immigration | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

June 30, 2016

Contradictions within the Baathist amen corner over Brexit

Filed under: immigration,Syria — louisproyect @ 1:14 pm

During the midst of the controversy over the invitation to arch-Baathist Tim Anderson to a conference on refugees in Lesbos, Michael Karadjis alluded to simmering differences within this camp over how to view the refugee crisis—specifically a quarrel that had broken out between Sukant Chandan and Jay Tharappel. I paid it little attention at the time but now I realize its significance as a sign of fissures in the ranks of the Baathist amen corner over the racist ramifications of Brexit.

Both are originally from India, share Maoist politics, a passionate devotion to the Baathist state and frequent appearances on Russian and Iranian television shows so when Chandan opened up an attack against Tharappel on FB, it was a sign that the issues posed by Brexit would lead to fissures:

Jay Tharappel was my comrade and younger brother for a number of years. A very bright wonderful comrade, from Indian Keralan heritage, has an excellent grasp of Indian politics, is broadly pro CPM (half of my family are CPM, and I respect the CPM with all my criticisms), and has some understanding of anti-imperialist politics generally. However, like many, he has found himself surrounding by fascists and those who are internalising fascist politics in the process of advocating for the defence of Syria from imperialism.

What is this fascism that is being promoted, proliferated, protected and promoted by Jay and others? It is:

1 – That there are deserving and non-deserving refugees, that Syrians are the only kind of real refugees (even then), and all other Asian and Africans are ‘fake’ refugees.

2 – That there is a ‘globalist’/’jewish’ plot to destabilise europe with refugees.

3 – That the west is ‘pure’ and ‘white’ culturally, and this should be maintained and not ‘impurified’ by non-whites.

4 – That Syrians are actually not ‘backward Arabs, but ‘white’ like white europeans.

5 – That the western far right (like trump, farage, le pen, alt for germany, and other far right forces) are the ‘natural’ allies for Syrians and also Iranians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Russians etc, and they are actively working to ally with such far right forces.

6 – Is hostile especially to South Asian and African, especially darker skinned Asian and African people. These fascists just hate them, dehumanise them, elevate themselves over and above them, and eschew any solidarity and unity building with them.

7 – Using Syria (or Palestine / Iran / Iraq / Russia / Ukraine etc) to impose upon refugees that ‘a lot ‘ or ‘most’ of them are ‘terrorists’, and that they all must come back to Syria, and they really should not have left Syria in the first place.

I will always oppose imperialist war and coloniality, as I have been for the past nearly 25 years. But I will not ever accept that imperialist oppression is a situation through which to protect and promote fascism.

This fascist protection and promotion is being done in a context of the alarming and fast rising racism and fascism from state and non-state levels across the West. There is a liberal fascism developing, which talks liberal and left by supports Nato wars an strategies, and there is a right wing fascism emerging which sometimes puts out rhetoric that it is against wars but supports all the concepts of colonialism and imperialism.

Our struggle is not a joke. I am not in the business of congratulating lefties and commies for being anti-racist. I am not in the business for allowing this fascist collaboration and organising to pass, rather our decolonial, anti-imperialist and socialist legacies, histories, ideologies and struggles informs us that we go out and conceptually and actually fascists to smash them, and neutralise all forces that are protecting them.

I except people to militantly oppose, expose and defeat this fascist infiltration and protection. ie., if you see people promoting or protecting any of the 6 points: I would strongly advise to enact anti-fascism and anti-imperialism. Our people are being targeted increasingly, the western narrative is becoming even more heightened in its racism and fascism. I am not some liberal middle class western-based type who postures and plays with our politics. I tried to engage Jay on these things for years. He is not interested. He is for a number of reasons loyal to the fascists over the anti-fascist cause. That’s his choice. He like many others has sold out. I am not about to be loyal with such over and above our peoples anti-imperialist and anti-fascist cause. I suggest and request that we MUST maintain clarity of strategy and analysis over and above petty personal loyalties that push us into fascism.

We either step up to the growing challenges, or we should step down or be made to step down.

When you read this, it is a little difficult to figure out specifically what the problem is since Chandan, never scrupulous about evidence to begin with, does not name names except for Tharappel. In Maoist circles, it is obviously very easy to denounce someone as a fascist. I say that as someone who has been the target of such abuse at least 10,000 times since I broke ranks with people like Chandan long ago.

Tharappel’s response to Chandan was similarly obscure:

As you probably already know…

Sukant Chandan has accused me of promoting fascism and racism for reasons that he knows to be completely false like the shameless liar that he is, indeed his lies about me are so outlandish that they’re being rejected in the comments section of his own post.

Specifically, he accuses me promoting the view that there are deserving and undeserving refugees, that “Syrians are the only kind of real refugees”, that “Asian and Africans are ‘fake’ refugees”, and that “there is a ‘globalist’/’jewish’ plot to destabilise europe with refugees”.

This is a lie. I have always maintained that the refugee crisis is a consequence of imperialist exploitation and war, that we in the imperialist countries should welcome those seeking asylum, but most importantly that we should oppose the wars that create refugees in the first place – in February I even wrote a post condemning the idea that there’s some globalist agenda to destabilise Europe which SC commented on (see screenshot).

He accuses me of promoting the notion that “the west is ‘pure’ and ‘white’ culturally, and this should be maintained and not ‘impurified’ by non-whites”, and accuses me of being “hostile especially to South Asian and African, especially darker skinned Asian and African people”, which needless to say is an obvious LIE, as anyone who spends a minute or so examining my openly communist and post-colonial leanings would know.

He then accuses me of promoting the view that “Syrians are actually not ‘backward Arabs, but ‘white’ like white Europeans”, which is another lie as I have never endorsed this view ever.

In truth what angers SC is that I refuse to replicate word-for-word his personal crusade against those of Syrian heritage who consider themselves ‘white’, for the simple reason that it’s mostly irrelevant to me how they identify themselves, but on planet Sukant, by not vociferously denouncing these views, I’m promoting them.

His next accusation is that I’m promoting “the western far right” including the likes of “trump, farage, le pen, [and] alt for Germany” as “natural allies for Syrians and also Iranians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Russians” which is another lie, in fact, aside from Trump, I don’t think I’ve EVER publicly mentioned any of those far-right personalities and parties.

I once innocently pointed out that Trump’s stated foreign policy agenda is strictly less threatening to Syria and Russia (which is objectively correct) compared to that of Hillary Clinton, which Sukant then creatively reinterpreted to mean that I was endorsing Donald Trump in some way.

You can see that discussion here: http://bit.ly/1VEWuck

His final allegation and lie is that I am “using Syria (or Palestine / Iran / Iraq / Russia / Ukraine etc) to impose upon refugees that ‘a lot ‘ or ‘most’ of them are ‘terrorists’, and that they all must come back to Syria, and they really should not have left Syria in the first place”, which is another cheap and baseless lie.

Are former anti-government fighters leaving Syria for Europe? Yes. Have I ever demonised ALL asylum seekers based on this fact? No.

What I have said is this, even if a portion of those asylum seekers were once fighting the governments of Syria and Iraq, we should welcome the news that by abandoning the battlefield and leaving for Europe they’re no longer destabilising the middle east which is the real target of destabilisation, NOT Europe.

As for the other civilian migrants who were simply caught in the middle of this war, contrary to Sukant’s claims, I have never said that they should be sent back, nor have I ever encouraged them to go back, because as someone who doesn’t face their consequences I am in no position to judge them for leaving Syria.

What Sukant is perhaps unable to comprehend is that unlike him I view the exodus of civilian refugees primarily from the perspective of the countries that have been destabilised, for whom the exodus of their best and brightest citizens undermines their ability to resist – the cruel logic of imperialism has always been that it encourages racism towards the very people it benefits from exploiting, that too after financing the destruction of their countries.

In the real world we have to pick our battles, and in the case of Syria many of us on the Left find ourselves in an alliance with a national liberation struggle against imperialism, which draws the support of many who are not Leftists and therefore do not share our opinions on every issue, and while I’m more than happy to state my disagreements with them, I’m not going to waste my time denouncing them relentlessly, I’d rather focus on opposing and exposing imperialism.

Tharappel referred his readers to a discussion that took place on May 17^th as seen above. I reproduce the most salient part here:

This gets to the heart of the contradictions within the Baathist camp. As it happens, the Kremlin and its allies internationally are hostile to the EU, open borders, and everything else that smacks of “globalism”. So naturally you see an affinity between Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Vladimir Putin. Trying to reconcile solidarity with the butcher of Damascus and Nigel Farage is no easy task, especially when you retain some belief in the words “Workers of the World Unite”.

To his credit, Chandan has been hammering away at the racism unleashed by Brexit on his “Sons of Malcolm” blog. Three days ago, he wrote a post titled “CORBYN INCHES TOWARDS THE RIGHT, SUPPORTS BREXIT, WOBBLES ON IMMIGRATION” that attacks what he views as adaptation to nativism in Britain similar to that I critiqued in my article on Diana Johnstone yesterday:

Corbyn and his team are choosing to ignore the two thirds of Labour voters who are hostile to Brexit, Corbyn is choosing to align himself with UK nationalist ‘left’ forces who are developing racism further by positioning a showdown with the EU in the context of growing racism and fascism. Part of this is Corbyn’s total contradictory position on immigration, while he said a FANTASTIC thing on immigration in this interview by stating there must be no upper limit to it, he also stated that the central colonial feelings that inform racism by people is not racism.

Andrew Marr: But there are lots and lots and lots of people around this country who do feel that immigration is for them a problem, they see their communities changing very, very quickly and they feel their identity is challenged and they feel their kids are not getting school places and so forth. They are not racists. They’re not far right people. They’re just people really worried about immigration and they feel that people like you are not really listening to them.

Jeremy Corbyn: I’m not calling them racists. What I’m saying is it’s a failure of our government to properly fund local authorities. …

Will any of this make any difference when it comes to supporting Assad’s murderous war that is responsible for the bulk of Syrian refugees? Probably not. These people are hopeless on this matter, I am afraid. But perhaps the growing affinity between openly fascist movements in Europe and the Kremlin will finally give them reason to pause and think things over. The Red-Brown alliance that has emerged out of the geopolitical chess game is one of the most shameful episodes of the left in decades and it is high time that it gets addressed. I don’t have much use for most of Chandan’s problematic ideology but give him credit for calling a spade a spade.

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June 29, 2016

Diana Johnstone’s poisonous nativism

Filed under: immigration — louisproyect @ 3:25 pm

It should probably come as no big surprise that the preponderance of articles appearing on CounterPunch favored Brexit. It goes hand in hand with the tilt toward Vladimir Putin whose hostility to the European Union is generally considered in these circles as practically on the same level as Che Guevara’s call for “two, three, many Vietnams”.

Most of the authors are sensible enough to admit that there were nativist tendencies at work but they were secondary to the more important need for allowing Britain to return to the pro-working class economic policies that Tories and treacherous New Labour overturned. Jeremy Corbyn’s role in all this is ambivalent. On record for opposing Brexit, some thought he dragged his feet in speaking against it under the influence of his press secretary Seumas Milne who was about hardcore a Putinite you can find.

Leave it to Diana Johnstone to break with the sane Brexit consensus at CounterPunch and plunge deeply into UKIP territory. An ardent fan of Vladimir Putin, Johnstone was bold enough to tell CounterPunch readers a while back that Marine Le Pen was on the French left:

If “the right” is defined first of all by subservience to finance capital, then aside from Sarkozy, Bayrou and perhaps Joly, all the other candidates were basically on the left. And all of them except Sarkozy would be considered far to the left of any leading politician in the United States.

This applies notably to Marine Le Pen, whose social program was designed to win working class and youth votes. Her “far right” label is due primarily to her criticism of Muslim practices in France and demands to reduce immigration quotas, but her position on these issues would be considered moderate in the Netherlands or in much of the United States.

Much of the United States? I suppose so if you are referring to the sort of people who listen to Rush Limbaugh every day and look like the people Diane Arbus photographed.

In today’s CounterPunch Johnstone ruminates on how “How Forcing People Together Tears Them Apart”. Well, heavens yes. As David Duke once put it, forcing whites to live next to Blacks is inviting disaster. The best thing would be to have separate homelands for each race. No matter his excesses, the white nationalist is savvy enough to take Putin and Trump’s side against the dreaded globalists.

Of course, the main cause of friction is immigration. You get all those Jamaicans, Pakistanis and Poles swarming into good British neighborhoods with their strange clothing, foods and musical tastes. Feh, who needs them. Even worse, their foreignness goes hand in hand with stealing jobs from good Englishmen whose ancestors after all have been here for millennia and invented democracy. Johnstone hones in on the immigration issue:

In reality, for the majority of working class voters, opposition to unlimited immigration can be plainly a matter of economic self-interest. Since the EU’s eastward expansion ended immigration controls with the former communist countries, hundreds of thousands of workers from Poland, Lithuania, and other Eastern European nations have flooded into Britain, adding to the large established immigrant population from the British Commonwealth countries. It is simply a fact that mass immigration brings down wage levels in a country. A Glasgow University study shows statistically that as immigration rises, the level of wages in proportion to profits drops – not to mention the increase in unemployment.

Okay, let’s call a spade a spade. This shit is exactly the same thing you would hear from the worst nativist in UKIP or in the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party. Johnstone observes that “In reality, for the majority of working class voters, opposition to unlimited immigration can be plainly a matter of economic self-interest.” This is not “pro-working class”. It is reactionary crap that has plagued the working class for the past 150 years at least. From its inception, the radical movement has had elements that embraced the same kind of nationalism Nigel Farage espouses but formulated in the same demagogic “leftist” terms as Johnstone.

Even among Karl Marx’s supporters in the USA in the 1870s, you can find the same divisions that are reflected among Brexit supporters like Johnstone and those on the other side who believed in open borders. Samuel Gompers, who was the first labor leader to openly espouse class collaborationism, agreed with Johnstone. As Gompers climbed the ladder into officialdom, he found that anti-Chinese racism gave him a foot up. He endorsed the labeling of cigar boxes as made by white men, to be “distinguished from those made by the Chinese.”

The First International socialists led by Friedrich Sorge were just as bad. A member of his faction in New York held forth at one of their public meetings:

The white working-men see and feel daily the effects of the Chinese labor in that State. We cannot only perceive how it affects us, but know assuredly that it will seriously affect the destiny of the working classes of this country. The Chinese have driven out of employment thousands of white men, women, girls and boys…. They are in all branches of the manufacturing business, and it is only a matter of time when they will monopolize all branches of industry; as it is impossible for white men to exist on the same amount and sort of food Chinamen seem to thrive upon.

In reality the debate over open borders has been going on for almost as long as the socialist movement has existed. Germany, which always had the most advanced Marxist thinkers, was a test case for the two perspectives.

Changing economic circumstances in the German states (the country had not yet unified) led to increased mobility in the 1850s. Liberal-minded industrialists insisted on the right of labor to move freely within and outside the country just as proposed by backers of the EU today. This need was felt especially keenly in cases where foreign workers could be used to break strikes. However, the impulse to greater freedoms was countered by traditional German social structures, especially strong in Prussia.

Things came to a head in 1867 when the Reichstag would debate sweeping legislation that would go the furthest in removing restrictions. If passed, both citizens and foreigners would be allowed to travel freely to the states within the North German Confederation that included Prussia as well as more economically developed entities.

While the motive of bourgeois politicians was purely to secure cheap labor, the working class representatives to the Reichstag were not prejudiced against legislation that would grant workers more freedom. Wilhelm Liebknecht, the father of Rosa Luxemburg’s close collaborator Karl Liebknecht, made a clarion call in support of the bill.

Lenin, who counted himself as a disciple of the German Social Democracy led by Wilhelm and Karl Liebknecht, was emphatic on this. In a 1913 article titled “Capitalism and Workers’ Immigration”, he wrote:

There can be no doubt that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon their native land, and that the capitalists exploit the immigrant workers in the most shameless manner. But only reactionaries can shut their eyes to the progressive significance of this modern migration of nations. Emancipation from the yoke of capital is impossible without the further development of capitalism, and without the class struggle that is based on it. And it is into this struggle that capitalism is drawing the masses of the working people of the whole world, breaking down the musty, fusty habits of local life, breaking down national barriers and prejudices, uniting workers from all countries in huge factories and mines in America, Germany, and so forth.

Two years later in a letter to the Socialist Propaganda League in the United States, Lenin specifically took on the nativism that had held back the American left:

In our struggle for true internationalism and against ‘jingo-socialism,’ we always quote in our press the example of the opportunist leaders of the S.P. in America, who are in favor of restrictions of the immigration of Chinese and Japanese workers (especially after the Congress of Stuttgart, 1907, and against the decisions of Stuttgart).

We think that one cannot be internationalist and be at the same time in favor of such restrictions. And we assert that Socialists in America, especially English Socialists, belonging to the ruling, and oppressing nation, who are not against any restrictions of immigration, against the possession of colonies (Hawaii) and for the entire freedom of colonies, that such Socialists are in reality jingoes.

In my view, those who supported Brexit are largely sincere in their belief that this was a measure that could have repudiated the neoliberalism of the EU and put Britain on a new course. The debate on the left over such perspectives is not one that lends itself to litmus tests even though the stakes of the outcome are quite high. As happens many times in politics, it is impossible to know what the future has in store so a leap in the dark is unavoidable.

That being said, Diana Johnstone’s opinions on immigration are pure filth and should be rejected by the entire left as a concession to the nativism that is threatening immigrants all across Europe and that will force desperate people trying to flee violence in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to remain in jeopardy.

This has not been the first time in history when our movement has become very confused over basic questions of left and right. In Germany there were two instances where the left ended up supporting the right. The first was when Germany signed the Treaty of Rapallo with the USSR that led the German Communist Party to back its government against Anglo-French imperialism rather than maintaining an independent class position—in other words the same mistake many CounterPunch writers make with respect to the “New Cold War”. Instead of analyzing Ukraine or Syria on their own terms, they simply follow whatever position favors the Kremlin.

In 1922, the French army invaded the Ruhr to seize control of mines and steel mills in order to force the Germans to pay debts extracted through the punitive Treaty of Versailles. The German capitalist class screamed bloody murder and proto-fascist armed detachments marched into the Ruhr to confront the French troops. At the height of the anti-French armed struggle in the Ruhr, the German Communist Party issued feelers to the right-wing nationalists.

Comintern representative Karl Radek was totally into this Red-Brown alliance. He urged that the Communists commemorate the death of Albert Schlageter, an ultraright fighter who died in the Ruhr and was regarded as a martyr by the right-wing. His lunacy struck a chord with some German Communists, including the generally unreliable Ruth Fischer who gave a speech at a gathering of right-wing students where she echoed fascist themes:

Whoever cries out against Jewish capital…is already a fighter for his class, even though he may not know it. You are against the stock market jobbers. Fine. Trample the Jewish capitalists down, hang them from the lampposts…But…how do you feel about the big capitalists, the Stinnes, Klockner?…Only in alliance with Russia, Gentlemen of the “folkish” side, can the German people expel French capitalism from the Ruhr region.

Is Diana Johnstone channeling the ghost of Ruth Fischer? It would seem so.

It was this sort of Red-Brown idiocy that discredited the German CP but not so nearly as bad as after it had been consolidated as a hard-core Stalinist group during the “Third Period” madness that led it to support a Nazi referendum that would unseat a Social Democratic politician.

In 1931 the Nazis utilized a clause in the Weimar constitution to oust a coalition government in the state legislature of Prussia. Prussia was a Social Democratic stronghold. The Communists at first opposed the referendum, but their opposition took a peculiar form. They demanded that the Social Democrats form a bloc with them at once. When the Social Democratic leaders refused, the Communists put their support behind the Nazi referendum, giving it a left cover by calling it a “red referendum”. They instructed the working class to vote for a Nazi referendum. The referendum was defeated, but it was demoralizing to the German working-class to see Communists lining up with Nazis to drive the Social Democrats out of office.

Is there an element of “third period” thinking in support for the Kremlin’s various positions on the EU, Syria, Ukraine, et al? I am afraid that this is the case. While one could possibly excuse the mad policies of the late 1920s and early 30s as a poorly thought out strategy to punish the treacherous Social Democrats, who after all had murdered Luxemburg and Liebknecht, they would only end up punishing the left itself that would soon be Hitler’s victims.

The only way to avoid such catastrophes is to be committed to a class analysis that is combined with a party-building strategy that avoids opportunist mistakes on both the ultraleft and right. This is not easy, of course, but it is necessary for the survival of our movement and our ultimate victory over a social system that will destroy the planet if not stopped dead in its tracks.

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June 8, 2016

Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2016

Filed under: Film,immigration,indigenous,Peru,Syria — louisproyect @ 7:21 pm

Tomorrow is opening night of the 2016 Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York that includes two documentaries that I had an opportunity to see at press screenings a while back and discuss below. If they are any indication of the quality of the scheduled films, I urge you to take in as many as possible. If they are not exactly entertainment (as if anybody with an IQ over 75 could be entertained by something like “X Men Apocalypse”), they are compelling reminders of the need to support all those struggling for a better life.

On Thursday, June 16^th at 8:45 PM, you can see “When Two Worlds Collide” at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. As a rule of thumb, if you have tended to agree with my recommendations, this is one not to be missed. It is the chronicle of the struggle between indigenous peoples of Peru and the government of Alan Garcia over the 840 Law he rammed through in late 2006 that opened up indigenous territory to mining and oil extraction as part of a neoliberal blitzkrieg that began earlier in the year with a Free Trade Agreement with the USA.

If I were to write a narrative film, I doubt if I could come up with someone as villainous as Alan Garcia. Early on in the film you see him addressing an audience of potential investors from the USA about how Peru was welcoming foreign investment. To indulge in a bit of Marxist jargon, he is the quintessential comprador bourgeois.

This was Garcia’s second term as President of Peru. In his first go-round, he clashed with the guerrillas of the Shining Party, a Maoist insurgency whose dogmatic and repressive approach isolated it from the urban working class. Their members were Quechean Indians living in the highlands.

In his second term it was the Indians of the Amazon rainforest who got the shaft. Unlike Chairman Gonzalo of the Shining Path, the opposition to Garcia was led by Alberto Pizango, a member of the Shawi tribe who was committed to nonviolence but totally uncompromising when it came to the rights of indigenous peoples whose water was being fouled by the Peruvian state oil company pipelines and who feared that things would get much worse with the advent of Law 840. It allowed private investment in their territory and sacrificed their hard-won right to a modicum of sovereignty.

They say that the choice of a principal subject is key to the success of most documentaries. That being the case, co-directors Heidi Brandenburg and Mathew Orzel were fortunate to have complete access to Pizango as he rallied opposition to the multinational onslaught given red carpet treatment by Alan Garcia. He is a plain-spoken man but capable of stirring rhetoric when the circumstances call for it. He was exactly the sort of grass roots leader José Carlos Mariátegui must have had in mind when he founded the Communist Party of Peru in 1928 based on a program that synthesized Marxism and indigenous principles.

As it happens, Mariátegui only decided to become a Communist after becoming disillusioned with the APRA party in Peru in whose name Alan Garcia misruled. For APRA, anti-imperialism and “development” were to be pursued within the framework of capitalism even if it meant treating the indigenous people in the same way they have always been treated in the Western Hemisphere, as relics of a “savage” past standing in the way of progress and civilization.

Once the opposition to Law 840 began to develop a mass base and after it began organizing picket lines throughout Indian territory, Garcia and his cohorts began to refer them to as relics of the past who were defying the needs of the country’s majority. That, of course, is what inspired the film’s title.

The tensions between the ruling party and the indigenous peoples escalated until a pitched battle took place on June 5^th, 2009 when the cops began firing on pickets assembled on the “Devil’s Curve” jungle highway close to Bagua, a town in the heart of Indian country. Not long after the first Indians fell to the ground mortally wounded, others seized guns from the cops or used their own and machetes to strike back at the cops. One of the most moving parts of the film involves the father of one of the dead cops who returns to Bagua to get help from the Indians in finding his son’s corpse or more optimistically winning his freedom. After he discovers that he had been dismembered and thrown into a nearby river, he calmly states that he does not blame the Indians but the overall climate of violence created by APRA politicians.

Although I would hardly describe the film as “entertainment”, the directors had a bird’s eye view of the clash on the Devil’s Curve and were skillful enough to turn the footage into some of the most hair-raising scenes I have ever seen in a documentary. The struggle continues in Peru as it is likely that Pedro Pablo Kuczynski has won the recently held Presidential election. He is a former World Bank economist and co-chairman of First Boston, so that says it all.

Next Wednesday at 8:30pm at the Walter Reade Theater and 9:15pm in the IFC Center in the Village you can see “The Crossing”, a powerful chronicle about a group of Syrians fleeing Assad’s reign of terror and taking a risky boat ride across the Mediterranean to Europe in search of political asylum.

It puts a human face on the ordeal facing millions of Syrians that is now only an abstraction in the mass media or—worse—a target of nativist violence and state-sponsored blockades through much of Europe.

If there is still a question of what drives refugees to flee Syria, all you need to do is listen to the journalist Angela—a Christian–who along with her husband and journalist partner was forced to flee the country when she became a target of the security forces in 2011 after writing articles in support of the Syrian revolution. She was arrested once and worried that the next time she might be killed.

You can also hear from IT expert Rami who was working in the UAE. When he was arrested at demonstration in support of the revolution by the emirate’s cops, he was ordered to leave the country. Since going back to Syria meant arrest or being killed, he opted to join Angela and about 20 others in an uncertain sea voyage.

In 2012, director George Kurian was working as a photojournalist in Syria in the thick of the battles while buildings were being bombed to pieces. That led to the decision to make a film about the efforts of some to leave this hell. He put it this way:

“The Crossing” is about Syrian people speaking for themselves. Through it, we hope to join the debate about our electoral policies…Islam and its branches of fundamentalism will always serve as flashpoints in any discussion…[but] it’s these ideas that have kept us from acting. These concepts make us see refugees as a problem rather than a people who have a problem and who need our help.”

Although it is not part of the HRW film festival, I also urge you to watch the six-part series of nine minute videos about another group of Syrian refugees on the New Yorker Magazine website (http://video.newyorker.com/) directed by Matthew Cassel and executive produced by Laurie Poitras, who made the Oscar-winning documentary about Edward Snowden. Poitras is affiliated with Glenn Greenwald whose views on Syria are questionable at best. I am glad that he obviously had no influence on this film.

Unlike “The Crossing”, Cassel’s film, titled “The Journey from Syria”, does not address the question of what drove people to mostly walk from Istanbul to Macedonia to flee the horrors of Syria but you might suspect that it was the regime rather than jihadists that was responsible especially since they refer to bombing. As is obvious at this point after 5 years of war, it is the Syrian air force that is creating genocidal conditions, not the lightly armed rebels.

For an excellent review of Cassel’s film, I recommend Idrees Ahmad, one of the most committed and tireless defenders of the Syrian revolution we have:

The Journey, however, is more than the chronicle of an exodus. It is a human story about ordinary lives disrupted by extraordinary circumstances. Its protagonists are normal people—a jeweller, a hairdresser, and a schoolteacher—who have to face dilemmas that jewellers, hairdressers, and schoolteachers do not normally face. The film is well constructed and tells its story with minimal editorialising. Through its relatable protagonists, it offers viewers a mirror to consider the choices they might have made had similar circumstances been thrust upon them.

This context is important for the kind of debate currently raging in Europe. The last segment of the documentary shows movements like Pegida and demagogues like Geert Wilders stirring up xenophobia. The refugee exodus has served as a boon for the European far right. Across Europe, far right parties are now ascendant. Refugees are routinely demonised.

But if the left has failed to challenge this wave, it is because they, just like the right, have been unwilling to address the root causes of the Syrian conflict. The organised left across much of Europe has shown little sympathy for Syrians fighting oppression. Some have tacitly supported the regime; others, such as the British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, have backed Russian military intervention while opposing safe zones for civilians. (Some of the tropes the right has used to stereotype refugees were first used by the left to demonise Assad’s opponents, painting them all as “extremists” and “jihadists”)

Read full review

Episode one of “The Journey from Syria” is on Youtube:

April 30, 2016

East of Salinas

Filed under: Film,immigration — louisproyect @ 9:54 pm

Bullfrog Films is a small-scale film distribution company in rural Pennsylvania that is dedicated to works made by directors and screenwriters with a social conscience. I try to spread the word on their latest offerings since they generally have relevance to the struggle against capitalist exploitation. “East of Salinas” is a case in point. Aired originally on PBS, this fifty-three-minute documentary focuses on a family of undocumented farmworkers from Mexico who are struggling to survive against impossible odds in the town where John Steinbeck was born and where much of his fiction was set. The star of the film is a fourth grader named José who is a poster child for the intrinsic values of such people who are demonized as rapists, gangsters and drug dealers by Donald Trump. José loves school, respects his parents, and puts up with all sorts of indignities with great aplomb given his youth.

The fourth grade teacher is Oscar Ramos, who like José grew up in a family of undocumented farmworkers. From an early age Ramos had a burning ambition to be a schoolteacher. Watching him inspire and challenge a class made up of children like José is one of the film’s greatest pleasures, even if much of it leaves you with a feeling of bitterness over how poor people have to put up with terrible living conditions, job insecurity and the constant threat of la migra. These are people who work 10 to 12 hours a day chopping lettuce so that you can enjoy a nutrient-free salad with dinner, while they are often forced to survive on rice and beans dispensed by church pantries.

Director Laura Pacheco, a trained anthropologist, gave an interview to PBS that while not mentioning Donald Trump offered one of the main reasons this documentary should be shown in classrooms around the country now:

I think East of Salinas should be required viewing for every candidate! Immigration is indeed such a hot topic now – and finding a path towards citizenship for the 11 million undocumented is more important now than ever. But what we really hope is that people who see the film are able to put aside their politics for an hour and settle into Jose’s story. His hope for his future is heartwarming.

There are 2 million kids like Jose in America. They all want to contribute and make their communities a better place. America is full of opportunities and I hope after seeing East of Salinas, the door to providing these opportunities to kids like Jose will open a bit wider. I think because we’ve focused on one story and stayed away from polarizing politics, the film can be used to encourage a different conversation around immigration reform.

For rental information to institutions and individuals, go to http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/eosa.html

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January 20, 2016

Ricardo Duchesne: the Marxist-Hegelian who became a White Nationalist

Filed under: Fascism,immigration,racism,transition debate — louisproyect @ 6:05 pm

Ricardo Duchesne

Yesterday as I began reading the penultimate chapter of Anievas and Nisancioglu’s “How the West Came to Rule”, one which deals with the “great divergence” between the West and Asia, I was surprised to see a history professor at the University of New Brunswick in Canada named Ricardo Duchesne mentioned as a believer in the “miracle” of the West. Like the more straightforward believers of Western superiority covered by Jim Blaut in “Eight Eurocentrist Historians”, Duchesne attributes its domination of the rest of the world to its “higher intellectual and artistic creativity”.

The last time Duchesne came to my attention was in September 2003 when I commented on a critique of the Brenner thesis that he had written for Rethinking Marxism.

Duchesne’s article is not only worth tracking down as a very effective rebuttal to Brenner and Wood but as a rarity in the academic world: a witty and highly readable essay that entertains while it educates. For veterans of PEN-L, it might come as some surprise to discover that he has written such an article for in the past he was one of the most vociferous opponents of James M. Blaut, both on that list and other lists where the origins of capitalism was a hot topic. For example in January 1998, he wrote the following on PEN-L:

“Now consider the dilemma Blaut finds himself: why did Europe came to dominate the rest of the World? Answer: geographical proximity of Europe to the Americas(!) gave it access to its metals and labor leading to the industrial revolution. Obviously the notion that European capitalism developed as a result of the exploitation of the Third World has been so roundly refuted I need not elaborate this here. Just a handy, if incomplete, stats: At most 2% of Europe’s GNP at the end of 18th century took the form of profits derived from commerce with Americas, Asia, Africa! (I think source is K.O’Brien).”

However, Duchesne now believes:

“The major drawback of Wood’s Origins is its Eurocentric presumption that explaining the transition to capitalism is simply a matter of looking for those ‘unique’ traits that set Europe or England apart from the rest of the world. Marxists can no longer rest comfortably with the story that England and Europe emerged from the Middle Ages with an internally generated advantage over the rest of Asia.”

As it turns out, his dissertation was on the “transition debate”. Written in 1994, it claimed that it would apply a “Hegelian” procedure to resolve a debate that reached an impasse in his view. His dissertation adviser was Robert Albritton, a Marxist scholar generally associated with the anti-Brenner camp. He also thanks David McNally, who we assume was on his dissertation committee, as being “helpful” despite their differences over deconstruction. Since I had just heard McNally paying loving tribute to Ellen Meiksins Wood yesterday, a person who never met a deconstructionist she wouldn’t have had for breakfast, I wondered what that was about.

Out of curiosity, I downloaded Duchesne’s dissertation that is titled “All contraries confounded: Historical materialism and the transition-to-capitalism debate” and turned to the conclusion. It certainly confirms his approaching the “transition debate” from a Hegelian standpoint, as this gibberish from his final paragraph would confirm:

Throughout this movement, however, it is crucial that we do not lose sight of our initial object of knowledge, our explanadum. Our explanadum must be the point of departure for the construction of our concrete whole: it sets the site of over-determination. It is the point from which we will derive a totality which is pertinent to our object of study, as opposed to an indifferent totality in which everything is related to everything else. It is also crucial that we remember our starting point in order to avoid the conclusion that this process of concretization is a reconstruction of history or society as such. Marx’s method of political economy comprehends one area of what Hegel called objective spirit, namely, socio-economic life. Our totality will be a part of a larger and still more complex whole – a totality which will always remain incomplete.

Having followed Duchesne’s interventions around the Brenner thesis on two different mailing lists in the early 2000s, the Hegelian influence is obvious to me seen in retrospect. I state that as someone who studied Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Mind” in 1966 at the New School when I was dodging the draft. Key to Hegel is the dialectic, which poses one set of ideas against another in an ongoing struggle that finally resolves itself in the Prussian state that Hegel bowed down to. Whenever Hegel’s name came up on Marxmail, Jim Blaut raised a stink since he considered Hegel an arch-reactionary and urged us to steer clear of him. Whether Duchesne was a Marxist at the time was open to question but there is little doubt what he turned into today, a vicious racist who has the same worshipful attitude toward the Canadian state of his dreams—one that is devoted to Western values and the White Race–that Hegel had toward the Prussian state.

The first indication that Duchesne had thrown in his lot with the Eurocentrists was a 2005 article taking issue with Kenneth Pomeranz, the author of “The Great Divergence”, a book that held that China was superior to Britain in many respects in the 18^th century, and that if not for British access to New World plunder and the availability of coal in the early stages of the industrial revolution it would have remained subordinate to China. Duchesne’s article remained within the parameters of scholarly norms, even though one might wonder whether it harbored a willingness to break ranks with the anti-Eurocentrists that the capricious scholar had tenuous ties to.

But it was the next article that appeared that year that amounted to a “coming out”. Titled “Defending the rise of Western Culture against its Multicultural critics”, it was the sort of article that you would expect to read in The New Criterion or The Weekly Standard. From that point on, everything that Duchesne has written is in the same vein with a brazen disregard for scholarly impartiality. It culminated in a 528-page book titled “The Uniqueness of Western Civilization” that was published in 2011. It has a chapter titled “The Restlessness of the Western Spirit from a Hegelian Perspective” that is a reminder that Blaut knew what he was talking about. It is followed by one titled “The Aristocratic Egalitarianism of Indo-Europeans and the Primordial Origins of Western Civilization”. I am sure that you know that Aryan is another word for Indo-Europeans.

But nothing would prepare you for Duchesne’s personal blog that is a blatant defense of White Nationalism of the sort that is tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Political Research Associates and other groups that follow the KKK, neo-Nazis, et al.

The blog is titled Council of European Canadians and describes its goals as follows:

We believe that existing strategies for immigration reform have not been successful and must be abandoned. We believe that assimilation (of non-Europeans in the current state of mass immigration) would be fatal to our European heritage, and that if we aim to enhance European Canada we must rely upon the current mechanisms afforded by multiculturalism while it lasts. Multiculturalism recognizes the right of ethnic groups to preserve and enhance their identity and cultural heritage.

We are against an establishment that is determined to destroy European Canada through fanatical immigration, imposition of a diversity curriculum, affirmative action in favor of non-Europeans, and promotion of white guilt. The domination of the cultural Marxists is so deeply seated, so entrenched inside the psychology of Canadians that we cannot engage only in ordinary party politics.

It has racist articles by Duchesne and crosspostings from other fascist-minded filth such as Tim Murray, the author of “Ban Muslim Immigration? Trump Is Right” and “Students for Western Civilization”, a group at York University that was formed by “White/European students to challenge those arguments about the inherent illegitimacy of our civilisation’s existence.”

Over the past couple of years, Duchesne has become a public figure in Canada for his racist views. On May 26 2014, he wrote a blog post titled “Chinese Head Tax, White Apologies, and “Inclusive Redress” that assailed Vancouver City Councilor Raymond Louie for urging that discriminatory laws and policies imposed on Chinese immigrants in the city between 1886 and 1947 be investigated. For Duchesne, this was a “cultural Marxist” assault on the city’s White values. (I should mention that his use of this term is consistent with the way it was used by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.)

Kerry Jang, another Chinese-Canadian councilperson, complained to the administration at Duchesne’s college that predictably defended his academic freedom. Meanwhile, some of his peers wrote a letter to the Toronto Star disassociating themselves from Duchesne:

The principle of academic freedom has long been established in Canada and continues to be a cornerstone of the Canadian university system. As such, Dr. Ricardo Duchesne has a right to use that freedom as a member of the Sociology Unit in the Department of Social Science, University of New Brunswick, Saint John.

However, academic freedom entails neither a right to be listened to, nor a right to an audience. We, the undersigned, also exercise our academic freedom and state categorically that we reject Dr. Duchesne’s expressed views on “Western civilization” and consider them void of academic merit. His views are his alone and are not shared by the ten signatories below from the Department of Sociology, UNB Fredericton.

Professors Gary Bowden, Dan Crouse, Tia Dafnos, Nick Hardy, Catherine Holtmann, Jacqueline Low, Nancy Nason-Clark, Paul Peters, Lucia Tramonte and Maria Costanza Torri, Department of Sociology, UNB, Fredericton

I don’t know enough about Duchesne personally to speculate on how he could have ended up as White Nationalist except to say that he was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Apparently the colonial condition was insufficient to keep his head screwed on right. In contrast, Jim Blaut had a very close connection to the island that sustained him until his death. He was married to America Sorrentini-Blaut, whom he met when he was teaching at the University of Puerto Rico. She was a central leader of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, a group that he strongly identified with and no doubt that influenced his decision to take up the question of Eurocentrism. Long after riffraff like Ricardo Duchesne are six feet under, serious scholars will be reading Blaut to get ideas on how to understand the phenomenon that Mahatma Gandhi once described in the following terms when asked what he thought of Western Civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”

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November 14, 2015

Three films of note

Filed under: Brazil,Film,immigration,workers — louisproyect @ 11:18 pm

Opening at the IFC Center on November 20^th, “Mediterranea” is a timely narrative film about immigration, an issue that has been dominating the media for the past year or two. In this instance, the characters are not political refugees but a couple of brothers from Burkina Faso who are trying to make to Europe in hope of a better life.

While most people who have been following the immigration story are aware that the voyage across the Mediterranean Ocean on rickety boats has cost the lives of more than 2000 people this year, the film dramatizes the hazards that must be faced even before they reach the boat. The two brothers, Ayiva and Abas, join a group of about twenty people who must reach their point of departure in Algeria by first traveling through the Libyan desert. Relying on a guide who they are told to trust implicitly, they are ambushed by Libyan bandits who obviously got tipped off by the guide. They are ordered to surrender their hard-earned cash and other valuables. When one man begins complaining loudly even as he has complied with their demands, he gets a bullet in the head.

Eventually the two brothers make it to Italy—just barely—where they make their way to a small town in the countryside where they hope to hook up with other Burkina Faso immigrants. After being warmly greeted in town by their brethren, they are escorted to their new home—a room in a shantytown hovel. Between the two brothers, there are conflicts over their situation with Ayiva seeing the glass half-full and Abas seeing it as ninety percent empty.

Like most of the other male immigrants, they end up as farmworkers picking oranges for an Italian family that looks upon them kindly but patronizingly. The grandmother insists on being called Mother Africa while the teenaged granddaughter turns over a carton of oranges because she is feeling bitchy. Her father is fair to his workers but only so far as it goes. When Ayiva practically begs him to help secure the papers necessary for permanent residence, the man lectures him about his grandfather who relied on nobody except his family when he came to the USA.

The film is remarkable by staying close to the realities of immigrant life without resorting to the melodrama that many of these types of films deem necessary. It is about the daily struggle to make a living in difficult circumstances and the small pleasures that come with the gatherings of fellow Burkina Faso men and women at night as they share drinks, listen to Western music, and shore each other up for the next day’s travails.

The press notes indicate how the director came to make such a film:

It would be pretentious on my part to claim that I have experienced anything remotely close to what the immigrants are experiencing —I can only be an outside observer here. However, because of my own background, I could approach the story of African immigrants in Italy with some personal connections. My mother is African-American and my father is Italian. And I’ve always been very interested in race relations, with a particular interest in the role of black people in Italian society. So when the first race riot took place in Rosarno in 2010, I immediately went down to Calabria to learn more about the circumstances that lead to the revolt. It was an event of historical proportions because it opened up for the first time the question of race relations in an Italian context. So I started talking to people and collecting stories about their lives. I settled there permanently and began to think about a script.

Although it should not be a factor in either reviewing or seeing this exceptionally well-made and politically powerful film, a few words about Burkina Faso would help you understand why such people would take the arduous trip across the Mediterranean to an uncertain future.

In 1983 Captain Thomas Sankara, who was to Burkina Faso as Hugo Chavez was to Venezuela, led a popular revolution in Upper Volta, a former French colony. Once in power, he changed the name of the country to Burkina Faso, which meant “Land of Upright Men”, and embarked on a bold series of social and economic reforms targeting the country’s poor, especially the women. Called the “Che Guevara of Africa”, he consciously modeled his development program on the Cuban revolution.

Unlike in Venezuela where Hugo Chavez was saved from a coup attempt by the power of the people, the Burkina Faso experiment had a tragic outcome. Blaise Compaoré, acting on behalf of Burkina Faso’s tiny but powerful bourgeoisie and their patrons in France, overthrew Sankara in 1987.

For the next twenty-seven years Blaise Compaoré created the conditions that forced people like Ayiva and Abas to risk everything on a voyage that could cost them lives at worst and at best to end up picking oranges for minimum wages. In 2006 the UN rated Burkina Faso as 174^th in human development indicators, just three places from the bottom. With cotton plantations dominating the rural economy, the country is locked into the traditional neocolonial, agro-export dependency.

Last year when Compaoré proposed a change to the constitution that would allow him to run for office once again after the fashion of Robert Mugabe, the country erupted in protests and he fled the country. In the aftermath, there have been various attempts by military figures to run the country temporarily until elections were held next year. Suffice it to say that none of them measures up to Thomas Sankara. One hopes that the same kind of courage and determination that led the characters in “Mediterranea” to make the arduous trip to Italy will serve to make Burkina Faso the “Land of Upright Men” once again.

Following in the footsteps of this year’s “A Second Mother”, a Brazilian film about class divisions between master and servant in a wealthy household, “Casa Grande” incorporates much of the same tensions and even a central character—a teenage son who is uncomfortable with privilege.

In “Casa Grande”, which opened yesterday at the Cinema Village in New York, we meet Jean the teenage son early on as he sneaks into the bedroom of Rita, one of the family’s two maids. Overloaded with raging hormones, he can barely restrain himself as Rita—a beautiful young woman—tells him about a tryst she had with a motorcyclist whose name she did not even know. He took her to an alley, lifted up her skirt, and began kissing her bottom. As Jean begins to make a move on Rita, she holds him off and sends him back to his room—the only power that she can exercise in a house where class privilege is on display every minute of the day.

Hugo, Jean’s father, is impatient with Jean who has a slacker temperament. It is not just that the youth is unmotivated, although that is a problem, it is more that he is not very smart—the same flaw that existed in the young man in “A Second Mother”. That does not stand in the way of the close relationship he has built with the hired help and in fact makes it more possible. For someone barely capable of passing Brazil’s onerous entrance exams for college, there is little point in pretending that he is something other than a kid who likes music and women. When Severino the chauffeur drives him to school in the morning, the main topic of conversation is how to “score”. It is clear that Jean has much more of a rapport with the driver than his martinet of a father who expects him to join Brazil’s bourgeoisie.

This is a bourgeoisie that Hugo is barely clinging to having lost his job as an investment adviser and who is now deeply in debt, so much so that every penny must be accounted for in Casa Grande. Before the family gathers for dinner in the evening, he reminds them to shut out the lights in their room before they sit down at the table. We eventually learn that Hugo, despite all his displays of privilege, has not paid the servants for the past three months and that he will be forced to sell their mansion in a gated community designed to keep out people from the lower classes.

When Jean develops a relationship with Luiza, a young woman of mixed ancestry, race joins class in forcing Jean to decide where his loyalties lie. The main topic of conversation at dinner gatherings is Brazil’s new affirmative action law that will allot 40 percent of the posts in many public institutions to Black or brown people, including Luiza. When she insists to Hugo that she deserves a spot in college because of the new law’s commitment to compensating for slavery, he spits out that he earned his place in society. Nobody ever gave him anything.

His place in society is exactly what is in jeopardy now. Although the information will be familiar to Brazilian audiences, I had to research the nature of Hugo’s immanent downfall on the net. It seems that he owned thousands of shares in OGX, the second largest oil and gas company in Brazil after Petrobras. This is a company that would go broke eventually because of the mismanagement of its CEO Eike Batista, who was an even bigger screw-up than Hugo.

In 2008 Forbes listed Batista as the 8th richest man in the world. Five years later he would be ruined because OGX was pumping only 15,000 gallons of oil out of the ground rather than the 750,000 it predicted. This year Brazilian cops seized seven cars from Batista, including a white Lamborghini Aventador, and all the cash he had left.

If you want to understand the turmoil in Brazil today, there’s no better place to go than the Cinema Village to see this brilliant dissection of a society falling apart at the seams.

Finally, there’s “Barge”, a 71-minute documentary showing tomorrow at the Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas on 260 W 23rd St, between 7th and 8th Avenues as part of the NY Documentary Film Festival that runs until the 19^th (the schedule is here: http://www.docnyc.net/schedule/).

In this marvelous work by Ben Powell, we accompany a crew as they navigate the Mississippi River from Rosedale, Mississippi to points northward. The film alternates between gorgeous vistas of the river, the men at work on the boat, and interviews that you have to strain a bit to understand since the drawls are so thick you can cut them with a knife. (Will Patterson’s minimalist film score is a winner, the best Philip Glass-inspired work I have heard in decades.)

The interviews are what make this film stand out. If you have read Studs Terkel’s “Working”, you’ll get an idea of what inspired Ben Powell to make such a film. In a period when workers are undervalued, you’ll be impressed with how the crew see themselves—as men who help keep the country going. One nails it this way: most of everything you touch gets there on a barge, including the concrete of the sidewalks you walk on and the plastic your groceries are packaged in. With so much of American society consumed with “making it” on an individualist basis, it is great to see a collectivist ethos that goes back centuries at least.

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September 20, 2015

Open Borders

Filed under: cults,immigration,Syria — louisproyect @ 9:51 pm

In the latest Militant newspaper, the organ of the infinitesimally small and monumentally bizarre SWP, there’s a swipe at a position defended in last week’s edition:

The labor officialdom in the United States and the different capitalist countries in Europe have refused to carry out the fight for working-class unity over decades, instead joining with each of their bosses’ governments in advancing a nationalist and protectionist course. Workers everywhere have to chart a new road forward.

It’s different than a general call to “open the borders,” as an editorial in last week’s Militant put forward. That’s a utopian demand, and, if adopted under capitalist rule, would lead to increased competition among workers, unemployment, lower wages and social misery.

This is not the first time such a correction has been made. Usually it can be attributed to Jack Barnes reversing himself on previously held positions. This never happened when I was in the SWP in the 1960s and 70s and probably reflects the descent of this sect into ever more increasingly uncharted waters with an unstable cult figure at the helm.

As it turns out, this is not the only cult-sect that is opposed to open borders because it is “utopian”. The Spartacist League that SWP’ers used to laugh at for its weirdness issued a reply to a reader’s letter that sounds like it could be an editorial in the Militant at this point:

The call to “open the borders” and its variants are hopelessly utopian. The modern nation-state arose as a vehicle for the development of capitalism and will remain the basis for the organization of the capitalist economy until the world capitalist order is shattered through a series of workers revolutions. Policing its borders is vital to the very existence of the capitalist state power. Moreover, “open the borders” can have a reactionary content, from advancing imperialist economic penetration of dependent countries to obliterating the right to national self-determination.

This, of course, is an odd use of the term “utopian”, which in Marxist theory generally refers to beliefs that small-scale experiments in collective ownership can lead to socialism. It would be clearer if the two sects would use the word “unrealistic” instead of “utopian” to avoid confusion. But then again, that would lead to some interesting questions about other demands that cannot be realized under capitalism. Perhaps there is something deeply conservative about this hostility to open borders even though the head men at the SWP and Spartacist League love to throw the ultraleft verbiage around.

If you take the trouble to Google “Open borders” on the Militant website, you’ll see that the group favored it in the past. Last week’s Militant erred only by assuming that the party line was in force until it would be changed by the democratic vote of the party at the next convention. Since the cult operates on the whim of the Dear Leader nowadays, the line can be changed any time he decides to change it. Who needs democracy when the group is led by the Lenin of today?

There were 58 results on a search for “open borders” on the Militant and all of them except for the one cited above defend them. For example, the Swedish group that is part of the SWP’s global network ran an election campaign that made such a demand.

In 2010, when I was still a part of the Swans Magazine collective, I wrote an article on the passport system for a special issue on immigration. I reproduce it below in the hope that people get a better idea of where Marxists stand on this issue.

Special Issue on Immigration

A History Of The Passport System

by Louis Proyect

(Swans – October 4, 2010) When I learned about the decision by the good folks who publish Swans that they intended to produce a special issue on immigration, I saw this as an opportunity to investigate the origins of the passport and visa system — something I regarded as a recent phenomenon. After reading John Torpey’s very useful The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, I was disappointed to discover that such documents have been around for a very long time in one form or another. Upon further reflection, I might have realized that this was the case since state formations — be they feudal, capitalist, or bureaucratic socialist — have been around for over a millennium. The only exception to this rule has been primitive communal societies or nomadic herders. Ironically, it will be up to an aroused and enlightened humanity to reintroduce communal social forms but based on advanced technology to finally put an end to the dungeon that such papers represent.

It is a sign of how little we have progressed that the Roma being persecuted across Europe today for their refusal to abide by the norms of “citizenship” were being persecuted for the same refusal in the 16th century. A police ordinance from 1548 Prussia stipulated that “gypsies and vagabonds” (Landstreicher) had to be issued passes to travel within the feudal state. Furthermore, in all feudal entities the lower classes needed traveling papers, a way of tying a serf to his lord’s manor.

Despite Britain’s reputation for being freer and more “enlightened,” things were not much different. A 1381 statute prevented anybody but aristocrats from leaving the kingdom. (A point on terminology: passports are required to leave a country; visas are needed to enter one.) Britain also had the same determination to keep the peasant tied to his master’s land. A member of the lower classes could migrate from one part of the kingdom to another only if he had a certificate issued by a court official or a cleric.

While Czar Peter the Great had the reputation of being a “Westernizing” progressive, the reality on the ground for the average Russian was one of slavery to documents. Since Peter had the ambition to create a large and powerful army, it was necessary to put obstacles in the way of a peasant who sought to flee this oppressive “duty.” A 1719 edict required someone moving from one village to another to have the proper papers. It is not difficult to understand why Stalin would reintroduce such restrictions during the 1930s since in many ways his regime was a mixture of Czarist autocracy and state planning.

The first blow delivered to such feudal encumbrances was the great French Revolution of 1789, or at least that was the hope. A delegate to the Estates General pleaded that each citizen “must be free to move about or to come, within and outside the Kingdom, without permissions, passports, or other formalities that end to hamper the liberty of its citizens…” Such hopes were in vain since the bourgeois republic reflecting the class interests of those who made it retained passports as a means of controlling the poor who were pouring into Paris.

It was not just the poor who were kept on a tight leash. When King Louis XVI was caught trying to flee the country disguised as a valet, the republicans cracked down. Anybody trying to flee the country without authorization would be subject to arrest, thus making the sublime sentiments of the conclusion of Humphrey Bogart’s Casablanca ring a bit hollow.

Worries over counter-revolution did not only stem from flights from the country. There was also a consensus that foreigners might find their way into France harboring subversive ideas. Subversive in this context, it should be added, meant a belief in the divine rights of Kings. France eventually resolved this problem by abolishing internal passports — in deference to the hopes of the democratically minded and a burgeoning capitalist class in need of “free” labor while institutionalizing them at the border. Henceforth, the concept of “foreigner” would be enshrined in the piece of paper that defined one in relationship to the bourgeois republic.

By and large, the 19th century was marked by a more permissive attitude toward the right to travel without restriction since a capitalist industrial revolution would not be possible without mobile pools of labor, in the same way that California agribusiness relies on an ample supply of Mexican stoop labor today.

Prussia, a state that symbolized absolutism, enacted legislation in 1817 that permitted its citizens to “travel freely and unhindered” without papers, but only within its borders. Leaving the country without a passport was strictly verboten, however.

If Prussia’s restrictions mirrored its inability to break cleanly with the feudal system, how does Britain — an exemplar of liberal free trade — stack up by comparison? As was always the case with Britain, the right to emigrate was joined at the hip to the capitalist economy. An economic downturn in the period 1810 to 1820 prompted bread riots by the poor. In face of such troubles, the ruling class decided to relax restrictions. That explains the enormous migration to Australia and other former colonies that would follow.

Changing economic circumstances in the German states (the country had not yet unified) also led to increased mobility by the 1850s. Liberal-minded industrialists insisted on the right of labor to move freely within and outside the country. This need was felt especially keenly in cases where foreign workers could be used to break strikes. However, the impulse to greater freedoms was countered by traditional German social structures, especially strong in Prussia.

Things came to a head in 1867 when the Reichstag would debate a sweeping legislation that would go the furthest in removing restrictions. If passed, both citizens and foreigners would be allowed to travel to the states within the North German Confederation that included Prussia as well as more economically developed entities.

The fact that some sectors of the capitalist class favor labor mobility today as a way to undermine trade unions in places like the United States and France, just as was the case in Germany in the 1860s, should not stand in the way of our call for freedom of movement.

Lenin, who counted himself as a disciple of the German Social Democracy led by Wilhelm and Karl Liebknecht, was emphatic on this. In a 1913 article titled Capitalism and Workers’ Immigration, he wrote:

Capitalism has given rise to a special form of migration of nations. The rapidly developing industrial countries, introducing machinery on a large scale and ousting the backward countries from the world market, raise wages at home above the average rate and thus attract workers from the backward countries.

Hundreds of thousands of workers thus wander hundreds and thousands of versts. Advanced capitalism drags them forcibly into its orbit, tears them out of the backwoods in which they live, makes them participants in the world-historical movement, and brings them face to face with the powerful, united, international class of factory owners.

There can be no doubt that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon their native land, and that the capitalists exploit the immigrant workers in the most shameless manner. But only reactionaries can shut their eyes to the progressive significance of this modern migration of nations. Emancipation from the yoke of capital is impossible without the further development of capitalism, and without the class struggle that is based on it. And it is into this struggle that capitalism is drawing the masses of the working people of the whole world, breaking down the musty, fusty habits of local life, breaking down national barriers and prejudices, uniting workers from all countries in huge factories and mines in America, Germany, and so forth.
(Source: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/oct/29.htm)

If anything, Lenin’s observations ring truer than ever. Globalization and advanced communications technology have broken down “national barriers” as anybody who has ever made a call to get technical support from Dell Computers would attest.

Unfortunately, labor solidarity has not kept pace with bourgeois solidarity that forges ahead with trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO. In the coming decades, labor will either face up to the task of realizing the old slogan of “workers of the world unite” or else it will fall backwards into greater and greater restrictions of the sort that typified feudal Europe. There is no turning back.

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September 14, 2015

Syrian refugees, Hungary and the “axis of resistance”

Filed under: Hungary,immigration,mechanical anti-imperialism,Soros,Stalinism,Syria — louisproyect @ 5:41 pm

Viktor Orban: member in good standing of the “axis of resistance”

It seems that a week does not go by without some incident in Eastern Europe involving the inhumane treatment of people who have fled Baathist terror in Syria.

For example, in the Czech Republic, cops wrote numbers on the arms of refugees in order to identify them, a chilling reminder of how Nazis tattooed such numbers on the arms of Jews in the death camps.

But it is Hungary that takes the cake apparently.

It put a razor-wire fence on the border with Serbia to keep refugees out.
It put up billboards (in Hungarian no less) warning anybody who made it through the razor-wire fence that “If you come to Hungary, don’t take the jobs of Hungarians!”
A TV news photographer kicked and tripped refugees running away from the police. The station she worked for was connected to the far-right Jobbik party that lines up with the “axis of resistance” on Syria, opposing “the systematic attempts of the West to find a casus belli for an armed intervention against the Assad government.”
At an internment camp for refugees in Hungary, cops threw bags of food to them as if they were hungry animals.

Since the refugees are only interested in making their way to Germany or Britain, the xenophobia is likely a strategy to mollify Hungary’s burgeoning ultraright groups like Jobbik and their voters. Key to success is the ability of President Viktor Orban to exploit simmering discontent over dire economic conditions. In fact this is exactly how German fascism succeeded. When economic disaster ruined Eastern European Jewry, the largely working class and impoverished small proprietors fled to Germany. Hitler then blamed “the Jews” for taking away German jobs.

It must be noted that Viktor Orban has recently joined the “axis of resistance” after the fashion of Jobbik. All across Europe ultraright parties with zero exceptions have showed solidarity with the Kremlin in its ostensibly “anti-imperialist” struggle against NATO, the EU, and Washington. This Red-Brown alliance is a revival of the National Bolshevist tendency of the early 1920s when a faction of the German CP advocated a united front with the incipient fascist movement.

Orban is now Putin’s closest European ally. While the bonds involve mutual economic interests, including Hungarian access to Russian natural gas at bargain prices and a willingness to back Putin’s pipeline project that would bypass Ukraine, there are also ideological affinities. He has nationalist pretensions casting himself as an enemy of neoliberalism. He has also followed Putin in cracking down on NGO’s and pressuring Hungarian media to follow his strong man rule.

For a fascinating account of Orban’s political evolution, I would recommend the Intercept article by Adam LeBor titled “How Hungary’s Prime Minister Turned From Young Liberal Into Refugee-Bashing Autocrat”. It seems that early on he was not kindly disposed to Russian domination, speaking at a Budapest rally in 1989 commemorating the death of Imre Nagy, the leader of the failed 1956 revolution. In his speech he demanded the immediate withdrawal of all Soviet troops from Hungary.

You don’t have to understand Hungarian to know that he was lambasting “Communist dictatorship”. Understanding which side of the bread was buttered, Orban hooked up with George Soros just before this speech was made. LeBor reports;

Orban was born in May 1963 in Alcsutdoboz, a small village 31 miles from Budapest. After graduating from high school he moved to Budapest to study law at Eötvös Loránd University. There he co-founded Századvég, a dissident social science journal.

He graduated in 1987 and joined the Central-Eastern Europe Study Group, which was funded by George Soros, the financier who had emigrated from Hungary after World War II. The following year Orban became a founding member of the Alliance of Young Democrats, known in Hungarian as Fidesz. The outspoken radicals quickly became the darlings of the Western media. They were young, smart and scruffily photogenic – Tamas Deutsch, another founding member of Fidesz, was a model for Levi’s jeans. Fidesz in its early years was a broad coalition, from near anarchists to nationalists. They all had one aim: to get rid of the Communists. Once that was achieved, like all revolutionary groups, the party began to fracture.

Having been born and raised in Hungary, Soros took a particular interest in his native land. He spent millions on cultivating a following among ambitious young politicians like Orban, paying for airfare and hotel costs in the USA where they were afforded red carpet treatment at Soros’s Open Society conferences. Soros was also shrewd enough to pay for photocopying machines that anti-Communist activists found crucial in their attempts in the late 80s to create a liberal pole of attraction against the Stalinist bureaucracy. Michael Lewis, by no means a critic of neoliberalism, traced Soros’s steps in a 1994 Guardian article:

IN 1984 Soros opened his first office, in Budapest, and began all manner of subversive activities for which he is temperamentally very well-equipped. “I started by trying to create small cracks in the monolithic structure which goes under the name of communism, in the belief that in a rigid structure even a small crack can have a devastating effect,” he wrote in Opening The Soviet System. “As the cracks grew, so did my efforts until they came to take up most of my time.”

Says Liz Lorant, who worked with Soros from the start: “It was the excitement of what we got away with [that is irreplaceable]. We got away with murder. [For example] at that time Xerox machines were under lock and key. That was the way it was. In Romania you had to register a typewriter with the police. Well, we just flooded the whole damn country with Xerox machines so that the rules became meaningless.” In short, by the time the dust settled over the Berlin Wall – boom! bust! – Soros had accumulated a highly-charged portfolio of gratitude. The Great White Gods of Eastern Europe – Havel, Michnik, Kis, Haraszti – were all in his debt. So were all sorts of lesser-known, highly motivated people wending their way to high political office.

For most people on the “anti-imperialist” left, Soros is a kind of archenemy symbolizing globalization, neoliberalism and all the rest. He is also a convenient symbol of liberal ignominy for the far right as the supposed puppet master behind Obama and the secret plans to transform the USA into a European-styled socialist state. Of course that is the paradox of George Soros. Like Fay Dunaway telling Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown” that a woman was both her daughter and her sister, Soros is both a neoliberal shark and someone favoring European style socialism, which is in reality nothing but a welfare state and incapable of being realized today.

With Soros’s record of intervening in Hungarian politics through his well-funded NGO’s, it is easy to understand why Orban would have a free hand in cracking down on them. Many Hungarians must have gathered that Karl Popper’s philosophy probably had more to do with a fast buck then it did with promoting civil society and equal opportunity.

Five years ago Soros’s firm was fined $2.5 million for illegal bank stock transactions in Hungary (a mere slap on the wrist.) It was his exploitation of short sales and other shenanigans from 2007 to 2010 that prompted the billionaire and major donor to my alma mater to confess that he was having “a very good crisis”, referring to the stock market crash that is still impacting countries like Hungary.

Like Greece, Hungary had huge debts when the crisis broke and like Greece has been scrambling to nurse the country back to health—a dubious prospect given the world economic situation. In late 2008 Hungary pleaded with the International Monetary Fund for $25 billion in emergency financing. In 2010 unemployment reached 11.4 percent while the economy shrank by 6.3 percent. It was such suffering that convinced voters to back Orban’s party that promised to wave a magic wand and make things right.

For those who think that a Grexit would solve Greece’s problems, it is worth mentioning that Hungary’s failure to be part of the Eurozone was no silver bullet as the NY Times reported in 2012:

Zoltan Zsoter, an 80-year-old retiree, would seem to be about as far from the world of currency speculation as a person can get. Yet he is an example of how the workings of the global financial system, amplified by the policies of a single political leader, can have a devastating effect on ordinary people.

Mr. Zsoter is one of hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who took out home loans that must be repaid in Swiss francs or other foreign currencies like the euro. Such loans offered seductively low interest rates when times were good. But then the Hungarian currency plunged, causing Mr. Zsoter’s monthly payment to almost double.

“I live day to day,” Mr. Zsoter said. After defaulting on his loan, he pays 40,000 forints, or about $163, out of his monthly pension of 51,000 forints to stay in his modest Budapest apartment as a renter. “Sometimes I have to choose between buying either food or medicine,” he said.

Hungary serves as a cautionary tale for those who argue that Greece could regain competitiveness by reintroducing its currency. The drachma would plunge against the euro, the theory goes, and allow Greek products to compete on price with countries like Turkey.

So if Viktor Orban is facing intractable economic problems, why not scapegoat Syrian refugees or the Roma who have been the target of persecution for a number of years now? And meanwhile, the left that admires Putin would have all the reasons to back Orban who after all is sticking it to the EU.

According to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, our species homo sapiens has a tendency to think in terms of binary oppositions like life and death or good and evil. This would likely explain the eagerness for so much of the left to divide the world between those forces aligned with the West and those with the East. Like a plot out of a Tolkien novel, the Evil West is always seeking ways to destroy the Good East. Instead of elves with bows and arrow, we have people like Pablo Escobar, Mike Whitney and Eric Draitser rallying around the “axis of resistance” to the fire-breathing dragons of the West. And god help any decent folk in the East who managed to get on the wrong side of an elite in their neck of the woods. Everybody had to understand that it was their half of the world, love it or leave it.

Ironically, Hungary was a symbol of this binary opposition way of thinking in 1956 when the population rose up over Russian domination. In the same way that sections of the left make all sorts of excuses for Assad today, the CP justified the invasion of Hungary in order to “defend socialism”.

But in fact it was Russian tanks that created the animosity in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Hungary that made it possible for George Soros, NATO, the CIA and the US State Department to get a foothold. By reinforcing bureaucratic rule in the name of “socialism”, ordinary people began to think positively of its opposite. In the most extreme example, Ukrainians regarded Stephen Bandera as a hero for opposing Soviet domination even if he was a fascist.

The bottom line is that the encroachment of NATO at the doorstep of Russia is a direct outcome of the encroachment of the Red Army on nations throughout Eastern Europe.

There was one Communist who was able to see through the lies. The Daily Worker, the British CP newspaper with the same name as the American paper, sent Peter Fryer to Hungary in 1956 fully expecting him to write articles that echoed the party line that Russia needed to quell a CIA-inspired plot. In other words, he was expected to write the same kind of crap that Max Ajl, Patrick Higgins and Adam Johnson are writing about Syria today. But Fryer obeyed his conscience rather than party bosses and filed reports that any radical journalist would be proud of. You can read Peter Fryer’s “Hungarian Tragedy” here. This excerpt shows that it doesn’t take much effort to see the similarities between Hungary in 1956 and the Arab Spring in Syria in 2011, no matter how it has been slandered in places like Jacobin, WSWS.org, MRZine and elsewhere:

But the crowds spoke also to me of their lives in this small industrial town, of the long years of grinding poverty, without hope of improvement, of their hatred and fear of the AVH [Hungarian secret police]. ‘I get 700 forints a month,’ said one. ‘I only get 600.’ said another. [1] They were ill-dressed, the women and girls doing their pathetic best to achieve some faint echo of elegance. They spoke to me about the AVH men. ‘They were beasts, brutes, animals who had sold themselves to the Russians.’ ‘They called themselves Hungarians and they mowed our people down without hesitation!’ ‘We shan’t leave a single one of those swine alive – you’ll see.’ They asked me what the West was doing to help, and some asked outright for arms. I for one do not regard these as counterrevolutionaries. If after eleven years the working people, goaded beyond bearing, look to the West for succour, whose fault is that? If the Americans are guilty of seeking to foster counter-revolution with the Mutual Security Act, surely the Rákosis and the Gerös are a hundred times more guilty for providing the soil in which seeds sown by the Americans could grow.

There was a general movement in the direction of the hospital, where an immense crowd had gathered, clamouring more and more insistently with every minute that passed for Stefko to be brought out to them. The German journalist and I were admitted into the hospital, where we met the director’s wife and a French-speaking woman who had volunteered to help with the nursing. It was here that I got for the first time reasonably accurate figures of the number of wounded. There had been about 80 wounded brought here, of whom eleven had died, and about 80 had been taken to the hospital at Györ. The need for plasma and other medicaments was desperate if lives were to be saved and so was the need, said the director’s wife, to end the tumult outside. A deputation from the revolutionary committee was interviewing her husband to demand that Stefko be handed to the people.

A few minutes later the director was forced to give in, and we saw a stretcher carried by four men appear out of a hut in the hospital grounds. On it lay Stefko, wearing a blue shirt. His legs were covered by a blanket. His head was bandaged. He was carried close enough to me for me to have touched him. He was fully conscious, and he knew quite well what was going to happen to him. His head turned wildly from side to side and there was spittle round his mouth. As the crowd saw the stretcher approaching they sent up a howl of derision and anger and hatred. They climbed the wire fence and spat at him and shouted ‘murderer’. They pushed with all their might at the double gates, burst them open and surged in. The stretcher was flung to the ground, and the crowd was upon Stefko, kicking and trampling. Relations of those he had murdered were, they told me, foremost in this lynching. It was soon over. They took the body and hanged it by the ankles for a short time from one of the trees in the Lenin Street. Ten minutes afterwards only a few people were left outside the hospital.

I wrote later in my first, unpublished, dispatch:

After eleven years the incessant mistakes of the Communist leaders, the brutality of the State Security Police, the widespread bureaucracy and mismanagement, the bungling, the arbitrary methods and the lies have led to total collapse. This was no counter-revolution, organised by fascists and reactionaries. It was the upsurge of a whole people, in which rank-and-file Communists took part, against a police dictatorship dressed up as a Socialist society – a police dictatorship backed up by Soviet armed might.

I am the first Communist journalist from abroad to visit Hungary since the revolution started. And I have no hesitation in placing the blame for these terrible events squarely on the shoulders of those who led the Hungarian Communist Party for eleven years – up to and including Ernö Gerö They turned what could have been the outstanding example of people’s democracy in Europe into a grisly caricature of Socialism. They reared and trained a secret police which tortured all – Communists as well as nonCommunists – who dared to open their mouths against injustices. It was a secret police which in these last few dreadful days turned its guns on the people whose defenders it was supposed to be.

I wrote this under the immediate impact of a most disturbing and shattering experience, but I do not withdraw one word of it. Much of the rest of the dispatch was never received in London because the call was cut off after twenty minutes, and the first ten had been taken up by three different people giving me contradictory instructions as to the ‘line’ I should take. Mick Bennett insisted on reading me a long extract from a resolution of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. I had had enough of resolutions. I had seen where eleven years of terror and stupidity had led Hungary, and I wanted to tell the readers of the Daily Worker the plain unvarnished truth, however painful it might be. But the readers of the Daily Worker were not to be told the truth. The day after I had sent this dispatch they were reading only about ‘gangs of reactionaries’ who were ‘beating Communists to death in the streets’ of Budapest. The paper admitted in passing that ‘some reports claimed that only identified representatives of the former security police were being killed’. Next day Hungary disappeared altogether from the Daily Worker’s front page.

Comments (46)

September 4, 2015

Keeping track of the untermenschen

Filed under: immigration — louisproyect @ 12:54 pm

June 3, 2015

What Does It Mean To Be American?

Filed under: immigration — louisproyect @ 1:46 am

When you understand what it means to be a real American, then you can see that most Cubans are real Americans, where most Floridians are not; that most Mexicans are real Americans while most Californians are not; and that many immigrants will never be real Americans, though probably most always were. If this essay makes no sense to you, then you are sober in your delusions, for I am drunk in my insights. Insight knows itself to be particular, whereas delusion imagines itself to be general. This separates Carlos Castañeda from John Ashcroft. If you don’t like my icons, then pick your own, just make sure they are real, like Crazy Horse and Noam Chomsky, instead of fakes like George Armstrong Custer and Henry Kissinger. If this rant makes any sense to you, then you are capable of seeing that the America that will survive into the 22nd century, in peace and security, is as remote from the America of George W. Bush as that of Mark Twain was from J. P. Morgan’s, or Kurt Vonnegut’s was from Richard Nixon’s.

via What Does It Mean To Be American?.