Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

November 21, 2018

Vain hopes in a Green New Deal

Filed under: Ecology — louisproyect @ 7:26 pm

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with climate change activists in Nancy Pelosi’s office

Largely as a result of the near total collapse of the 100 year Soviet experiment in Russia and its replicas elsewhere, there have been attempts to reorient the left to new forms of social and economic transformation supposedly untainted by failed measures such as a planned economy based on state ownership of the commanding heights of industry. First and foremost among them is the belief that cooperatives can form the basis of a socialism from below. The idea is that local initiatives such as those in Jackson, Mississippi can become so widespread and popular so that they will finally bring about a qualitative change in class relations, finally putting the working class in power.

While not advertised as a transitional step toward socialism, the idea of a Green New Deal has captured the imaginations of many on the left. For example, Jacobin editor Branco Marcetic wrote an article titled Make Them Do It just before the recent midterm election that insisted on the need for Democrats winning, “not just to keep the natural world from being fed through the shredder, but to truly start the process of reversing the march toward catastrophic climate change through bold, decisive action.” To give you an idea of the kind of Democrats whose victory would save the world, he included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (naturally) and Tulsi Gabbard, whose climate legislation has been called “the strongest yet introduced in Congress” by Food and Water Watch. Whatever position Gabbard has staked out on reducing greenhouse gases in the USA is certainly compromised by her avid support for Bashar al-Assad and Narendra Modi, who have turned their respective countries into ethnic cleansing and ecological dead zones.

Ocasio-Cortez has made the Green New Deal front-page news after taking part in a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office on November 13th. Most people who just skimmed the headlines on this story might have assumed that this was some kind of protest meant to discredit Pelosi and the establishment Democrats. In reality, it was much more of a bonding exercise of the sort that has been taking place ever since the “progressives” poured into the new House of Representatives making nice with Pelosi and other old-guard players. The Washington Post described the event as “an encounter that touched off a display of mutual admiration between the 78-year-old matriarch and the millennial upstart.” Ocasio-Cortez, described as “less confrontational” than in the past, said: “Should Leader Pelosi become the next speaker of the House, we need to tell her that we’ve got her back in showing and pursuing the most progressive energy agenda that this country has ever seen.”

It was a virtual love-in with Pelosi smooching back on Twitter: “Deeply inspired by the young activists & advocates leading the way on confronting climate change. The climate crisis threatens the futures of communities nationwide, and I strongly support reinstating the select committee to address the crisis.”

It turns out that the origin of the concept was in op-ed columns by Mr. Globalization himself Thomas Friedman. In a January 19, 2007 NYT op-ed, the arch-imperialist wrote:

The right rallying call is for a “Green New Deal.” The New Deal was not built on a magic bullet, but on a broad range of programs and industrial projects to revitalize America. Ditto for an energy New Deal. If we are to turn the tide on climate change and end our oil addiction, we need more of everything: solar, wind, hydro, ethanol, biodiesel, clean coal and nuclear power — and conservation.

It takes a Green New Deal because to nurture all of these technologies to a point that they really scale would be a huge industrial project. If you have put a windmill in your yard or some solar panels on your roof, bless your heart. But we will only green the world when we change the very nature of the electricity grid — moving it away from dirty coal or oil to clean coal and renewables. And that is a huge industrial project — much bigger than anyone has told you. Finally, like the New Deal, if we undertake the green version, it has the potential to create a whole new clean power industry to spur our economy into the 21st century.

Is there any difference between this and what Ocasio-Cortez is calling for? You can read her proposals that supposedly are in the best interests of the Democratic Party at https://ocasio2018.com/green-new-deal. While not mentioning the word socialism once, it makes you wonder if going through such a convulsive change is necessary since “a national, industrial, economic mobilization of this scope and scale is a historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty in the United States and to make prosperity, wealth and economic security available to everyone participating in the transformation.” Eliminate poverty and make prosperity, wealth and economic security available to everyone? Sure, why not? It certainly breaks with the Neanderthal version of socialism advocated by Monthly Review and most of the people writing for CounterPunch, including me. Our dinosaur brand of socialism was rejected by Jacobin author Neal Meyer in July, 2018:

It’s one thing to know what democratic socialists fight for, and another to lay out a convincing path to realizing it. This is where democratic socialists truly differ with some of our friends on the socialist left. We reject strategies that transplant paths from Russia in 1917 or Cuba in 1959 to the United States today, as if we could win socialism by storming the White House and tossing Donald Trump out on the front lawn.

Yes, that is what Marx advocated, don’t you know? Throwing despots out on the front lawn.

Perhaps the most persuasive case for making the connections between Ocasio-Cortez, the Official Democratic Party leadership as represented by Nancy Pelosi, and the loathsome Thomas Friedman was her widely quoted statement that appeared on Huffington Post: “The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan. We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy.”

Ocasio-Cortez was an economics major at Boston University but she might have spent some spare time reading what Marxists have said about the New Deal, WWII and the Marshall Plan that interestingly enough flow together dialectically as a study in the contradictions of capitalism.

If FDR created jobs through the WPA and other New Deal make-work projects, that was hardly enough to lift the country out of the Great Depression. Twenty years ago, someone with a mindset identical to Jacobin, the DSA, and Ocasio-Cortez on a day when she tries to cover her left flank, submitted an article to Monthly Review that the saintly Harry Magdoff had trouble with, especially with this sentence: “Today’s neo-liberal state is a different kind of capitalist class than the social-democratic, Keynesian interventionist state of the previous period.”

Harry wrote the author explaining what was wrong with this analysis:

The term “Keynesian state” has become a catchword that covers a variety of concepts and is usually misleading. It may have some meaning for the Scandinavian countries and elsewhere. But the United States? Although the concept is often applied to the New Deal, the deficit spending of the New Deal had nothing to do with Keynes (nor did Hitler’s recovery via military expenditures). It’s true Washington economists were delighted with the appearance of Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money because it gave them theoretical handles for analysis and policy thinking (e.g.,the offset to savings concept and a framework for gross national product accounts). Nevertheless, despite a promise of heavy government spending, and Keynes’s theoretical support, the New Dealers were stumped by the 1937-38 recession, which interrupted what looked like a strong recovery. There was then as there is now an underlying faith that capitalism is a self-generating mechanism. If it slowed down or got into trouble, all that was needed was a jolt to get back on track. In those days, when farm life supplied useful metaphors, the needed boost was referred to as priming the pump. The onset of a marked recession after years of pump-priming startled Washington. Questions began to be raised about the possibility of stagnation in a mature capitalism, the retarding effect of monopolistic corporations, and other possible drags on business. These concerns faded as war orders flowed in from Europe, and eventually they disappeared when the United States went to war. The notion of the “Keynesian Welfare State” has tended to disguise the fact that what really turned the tide was not social welfare, Keynesian or otherwise, but war. In that sense, the whole concept of Keynesianism can be mystification. [emphasis added]

A number of liberal economists have disputed the idea that WWII ended the Depression but it was up to J.R. Vernon (no Marxist, by any stretch of the imagination) to make the same case as Harry in the December 1994 Journal of Economic History where he stressed that more than half of the recovery took place between 1941 and 1942—in other words when war spending had geared up. Government purchase of goods and services ticked up by 54.7 percent in this one-year period and continued to increase as the actual war began. Furthermore, in examining one New Deal supporter’s figures, he came to the conclusion that by the fourth quarter of 1940, only 46 percent of the recovery had been accomplished.

By the way, Paul Krugman wrote an op-ed piece in the November 10, 2008 that essentially made the same case: “What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.”

So until we have WWIII, it looks to me that the current economic slump will not be resolved within the context of capitalism, least of all by a Green New Deal that will be constrained by its reliance on the profit motive. After all, it is automobiles exported to India that generates growth, not windmills.

As for the Marshall Plan, this was just the fix that capitalism needed after WWII to lay the groundwork for a new round of accumulation. WWII ginned up capitalist production in the USA, especially in the smokestack industries, and the Marshall Plan revived Europe and Japan as markets for American exports as well as undercutting the massive support for Communism. In his 1947 speech on the plan, George Marshall made clear its purpose was “the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” Free institutions obviously meant the freedom to exploit labor.

In helping to revive capitalist production in Europe, the USA created the conditions for its own decline. The market that was created for American exports was joined at the hip by the growth of VW, Mercedes-Benz, and other corporations that would eventually reduce Detroit to a status resembling Berlin in 1945. Capitalism, after all, is a zero-sum game.

Finally, turning to the question of the feasibility of making America Green without abolishing capitalist property relations, I want to draw an analogy with the last great revolutionary struggle in the USA, namely the Civil War.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was the leader of a bourgeois revolution which pitted the northern industrialists against another section of the bourgeoisie—the cotton plantation owners of the South who required slave labor to maintain their class domination.

Now, 158 years later, the petrochemical sector constitutes the same kind of reactionary grip on American society that will smash any challenge to its exploitation of fossil fuels and wage labor. What cotton and chattel slavery were to Lincoln’s day, carbon-based commodity production and wage slavery are to our epoch. It is not just Exxon that is determined to keep producing oil. You have the fracking corporations who have helped to make the USA the primary energy producer in the world today. On top of that you have the automobile companies who have zero interest in public transportation based on alternative energy sources. Or the airline industry that will never replace jets with dirigibles. Then there are the industries that either produce plastic or use it, such as at least 80 percent of the manufacturers of the commodities for sale at Walmart and that are now helping to destroy all living creatures in the world’s oceans. Let’s not forget about the companies producing chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that are key to industrial farming. Will they be ready to be replaced by sustainable organic agriculture?

American capitalism of the modern era cannot co-exist with environmentally sustainable practices. One or the other will have to triumph. If American capitalism succeeds, civilization will be the loser. As Rosa Luxemburg once put it, the choice is between socialism and barbarism. Sitting in at Nancy Pelosi’s office will not change that equation unfortunately.

November 20, 2018

The Dawn Wall; Free Solo

Filed under: Film — louisproyect @ 10:13 pm

Quite by coincidence, I just finished watching press screenings of two newly released films about professional rock climbers scaling El Capitan, the 3000 foot granite rock formation in Yosemite Park that rises at a ninety degree angle from the ground. “The Dawn Wall”, which is available for sale as a DVD or VOD starting on December 4th at the film’s website covers the ascent of Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson up a portion of El Capitan that had never been scaled before, mostly because it lacked the nooks and crannies that made other vertical paths more navigable. By analogy, it would be like instead of playing Bobby Fischer in his prime playing him blindfolded and after having drunk a fifth of Jack Daniels. Playing now at the Angelika in New York City, “Free Solo” is focused on Alex Hannold, whose specialty as the title indicates is rock-climbing without a rope. Maybe the analogy with Hannold’s climb up El Capitan is playing Bobby Fischer blindfolded, after dropping LSD, and washing it down with a fifth of Jack Daniels.

Mostly as a result of breakthroughs in digital photography, both films are visually spectacular—so much so that I felt like Jimmy Stewart in “Vertigo” half the time. Like “Man on Wire”, the great documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNqlynceGko) about Philip Petite walking a tightrope between WTC 1 and 2, you can barely stand the tension even though it was obvious from all three films that they were celebrating great achievements.

“The Dawn Wall” is mostly Tommy Caldwell’s story. It was his idea to master the Dawn Wall and Kevin Jorgeson was recruited for the two-man team. Caldwell is to rock-climbing as Muhammad Ali is to boxing or Babe Ruth was to baseball. He broke all sorts of records early on and pushed the envelope even further in a sport that practically defined envelope-pushing. In 2000, Caldwell found himself in a challenge even bigger than climbing El Capitan.

With a group of other climbers, including his girlfriend who was also a professional, Caldwell was half-way up a rock formation in Kyrgyzstan when bullets began bouncing off the rocks all around them. They were coming from the automatic rifles of Islamic fundamentalist rebels on the ground beneath them. After they were ordered to come down, they basically became hostages of the men who were ready to kill them at a moment’s notice. In fact, a Kyrgyzstani soldier who was also a captive was shot in the head along the way. As they were being led to the rebel camp by a single guerrilla up a winding path in the mountains, Caldwell consulted with his comrades. The only way to freedom was to throw the guerrilla off a cliff, a task he was willing to assume himself. After voting in favor, Caldwell jumped him from behind and threw him to what he thought was his death. At the risk of including a spoiler, I can say that the man survived the fall and was found guilty of terrorist acts by a Kyrgyzstani court.

If this was not enough drama in the superstar’s life, he was back home not far from El Capitan working on a bandsaw in a shed next to his house when he accidentally took off the top third of the index finger on his left hand that would have ended the career of any rock-climber since it is essential to getting a grip on the side of a rock wall. Showing the same kind of grit that made him choose this career in the first place, Caldwell learned to get by with less. It reminded me of how Django Reinhart became one of the greatest jazz guitarists of all time even though one hand was crippled by a fire in his home when young.

In an interview with Tommy Caldwell in the press notes, we learn that in addition to the life-threatening conditions such men and women operate in, the “normal” working day is about as far as the pampered athlete’s life as you can imagine:

Generally, when you big-wall climb, you get up at first light and you climb all day long until it gets dark, no matter what. The Dawn Wall was completely different than that because we needed good conditions and really cold weather. If it’s hot your fingertips cut much more easily and the rubber on your shoes is softer and falls apart, so we had to wait until it was cold, which often meant night-time. Our daily logistics were pretty funny: we would wake up with the sun – it’s impossible to stay asleep up there without shade in the blazing sun. So you‘d wake up and just hang out in your portaledge for the whole day until night-time comes around. We would climb from about 5 o‘clock in the evening when the sun would leave the wall until 1 o‘clock in the morning, under headlamp a lot of the time. It was a good combination of a lot of time to enjoy the place that we were in and joke around, and when night-time would hit it would be down to business and it would be really intense for a few hours each night.

“The Dawn Wall” is co-directed by Peter Mortimer and Josh Lowell, who have been rock-climbers themselves for many years. Brett Lowell, who has a great deal of experience in high-angle camera work, is Director of Photography. The three of them have made a great film that I recommend highly.

Caldwell makes a cameo appearance in “Free Solo” as a consultant to Alex Hannold helping him pick a route up El Capitan that would fall within the realm of possibility of someone using his bare hands rather than ropes and tools as was the case with Caldwell and Jorgeson.

We learn early on that free solo climbing is qualitatively more dangerous than what Caldwell does. Over the years, there have been a number of casualties that Hannold considers fatalistically. Like a professional racing driver, it is understood that the slightest misstep of the hands on a rock wall or on a steering wheel can lead to death.

Like Caldwell, Hannold is an odd bird. Caldwell became obsessed with rock climbing at a very early age after his father decided to toughen him up. As a shy and somewhat intellectually challenged grade schooler, his body-building father decided to take him along on dangerous outside activities including rock-climbing. A friend of Caldwell observed that he might have been found guilty of endangering a child if caught in the act. Fortunately for father and son, Caldwell took to the sport like a duck takes to water.

About a decade younger than Caldwell, Hannold became a huge fan of the superstar. We learn that unlike playing professional baseball or tennis, or even auto racing, rock-climbing does not make you rich unless you are at Caldwell’s level. In a lecture, when asked about how much money such professionals make, he answered that if you are good, you might make the same money as a dentist.

Back in 1968, a group of us were sitting around SWP headquarters in New York City chewing the fat when Derrick Morrison, an African-American party leader I deeply respected, raised eyebrows when he said that sports will die away under socialism. All of us tried to argue him down but his point was clear. Professional sports, especially boxing and football, turn men into the modern equivalent of gladiators. Take away the competition and the hunger for money and they will wither away.

Will rock-climbing survive? It just may because it involves existential choices that have little to do with capitalism. Why do children climb trees even though they know that they can break an arm or a leg if they misstep? There is a need to push the envelope that is very much akin to what makes us human. I recommend both of these very fine films as a reminder of how climbing a rock wall is as much a creative act as playing an instrument or writing a poem. Both are among the best documentaries I have seen this year even though they are not the socio-political treatises I specialize in. Enough said. Go see them.

FDR made Donald Trump look “woke” by comparison

Filed under: New Deal,racism — louisproyect @ 12:39 am

Greg Robinson:

In contrast, the President lent credence to the wildest and most unsubstantiated anti-Japanese rumors. A few weeks after Executive Order 9066 was signed, for example, Roosevelt told his Cabinet that “friends of his” who had explored the lower California region of Mexico some time previously had uncovered numerous secret Japanese air bases, which could be mobilized for work in concert with Japanese aircraft carriers on bombing raids into southern California.’ Thus, if the President believed unsubstantiated reports of fifth column activity by Japanese Americans, it was not simply because he lacked hard information but also because he was prepared to believe the worst, and expected the worst, from them.

Roosevelt’s view that the character of different ethnic and racial groups was biologically inherited, and the influence of such ideas on his policy decisions, expanded during the war years, even though such Social Darwinist racial theories had begun to be discredited by the anthropological writings of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and others. In mid-1942 the President commissioned Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. Isiah Bowman, president of Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Henry Field of the Field Museum of Natural History to direct a massive secret series of anthropological studies by experts on postwar migration and resettlement of Jews and other groups, with an emphasis on “problems arising out of racial admixtures and . . . the scientific principles involved in the process of miscegenation as contrasted with the opposing policies of so-called racialism.”

The President stated that he wanted the scientists to determine the optimum racial mixture of postwar refugee populations: “The President wishes to be advised what will happen when various kinds of Europeans—Scandinavian, Germanic, French-Belgian, North Italian, etc.—are mixed with the South American base stock. The President specifically asked the [research] committee to consider such questions as the following: Is the South Italian stock—say, Sicilian—as good as the North Italian stock—say, Milanese—if given equal social and economic opportunity? Thus, in a given case, where 10,000 Italians were to be offered settlement facilities, what proportion of the 10,000 should be Northern Italians and what Southern Italians?”‘ Similarly, Roosevelt commented at different times about the possibility of imposing eugenicist policies against troublesome groups. He joked in 1945 that Puerto Rico’s high birthrate could be curbed through mass sterilization, using “the methods which Hitler used effectively.” Similarly, in August 1944 the President discussed with his Cabinet “the advisability of sterilizing about 50,000 Junkers and officers of the German Army. [FDR] said that science had done wonderful things and that sterilization could now be accomplished by the use of rays which were practically painless.” Although these remarks may also have been facetious, at least in part, Roosevelt told Treasury Secretary Morgenthau a few days earlier, “You either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in such a manner so they can’t go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.” Other administration officials, notably Navy Secretary Knox, discussed sterilizing Germans in earnest.”

Throughout the period of evacuation, Roosevelt’s ideas about people of Japanese ancestry remained dominated by his belief in innate biological character. In spring 1942 FDR maintained a correspondence with Hrdlicka on the source of the nefarious and warlike Japanese character, which Hrdlicka attributed to the less developed skulls of the Japanese.” Roosevelt’s view of the Japanese as inherently savage was likewise reflected in his private conversations. He stated in 1935 that aggression “was in the blood” of Japanese leaders. In January 1942 he told Quentin Reynolds that the Japanese were “treacherous people,” and hissed through his teeth while quoting Japanese leaders in imitation of stereotypical Japanese speech patterns.” FDR’s assistant, William Hassett, recounted in August 1942 that “the President related an old Chinese myth about the origin of the Japanese. A wayward daughter of an ancient Chinese emperor left her native land in a sampan and finally reached Japan, then inhabited by baboons. The inevitable happened and in due course the Japanese made their appearance.

Roosevelt’s words and actions both before and after Pearl Harbor, when taken in their entirety, point to his acceptance of the idea that Japanese Americans, whether citizens or longtime resident aliens, were still Japanese at the core. He regarded them as presumptively dangerous and disloyal on racial grounds. There might well be some loyal individuals: Roosevelt was willing to make exceptions for Japanese Americans of demonstrated loyalty once they were properly vouched for, and he had approved John Franklin Carter’s plan during fall 1941 to organize protection for “the loyal Japanese” in case of war. However, in the absence (and sometimes in the presence) of evidence of loyalty, the presumption remained, and in an extreme situation it overshadowed all other considerations. When Carter’s “Roosevelt” character is asked about the feelings of Japanese Americans who were deported “because they had slant eyes and yellow skins,” he remarks coolly, “Their patriotism was suspect.” Roosevelt’s decision to approve the race-based exclusion of West Coast Japanese Americans followed logically from this view that they were incapable of being true Americans. Already in his 192os articles, FDR justified discriminatory legislation by ‘Americans” toward a group he gratuitously referred to as “unassimilable aliens.” His refusal to admit discriminatory intent in the race-based exclusion of Japanese immigrants during the 192os logically precedes his willful blindness toward the role of racial bigotry in catalyzing Californians with longtime nativist grudges to press for the evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

November 19, 2018

Nancy Pelosi and the horse trading progressives

Filed under: two-party system — louisproyect @ 8:27 pm

Nancy Pelosi has been making news lately as an obstacle to the transformation of the Democratic Party into the kind of European Social Democratic Party the DSA and Sandernistas yearn for. There is a growing momentum to reject her bid to be reelected as Speaker for the House of Representatives.

Norman Solomon, the director of RootsAction.org, a Sandernista online activist group, wrote an article for Truthdig titled The ‘Pelosi Problem’ Runs Deep that does not quite call for a vote against her: “Nancy Pelosi will probably be the next House speaker, a prospect that fills most alert progressives with disquiet, if not dread. But instead of fixating on her as a villain, progressives should recognize the long-standing House Democratic leader as a symptom of a calcified party hierarchy that has worn out its grassroots welcome and is beginning to lose its grip.” Solomon instead urges his 1.5 million “members” (nothing more than clicking a link online) to continue more or less the same course DSA urges, namely activism around various issues such as a “Green New Deal” and electing people like Ocasio-Cortez.

Justice Democrats, another online activist outfit like RootsAction.org focused on electing “progressives”, has received the endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez. Two days ago she got on the phone with some 700 Justice Democrats, most of whom were active in the Sanders campaign, and told them: “Long story short, I need you to run for office. We all need to run at all levels of government, but I really hope that many of you join me here in Congress.”

Last Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez participated in a sit-in at Pelosi’s office calling for a Green New Deal that she views as requiring the same commitment as WWII and the Marshall Plan. If I were her, I’d probably not have alluded to such obvious imperialist projects but then again I live in Another Country, as James Baldwin once put it.

Does this mean that she was ready to vote against Pelosi becoming Speaker? Surprise-surprise. Four hours ago, she pledged support for her as the “Most Progressive Candidate” . She added, “All of the rebellion for the speakership are challenges to her right, and so I think it’s important to communicate that.” Among the 16 House Democrats opposing Pelosi is Max Rose, who just got elected in Staten Island, a NY borough that has much more in common with rural Iowa than the rest of the city. Filled with white cops and firemen, you’d think that Rose would be another Joe Manchin. A visit to Rose’s website, however, will reveal that he favors lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to 55, etc. The NY Times analyzed why he beat the incumbent:

His pedigree might have alienated potential constituents, but his rhetoric did not. He offered a simple, unifying message that was progressive in substance but relatively neutral in its delivery: that the system is rigged to benefit special interests, that the little guy is getting stiffed over and over, that we need better infrastructure and stronger unions.

The most outspoken opponent of Pelosi’s reelection is Marcia Fudge, an African-American Representative from Ohio, who has even been considering a run against Pelosi. Fudge has been stigmatized as homophobic for refusing to co-sponsor the Equality act but defends herself by saying that that she supports gay rights, but not the way that particular bill was handled. She said, “They can’t find one vote, not one vote, that’s anti. I just don’t want to insert it into the civil rights bill. It should be a stand-alone bill and I’d support that.”

Fudge is an ally of Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, who also signed the letter against Pelosi and who ran against her for the House Speaker post in 2016. There’s nothing much in his record to place him in the DP’s rightwing. Indeed, in an op-ed piece for the NY Times, he stated: “I think that Ocasio-Cortez was expressing the frustration that so many people feel right now that our systems aren’t working for the people who work hard and play by the rules. She talked about the cost of rent, health care, wages and education. Those are bread and butter issues that play all across the country.”

I really don’t have the time, nor the motivation, to look into the background of the other 15 Democrats but for argument’s sake will accept the possibility that they are to the right of Pelosi. What interests me more is how this fits into the broader question of how to understand the role of the Democratic Party in American society.

To start with, Ocasio-Cortez does have a point. Pelosi is, by DP standards, fairly progressive. On Facebook, Stephen Zunes, a San Francisco professor and well-known journalist of the left, wrote:

Given that under Nancy Pelosi’s leadership the Democrats won back the House while under Chuck Schumer’s leadership Democrats actually lost seats in the Senate, why is it Pelosi whose leadership is being challenged?

1) Pelosi, while not nearly as progressive as I would like, is still more liberal than Schumer. For example, she opposed the invasion of Iraq and supported the Iran nuclear agreement while Schumer sided with the Republicans on both of these important foreign policy matters. Pelosi is also more progressive on a number of important domestic issues as well.

2) Pelosi, because she is more willing to challenge Republican priorities, has been attacked a lot more by Republicans than has Schumer and some Democrats get easily spooked by right-wing criticism

3) there is still a lot of sexism among Democrats

In my view, the opposition to Pelosi is overdetermined in the Althusserian sense. Among the various factors, each of which by themselves would serve as a sufficient grounds for opposing her, are:

  1. As Zunes said above, she has been pilloried for years now by the Republicans. Leaving aside the merit of their attacks, her unpopularity rating is at 29 percent. To some extent, this is the same sort of burden Hillary Clinton carried around. The two are female (obviously), wealthy, urban, and indifferent to the plight of the working people. For example, in 2010 Pelosi opposed a moratorium on home foreclosure, something Clinton ironically did support.
  2. As opposed to the Republicans, the Sanders wing of the party views her as inimical to the changes that are necessary to make the DP an agent of “socialism”. Despite the Republican attack on her as a “radical”, Govtrack.us ranks her as the 37th most conservative Democrat in the House.
  3. Probably the most important motivation for replacing her is the perceived need voiced by younger elected officials in the DP to make room at the top for themselves and their cohorts. In a way, it is the same problem that exists in the academy where professors continue to hold down jobs well into their 70s, if not their 80s. An old friend who taught sociology at Columbia described this as “calcification” not much different than the kind that can cause a stroke.

You get a real sense of the ambitions that drive opposition to Pelosi from Beto O’Rourke, the leftwing darling who lost a narrow race to Ted Cruz in November. In today’s NY Times, he comes across as the ultimate careerist:

“You have some of the institutional members say, ‘Who are these upstarts?’ ” one of these younger Democrats, Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas, who was elected in 2012, told me in 2015. “One member of Congress compared us to spoiled kids, like teenagers who want a car on their 16th birthday. But you look at my class: Tulsi Gabbard, she’s not going to stay in the House for long — she’ll run for governor. Joe Kennedy, the same. Pat Murphy, the same. And they’re all talented, ambitious and good fund-raisers. I’ve just got to think that when you see that 20-year road to be in a position of consequence, other options look a lot more attractive.” O’Rourke, of course, left this year to pursue those other options, following his fellow erstwhile rising House stars Xavier Becerra (who was appointed attorney general of California in 2017) and Kyrsten Sinema (whom Arizona elected to the Senate this month). [emphasis added]

This reminds me quite a bit of what Les Evans told me when I joined the SWP in 1967. “I looked around when I joined and saw that I could become a leader of this party without too much trouble.” (Or something to that effect.) After cutting his ties to the party during the turn, Evans took a position at UCLA exploiting his knowledge of Chinese he developed in the party. Today, he is a Zionist and a liberal. Who knows where O’Rourke will be in 20 years? I can say that when he started out, he was not exactly the sort of politician that would endear himself to the average DSA member.

Probably the most savvy take on the progressive opposition to Pelosi comes from Politico, a website that views this sort of thing the way that touts view the odds at a horse race. Titled Progressives back Pelosi for speaker — in return for more power, it sees the compromise as old-fashion horse-trading, to continue with the equine analogy.

It wasn’t a coincidence that moments after Nancy Pelosi promised progressive House leaders more power in the next Congress, a host of liberal groups announced they were supporting her for speaker.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who is expected to co-chair the House Progressive Caucus next year, left a Thursday night meeting with Pelosi in the Capitol and proclaimed that her members would have more seats on powerful committees and more influence over legislation.

The Washington state Democrat then phoned MoveOn and Indivisible with the news, and they promptly tweeted out support for Pelosi. Then, on Friday morning, Jayapal, previously uncommitted on whom she would back for speaker, gave Pelosi a full-throated endorsement.

“No one can really doubt Pelosi’s progressive chops,” Jayapal told POLITICO in an interview. “And I do think, for the next two years, as we lead into 2020, and are coming off this big wave, we need someone who is smart and strategic and has done this.”

Smart and strategic? I suppose so. To give you an idea of what this means in practice, look how Jayapal and her cohorts finessed the abolish ICE demand as reported by In These Times:

In July, three members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus—Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.)—introduced a bill to abolish ICE. They intended it as a statement of principle and, as Vox observed, “weren’t ready to be taken seriously,” given that the majority of Americans oppose abolishing ICE and Democrats themselves are split. House Republicans threatened to bring it up for a vote, with the hope of embarrassing Democrats. The progressives then announced they would vote against their own bill. But as with Warren’s plan for reforming capitalism and the more ambitious climate change plans, such laws that push the moral envelope lay important groundwork for when progressives and Democrats actually have power. [emphasis added]

So if they don’t take themselves seriously, why should we?

Writing for The Nation, the abysmal Joan Walsh interviewed Jayapal as “a bridge between the still-feuding Clinton and Sanders wings of the Democratic Party”. It concluded with these words from Jayapal: “We can’t tear each other down. If we start to divide ourselves now, we’re really lost. It doesn’t mean we can’t disagree about things. But we agree we’re all working toward the same place. That’s when we begin to win.”

For the past year or so, we’ve been hearing about how people like Jayapal and Ocasio-Cortez will eventually take over the Democratic Party. Mark my words. Within a year or two, the Democratic Party will have taken them over. That’s what it has been doing with the left for over a century and it is an art it has perfected. When those being co-opted are getting richly rewarded for their surrender, no wonder there will barely be a whimper. It is up to us who still see a need for revolution to scream at the top of our lungs from every rooftop.

Repudiating the Stalinist Legacy: Critique of “A Marxist-Leninist Perspective” on Stalin (Part III/III)

Filed under: Uncategorized — louisproyect @ 5:36 pm

Notes toward an International Libertarian Eco-Socialism

“In a totally fictitious world, failures need not be recorded, admitted, or remembered. […] Systematic lying to the whole world can be safely carried out only under the conditions of totalitarian rule.” – Hannah Arendt1

Lenin Stalin Lenin and Stalin in 1922 (courtesy Keystone/Getty Images)

So far, in parts I and II of this response to “A Marxist-Leninist Perspective on Stalin,” we have seen how the “Proles of the Round Table” and their host Breht Ó Séaghdha have systematically lied on their infamous ‘Stalin podcast’ about the history of the Soviet Union, from covering up the Barcelona May Days (1937), the GULAG slave-labor camp system, the Hitler-Stalin Pact (1939), and the NKVD’s mass-deportation of Muslim and Buddhist minorities during World War II to declaring mass-death through Stalin’s forced collectivization of the peasantry to have been “extremely successful.” It is clear why Jeremy and Justin confidently present such a fraudulent version of…

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November 16, 2018

The Mafia and the class struggle, part two

Filed under: Counterpunch,Film,mafia — louisproyect @ 11:00 pm

(Apologies for not providing trailers for “Salvatore Giuliano” and “100 Steps” in English. There are none. However, the trailers can give you a flavor of the sort of intense drama you’ll find in the subtitled full versions, which are relatively easier to track down.)

COUNTERPUNCH, NOVEMBER 16, 2018

Eleven years ago I went to a press screening at the Film Forum for the revival of “Mafioso”, a 1962 dark comedy directed by Alberto Lattuada. It was unlike any mafia film I had ever seen, either in the Scorsese/Coppola vein or comic fare like “Analyze This” and “Married to the Mob”.

It moved seamlessly from a satire on Sicilian customs in the village Calamo, which is dominated by a Godfather figure named Don Vincenzo, to the film’s climax when the main character, who had been visiting relatives in the village, was forced to carry out a hit on an American gangster–a total stranger to him. It was made clear to him by the gangster that if he did not follow orders, he and his family would be killed instead. As has been the case with the mafia going back to its origins in the 1860s, violence, extortion and comity are often mixed together. As Don Vito Corleone put it in “The Godfather”, “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse”.

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November 15, 2018

Cornered: Trump Gets Thumped on Cuba at the UN 

Filed under: cuba,Guest Post — louisproyect @ 8:02 pm

By IKE NAHEM

On November 1, 2018, for the twenty-seventh straight year, the full United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voted by a near-unanimous 189-2 for “the necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.” The Israeli government, as usual, voted automatically with the US without saying a word on the floor. There were no abstentions, but Moldova and the Ukraine chose not to vote at all.

[Footnote 1:  The Benjamin Netanyahu Israeli government generally jerks its knee behind the US position on the Cuba anti-US blockade votes, abstaining in the last vote in 2016 when Barack Obama was in the White House. Netanyahu’s UN representatives reverted to a No vote this time under Trump. While diplomatic relations between Israel and Cuba have not been restored since being broken in the aftermath of the 1973 Middle Eastern War, which saw major combat between Israeli forces and the armies of Egypt and Syria, Israel and Cuba carry out significant two-way economic trade and commercial relations. There is important Israeli-based capital investment in several Cuban projects and industries including irrigation technology, office towers, and agricultural production. There is also fully legal travel from each country to the other. The many thousands of Israeli travelers to Cuba, and the travel agencies that work with them, have found no anti-Semitism in Cuba and no personal hostility towards Israelis even though the Cuban government is a strong supporter of Palestinian self-determination and has normal or friendly diplomatic relations with all the Arab countries as well as Iran. Cuba promotes a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine based on UN Resolution 242, with East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital.]

“Clever” Tactic Fizzles Fast

The final vote had been delayed a day as the Donald Trump White House wheeled out what they apparently thought was a very clever tactic aimed at diverting attention away from Washington’s annual political isolation and defeat. The tactic was to propose a series of no less than eight “amendments” to the anti-blockade Resolution with bogus attacks against Cuba over “human rights” and political freedoms inside Cuba.

US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, in her last hurrah before resigning the post by year’s end, presented the “amendments” as being formulated by directly using the past words from Washington’s NATO allies in the European Union and Canada. This year, as usual, the EU and Canadian representatives made perfunctory statements after the vote with implicit criticisms of Cuba along the lines of restrictions on democratic rights, freedom of speech and assembly, and so on, which are sometimes put in the context of the US blockade. (See my Submission to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Geneva, Switzerland, “The Case of Cuba: “Human Rights” as a Club” https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/10/the-case-of-cuba-human-rights-as-a-club/)

Both EU and Canadian diplomatic spokespeople quickly disabused Haley of any hope that Washington’s maneuvers would gain traction this year and bottle up the works. An Austrian diplomat speaking for the EU and the Canadian representative both made forceful statements rejecting all the “amendments.” They reiterated that the “amendments” had “no place in the current Resolution” and that the question of the “extraterritorial” US economic, commercial, and financial embargo against Cuba should not be “mixed up” with the issues raised through the “amendments.”

The General Assembly was required to vote on each Amendment separately. Haley and her boss Trump were isolated and cornered with no political way out. Each “amendment” went down in flames with 3 votes in favor (the US, Israel, and the Ukraine, which managed this time to press a button, 114 against, with 66 abstentions.

The common denominator in the near-unanimous votes, year after year in the UNGA, is the question of “extraterritoriality,” whereby the United States government gives itself the right to impose its economic, political, and travel blockading of Cuba on other countries and commercial entities who have normal or friendly relations with the Cuban workers’ state. It is this US posture, long before Trump’s regime came into power, that determined the votes of the European Union – a major capitalist trading and economic bloc with its own great political pretensions – with Cuba against US policy. Trump and Haley’s amendments ploy fizzled fast and was labeled correctly by EU and Canadian representatives as a “diversion” from the real issue, for them, of “extraterritoriality.”

The General Secretary’s Report

Most speakers from the floor referred positively to the report issued by UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres, the former Portuguese President and former President of the Socialist International, on the UNGA Resolution against the US blockade. It is a 168-page long comprehensive document. (http://undocs.org?A/73/85). Virtually every member-state plainly gives their opposition to the US blockade in their own words, as well as statements from 36 “organs and agencies of the United Nations system” from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization to the United Nations Children’s Fund to the World Trade Organization, all attacking from their own angle and perspective the US blockade and solidarizing to some degree, mostly strongly, with Cuba.

From Obama to Trump

The Trump Administration has re-tightened aspects of the US economic and travel sanctions that had been marginally loosened during the last two years of the second Barack Obama White House. Full diplomatic relations were restored between Washington and Havana in July 2015 and Trump has stopped short of moving to abrogate them. He has, however, virtually frozen US embassy functions in Havana, making it very difficult for Cuban citizens to travel to the United States. This includes family members, trade unionists, doctors and scientists, and artists and musicians. “People-to-people” licensed travel to Cuba by US citizens is still possible and Cuban-American citizens remain able to travel back and forth to the island with no special requirements.

Trump has consciously ratcheted up bellicose and provocative anti-Cuba rhetoric. This plays badly with the “public opinion” of the peoples and governments of the world, including inside the United States and among Cuban-Americans. The fusillades of hostile demagogy against the Cuban government by Trump, Nikki Haley, and National Security Advisor John Bolton only produces disdain and contempt across the political and ideological fissures in world politics. This is because the Cuban state and government practice of international solidarity – including Cuba’s vanguard role in medical internationalism and worldwide emergency disaster relief efforts – and its political principles is universally admired. It is universally recognized that Cuba’s quick action and dispatch of medical personnel was the decisive factor in containing and conquering the 2014 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa on the ground. Also very clear factually are the example of Cuba’s great human indices for the health and education of the Cuban population as a whole despite the terrible impact of decades of US economic and political aggression, and recurrent military and terrorist threats. These are all settled questions around the world. And all the huffing and puffing of Trump and his lackeys cannot change that.

For many years before Trump, the UNGA annual vote around Cuba have registered an accumulating political problem for Washington in the world, particularly across the Americas. This was the case under both Republican and Democratic White Houses and Congresses. Considerable political damage was absorbed by the US government. Well into his second term, President Barack Obama, backed by his former-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the bulk of the Democratic Party, and some Republicans, decided that a political retreat was necessary. (https://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/obama-and-cuba-end-of-an-illusion/)

Months and years of serious diplomatic talks preceded the December 2014 “breakthrough” announcements by Presidents Obama and Raul Castro. The political retreat and shift by Obama required him to order the release of the Cuban Five and for the US State Department to formally remove Cuba – an historic recipient of US-sponsored terrorism in the actual world – from its “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list. But the US economic, financial, and commercial embargo – which openly aims to use US power to universally blockade Cuba – remained in place and was barely tinkered with by Obama even in areas he could have.

[Footnote 2: In the 1990s, Cuba’s economy contracted sharply, and virtually overnight, following the evaporation of the island’s exchange and commercial ties with the former Soviet Union and allied Eastern European governments during the “Cold War.” Long-defeated counter-revolutionary Cuban-American organizations, with histories of violence and terrorism against Cuba, felt wind in their political sails. They illegally organized from US territory, stepping up subversive provocations against Cuba. These groups particularly targeted the rapidly expanding Cuban tourism industry which was generating much-needed foreign exchange. A terrorist bomb killed an Italian tourist. After repeated attempts to get the US government to act against all of this, a team of trained Cuban revolutionaries were dispatched to South Florida to infiltrate and monitor these groups clandestinely. Until they were arrested and convicted in a rigged Miami Courthouse in 1998, the Cuban Five – Fernando Gonzalez, Rene Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernandez, and Ramon Labanino – preempted a number of planned attacks. A major international campaign organized over many years demanded freedom for the Cuban Five. The last three incarcerated Cuban heroes were released in December 2014, as part of the agreement between Cuban President Raul Castro and US President Barack Obama to restore US-Cuban diplomatic relations.]

 John Bolton Whips it Up

John Bolton, who replaced the harried Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster as Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor in April 2018, has a history of ranting and railing hard against Cuba. In 2002 he ran up the propaganda flagpole the idea that Cuba was involved in production of chemical and biological weapons. Inside the George W. Bush Administration, Bolton pushed for international inspectors to monitor Cuba’s biological facilities. This clear attempt to frame Cuba was not, and could not, gain any political traction, insofar as it was: 1) made up out of whole cloth; and 2) then-President Fidel Castro responded quickly, forcefully, and with full political impact. Bolton crawled back in his hole.

[Footnote 3: At the time Bolton thundered, “The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort. Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states. We are concerned that such technology could support [biological weapons] programs in those states. We call on Cuba to cease all [biological weapons]-applicable cooperation with rogue states and to fully comply with all of its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention.”]

On November 1, 2018 in Miami, at a campaign rally in support of Florida Republican candidates in Miami, Bolton conjured up a “troika of tyranny” with Venezuela and Nicaragua as US-anointed members and Cuba the communist mastermind. The crowd of hundreds was populated with veteran Cuban counterrevolutionaries and mercenaries from Washington’s wars and terrorism against the Cuban Revolution since the 1960s.

The Last Ordeal of Nikki Haley at the UN

If I was a talented cartoonist, I would portray Nikki Haley up there at the UNGA podium, and John Bolton among the defeated, aging counterrevolutionaries, as caricatures with steam coming out of their ears. The cornered Haley could only strike the pose of relishing in her government’s isolation and pathetically trying to make a virtue out of political humiliation. Haley pouted: We. Are. Alone. We are proud of it! We are defiant!! (And we are screwed.)

The most revealing statement of all from Haley was her labeling of the proceedings as a “a total waste of time.” To begin with, the annual vote and previous votes represents a particularly powerful marker that acts as a restraint on US aggression. It is part of the world political atmosphere that creates space for the international political defiance of US policy and solidarity with Cuba. It is this solidarity that has eroded the blockade politically and economically, objectively helping revolutionary, socialist Cuba survive the economic cataclysm of the 1990s following the near-overnight collapse of its then-extensive economy ties with the former Soviet Union and the so-called “socialist camp in Eastern Europe.”

The reality is that the accumulation of political defeat for Washington year-after-year, in forum after forum, has become a material factor in world politics. Haley’s arrogance barely veils the accumulated political damage that Washington continues to endure on the “Cuba Question” in Latin American and world politics.

Haley engaged, on the stage of world politics, in what in psychology is called “minimization,” that is “a type of deception coupled with rationalization in situations where complete denial is implausible,” as defined in Wikipedia. Practitioners such as Haley are engaged in “downplaying their misdemeanors when confronted with irrefutable facts.” Haley’s bleating went so far as to portray the world body gathering as ganging up and bullying poor old Uncle Sam. Here we have Goliath turned into David. Here the schoolyard bully finds the entire school united against him and the bully cries foul. But with no allies and collaborators, the bully’s aura and the fear he counts on evaporates.

Haley and Bolton’s Bombast is Not Politically Sustainable.

All the bluster in the world cannot hide the political weakness in the Trump Administration’s policy. After the latest thumping for US policy at the UN can Trump move to implement new anti-Cuba actions beyond what he has already done? Will legal travel between the US and Cuba, including for Cuban-Americans, be closed even more, or altogether? Will diplomatic relations be unilaterally abrogated by Trump? Are subversive US “regime change” programs being reactivated and stepped up? 

US embarrassment and political isolation at the UN would likely become a political disaster and crisis for Washington at home as well as worldwide if US anti-Cuba moves sharply escalate with interventionist threats and deeds. Such moves would be far more likely to increase demands to defy Washington and back up the UNGA Resolutions with concrete deeds, despite the US veto in the UN Security Council (UNSC). Bullying in full view is rarely a winning tactic in the long run, especially when the bully is up against a politically savvy opponent full of principle and dignity such as the Cuban revolutionaries.

In any case, Trump and his team are nowhere near creating the political conditions for a US-backed military coup in Venezuela, let alone direct US military aggression.

 The interventions from the General Assembly floor began with the “geopolitical” and other groupings that claim to speak as one, from time to time, on issue by issue. On the Cuba-sponsored Resolution, top diplomats from one country lined up to denounce US policy for the bloc or group: Ethiopia for the African Group, Egypt for the Group of 77 Plus China; Venezuela for the Non-Aligned Movement; El Salvador for the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC); Singapore for the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN); the Bahamas for the Caribbean Community (CARICOM); and Bangladesh for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Solidarity with Cuba was most pronounced by the representatives of countries that have benefited directly from Cuba’s socialist internationalism. The representative from the Bahamas, who spoke for the Caribbean Community gave a heartfelt tribute to Cuban medical assistance, including the free medical training of Bahamian and Caribbean doctors. These were echoed by strong language from the representatives of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Jamaica. Jamaica’s representative called the US blockade “an affront to the world.” He was echoed by many speakers when he expressed “profound disappointment that we are still meeting on this question, that this is still happening” following the steps taken under Obama’s last years which raised hopes (and illusions) worldwide and in the United States.

Part of the campus of the Latin America School of Medicine (ELAM). Since 2005 ELAM. has graduated tens of thousands of physicians from oppressed and exploited populations in Africa, Asia and the Americas, including working-class and impoverished communities in the US, with full scholarships offered by Cuba. These new young doctors make a commitment to work in underserved areas upon graduation.

South African and Namibian representatives spoke with sharp emotion of Cuba’s decisive part in the defeat of the apartheid South African state and the “democratic dispensation” in South Africa, and the winning of the independence of Namibia.

The Bolivian representative gave a militant defense of the Cuban Revolution – “the enormous island of dignity.” He called US aggression against Cuba “one of the most important issues facing the UN system…One of the most powerful countries – the host country – refuses to comply with General Assembly resolutions year after year…Cuba is an example for all humankind [with its] selfless assistance to the rest of the world. Cuba was there in Africa! Cuba was there!” He ended his rousing remarks by quoting the legendary Ernesto Che Guevara, who said “the people of Cuba are stirred when any injustice occurs in the world.”

Cuba Speaks for Itself

Before the final vote on November 1, 2019, after Haley’s amendments were defeated, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez took the floor in a powerful presentation. (http://misiones.minrex.gob.cu/en/un)

Rodriguez spoke in the tradition of Cuban revolutionary diplomacy around the world and at the UN going back to the work of the legendary Cuban UN Ambassador Raul Roa and the speeches of Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara before the General Assembly. In those early decades of the Revolution, when the US blockade was at its tightest, and when the military threats and interventions of Washington and the militarized counterrevolutionary exiles was at its height, Cuba boldly made its case and defended itself politically from the platform of the UN.

[Footnote 4: It was a time when a Cuban diplomat was assassinated in the streets of Queens, New York. It was a time when terrorist bombs were set off at the offices of the 1199 Health Care Workers Union, which courageously opposed the US blockade of Cuba, in the heart of Manhattan, the offices of Casa de las Americas, Cuban-Americans who defended the Revolution, and elsewhere. The Cuban Mission to the United Nations made networks of friends and supporters of revolutionary and socialist Cuba in the 25-mile-radius New York City-area where Washington, as the host country of the UN, could not prevent a Cuban presence or Cuban revolutionary freedom of speech at the UN. These friendships and solidarity have become deeply rooted over many decades. This was recently exemplified when newly elected President of the Cuban Council of State, Miguel Diaz-Canel, came to the United Nations for the Fall 2018 opening of the General Assembly and spoke to some 2300 people from New York, New Jersey and many other cities, who packed into the historic Riverside Church in Manhattan, for a rousing evening of solidarity.]

Raul Roa and Fidel Castro at the United Nations General Assembly in 1960

Rodriguez spoke not only as Cuba’s top diplomat in making a comprehensive presentation of the human impact of the US blockade, including in Cuba’s exclusion from US-based life-saving or life-enhancing medical products, medications, technologies, and devices. Much of Rodriguez’s presentation took this up in moving detail. But he also spoke as a representative of the Cuban socialist revolution, which holds up the banner of international solidarity with the oppressed and exploited overwhelming majority of humanity in opposition to the world of capitalist exploitation and imperialist war.

Rodriguez began his speech with an expression of solidarity with the Jewish community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where a Jew-hater inspired by Nazi ideology and anti-immigrant hatred gunned down eleven Jewish people in their Tree of Life Synagogue on October 27.  The Temple congregation was prominent in aiding war and other refugees migrating to the US. This evidently sparked the carnage. Rodriguez also expressed solidarity with the victims of floods and landslides in Indonesia which killed dozens.

Most powerfully the Cuban Foreign Minister was not about to listen to any lectures from Donald Trump, Nikki Haley or the United States government on Human Rights:

“The US government does not have the least moral authority for criticizing Cuba or anyone else with regards to human rights.  We reject the repeated manipulation of human rights with political purposes as well as the double standards that characterize it… The US government is the author of human rights violations against its own citizens, particularly Afro-Americans and Hispanics, minorities, refugees and migrants. In the midst of the opulence of that country, 40 million of its citizens live in conditions of poverty and 52 million live in impoverished communities.  More than half a million sleep in the streets. Twelve per cent lack medical insurance and millions of low-income persons will be left without it. Quality education is not accessible to the majority. Equal opportunities are a pipedream. It is a government of millionaires imposing savage policies…There is a different racial pattern with regards to the inmate population, the length of imprisonment terms, the application of the death penalty -which is also applicable to minors and the mentally disabled; and the number of persons being shot dead by the police. The US government builds walls and separate children -even young children- from their migrant parents and put them in cages. The United States is party to only 30 per cent of human rights instruments and does not recognize the right to life, peace, development, security, food or the human rights of boys and girls.”

Rodriguez’s speech included a strong socialist critique of the “democratic” pretensions and highfalutin words of Washington’s mouthpieces vs. the realities of capitalist politics in the United States:

”The ‘special interests,’ that is, the corporate interests, have kidnapped the US political system, which is corrupt by definition…Words and political statements do matter. While demonizing and turning political opponents, institutions, social groups and nations into enemies through the use of propaganda, division, violence, hatred, [then] crimes and wars thrive and take root…Dirty politics, indecency, amorality, lies, the redesigning of electoral districts out of political convenience and the manipulation of voters are all exacerbated. Six million low-income US voters are prevented from voting.  In Florida, 21 per cent of Afro-American voters are not entitled to cast their vote. [There is] [f]ake information [and] the monopoly over communication…The US government unscrupulously interferes in the electoral processes and internal affairs of most States in this planet.” (See Isaac Saney’s Submission to the UN Human Rights Council, “Cuba, Human Rights and Self-Determination for a clear look at Cuba’s highly participatory electoral procedures. https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/06/cuba-human-rights-and-self-determination/)

A Post-World War II, Post-Cold War World is Emerging

This year the UN vote highlighting the US economic war against Cuba converges with Washington’s – which is now Trump’s Washington – tendentiousness and political isolation on other burning issues and existing and looming crises worldwide:  Trump’s unilateral pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was reached between Iran and the United States, the UK, Russia, France, China, Germany and the EU in July 2015 and confrontations he is pushing with the EU and other powers over US “extraterritorial” pressures to tow the US line; unfolding political developments on the Korean Peninsula; Saudi Arabia’s US and UK-backed murderous war on Yemen and the mounting political crisis in the Saudi bastion of reaction in the entire Middle East region; the political aftershocks of the brutal Syrian war; prospects for a two-state settlement in Israel-Palestine; and Trump’s pulling out of the (already weak) UN “Framework Convention on Climate Change” after 2020, an issue where Washington is even more isolated than on Cuba.

Trump, in his crude branded way, blurts out US imperial arrogance in a world today that is marked by an emerging post-World War II, post-Cold War era where the full-spectrum economic, financial, and political dominance of the American Colossus is receding more and more from sight in history’s rear-view mirror. Recently, South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in floated the idea of lifting some of his country’s sanctions against the North, Trump said, “They won’t do it without our approval. They do nothing without our approval.” (Both “South” and “North” Korea voted with Cuba at the UN.)

The relative decline of US capitalist power in the world of today means that the still-overwhelming military dominance Washington holds – in terms of nuclear arsenal and other unmatched firepower capability; the worldwide reach and projection of US naval and air power, with hundreds of military bases in operation worldwide – still finds great pressures and limits on the political ability to use it, particularly since the unintended consequences of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. I think this is particularly true across the Americas, even with the recent electoral advances of conservative and reactionary forces on the South American continent.

Brazil’s Election and Potential New Alignments

With the election on October 28, 2018 of Jair Bolsonaro, a rightist demagogue, Trump and Bolton quickly saw a potential weighty ally in Latin America for the perspective of putting together a political bloc against Cuba and to breach the wall of continental solidarity with it against the US blockade. Bolton welcomed Bolsonaro’s election saying, “The recent elections of like-minded leaders in key countries, including Ivan Duque in Colombia, and last weekend Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, are positive signs for the future of the region, and demonstrate a growing regional commitment to free-market principles, and open, transparent, and accountable governance… today, in this hemisphere, we are also confronted once again with the destructive forces of oppression, socialism and totalitarianism…Under this administration, we will no longer appease dictators and despots near our shores in this hemisphere. We will not reward firing squads, torturers, and murderers … The troika of tyranny in this hemisphere – Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua – has finally met its match.”

Bolton shameless demagogy, as with Haley, correlates to another classic scientific category called “psychological projection.” This is, in Wikipedia’s definition, “a theory in psychology in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. For example, a person who is habitually rude may constantly accuse other people of being rude. It incorporates blame shifting.” Insofar as the United States government has a crystal-clear history and legacy of supporting, sustaining, or directly installing virtually every blood-soaked military or rightist family or oligarchical dictatorship in Central America, Latin America, and the Caribbean in modern times, this is “projection” of the highest order. (Check out this US interventionist history in https://www.zompist.com/latam.html)

And let us underline that Bolton is praising a political and military figure, Bolsonaro, who came out of and defends wholeheartedly the right-wing military regime in Brazil from 1964-1986, with its documented history of death-squads, murder, and torture on a mass-scale. Bolsonaro has publicly said that the military dictatorship did not murder and torture those who resisted and fought it enough.

[Footnote 5: It should be noted that the democratically elected government of João Goulart, which attempted to carry out progressive measures in education, voting rights, taxes, and land reform that infuriated the Brazilian capitalists and large landowners. It also enraged bipartisan Washington, in this case under the liberal Democratic White Houses of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. This was mainly because Goulart opposed the US blockade of Cuba and refused to break diplomatic relations as demanded by Kennedy and Johnson. Between 1961 and 1964, the CIA performed so-called psyops, or “psychological operations” against Goulart, poured money into opposition groups, and was essentially the architect of the coup.]

Bolsonaro was elected with a ten-point margin, culminating, for now, a deepening political crisis in Brazil that was set in motion by the sharpest economic retraction and recession in modern Brazilian history that kicked in starting in 2014. This drawn-out political earthquake saw the 2016 impeachment and removal from office of Workers Party (PT) President Dilma Rousseff on dubious charges of manipulating budget statistics followed by the 2018 imprisonment and barring from running for President of PT leader and former president Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva on the relatively petty charges of receiving access to an apartment on the beach. Denied strongly by da Silva, the charges rose to the level of the absurd given the massive corruption that marks capitalist politicking in Brazil with its rampant wheeler-dealerism, kickbacks, and bribe-taking. This was the case before, during, and after Lula da Silva and the PT won the Presidency in January 2003, starting with the political forces that moved against Rousseff and Lula da Silva.

Among the aftershocks over time from the 2007-08 world economic crisis and depression was the collapse in raw materials, energy, and other commodity prices in world capitalist markets. This expedited the economic crisis in Brazil, the eighth largest capitalist economy in the world. Brazil has built up giant export platforms for oil and other raw materials to markets in advanced capitalist countries such as the US and the EU, as well as to China, over many decades. Huge capitalist farms in Brazil export products such as soy beans, sugar, and meat that brought in large sums in foreign exchange. It is an example of how even the most developed (semi-industrialized) capitalist economies in “Third World” nation-states like Brazil are dependent on the advanced capitalist economies of the United States, western Europe, and Japan and the international institutions they control like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) for markets and credits (that is, debt).

In that cyclical period of expansion driven by high commodity-raw material prices, the successive PT governments funded social-welfare programs that created real – but tenuous and ephemeral as it turned out – alleviation of extreme poverty, of which there is a tremendous amount in Brazil. These policies marginally advanced working-class access to education and health care and fueled Lula’s high levels of political support and popularity. This popularity was apparently the decisive factor in banning him from being on the ballot in the Presidential election, where most surveys had placed him in the lead.

Politically, the PT policies delivered relative class and political stability, without any disruption of the financial, economic, and social dominance of the Brazilian bourgeoisie and landowning ruling classes. The Workers Party in the October 2018 elections paid the political price for the sharp economic recession that unfolded from 2014-16, with a stagnant “recovery” today. Bolsonaro was able to exploit other issues such as the miserable living conditions in the favelas, controlled by criminal gangs running organized drug rackets that are tangled up with corrupt and murderous police forces. The Brazilian ruling classes and media oligopolies swung behind Bolsonaro decisively in the elections, burying previous derisions of him when he was “on the fringe” of bourgeois politics in Brazil.

It remains to be seen if Bolsonaro is prepared to – or is politically able to – unite with Trump in an anti-Cuba, anti-Venezuela crusade. In a November 7, 2018 Financial Times article titled “Brazil version of Trump to play hardball with Bolivian autocrat,” writer Gideon Long relishes a coming confrontation between Bolsanaro and Bolivian President Evo Morales (“one of the last survivors of the leftist ‘pink tide’”) over a natural gas deal that is up for renewal. Long further asserts the ascendancy of “a new regional order” in a Latin America that he says has “shifted rightward.”

Bolsonaro Forces Out Cuban Doctors

On November 14, 2018, the press office of the Cuban UN Mission in New York issued a Declaration from the Ministry of Public Health announcing the withdrawal of Cuban doctors from Brazil following Bolsonaro’s attacks and threats on them and the Program More Doctors organization the Cuban volunteers work through. The Declaration states:

“Jair Bolsonaro, president-elect of Brazil, who has made direct, contemptuous, and threatening comments against the presence of our doctors, has declared and reiterated that he will modify the terms and conditions of the Program More Doctors…he has questioned the qualification of our doctors and has conditioned their permanence in the program to a process of validation of their titles and established that contracts will only be signed on an individual basis…These unacceptable conditions make it impossible to maintain the presence of Cuban professionals in the Program…The decision to bring into question the dignity, professionalism and altruism of Cuban cooperation workers who, with the support of their families, are currently offering their services in 67 countries is unacceptable. During the last 55 years, a total of 600,000 internationalist missions have been accomplished in 164 nations, with the participation of 400,000 health workers who, in quite a few cases, have fulfilled this honorable task more than once. Their feats in the struggle against the Ebola virus in Africa, blindness in Latin America and the Caribbean and cholera in Haiti as well as the participation of 26 brigades of the International Contingent of Doctors Specialized in Disaster Situations and Great Epidemics “Henry Reeve” in Pakistan, Indonesia, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Venezuela, among other countries, are worthy of praise…Likewise, 35,613 health professionals from 138 countries have been trained in Cuba at absolutely no cost as an expression of our solidarity and internationalist vocation. The peoples from Our America and from all over the world know that they will always be able to count on the solidarity and humanistic vocation of our professionals.”

Cuban Doctors in Brazil

“Pinochetism” Without Pinochet?

Bolsonaro is gearing up to carry out a “neoliberal” austerity program of attacks on industrial workers, agricultural workers, landless peasants, and small and medium farmers. He looks to the “model” of the policies carried out with extreme violence by the US-backed military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which overthrew the elected, constitutional President Salvador Allende in a 1973 US-backed military coup.

At each step of the consolidation of his brutal dictatorship Pinochet consulted with and was advised by various US government and academic figures. These included, famously, a group of University of Chicago (UC) conservative and reactionary economists, spawns of Milton Friedman and Frederick von Hayek. These “Chicago Boys” found themselves dominating the Economics Department at UC and were available for the cause of crushing the workers and peasants of Chile into the dirt.

Survivors and would-be revivers of that “Chicago School” are very enthusiastic backers of Bolsonaro, starting with incoming Finance Minister Paulo Guedes. In an interview with the November 2, 2018 Financial Times Guedes said Bolsonaro’s election presents a “Pinochet” moment for Brazil. “The Chicago boys saved Chile, fixed Chile. Fixed the mess.”

Of course, when class and political polarization reaches the intensity of the last years of the Allende government, the room for “parliamentary democratic” resolution diminishes. Washington and the Chilean bourgeoisie and oligarchy, including in the officer corps of the Chilean armed forces, were baying for blood and carried out economic sabotage, covert subversion, and terrorism against Allende’s Popular Unity (UP) coalition, whose mass and electoral support was increasing at the time of the coup. Nevertheless, the UP government and Chilean revolutionists were unable to counterattack effectively and derail the more-and-more open coup plotting, US covert action, and right-wing mobilizations.

[Footnote 6: See Fidel Castro on Chile, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1982 with an introduction by Elizabeth Stone, a comprehensive compilation of speeches, interviews, press conferences, and interactions with Chilean workers and trade unionists, peasants, and students from November 10 to December 4, 1971 when the Cuban revolutionary and President visited the country. In speech after speech, Castro foresees – in a cumulative master class in the Marxist method – the gathering, impossible-to-be-avoided political, social, and class showdown. Castro did everything in his power to prevent a historic defeat and slaughter of working people in Chile similar to what Ernesto Che Guevara had witnessed in 1954 Guatemala. The classic documentary The Battle of Chile, shot during the Allende years and during the coup, smuggled out of Chile, and finished in Cuba, shows how workers and peasants, ready to defend their gains, arms in hand, waited, Godot-style, to be mobilized, armed, trained, and organized as the defense of democratic space and constitutional legality was being abandoned by the Chilean ruling classes and was, in fact, collapsing.]

It would have been impossible to carry out “the fix” Guedes crows about for Chile without the destruction of democratic rights and political space and murdering thousands of trade unionists and revolutionary-minded working-class and student youth, and anyone who stood in their way. Gruesome torture was institutionalized by the “fixers” on a mass, industrial scale after the initial bloodbath. This was a pre-condition for smashing trade union legality and driving the workers movement underground. Suppressing wages and worker’s rights laid the basis for renewed “confidence” and profitability for Chilean and foreign capital. Cyclical economic expansion primarily benefited a super-affluent minority.

The workers and mass struggles that pried open political space and trade-union legality in the 1980s, leading to Pinochet’s demise, used that space to fight to raise their living standards.

Can there be an updated Pinochetism against Brazil’s highly organized working-class movement, including mass trade unions and landless peasant organizations that Bolsonaro has made a career of making harsh attacks on? Bolsonaro spoke openly during and after the election of going after “delinquent Reds,” and organizations of landless peasants and homeless people, in addition to going after pension systems for organized workers, a centerpiece of Pinochet’s “reforms” in Chile.

While many on the Brazilian “left,” including PT activists, are no doubt shaken by the election of Bolsonaro, who obviously won the votes of many disillusioned and desperate working people, it should be said that the Brazilian workers and peasant class organizations and the mass, social movements, including for Afro-Brazilian rights, women’s rights, and LGBT rights, have not been defeated in struggle and combat, as was the case in Chile. Bolsonaro’s “electoral mandate” will be tested in the actual class and political struggles ahead.

Operation Condor II?

With Pinochet’s triumph in 1973 there was increased collaboration and coordination of the Latin American military regimes (joined by Argentina in 1976) under Chilean leadership (and that of the US CIA in the shadows) in the so-called “Operation Condor,” which operated death squads and organized terrorist acts on a continental scale.

The Condor Years: How Pinochet And His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents by John Dinges

Trump’s team, to the degree that they have a coherent political focus on Latin America, certainly see opportunities to advance US policies through alignments with the series of more conservative and reactionary governments that won elections in Argentina, Chile, Columbia, and Peru in recent years. Economic conditions in all these states compel them, and they all are preparing, to take on the working-class and popular movements and to use the economic crisis to reverse the advances made in the period of the “pink tide” ascent. The Mauricio Macri government in Argentina, in particular, is in a real-time crisis after a disastrous decline in the value of the Argentine peso and consequent huge rise in the country’s dollar-denominated debt, topped off with a humiliating $57 billion “bailout” loan from the hated International Monetary Fund.

It should be noted that the election of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico will replace a conservative “neoliberal” regime with an Administration and legislature that campaigned as progressive, anti-establishment, anti-corruption, and opposed to US interventionist policies in the Hemisphere.

Venezuela

Trump and the Latin American forces he looks to bloc with certainly would like to pounce on Venezuela, which they portray as descending into ungovernability and endless economic cataclysm, and therefore is viewed as politically vulnerable. They dream and devise plans to sweep in a pro-imperialist government in an orchestrated “regime change.” There has leaked for public consumption US discussions and collaboration with pro-coup forces inside Venezuela’s military and other state institutions. These discussions were over the viability of a US-backed coup or a direct US military intervention to overthrow the Nicolas Maduro government. Nikki Haley has spoken openly to street actions calling for Maduro’s overthrow.

The Trump White House has spent over $20 million in “humanitarian refugee assistance” under the pretext of dealing with the some 2-3 million Venezuelan refugees who have been generated from the still-deepening economic crisis, crash in production, and runaway inflation in the country. These refugees have poured mainly into Colombia, with many transiting from there to Ecuador and other Latin American countries.

It is certain that the class struggle across the Americas will intensify and deepen in period at hand and coming. And that the political alignments of today may not be the realignments of tomorrow. The “Cuba Question” is bound to be at the center of all of this. The 2018 UN vote against the US blockade strengthens Cuba’s position in this volatile and explosive period in world and Western Hemispheric politics, and in the international class and national liberation struggles, that are now unfolding.

November 15, 2018

New York City

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

November 14, 2018

What They Had

Filed under: aging,Film — louisproyect @ 8:30 pm

A couple of weeks ago a publicist asked me to have a look at a documentary titled “Distant Constellation” set in an Istanbul old age home. I warned her that I had misgivings about such a film but would give it a shot since I have valued her efforts on behalf of non-commercial films. Within fifteen minutes, however, I realized that the film was too close to home. The residents of the nursing home were either suffering from dementia or unable to present a cogent account of their lives there. The title of the film derives from one of the elderly patient’s speculations about life on other planets.

The Guardian review of the film begins with a Philip Roth quote: “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.” That summed it up for me.

When the publicist asked me why I bailed on the film, I explained that it was too close to home. Two years ago my father-in-law Hasan, now deceased, got on a minibus in Istanbul without any idea where he was going. His wife Meral grew increasingly frantic in his absence until she got a phone call from a good Samaritan who had figured out that Hasan was suffering from dementia and asked him politely to show him his wallet, which he did. That led to the phone call and the realization that he could only go outside their building accompanied by the live-in caregiver. Until his death a few months ago, the stress of caring for him weighed heavily on both my mother-in-law and my wife. Massacre, indeed.

Until my mother’s death a decade ago, I visited her fairly regularly at the upstate nursing home she had been living in for two years or so. Until the day she died, my mom did not suffer from any cognitive deficits. Her problem was mostly circulatory, a function of never doing the slightest bit of exercise, not even walking. A visit was always a pleasant experience but compromised by the sight of so many patients her age suffering from dementia or stroke-induced paralysis. Massacre, indeed.

Yesterday I watched a screener for “What They Had”, a film that had been sent to me under consideration for NYFCO’s annual awards meeting in December. This is a narrative film about a family dealing with an elderly woman’s descent into the final stages of Alzheimer’s with her husband fighting to keep her at home while his son and daughter try to persuade him that the best thing would be for her to be placed in a nursing home.

The woman, named Ruth, is played by Blythe Danner, who was a close friend of mine at Bard College that I lost touch with after I graduated, which was the case with just about everybody I knew at Bard except for a former girlfriend and my close friend Jeffrey who is my regular chess partner and a dispenser of valuable but free psychological advice over the years.

As was also the case with Chevy Chase, who dated Blythe briefly at Bard, I have tried to follow her career for the past 53 years. This did not necessarily mean seeing some of the forgettable films or TV movies she appeared in over the years but at least reading any article covering her latest appearance. In her earliest roles, she played the ingenue, typically as in the Broadway play “Butterflies are Free”, where she was the ditzy next door neighbor of a young and handsome blind man.

It was this play that left her with the raspy voice that probably narrowed the range of characters she would play over the years. In an interview with Susan Wloszczyna on the Roger Ebert website, she explained how it happened: “I hurt my voice while doing my first Broadway play. I had a very high voice and I lowered it for my character. I didn’t know it would get me in trouble. So I’m stuck with a raspy voice.”

I remember Blythe before the raspiness kicked in. She was a great singer who could have made it as a recording artist. In 1965, I brought Bill Evans up for a solo concert at Bard and he agreed to accompany Blythe for a couple of songs, which was very generous for a celebrity like Bill.

Her parents gave her the name that befit her personality. She certainly was a “blithe spirit”, almost like one of Shakespeare’s fairies in “Midsummer Night’s Dream”. To this day, I still have vivid memories of sitting on the lawn at Bard after smoking some pot and watching her and another theater major doing a highland fling just ten feet away. The sun shined on the two, with Blythe’s flaxen hair reflecting the sunbeams magically.

I used to sit alone in the dining commons at Bard, mainly because I felt anti-social most of the time. On numerous occasions, Blythe would join me at the table and confess her insecurities. She always felt inadequate academically and feared that people thought she was “ditzy”. I always tried to reassure her that she was very bright and level-headed but somehow I got the feeling that until she became a theater and film star, that feeling of inadequacy never disappeared.

Old age has a way of sneaking up on you. About five years ago, Blythe started doing commercials for Prolia, a medication for treating osteoporosis, an ailment she was suffering from herself.

It always felt strange to see the flaxen-haired ingenue of my youth appearing in such a commercial but that didn’t prepare me for “What They Had”, a story in which most of her dialog is off-kilter as you’d expect from her character. In one typical scene, when she hears the phone ringing, she comes back with an open stapler next to her ear, asking “Who’s there?” In another scene, she drinks the holy water in the Catholic church she, her husband and two children attend on a Sunday morning for old time’s sake. During the priest’s homily, she turns around and flips someone the finger for no apparent reason and then, a few minutes later, comes on sexually to her son. He is played convincingly—as always—by Michael Shannon. The daughter is played by Hilary Swank, who is more reluctant than Shannon’s character to place her in a home. Ruth’s husband is played by Robert Foster, an outstanding actor who captures the stubborn devotion his character has to a woman who can barely tell if he is her husband or not.

To be honest, “What They Had” is barely a step up from one of those Lifetime Cable “problem” movies that are geared to the network’s female audience. It was written and directed by the actress Elizabeth Chomko who was at least able to draw from personal experience in making the story so close to what families have to deal with when one of their number has to be institutionalized (there’s really no other word to describe it.) A slashfilm.com interviewer told her that the film came across as very personal. Chomko replied:

Yes. It is definitely personal—inspired by my grandparents, my family, and what we all went through coping with my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and loving her through all the subsequent memory loss and the ways in which it sort of—the caring for her—caregiving—the way in which it brought us to closer together and pulled us all apart. I think in the film everyone is reckoning with their memories and their own sense of time gone and past. I think when you start to witness someone losing their memories it really prompts—at least for me—a sense that memories are precious and that we take them for granted a little bit. So I think for all the characters, it prompts just a sense of coming of age. I think coming of age is something we do over the course of our life many times. I wanted to write something it felt like three generations kind of coming of age and in particular, the character that Hilary plays—a woman sort of reckoning with the decisions that she’s made and why she’s made them and does she want to continue down the path that’s led her on or not.

These strike me as very wise observations. Suffice it to say that the film embodies them even if it is not great filmmaking by any stretch of the imagination. You can expect the film to show up on VOD in a few months. As long as you don’t expect Orson Welles and as long as you can identify with the ordeal the family in the film have to deal with, it is worth watching.

Naturally, the question of dementia likely faces most of my readers, especially those closer to me in age than the average DSA’er. Over the past 10 years I find myself increasingly unable to remember the names of people, a “lapse” that is ubiquitous to senior citizens and not necessarily a sign that you will be drinking holy water at some point. As a way of doing sit-ups for my neurons, I play chess all the time on my computer and do the most difficult crossword puzzles I can find, especially the Saturday cryptic puzzles on the Wall Street Journal that would fry the brain of most people whatever their age. I also play a word game that does not require a pencil or a computer. I choose a category like jazz musician and then go through the alphabet trying to name as many as I can for each letter (Adderly, Ammons, Allen, Abrams, etc.)

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, 1 in 3 seniors dies with Alzheimer’s or another type of dementia. it kills more than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. So we are talking about a very frightening illness that will turn us into something like a zombie. The thought of losing your identity, your independence and your ability to use your mind productively is enough to keep you awake at night.

Two days ago, the NY Times reported on how “Dementia Is Getting Some Very Public Faces” prompted by the news that retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had released a letter announcing that she’d been diagnosed with dementia, probably Alzheimer’s disease. The Times tries to put the best possible spin on how public acknowledgement of the disease can remove the stigma and reduce the isolation most patients have to endure but the real issue that is never confronted in such articles is the right to die. If someone still has a grip on reality but is just at the cusp of losing it, there should be an exit door that is available. Instead of forcing family members to spend their entire savings to keep a loved on in a nursing home long after they have no idea who they are, let alone their children or loved ones, people should be allowed to spare themselves the difficult choices forced upon the family in “What They Had”.

As should be obvious, the same reactionary forces that prevent women from controlling their own bodies also prevents us from ending our lives gracefully. If we lived under socialism, the expenses would be far less since the profit motive would be eliminated from the health industry. However, there is still the existential question that each of us face and that has to be resolved through our own free will. That takes a combination of Karl Marx and his contemporary Schopenhauer to navigate successfully.

 

 

 

 

November 13, 2018

Whither Poland?

Filed under: Poland — louisproyect @ 11:20 pm

A banner reading “Independence March — Death to the enemies of the homeland” in Warsaw on Sunday. Credit: Radek Pietruszka/EPA, via Shutterstock

On November 11th, 250,000 rightists marched in Warsaw to celebrate Independence Day, which honors the creation of a Polish republic in 1918. There were effectively two contingents, one led by President Andrzej Duda, and the other trailing behind it by a couple of hundred yards organized by a coalition of neo-Nazi groups, including the National Revival Party that featured the slogan “Fascism? We are Worse” when it ran candidates in parliamentary elections in 2007. The NY Times reported on the neo-Nazi contingent:

Last year, the neo-Nazis marched by themselves,  chanting, “Pure Poland, white Poland,” and “Refugees, get out!”. Some carried banners with the slogan “White Europe of brotherly nations.”

Duda models himself on Viktor Orban, the ultraright president of Hungary who shares his xenophobic and authoritarian tendencies, so much so that he once declared his intention to turn Warsaw into Budapest. Like Donald Trump, both men have a way of winking at groups like National Revival while insisting on their status as law-abiding if nationalist right-centrist parties. Steven D’Arcy, a Canadian Philosophy professor, wrote an article titled “Two-Track Fascism: Notes on the Collusion of Far-Right Demagogues Like Trump with Street-Level Fascists” that calls attention to the informal ties between someone like Duda, who can be described as Poland’s Donald Trump, and the more openly fascist groups like National Revival or the Proud Boys. Perhaps my only cavil with D’Arcy’s article is whether the ruling class in any country is ready to throw its weight behind neo-Nazis rather than figures like Donald Trump or Andrzej Duda. For the time being, the latter-day stormtroopers are just pawns in a chess game.

Largely because of my survey of Andrzej Wajda’s films, I got up to speed on Polish history and politics in the period leading up to and including the division of the country between Hitler and Stalin. Since it is obvious that Poland has become a breeding ground for neo-Nazi groups just like Ukraine, I became convinced to do some reading about the period between Poland’s exit from the Soviet bloc until today. In many ways, the emergence of the Law and Justice Party in Poland was just as predictable as the failure of Poland to satisfy the hopes of its citizens in the post-Communist period through neoliberalism.

Indeed, the growth of neo-Nazi parties mirrored what has happened in East Germany as angry and frustrated men and women blame liberal democracy and the EU for their diminished expectations. The Law and Justice Party owes much of its 40 percent support to the rural and small town denizens of the country’s east and south. While the benefits of integration into the EU were always dubious, that was much truer for those like Adam Kalabis, a coal miner who was interviewed in Le Monde Diplomatique two years ago.

Kalabis works a seven-and-a-half-hour day, five days a week for the publicly owned KW company and receives 2,900 zloty (less than $740) a month. “My wages have increased by 150 zloty [$38] in 15 years. Even so, I’m better off than some. The widow of a friend who was killed in the Halemba methane explosion [which caused 23 deaths in November 2006] got compensation for six months and then nothing. Everyone in my family has worked in the mines, for generations. But I’m the last. My wife cleans public toilets. It’s a junk contract — 800 zloty [$200] a month, full time.” (In Poland “flexible contracts” are more commonly known as “junk contracts”.)

Like most on the left, I stopped paying attention to Poland not long after it became clear that the leadership of Solidarity had no interest in “socialism with a human face” as was the case in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Lech Walesa was more or less the same kind of opportunist trade union leader as Lula and his intellectual partners in the Solidarity leadership showed a shocking tendency to betray the egalitarian impulses that drove the Gdansk shipbuilders and miners like Kalabis to struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Adam Michnik was arguably the worst of them. In an interview with Michnik conducted by Dissent’s Jo-Ann Mort, he blithely refers to the circumstances that led to Duda’s rise as if it were something like a change of weather: “I don’t know what neoliberal policies were in the Polish context, because we had a transition from a centralized to a market economy and of course, there were winners and losers. It’s a feature of a market economy.”

In 1990, Lech Walesa became Poland’s first President. Once in office, he recruited Jeffrey Sachs to push through the same “shock therapy” he would prescribe for the Russians four years later. Walesa had about the same contempt as Sachs for the workers he once led, not that they had the muscle to resist his austerity measures. Under Walesa’s watch, Solidarity went from 10 million members to just 1½. Unemployment rose to 20 percent and mostly affected older workers, many of whom were like Adam Kalabis. Once you lose a job as a miner or a shipbuilder, there is little chance that you will ever have a good-paying job again.

According to some Jeffrey Sachs fans, especially at the NY Times and the Washington Post, Sachs’s measures reached their goal and by 1992, the economy went on the upswing thus vindicating the neoliberal turn.

Obviously disgusted with shock therapy, Poles decided to “vote the bum out” in 1995. Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former Communist, ran as a Social Democrat promising “to cope with the problems of unemployment, of the poor and with the situation of Polish women.” To show that he was for Polish national unity, he resigned from the Social Democracy after taking office and then embarked on the same exact neoliberal path as Walesa, except at a somewhat slower pace. Furthermore, Poland enjoyed significant growth under Kwasniewski , even if it was limited to the metropolitan centers and in finance, high technology and other growth sectors of this period blessed by an expansion of world capitalism at the time. Finally, he was such a relief from what had preceded him that he was rewarded with a second term in 2000.

However, those in the rural east and south continued to suffer. On top of that Poland was hit by a significant economic downturn in 2004 that laid the groundwork for the Law and Justice breakthrough. The candidates in 2005 were Donald Tusk, the candidate of the Civic Platform that was similar to Christian Democratic Parties in Western Europe and perhaps the old guard Republican Party of George Bush ’41. His opponent was Lech Kaczyński who founded the Law and Justice Party and who had been active in Solidarity. As mayor of Warsaw, he also blocked the LGBT parades in 2004 and 2005. To give you an idea of the ingrown character of Polish politics, both the Civic Platform and the Law and Justice Party emerged out of the Solidarity movement (of course, long after it had become detached from an increasingly fragmented and weak trade union movement, a casualty of shock therapy.

Among the most prominent Marxist analysts of Poland’s integration into Western economic financial and national security networks is Jane Hardy, the author of “Poland’s New Capitalism”, a 2009 Pluto book. Although I have not had a chance to examine the book, I was able to consult one of her articles behind the JSTOR paywall. (Contact me for a copy). Titled “The New Competition and the New Economy: Poland in the International Division of Labour” (Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 59, No. 5, Jul., 2007), it refers to the relatively dynamic growth of Poland in the early 2000s that helped Kwasniewski be elected to two terms. It also discusses the faith that Polish economics had in the “new economy” based on high technology that would supposedly replace the shipbuilding and mining industries that were so closely linked to the trade unions and Solidarity. Supposedly Poland would ride the wave of this dynamic and all-encompassing economic revolution that was facilitated by its close integration with the West.

In reality, Poland had more or less the same relation to Germany that Mexico has to the U.S. Cars might be made in a less developed country but except for the wages paid to assembly-line workers, the real benefits accrue to the imperialist centers:

The automotive industry has invested heavily in Poland in terms of both producers, assemblers and component manufacturers. Between January and September 2005 Poland produced 76% more cars than in the same period in the previous year. The fact that 84% of passenger cars and 90% of vans were exported suggest that Poland is becoming a major export platform for car production. However, the extent to which technology has been transferred is highly variable depending on both the place of the firm in the value chain of the parent company and the particular corporate strategy of the firm. While Volkswagen now undertakes a large part of its engine production for its global industrial system in Poland, in 2002 all parts were imported from Germany and there was no local sourcing. Volvo undertakes core research and engine production in the home country, but their decision to source supplies locally transferred quality down the value chain. The point here is that spillovers cannot be automatically assumed and claims of technology transfer have to be treated cautiously. The impacts of foreign investment in the automotive sector are highly mixed, and range from examples of high level ‘knowledge-based’ production to the manufacture of simple components for global networks.

To put it bluntly, Poland was not much more than a maquila zone to Germany and other more advanced Western nations.

In comparing Trump’s Republican Party to Law and Justice, one thing is important to note. Unlike Trump’s rhetorical lip-service to workers suffering from a stagnant economy, Lech Kaczyński carried out policies that had teeth in them. Like the Workers Party in Brazil or Ortega’s quasi-Peronist remake of the FSLN, he and Duda have both followed redistributionist polices that made a real difference in working-class households. Furthermore, they have cracked down on private firms even converting some of them into state property.

For many Poles who have nostalgia for the stability and social protections of the Communist era, the Law and Justice Party is a welcome relief from the insecurities and hardships of the previous governments. To get an idea of the significant withdrawal from neoliberalism but maintaining its commitment to capitalist development, Krzysztof Jasieckil’s “The Nature of Capitalism in Poland” that appeared in the Corvinus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy Vol.8 (2017) offers some useful data.

Jasieckil refers to a 2016 book by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris titled “Trump, Brexit, and Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash” that provocatively refers to Law and Justice, as well as Orban’s party, as “left-wing populist” on the basis of its rejection of the “neoliberal model of economic policy and its ideas about small state and free market, deregulation, low taxation and individualism.”

Jasieckil describes a policy of renationalization (what the government calls “repolonization”) that recalls the sort of policies associated with the “import substitution” strategies of progressive economists in Latin America like Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado, perhaps ones that can be called fall under the rubric of “Poland First”. Jasieckil writes:

For example, having taken over the private Alior Bank and PKO SA from the Italian Credit Union Group, domestic capital (controlled mainly by the government) now owns more than 52% of the banking sector. Over 60% of electricity in Poland is currently produced by the state energy sector (Blaszczyk 2016). The media context of “repolonization” has clear political connotations, as some PiS politicians argue that foreign owners, predominantly German ones, “carry deliberately unfavorable coverage of the current government in an effort to undermine it.” The president of Employers of Poland notes that the taking over of media by the state can foster to reduce freedom of expression in public debate.

In addition, Law and Justice has provided generous social benefits. After taking power, it provided a stipend of 500 zlotys, or around $148, a month for every child after the first child and for every family in the country. It also reversed a deeply unpopular decision to raise the retirement age to 67, reducing it to 60 for women and 65 for men. Finally, it has provided new housing subsidies and worked to reopen shut state factories.

In many ways, Poland has the same array of social and political forces as in the USA except that the right-wing government has a much more secure base for the simple reason that the working-class and farmers have made real gains under the nativist, homophobic and anti-democratic regime. Whether this state of affairs will last much longer is open to question. The ability to provide benefits to workers and farmers is constrained by the country’s ability to sustain economic growth. After all, Venezuela’s government became deeply unpopular after oil prices dropped. Since Poland is not a commodity-exporting nation, it remains to be seen how it will fare in the next occurrence of a global slowdown that is inevitable.

As for the left in Poland, it is not much more powerful than here in the USA. Podemos seems to have inspired a similar effort there called Razem (Together). Whether it has much staying power is open to question. Until workers begin to challenge Law and Justice, it is doubtful that a group made up primarily of college youth, professionals, etc. will have much traction (the same thing can be said about the DSA, of course.) I’d refer you to an interview with two Razem members Marcelina Zawisza and Maciej Konieczny that appeared in European Alternatives (https://euroalter.com/2016/new-left-poland-podemos). It reflects the challenge facing people on the left in confronting a state that blends deeply reactionary and racist policies with those that a Bernie Sanders or a Jeremy Corbyn would gladly endorse:

Q: Talking about social policies, the current government – led by Kaczyński’s party Law and Justice – is quite an interesting case. It is for sure an authoritarian, xenophobic, illiberal government, on a collision course with the EU. But it is, nevertheless, passing some measures that could be seen as traditionally leftist: reduction of the retirement age, maternity allowance, social housing. What do you think about it? Is this a new kind of nationalist socialism?

A: We must say we are surprised as well. We thought the social agenda mentioned during the political campaign would be forgotten once elected, as it had happened when the same party had the chance to govern previously. But now they are really doing it! They are way more nationalistic and authoritarian than the first time, but they are also way more social. For the first time we have assisted to a growth, rather than to a reduction in welfare provisions. The new maternity law will drastically reduce child poverty from 28% to 10%, an issue closely linked to large families here in Poland. And for the first time, the most of public spending will go to the poorest: 6 billion szloty to the poorest 10% of the country, only 300million to the richest 10%.

Q: So, for the first time there are redistributive policies.

A: And we will not be the ones criticising them. A social housing program was launched, not giving resources to banks or big building companies, but giving resources for controlled rents. And there is more: the taxation system is undergoing a modification that will make it more progressive, flat tax is being abandoned together with regressive taxes for the richest. But at the same time, the government is extremely authoritarian. A militia with semi-automatic weapons is about to be created, mostly made by components of far-right groups. A bill against terrorism is about to pass, creating a permanent state of emergency. Not to mention the gag that has been put on the press or all attacks to the independence of the Constitutional Court. It is quite frightening.

Additional resources:

The Promise of Prosperity | The Nation:
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-promise-of-prosperity-poland-law-and-justice/

The Puzzle of Poland | Dissent Magazine: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/puzzle-poland-right-wing-populism-media-pis-michnik

Jan-Werner Müller | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/02/11/kaczynski-eu-problem-with-poland/

The Polish Right Can Be Defeated | Jacobin Magazine:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/law-and-justice-pis-poland-civic-platform-razem-jaroslaw-kaczynski

Poland’s Iron Consensus | Jacobin Magazine: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/poland-october-elections-kaczynski-law-justice-party/

The Law and Justice Party and Poland’s turn to the right | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal:
http://links.org.au/poland-law-justice-party-kaczy%C5%84ski-duda

Populism or Capitalist De-modernization at the Semi-periphery: | nonsite.org: https://nonsite.org/article/populism-or-capitalist-de-modernization-at-the-semi-periphery

Poland’s rightwards shift, by Dariusz Zalega (Le Monde diplomatique – English edition, September 2006):
https://mondediplo.com/2006/09/15poland

Poland’s populist revenge, by Cédric Gouverneur (Le Monde diplomatique – English edition, March 2016):
https://mondediplo.com/2016/03/02poland

 

November 10, 2018

Craig Carton and the American malaise

Filed under: sports — louisproyect @ 8:26 pm

Craig Carton

One of the reasons for a happy marriage now in its sixteenth year is that my wife and I have similar pop culture tastes as well as leftwing politics even when they clash. For example, we have both enjoyed listening to shock jocks in the morning for about as long as we have been married.

First it was Howard Stern, an obvious sexist pig but a very funny one. When Stern moved to satellite radio, we switched to Don Imus, his arch-enemy. When Imus was fired by WFAN in 2007 for a racial slur, we decided to give his replacements a try. Despite being featured on a sports talk radio show, Imus was mostly about interviewing politicians and reporters—and very good at it. Taking over for Imus, ex-NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason and long-time radio talk show host Craig Carton also interviewed politicians but their primary focus was on sports. What made the show worth listening to was Carton’s shock jock antics that were obviously stolen from Howard Stern. Riffs on bowel movements, raising kids, impromptu restaurant reviews, etc. were interspersed with commentary on sports with the typical call-ins from “Vinnie from the Bronx” about a trade the Yankees should make.

Three days ago a jury found Carton guilty of conning wealthy investors into buying bulk tickets to concerts but only used the seven million dollars to pay off his gambling debts plus other personal expenses such as landscaping his 9,345 square foot mansion. He faces up to 45 years in prison but will likely get much less, my guess five years or so.

Carton was making huge bets at casinos. Witnesses told the jury that he borrowed money from loan sharks to fund these outings. One of them was Desmond Finger, the general manager of the Upper East Side strip club Sapphire 39, who testified that he made high-interest loans of up to $500,000 for each of his casino fixes. Carton probably worried much more about the money he owed to someone like Finger than the hedge funds he conned. It is not hard to imagine him getting roughed up or worse from one of Finger’s friends if he didn’t pay up. At least in prison, he won’t have to worry about his legs being broken–at least if he keeps his eyes opened and his big mouth shut..

Carton, like Stern and Imus, made lots of enemies because of his big mouth. Bob Raissman, a sports columnist for the NY Daily News, a one-time far-right tabloid now oriented to the Democratic Party, raked him over the coals. Referring to his attorney’s decision not to put him in the witness box, Raismann wrote:

How ironic that in the fight of his life, Craig Carton could not use his most lethal weapon — his mouth.

The same mouth that took him to radio’s mountain top. Morning-drive in New York City, making over $1 million per year working on WFAN with a celebrity/ex-jock/wheeler-dealer Norman Julius Esiason.

The same mouth that spewed invective, verbal sewage, loved by FAN’s target audience, the miscreants who showed up to watch him walk across the Brooklyn Bridge in a Speedo.

Many people, including me and my wife, could not figure out why someone doing so well would shoot himself in the foot. It was the same question I had about Bernie Madoff. After having made it big as a shock jock or a securities broker, why would anybody risk throwing it all away by committing a crime?

Madoff remains a mystery but it is clear that Carton had a very serious gambling addiction. Like drugs, tobacco or alcohol, it can destroy one’s life. I say this from personal experience having a very close friend who lost well over a hundred thousand dollars over the years betting on horse races. When we were in our late teens, he used to bet hundreds of dollars on the trotters at Monticello Raceway. Some nights he’d win, other nights he lost. I used to accompany him to the races but usually bought a book with me to read during the races. For me, gambling is a complete waste of time and money. One of the reasons I got out of the stock market was that it was too much like gambling.

If you listened to the Boomer and Carton show, you’d be struck by how much gambling permeated the conversation between the two. It was always about whether a team would cover the odds. All of these shows on WFAN have a big focus on the “over-under” on professional sports events especially on Friday, just before the NFL games on Sunday.

On May 14th this year, New Jersey, Carton’s home state, made sports betting legal. This measure had been pushed for years by the former governor Chris Christie, who was one of Carton’s best friends. Christie, a frequent guest, on the Boomer and Carton show, used to love talking odds with the hosts. FanDuel, a sports fantasy website, has also been given the green light for bookmaking.

On top of sports betting, lotteries have become ubiquitous in the USA. Even though a lottery ticket might cost only a couple of dollars, poor people can end up throwing money down the drain in the hope that they can become millionaires. As a vicious cycle, the lotteries only exist because state treasuries have been drained by tax cuts, thus making poor people even more needy.

The Wikipedia entry on “problem gambling” cites medical authorities who see it in the same terms as substance abuse even though it is described as an impulse control disorder rather than an addiction. The gambler can’t help betting when feeling distressed (e.g., helpless, guilty, anxious, depressed). Since this is the normal state of mind for most Americans, it is not surprising that billions of dollars are wasted on betting just as they are on opioids. Of course, gambling will only cost you your freedom while opioids will cost you your life.

Like Boomer Esiason, Craig Carton was a Trump supporter and a racist. The show constantly praised the cops and always took their side whenever someone like Trayvon Martin was killed. It is a crowning irony that a “law and order” man like Carton will end up in a New Jersey prison serving time with Black prisoners who might have heard him on one of his racist rants.

I continue to listen to Boomer Esiason in the morning, now that he has a new co-host, a guy named Gregg Gianotti who is the comic next to Esiason’s straight man just as was Carton. Thankfully, Gianotti does not seem that interested in politics. Mostly, he enjoys talking about sports. Naturally, my wife has bailed on the show since her interest in sports is zero.

I only wish that WBAI was not as bad as it is. For most of the 1980s and until 2000, I used to listen to it religiously and donate hundreds of dollars a year. A typical morning show would consist of great music and interviews by someone like Will Wilkens, a fellow member of CISPES and a good friend. This was the kind of programming Samori Marksman, a Caribbean Marxist, used to promote.

After Marksman died suddenly of a heart attack in 1999, there was a coup led by Utrice Leid that antagonized most listeners, including me. A listener revolt eventually led to her clique being ousted and the station converted into one based on “community control”. That conversion led to a new type of programming marked by conspiracy theories, medical quackery and tedious leftist sermonizing that was unbearable.

Anticipating this article a couple of days ago, I turned WBAI on just for a sample of what it was up to now. Confirming my worst suspicions, the host was on the phone with someone who was making the case for alchemy as a solution to diabetes, heart disease and other ailments.

The opening sentence of Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” reads as follows:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Of course, Dickens wrote the novel to demonize the French Revolution but some of this rings true as applied to the current period. I would only qualify it by saying that a new “Tale of Two Cities” would be much darker and would begin by simply stating: “It was the worst of times”.

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