouds of pepper spray and phalanxes of riot cops a new generation of revolutionaries is being forged, and it would be a shame if the Peter Camejos, Max Elbaums, Angela Davises, Dave Clines, and Huey Newtons of this generation end up in separate “competing” socialist groups as they did in the 1960s. Now is the time to begin seriously discussing the prospect of regroupment, of liquidating outdated boundaries we have inherited, of finding ways to work closely together for our common ends.

Above all else, now is the time to take practical steps towards creating a broad-based radical party that in today’s context could easily have thousands of active members and even more supporters. Initiatives like Socialist Viewpoint’s call for a joint revolutionary socialist organizing committee in the Bay Area is a step in the right direction. We need to take more of those steps, sooner rather than later. The opportunity we have now to make the socialist movement a force to be reckoned with again in this country depends on it.

Anyone who agrees with this conclusion, whether they are in a socialist group or not, and wants to take these steps should email me so we can find ways to work together.

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