The latest issue of Hard Crackers is out, a magazine that is a continuation of “Race Traitor” and the embodiment of editor Noel Ignatiev’s sensibility. Around 25 years ago I bought a copy of his “How the Irish Became White” that now sits on my bookshelf next to Ted Allen’s “The Invention of the White Race” and David Roediger’s “The Wages of Whiteness”. When, to my surprise, I discovered that such books had been written, they became part of my permanent library since they resonated with the observation made by Leon Trotsky in 1933 during his exile in Prinkipo: “But today the white workers in relation to the Negroes are the oppressors, scoundrels, who persecute the black and the yellow, hold them in contempt and lynch them.”
This always struck me as more in tune with American realities than some of the workerist “Black and White, unite and fight” rhetoric that could be heard from those in the CPUSA’s orbit or from the ultra-sectarian Trotskyist groups that split from the SWP over its “adaptation” to Black nationalism. When I was a senior at Bard, I heard Malcolm X speak at a Militant Labor Forum and sympathized with his every word, even if at the time I was a conventional liberal on every other question.
“Hard Crackers” is not your typical leftist magazine (thank god). Instead of writing abstract treatises on racism, it is grounded in the everyday stories of ordinary Americans. On the back cover of each issue and in the “about” page on the magazine’s website, you can read about its orientation:
Hard Crackers focuses on people like the ones Mitchell profiled. It does not seek to compete with publications that analyze world developments, nor with groups formed on the basis of things their members oppose and advocate; still less does it consider itself a substitute for political activity. It is guided by one principle: that in the ordinary people of this country (and the world) there resides the capacity to escape from the mess we are in, and a commitment to documenting and examining their strivings to do so.
The Mitchell referred to above was Joseph Mitchell who profiled different people in The New Yorker during the 40s and 50s. Although I’ve never read Mitchell, he seems to have something in common with Harvey Pekar, who when he wasn’t writing about his own mundane life in “American Splendor”, gravitated to the same sort of eccentrics Mitchell wrote about. Before I lost contact with Harvey before he became sick with the lymphoma that would kill him, he told me that his dream was to carry on in the tradition of Studs Terkel who was to Chicago that Mitchell was to New York and Harvey was to Cleveland. You might say that “Hard Crackers” covers the same beat but what makes it must-reading in this period is that it puts a spotlight on the red state boondocks whose long-suffering working class will be the first to struggle uncompromisingly just as they did when they voted for Eugene V. Debs a century or so ago.
In the latest issue, there are three stories that stand out as examples of such reporting. Richard Dixon reports from rural Oklahoma in “Winding Stair Mountain” during bow hunting season. Dixon writes, “You want to find individuals with eccentric bents or outlaws, come down here, this area spawning both Belle Starr and Pretty Boy Floyd”.
Next there is “Heartland Reunion” by Lowell May who describes himself as an Iowa farmhand and 60s radical. May grew up in Hampton, Iowa that is now 30 percent Latino and the epicenter of the debate over “illegal aliens”. Divisions over the new residents were the topic of a NY Times article dated August 12, 2017 but needless to say a home-town boy who is a member of the IWW brings something to the table that the NY Times can’t. He discovers that many of the immigrants are working in CAFO’s, the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations owned by agribusinesses that have devastated the Carolinas. For the immigrants, the foul-smelling and slave-like conditions are tolerable for the simple reason that the jobs pay enough to keep a family together.
Economic necessity also motivated many Crow Indians to vote for Trump in 2016 as reported by Cloee Cooper in “A Coal Miner’s Musings from Crow Nation”. Since the Crow reservation is a major source of coal and gas, the only way the Crows can enjoy a bare-minimum existence is by keeping the coal mines going. So they voted for Trump but were first to arrive at Standing Rock to provide material and spiritual aid to the native peoples protesting there.
Such contradictions exist throughout the USA today and Hard Crackers is indispensable for unraveling them. It cost $6 per issue and is worth far more. I try to keep with left print publications and will only say that as a subscriber to Jacobin and Hard Crackers from the very first issue, it is only the latter that I read from cover to cover each time it arrives. I strongly recommend taking out a sub to Hard Crackers since it will give you insights into the American malaise, for which only the revolutionary struggles of the marginal peoples chronicled in its pages is capable of ending.
In his bid to take over the historic British left-wing magazine, The Tribune, Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara is being accused of reneging on wage deal by employees of the paper, who kept the publication alive during struggling times. Tribune was once the home of such greats as George Orwell and has since become the leading publication associated with the influential Momentum faction within the Labor Party.
The purchase of the paper seemed like an ideal takeover for Sunkara linking his viral socialist publication in America with the struggling legacy British paper.
This past weekend, Sunkara had a high-profile launch event attended by influential members of the Labor Party, including British member of Parliament Jon Trickett and Len McCluskey, General Secretary of 1.2 million member Unite the Union, the largest union in the UK. The Liverpool featured the French socialist leader Juan-Luc Melenchon as well as Julia Salazar, who despite falsely portraying herself as a working-class immigrant from Colombia, was successful in her bid to be the Democratic nominee for an influential State Senate seat based in Brooklyn.
The event received much fanfare, however underneath the takeover of the storied British publication by the American publisher, media workers activists say that he’s done it by exploiting those, who produce content for socialist publications.
Workers say that Sunkara promised that if workers took a settlement of only 70% of the back wages that they were owed that he would bring them back as staffers after taking over the publication. However, Sunkara in a statement to Payday confirmed that he would not bring the staffers back.
The workers in a series of open letters have accused Sunkara of lying to them and simply taking over the publication to expand Jacobin’s content reach into European markets under the Tribune’s prestigious name.
“In the capitalist world someone who buys an ailing company and dumps its committed workers is known as an asset-stripper or robber baron, but at least they don’t claim to be socialists,” said former Tribune employee Ian Hernon.
The dispute between the British magazine’s staff and its new publisher Bhaskar Sunkara, the 29-year-old son of a well-to-do family from the elite New York City suburbs of Westchester County, raises vital questions about how leftists publications treat the workers they employ.
The brash 29-year-old Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder and publisher of the Brooklyn based socialist magazine Jacobin, has proven to be one of the most controversial figures in the left press: known for increasing the reach of socialist writing while engaging in labor practices far less than socialist.
At a time when many speculated that print was dead, Sunkara built a socialist publication founded in 2011 that proudly boasts of publishing over a thousand articles a year, a print subscription of 30,000 and over one million page views a month online. In addition, the publication boasts of a specialized Jacobin book published by Verso press that has produced a dozen books, a separate academic journal “Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy of Strategy” launched last year, and dozens of Jacobin reading groups throughout the country that help the publication raise money.
However, Sunkara, has been accused of building his empire by underpaying his writers with many making on average $50-$100 a story.
For years, Sunkara and his allies have claimed that the socialist publication lacked the resources to pay its writers.
However, the purchase of the 80-year-old legacy British publication from the British football club Blackpool raised questions about what exactly Sunkara did with the money he saved by underpaying his writers at the Brooklyn-based Jacobin Magazine.
In the last year, the Tribune struggled with financial issues and discontinued print editions in January. In the interim period, a skeleton crew of writers and editors struggled to keep the publication afloat as a strictly online publication as they shopped for buyers of the storied publication. As part of his proposed takeover of the publication, Sunkara promised to pay the writers only 70% of the back wages they were owed and give them their jobs when they were returned.
Now, writers say that Sunkara has reneged on his promise to pay their workers their wages owed for the years they spent keeping the publication alive.
“All the pious, pseudo-academic waffle in the world doesn’t really amount to a hill of beans. Our actions are what count. How we treat others is what matters”wrote George Orsby in a letter protesting the move.
Reporters told Sunkara that they were outraged that he would renege on their deal and dismiss the workers from the publication. In an email responding to the disgruntled former staff, Sunkara and newly-appointed Tribune editor Ronan Burtenshaw, disputed the contributions of the editor who kept the publication alive during its financial stresses.
“While we appreciate all of those who have contributed to Tribune over many years, the claim in this instance that their stewardship of the project in the last three years ‘made it possible’ for Jacobin to take over the magazine is entirely false,” Burtenshaw told Payday Report in a statement.
However, the employees recently disposed of by Sunkara after they agreed to take a cut in back wages owed to them, have less than kind words to say about the jet-set Socialist publisher.
“You said you tried not to become the sort of editor/proprietor you despised. My advice to you is: try harder” wrote former Tribune employee Ian Hernon.
Within ten minutes or so of the press screening for “July 22”, a narrative film about Anders Behring Breivik’s mass murder of young social democrats on the island of Utoya seven years ago on that very date, the narrative style was so unique and so effective that I was sure that this powerful film was made by the same man who made “United 93”. Like “United 93”, which told the story of the 9/11 hijacking on the one plane that failed to hit its target, “July 22” is an understated, documentary-like account of an incident that lends itself to melodrama. Paul Greengrass, the British director and screenwriter for both films, does not make movies that deliver cheap thrills. Instead, you will get a more intense experience for the simple reason that it is more lifelike.
As the film begins, we see the crosscutting of scenes with Breivik (Anders Danielsen Lie) assembling the weapons he will need to launch a one-man war on “Cultural Marxism” and his target, the young people singing leftist folk songs around a campfire, in a meeting to discuss politics or playing soccer. You get the same sense of impending doom that was dramatized in “United 93”, a film that I panned upon first seeing but have grown to appreciate after further viewings on cable. Greengrass made little attempt in “United 93” to explain what led the hijackers to such extreme measures and follows suit in “July 22”. We never see any flashback explaining what turned Breivik into a killer but should know enough by now about the white supremacists on the rise everywhere to know it does not matter that much. Unfortunately it is ubiquitous. Clearly, he understood only a documentary could have unraveled the evolution of Salafist or neo-Nazi terrorism and that a narrative film was only charged with the task of creating powerful human drama. On that basis, he has succeeded admirably.
Most of you are probably aware of Breivik’s attack at Utoya but that was actually the second act on that bloody day. He began by detonating a bomb inside a van in front of the building where Norway’s Prime Minister had an office. It killed 8 people in a prelude to the massacre that would take place in an hour or so. He used the same ingredients that Timothy McVeigh used in his terror attack on an office building in Oklahoma City and for about the same reason: to launch a one-man war against the left. Dressed in a police uniform, Breivik showed up at a pier on the mainland near Utoya and put in a call to be ferried to the island to provide security for the young people. Since Norway was on high alert after the bombing, the ferry boat pilot assumed he was legitimate. But when the camp director and security met him when he got off the boat, they became suspicious after he could not answer questions about his credentials. This led him to kill his first two victims.
Next Breivik roams the island shooting the unarmed and frantic teens, taking the lives eventually of 69 campers. We share the horror of a group of about six young people who are clinging to a rocky ledge halfway between a cliff at the edge of the water and the shore below. Before long, Breivik spots them and opens fire as they run panic-stricken along the beach. Two are brothers: Viljar and Torje Hanssen, whose mother is the Labour Party mayor of a town in the far north. Viljar, the older brother, is felled by five bullets from Breivik’s automatic rifle. As his brother kneels over him in both grief and fright, Viljar tells him to run for his life.
Viljar is the hero of the film, even though he is not an action hero in a drama that could not possibly supply one. We see him going through an agonizing recovery that included repeated surgeries that stopped short of extracting the bullet fragments close to his brainstem. The head surgeon worried that in trying to remove them, his patient’s brain would be even more damaged than it already was, if not prove fatal. In fact, Viljar was given the bad news that a shifting fragment could end his life at any moment.
Viljar is played by Jonas Strand Gravli and will certainly get my nomination for best actor of 2018, especially in portraying the real life efforts of the young man to become mobile enough to testify against Breivik in the courtroom. Like everybody else in the cast, he is Norwegian even though he, like the rest, speak English. This was an odd choice by Greengrass and perhaps calculated to avoid the subtitles that are the bane of so many people.
Most of the film crosscuts once again between Breivik’s interaction with his lawyer, a Norwegian social democrat, and Viljar’s heroic efforts to make a life for himself under Job-like conditions. We know about the 69 fatalities of July 22, 2011 but a lot less about the 209 who were injured. As so often is the case, especially with automatic rifles, the wounds can inflict great pain through the remainder of the victim’s life.
In the press notes, Greenglass explains why he made this film:
I originally wanted to make a film about the migrant crisis. And I spent a fair amount of time researching what was happening in places like Lampedusa in southern Italy, and the realities of people trafficking.
But the more I worked on it, the more obvious it became that fear of migration, together with continuing economic stagnation, was driving a profound change in our politics.
The door was being opened to political extremism, across Europe. Across the West. With dangerous consequences I fear…
That’s what lead me to make this film – because Anders Breivik and Norway shows us the consequences of this process in dramatic terms, and in ways relevant to all of us, wherever we live.
Breivik saw himself – in his extreme narcissism – as raising the battle standard of extreme right-wing rebellion across the West.
But the way the people of Norway responded after the attacks, which is what our film is really about – the way politicians, lawyers and most importantly those families caught up in the violence responded – can inspire all of us with their dignity and their tenacious commitment to democracy.
“July 22” opens on Netflix and in theatres on October 10. Look for its arrival then.
Suffice it to say that the same socio-economic conditions that drove Breivik to carry out mass murder in 2011 exist today in the USA. Furthermore, they were also present when the American counterpart of Anders Behring Breivik carried out a similar attack on April 19, 1995. I speak here, of course, about Timothy McVeigh whose bombing of a government building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people and injured another 680.
To understand what drove him to such a murderous assault, I strongly recommend the documentary “Oklahoma City” that I watched a couple of months ago as a screener for the 2017 NYFCO awards meeting. Since it is now streaming on Netflix and on Youtube, don’t hesitate to view a film that will help you understand the neo-Nazi movements of twenty to thirty years ago that were much more lethal in their intentions than any that have shown up in Charlottesville or elsewhere more recently.
Unlike the followers of Richard Spencer et al, these groups were organized specifically as militias and were ready to open fire on anybody who stood in their way. However, McVeigh’s terrorist attack was beyond the scope of what was on their political agenda at the time just as was the case in Norway seven years ago. Indeed, an ultraright leader called to testify in Breivik’s defense described him as a mad man. Very few people considered McVeigh as a hero, except himself. As homicidal narcissists, McVeigh and Breivik stand alone.
Most of the groups that were in McVeigh’s orbit have faded from the scene but at the time they were involved in major confrontations with the authorities. We see footage of shootouts between the cops and various ultrarightists that predictably led to the latter being mowed down and consequently attaining martyr status for their supporters. McVeigh identified closely with the militia leaders under siege and saw every gun duel as proof that the government was the enemy of the people. In 1992, McVeigh identified closely with Aryan Nation member Randy Weaver who was in a stand-off with ATF officers surrounding his heavily fortified home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Weaver, who had failed to show up in court for a firearms violation, saw himself as above the law basically. The view that the state was illegitimate was widespread among ranchers and survivalists in the Northwest, with the latest occurrence taking place over Ammon Bundy’s armed occupation of federal land two years ago.
But it was Waco that pushed McVeigh over the edge. In 1993, the religious cult Branch Davidians were suspected of stockpiling weapons and once again the ATF arrived to arrest its leader David Koresh, who became a martyr to the ultraright just like Randy Weaver.
After witnessing the siege turn deadly, mostly against the cult members, McVeigh decided to begin preparing for his revenge against an out-of-control federal government. Obviously, we are in a much different situation today. Instead of Janet Reno and Bill Clinton serving as Satanic figures to American white supremacists, we have a White House that is hailed as its champion. The victims are not people seen as advancing the interests of a socialist or liberal state such as young social democratic campers or government workers in Oklahoma City. Instead, they are the immigrants that both the Norwegian and American governments are using as a scapegoat. Today, Norway is ruled by the Conservative Party whose leader Erna Solberg warns that there is “no free entry into Europe”. For those hoping that the USA can become more like a Scandinavian country, this is not good news nor is it good news coming out of Sweden that the Sweden Democrats (a misnomered neo-Nazi party) is on the upswing. Ultimately, the best way to confront the ultraright is by drawing clear class lines and fighting for social justice by any means necessary. If that sounds like extremism, that’s to be expected in a period where moderation only leads to further erosions of constitutional and human rights.
Fred Feldman was a major figure in the SWP until he was expelled for warning the party leadership that unless they got involved with Mumia’s defense, some comrades would succumb to doing free lance activism on his behalf. This innocent comment got him thrown out after more than 30 years of membership.
Yesterday an article appeared on CounterPunch that basically made the Chinese government’s case against the Uyghurs. Co-written by Thomas Hon Wing Polin and Gerry Brown, it is an Islamophobic screed that identifies Uyghur activism as a CIA plot to encroach upon Chinese national sovereignty and defends repressive measures as necessary to protect Xinjiang’s silent majority from fiendish Salafists. It is the sort of propaganda you hear about the Syrian rebels and the Rohingya people. To give you an idea of where China stands on such questions, it has suggested the possibility of sending troops to take part in the final assault on Idlib and has China has sided with Myanmar’s refusal to allow a United Nations fact-finding mission to investigate human rights violations.
Thomas Hon Wing Polin is a journalist and an academic. He was the founding managing editor of Asiaweek, a subsidiary of Time Magazine that ceased publication in 2001. On Facebook, he describes himself as a Global Investor. As for Brown, nothing turned up on him after a brief search except for his own articles on CounterPunch. Between the two, either separately or together, there are over 20. To summarize their approach, it is sufficient to say that they don’t make any pretensions that China is building socialism and only hail it as a kinder and gentler capitalist behemoth as Polin put it in this article on the government’s partnership with Goldman-Sachs: “So the door of Chinese finance has opened another significant notch to global capital. In the past week, Beijing has concurrently introduced other sweeping measures, largely to enhance its ability to oversee domestic financial markets and minimize abuses.”
So obviously anything that gets in the way of China’s way of becoming the biggest player in global capital has to be shoved aside. Since the man making such an argument describes himself as a global investor, clearly he knows what he is talking about.
The article was obviously a reaction to wide-spread media reports that about a million Uyghurs are confined in concentration camps where Islam and other particularly national identity markers such as their own Turkic language are being beaten out of them. Hilton and Brown dismiss these claims:
The recent spate of Western media reports alleging brutal repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang marks a new phase of a propaganda drive to demonize China and destabilize its periphery. Highlighted by screaming headlines in Western corporate media are accounts of a million Uighur Muslims (or 2 in 5 Uighur male adults!) being interned in concentration camps and subject to torture, such as waterboarding. The suggestion or assertion is that Xinjiang has become an open-air prison (which actually reminds one of the real one operated by Washington’s ally Israel in Palestine).
Against the Chinese government’s denials, you have a number of Uyghurs who have been interned in such places describing what happened to them there, including the people interviewed here.
The problem, however, is that these camps or prisons or training centers—whatever they are—are kept in secret locations. Additionally, reporters trying to get the story in Xinjiang are either harassed or expelled from the country.
The authors describe a Great Game in which the USA is using Uyghur militants to create a beachhead in Xinjiang, even to the point of having the CIA train them in guerrilla tactics. If you try to find some documentation on this, a search for “CIA Uyghur training” in Nexis turns up nothing. However, since you can’t trust the mainstream media, you might as well go to a reliable source that is like the source of Polin and Brown’s claim: Infowars.
In 2009, Uyghur riots broke out in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s largest city, over the killing of two of their countrymen working in southern China. This led to martial law and the imposition of repressive measures that have continued unabated. Polin and Brown justify keeping a lid on the unruly natives:
Even peninsular Malaya’s British colonial rulers imposed emergency rule from 1945 to 1957 when confronted with a communist insurgency. And post-9/11, US authorities enacted a draconian security law (the Patriot Act) and implemented other measures that stripped away civil liberties in the name of anti-terrorism.
So if the British and the Americans do it, so can the Chinese? That’s quite a mouthful.
If you read between the lines in this paragraph, it is not too difficult to see how the Chinese authorities have been up to forced assimilation. Obviously, a system that keeps its how Han dissidents under tight control will be even more brutal with a subjugated people who are ethnically distinct. I have added italics that will help you get a handle on the population control measures:
Almost a decade after the Urumqi riots, China has turned its anti-terrorism focus to undoing the toxic brainwashing of ordinary Uighurs by extremists. Neighborhood religious institutes have been set up to educate citizens on the perils of religious extremism (these community centres where classes are held to detoxify radical Wahhabism were labelled “re-education camps” or concentration camps by the western press, and those attending the classes claimed to be “incarcerated”!) Programs to eradicate poverty are implemented to train and prepare Uighurs for jobs in towns and cities. Some 600,000 Uighurs were lifted out of poverty in 2016, and another 312,000 in 2017. More than 400,000 have been relocated from remote villages to places where they are gainfully employed.
Basically, the italicized words describe a process in which religiously observant rural people are being pressured into forsaking Islam and becoming proletarianized. Everybody knows that factory workers in China are much easier to keep leashed up. I have to laugh at the sentence that begins the next paragraph following the one above: “The Chinese government, through various programs, has been winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Uighurs.”
Winning the hearts and minds? Where have I heard that before? Oh, I remember. That is what Lyndon Johnston said the USA had to do in Vietnam in order to win the war: “get the gospel of pacification carved into the hearts and minds of all concerned.”
I have a special interest in Uyghur oppression for a couple of reasons. To start with, they are a Turkic people whose language my wife and in-laws can practically understand. Secondly, they are just another example of how people living under Stalinist rule can suffer the same kind of injustices as they suffered under pre-Communist colonial rule.
During the rise of the Mongols, the Turks, who were also a nomadic people historically, settled into the region that became known as Turkestan. As such, it was a key element in the Silk Road that facilitated trade between Europe and Asia until the end of the 15th century.
This area languished for centuries until competition between China, Russia, and European powers during the 19th century prompted an invasion by the Manchus into East Turkestan with the encouragement of British banks who were participating in the “Great Game”. “Xinjiang” or “Sinkiang”, which means “New Dominion” or “New Territory”, was annexed by the Manchu empire on November 18, 1884.
Meanwhile, Czarist Russia was seizing control over West Turkestan in its own expansionist bid. In their victory over the old regime, the Bolsheviks had to contend with the problem of oppressed nationalities, in particular the Muslim peoples to the south in what had been known as West Turkestan. In a fascinating debate between Lenin and Bukharin in 1919, there are some issues that are relevant to today’s struggles. Bukharin questions the need for self-determination of such peoples, using arguments similar to that of Rosa Luxemburg. Responding to Bukharin’s assertion that “I want to recognise only the right of the working classes to self-determination,” Lenin refers to the Bashkirs, a Turkic people who had petitioned the Soviet government for the right to form an autonomous Soviet Republic.
What, then, can we do in relation to such peoples as the Kirghiz, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Turkmen, who to this day are under the influence of their mullahs? Here, in Russia, the population, having had a long experience of the priests, helped us to overthrow them. But you know how badly the decree on civil marriage is still being put into effect. Can we approach these peoples and tell them that we shall overthrow their exploiters? We cannot do this, because they are entirely subordinated to their mullahs. In such cases we have to wait until the given nation develops, until the differentiation of the proletariat from the bourgeois elements, which is inevitable, has taken place.
Our programme must not speak of the self-determination of the working people, because that would be wrong. It must speak of what actually exists. Since nations are at different stages on the road from medievalism to bourgeois democracy and from bourgeois democracy to proletarian democracy, this thesis of our programme is absolutely correct. With us there have been very many zigzags on this road. Every nation must obtain the right to self-determination, and that will make the self-determination of the working people easier.
As most of you probably know, this policy was reversed within two or three years as Stalin consolidated power and reintroduced the Great Russian chauvinism that made people such as the Bashkirs miserable. Just before his death, he wrote an article that has been described as his testament. It included the following warning:
It is quite natural that in such circumstances the “freedom to secede from the union” by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.
Probably no Turkic people had it worse under Stalinist rule than the Crimean Tatars who were exiled from their homeland as a measure intended supposedly to help the USSR defend itself from the Nazis. Since there was a Tatar Legion in the Nazi army and since some of the Tatar clerics were sympathetic to the Nazis, Stalin decided upon collective punishment. The Soviet government described the forced migration as “humane” but the Wiki on the Tatars claims that 46.3% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition. In other words, they suffered the same fate as Cherokees or Armenians.
In 1967, when I joined the Trotskyist movement, the party press, especially Intercontinental Press that was edited by Joe Hansen (one of Trotsky’s body guards), was taking up the cause of Soviet dissidents, including General Pyotr Grigorenko who was such a forceful defender of Crimean Tatar demands for justice that he had been put in a mental hospital in 1964. You can judge his mental status based on a speech he gave to the Tatars in 1968:
After having lost forty-six percent of their numbers in the forced exile disaster, they began to gather strength and to enter into battle for their own national and human rights. This struggle led to certain successes: the status of exiled deportees was lifted and a political rehabilitation of the people was achieved. True, this rehabilitation was carried out quietly … which in significant degree rendered it valueless. The majority of the Soviet people, who previously had been widely informed that the Crimean Tatars had sold the Crimea, never did learn that this ’sale’ was transparent fabrication. But worst of all, the decree on political rehabilitation… legalized the liquidation of the Crimean Tatar nationality. Now, it appears, there are no Crimean Tatars, there are just Tatars who formerly lived in Crimea.
Some would say—and they did—that the SWP was in a united front with the imperialists since the United States Information Agency had decided to publish a collection of documents written by the dissidents, including Grigorenko. Interestingly enough, they appeared in the journal Problems of Communism that was edited by Abraham Brumberg. Brumberg, who had impeccable anti-Communist credentials, developed some sympathies for the Sandinista revolution and defended Nicaragua against Reagan’s counter-revolutionary intervention throughout the 1980s. For those who think in terms of black-and-white, Brumberg would be too hard to figure out.
As might be expected, the people of East Turkestan were treated just as badly as their brethren under Soviet rule since Mao, for the most part, agreed with Stalin on how to build socialism. Although China had fewer nationalities to forcefully assimilate, it did so with little regard to Lenin’s warnings about avoiding national chauvinism. In China, this was essentially expressed as Han nationalism that was intended to serve as a battering ram against non-Han peoples, first and foremost the Tibetans and the Uyghurs.
China decided to swamp the Xinjiang province, the homeland of the Uyghurs, with the dominant Han nationality not long after Mao took power. Between 1949 and the mid-80s, more than 5 million Chinese were sent to Xinjiang from eastern China in order to help assimilate the Uyghurs, as well as other Turkic peoples including the Kazakhs, Kirghiz and Mongols.
In utter disregard of Lenin’s comment about having patience with people who still follow the lead of their mullahs, China organized a campaign against Islam under the rubric of combating a desire to restore “the old rule by capitalists, feudal lords, slave-owners” in the words of Liu Ke-ping, the Chairman of the Committee of Nationalities of the National People’s Congress. This included a ban on teaching Arabic in Xinjiang schools, a measure that would undercut the study of the Koran but likely to have little effect on the development of communism.
On January 14, 1985 the Washington Post reported:
The assimilation effort reached its peak during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 when the Arabic alphabet was outlawed in favor of the Latin alphabet, mosques were closed and turned into workshops, Moslem classics were burned, restrictions were imposed on the number of sheep minority peasants could raise, and Han officials delivered speeches in Chinese without providing interpreters.
So much for the Cultural Revolution as returning China to the communist road, unless of course your idea of communism is inspired by Stalin rather than Lenin.
The Post article continues:
In 1981, ethnic tension flared in Kashgar when a young Uighur peasant who was digging a ditch got into a fight with a Han Chinese. Neither was able to speak the other’s language. In a fistfight the Han was beaten by the stronger and bigger Uighur. Angered, the Han went into his store, took out his hunting gun and shot the Uighur.
As is so often the case today, oppression of Muslim peoples seems to go hand in hand with the need to control petroleum resources. On August 28, 2008 the Financial Times reported:
The increasing importance of the Muslim-dominated Xinjiang autonomous region as a source of the energy and minerals needed to fuel China’s booming eastern cities is raising the stakes for Beijing in its battle against separatists agitating for an independent state.
“The Chinese didn’t want to let Xinjiang be independent before, but after they built all the oilfields, it became absolutely impossible,” said one Muslim resident in Korla, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution by government security agents.
The desert around the city is punctuated every kilometre or two by oil and gas derricks, each of them topped with the red Chinese national flag, an assertion of sovereignty over every inch of the energy-rich ground.
In 2005, Xinjiang’s local government was allotted only Rmb240m ($35m, €24m, £19m) out of the Rmb14.8bn in tax revenue from the petrochemical industries that are based in the region.
In Korla, the oil industry is under the control of a subsidiary of PetroChina, the state-owned energy giant, which answers directly to its head office in Beijing.
“We don’t have the power to tell them to do anything – they only listen to their bosses in Beijing,” said one local government official who asked not to be named.
Many of Korla’s original Uighur residents feel they have missed out altogether on the few benefits that have trickled down to the region from the rapid extraction of its energy resources.
It is no wonder that China put so much pressure on the U.S. government not to release the Uyghur men who were kept in Guantanamo after being falsely accused of being Al Qaeda operatives. In the war on terror, which is really after all a war to control oil resources, the U.S. and China clearly see eye to eye.
As part of its continuing PR effort on behalf of the DSA, the New York Times has a multiple choice/interactive feature titled “What is Democratic Socialism”. With this article reaching nearly 2.2 million readers, you can just see the membership figures for the DSA topping 100,000 before long. That’s the same number the CP reached in the 30s and was, like with the DSA, partly a result of its cachet among liberal elites.
Let’s take the multiple choice test together:
(1) Let’s start with the big question. In an ideal world, who would control the means of production?
a. Private Owners
b. The Government
c. Workers
For some reason, each of the questions includes one that is a giveaway. As if anybody who favors “private owners” is trying to make up their mind whether they are socialists or not.
It’s sort of a trick question since socialism, whether you identify it with Cuba or Sweden, does involve government control. If you chose b, however, you are not a democratic socialist since only “Leninist” governments are control freaks. If you chose c, you are in good company since that means workers will be in charge and who can oppose that? The DSA does allow that key industries like steel and energy would be “administered” by the government but everything else would be those apple-cheeked cooperatives that Richard Wolff is so gung-ho on. This begs the question whether steel and energy would be state-owned or not. After all, administration could also mean riding herd in the way that Cuba deals with foreign-owned hotels. As for cooperatives, what prevents them from becoming like Mondragon? A company making pressure cookers, as Mondragon does through its Fabor subsidiary, has to compete with other pressure cooker manufacturers in a market economy. Since there are always winners and losers, it always helps a firm be a winner if it pays attention to the bottom line. In a Fortune Magazine article titled “Defiant Spanish workers stage lock-in, resist layoffs”, we can see that cooperatives obey the same economic dictates as conventional firms do:
Almost 28,000 companies have declared bankruptcy during Spain’s five-year economic crisis, hitting a peak of 2,854 during the first three months of 2013. But Fagor Electrodomésticos is not just any business. Launched in 1956 by a Catholic priest named José María Arizmendiarrieta and five students from a technical college he started in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, Fagor is the foundational unit of Mondragón, the world’s biggest conglomerate of worker-owned cooperatives.
With 80,000 employees and operations in 18 countries outside Spain, Mondragón became a symbol of what a worker-owned cooperative model could achieve. In the late 1980s, Pedro Nueno, a professor of entrepreneurship at the IESE Business School, consulted with Fagor on ways to innovate for the “kitchen of the future.” He says he was struck by the leaders’ long-term vision and by how committed they were considering their low salaries (top executives at Mondragón make less than 10 times the lowest paid worker’s salary).
“A person with the same responsibilities would be getting five times that in another company,” he says.
Similarly, when Richard Wolff, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, visited Fagor two years ago, he was impressed by the seriousness with which management handled buying assembly line equipment, which came from outside the Mondragón family of industrial companies. “They gave me a lecture on policy: You buy within Mondragón if quality or price was competitive. If not, you go outside,” he says.
But such commitment and seriousness has done little to help Fagor recently. Revenues fell from €1.75 billion in 2007 (about $2.58 billion at the time) to €1.28 billion in 2011, and the company has lost money for the last five years, racking up debts of €859 million. During that time, Mondragón lent it some €300 million.
(2) In a capitalist system, do you believe government regulations are helpful or harmful?
a. Helpful
b. Harmful
A giveaway.
(3) Do you believe that everyone is entitled to a certain minimum standard of living?
a. Yes
b. No
Another giveaway.
(4) Do you believe labor unions are a positive force?
a. Yes
b. No
Another giveaway. As you can see, questions 2 through 4 are set up to make people like Cynthia Nixon decide to declare that she is a socialist. In fact, probably 90 percent of the audience watching Rachel Maddow would choose the “correct” answers. The truth is that anybody who voted for Obama would be a “democratic socialist” on the basis of how they reply to those questions. Maybe the whole thing is calculated to make “democratic socialism” such an acceptable choice in order for the Democratic Party to regain the hegemonic status it possessed from FDR to LBJ. American capitalism has a rocky road in front of it and it requires adroit statesmanship to avoid a collision. Clearly, the new generation of people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and even Andrew Gillum, who eschews the label of socialist, are waiting in the wings to displace Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
(5) Which of these best matches your views on health care?
a. The government should have minimal or no involvement in providing or funding health care.
b. The government should subsidize the cost of private insurance for people who can’t afford it, through a system more or less like the Affordable Care Act.
c. We should have a single-payer system, like “Medicare for all.”
d. The whole health care industry should be socialized. Health care would be funded through a single-payer government system, and doctors would be public employees, like in Britain.
If you chose c, you are partly a democratic socialist but if you want to be included in the inner circle that will save humanity from Armageddon, the right choice would have been d since that’s the most socialistic. Unfortunately, the health care system in Britain is being undermined by a thousand cuts, just like the shitty Obamacare is in the USA. Unless the political power of the bourgeoisie is ended, health care is subject to its whims. That political power rests on its economic power, of course, something that will resist relinquishing in the same way that the southern bourgeoisie resisted Lincoln’s abolitionist agenda: violence. This leads me to the final question that really needs to be sorted out since it is basically a trick question.
(6) Ideally, how should major social or political changes be achieved?
a. Through the traditional democratic process: elections, legislation and popular lobbying.
b. Through grass-roots organizing.
c. By any means necessary, including violence and/or revolution.
If you chose a, you’d be partially democratic socialist even though there’s not much to differentiate you from an ordinary Democratic Party ward-heeler. If you chose grass-roots organizing, what are you waiting for? Go to the DSA website, enter your name, address, etc. and click “submit”. That’s all there is to it. After all, being in favor of grass-roots organizing doesn’t actually obligate you to do anything. That would be so Leninist, after all.
Choosing c condemns you as a “communist”:
You disagree with democratic socialists. This is a common point of misunderstanding for people who conflate democratic socialism with communism. Democratic socialists don’t support a revolution to overthrow capitalism; they believe change should happen, well, democratically. “Any possible transition to socialism would necessitate mass mobilization and the democratic legitimacy garnered by having demonstrated majority support,” Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Schulman wrote.
Democratic socialists support and participate in the electoral process, but they believe that ideally, workers should achieve changes for themselves — for instance, through unions and tenant organizations — rather than relying on people in traditional positions of authority.
“We would prefer, for example, for us to win universal rent control in New York through organizing millions of New Yorkers,” Ms. Svart said. “We believe that it’s through the process of pushing for these changes that people empower themselves.”
The Schwartz and Schulman referred to above are Joseph Schwartz and Jason Schulman who co-wrote “Toward Freedom: Democratic Socialist Theory and Practice” on December 21, 2012. They see themselves as more advanced than Karl Marx since, unlike them, “Marx did not make clear his commitment to political democracy”. Poor Karl Marx did not understand the need for “political pluralism” that obviously means having free elections that include parties arguing for the overthrow of socialism. Leaving aside whether Chile or Nicaragua were socialist, Salvador Allende and Daniel Ortega tried that. Look how far it got them. Nasty old Cuba did not permit that. Yeah, it meant that you were living under authoritarian rule but given Cuba’s proximity to the USA, it is doubtful that anything else would have allowed the socialized medicine DSA supports to be possible.
This business about “violence” is the stock-in-trade of sleazy liberal journalists going back for a century. I used to hear it all the time when Malcolm X was alive. This is how he used to handle it:
Malcolm X was sympathetic to the Socialist Workers Party and for good reasons. He and the party understood this question of violence to the marrow of their bones. When James P. Cannon and other party leaders were on trial for violating the Smith Act in 1941, he spoke about the SWP’s position on violence. I recommend reading his entire “Socialism on Trial” but will conclude with the section dealing with question of violence:
Q: Now, what is the opinion of Marxists with reference to the change in the social order, as far as its being accompanied or not accompanied by violence?
A: It is the opinion of all Marxists that it will be accompanied by violence.
Q: Why?
A: That is based, like all Marxist doctrine, on a study of history, the historical experiences of mankind in the numerous changes of society from one form to another, the revolutions which accompanied it, and the resistance which the outlived classes invariably put up against the new order. Their attempt to defend themselves against the new order, or to suppress by violence the movement for the new order, has resulted in every important social transformation up to now being accompanied by violence.
Q: Who, in the opinion of Marxists, initiated that violence?
A: Always the ruling class; always the outlived class that doesn’t want to leave the stage when the time has come. They want to hang on to their privileges, to reinforce them by violent measures, against the rising majority and they run up against the mass violence of the new class, which history has ordained shall come to power.
Q: What is the opinion of Marxists, as far as winning a majority of the people to socialist ideas?
A: Yes, that certainly is the aim of the party. That is the aim of the Marxist movement, has been from its inception.
Marx said the social revolution of the proletariat—I think I can quote his exact words from memory—“is a movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority”[2] He said this in distinguishing it from previous revolutions which had been made in the interest of minorities, as was the case in France in 1789.
Q: What would you say is the opinion of Marxists as far as the desirability of a peaceful transition is concerned?
A: The position of the Marxists is that the most economical and preferable, the most desirable method of social transformation, by all means, is to have it done peacefully.
Q: And in the opinion of the Marxists, is that absolutely excluded?
A: Well, I wouldn’t say absolutely excluded. We say that the lessons of history don’t show any important examples in favor of the idea so that you can count upon it.
Q: Can you give us examples in American history of a minority refusing to submit to a majority?
A: I can give you a very important one. The conception of the Marxists is that even if the transfer of political power from the capitalists to the proletariat is accomplished peacefully—then the minority, the exploiting capitalist class, will revolt against the new regime, no matter how legally it is established.
I can give you an example in American history. The American Civil War resulted from the fact that the Southern slaveholders couldn’t reconcile themselves to the legal parliamentary victory of Northern capitalism, the election of President Lincoln.
Q: Can you give us an example outside of America where a reactionary minority revolted against a majority in office?
A: Yes, in Spain—the coalition of workers’ and liberal parties in Spain got an absolute majority in the elections and established the People’s Front government. This government was no sooner installed than it was confronted with an armed rebellion, led by the reactionary capitalists of Spain.
Q: Then the theory of Marxists and the theory of the Socialist Workers Party, as far as violence is concerned, is a prediction based upon a study of history, is that right?
A: Well, that is part of it. It is a prediction that the outlived class, which is put in a minority by the revolutionary growth in the country, will try by violent means to hold on to its privileges against the will of the majority. That is what we predict.
Of course, we don’t limit ourselves simply to that prediction. We go further, and advise the workers to bear this in mind and prepare themselves not to permit the reactionary outlived minority to frustrate the will of the majority.
Q: What role does the rise and existence of fascism play with reference to the possibility of violence?
A: That is really the nub of the whole question, because the reactionary violence of the capitalist class, expressed through fascism, is invoked against the workers. Long before the revolutionary movement of the workers gains the majority, fascist gangs are organised and subsidised by millions in funds from the biggest industrialists and financiers, as the example of Germany showed—and these fascist gangs undertake to break up the labor movement by force. They raid the halls, assassinate the leaders, break up the meetings, burn the printing plants, and destroy the possibility of functioning long before the labor movement has taken the road of revolution.
I say that is the nub of the whole question of violence. If the workers don’t recognise that, and do not begin to defend themselves against the fascists, they will never be given the possibility of voting on the question of revolution. They will face the fate of the German and Italian proletariat and they will be in the chains of fascist slavery before they have a chance of any kind of a fair vote on whether they want socialism or not.
It is a life and death question for the workers that they organise themselves to prevent fascism, the fascist gangs, from breaking up the workers’ organisations, and not to wait until it is too late. That is in the program of our party.
Michael Moore fans will be happy to hear that “Fahrenheit 11/9”, which opens today at theaters everywhere, is his best film in years, even in spots achieving the brilliance of “Roger and Me”. As pure entertainment, it is on a par with the best of Saturday Night Live, the Stephen Colbert show or any other pop culture attempts to rally people against Donald Trump even if it is unlikely that any such comedy so wedded to the Democratic Party will have any effect.
The film is a blunderbuss attack on the Trump administration and the Democratic Party establishment that includes Bill and Hillary Clinton. Even Barack Obama gets the Michael Moore treatment in an obvious display of buyer’s remorse. If you’ve seen the 2009 “Capitalism, a Love Story”, you might recall that the film portrays him as a knight in shining armor. Two days after Obama was elected for his first term Moore said, “The Republicans aren’t kidding when they say he’s the ‘most liberal’ member of the Senate. … He is our best possible chance to step back from the edge of the cliff.” In keeping with the general drift of the left, Moore now regards him as a total sell-out. In a lengthy segment on the Flint water crisis, we see Obama as a total jack-ass making a “joke” at a mass meeting of parents worried sick about their children’s health by asking for a glass of water. He repeats this stunt at another meeting with doctors and community leaders.
For Moore, the original sin was Bill Clinton becoming the equivalent of a moderate Republican in his first term. Since organized labor was not as powerful as it was in the past, especially in places like Moore’s hometown Flint, Clinton decided to cater to big business that would provide the necessary funding for him to be elected and then re-elected. This meant putting an end to Glass-Steagall, Aid to Families with Dependent Children and other policies falling under the rubric of neo-liberalism.
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Cynthia Nixon did a phenomenal job.
JAKE TAPPER: She lost your district by 30 points.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: Right, right, but we focused on our local candidates, and we focused on the legislatures.
But I think that what she did was that she centered a lot of phenomenal issues. She centered racial justice. She centered criminal justice reform. She centered the legalization of marijuana, single-payer health care. And a lot of down-ballot candidates benefited from that.
And what I also look forward to moving forward is us rallying behind all Democratic nominees, including the governor, to make sure that he wins in November.
The Guardian, September 14, 2018
Andrew Cuomo says progressive wave is ‘not even a ripple’ after primary win
Governor discussed his vision of the Democrat party at a press conference on Friday, calling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win ‘a fluke’
‘I’m not a newcomer. But I am a progressive. And I deliver progressive results,’ Andrew Cuomo told reporters. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, has said the so-called insurgent progressive wave in his party is “not even a ripple”, arguing that it’s pragmatists like him who can get things done who are the true progressives.
Cuomo, a two-term Democratic incumbent, on Thursday defeated challenger Cynthia Nixon by a 30-point margin – turning back the latest attempt by a newcomer from the left to unseat a Democrat favored by the establishment.
The governor, viewed as a potential 2020 presidential contender, used a victory lap press conference on Friday to make a forceful case for his own vision of the party.
“I’m not a socialist. I’m not 25 years old … I’m not a newcomer,” he told reporters at his Manhattan office. “But I am a progressive. And I deliver progressive results.”
Cuomo was fighting back against another narrative that has taken hold in the party: that the upset win by New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic socialist who knocked off the powerful representative Joe Crowley, set off a domino effect in primaries around the country, including upset wins by progressives running for governor in Georgia and Florida and for a congressional seat in Massachusetts.
“Where was that effect yesterday? Where was it?” Cuomo asked.
Instead, he said the win by Ocasio-Cortez in Queens in June was merely “a fluke”, explained by the timing of the vote which resulted in low turnout.
The statewide primary this week, by contrast, saw a spike in turnout, and Cuomo bragged that he got more primary votes than any governor in history.
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“That is a wave,” he said. “On the numbers – not on some Twittersphere dialogue where I tweet you, you tweet me, and between the two of us we think we have a wave. We’re not even a ripple.”
Cuomo won despite a series of missteps in the closing days of the campaign, when he drew criticism for a mailer sent out linking Nixon to antisemitism, which his camp and the state Democratic party were forced to disavow.
And after Cuomo hosted an event alongside Hillary Clinton to mark the opening of a new bridge named for his father, the span was forced to stay closed due to structural dangers.
Cuomo ruled out a presidential run during the primary race, promising to serve a full term as governor unless “God strikes me dead”, but there are already rumblings he could change his mind.
To have a chance, he would have to make the case that a politician like himself – the son of a former governor, known more as an operator and dealmaker than an ideological purist – is the best standard bearer against Donald Trump, an argument that was apparent in his remarks on Friday.
He pointed to his track record of raising the minimum wage, creating a paid family leave program, and legalizing gay marriage.
“A progressive Democrat, a Democrat in New York state – these are not ivory tower academics. These are not pontificators. These are not people who live in the abstract or the theoretical. New York Democrats, these are hard-working men and women,” he said.
“They opened the envelope and they looked at their check, and they saw that their check went up. That’s how they know a $15 minimum wage meant something to them.”
At first blush, the two documentaries “Rodents of Unusual Size” and “Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco” seem to have very little in common. The first is about the introduction of nutrias from Argentina into Louisiana in the 1930s, an invasive species that has wreaked havoc on the wetlands on the southern coast. The second is about a charismatic fashion illustrator who was part of the wild party scenes at places like Max’s Kansas City in New York and Club Sept in Paris in the 1970s. But what they have in common is the fashion industry and social history with fascinating glimpses into Cajun country and the cultural underground that swirled around figures such as Andy Warhol, Karl Lagerfeld and models like Grace Jones. It turns out that the nutria were introduced in order to launch a native fur industry in Depression-wracked America while Antonio Lopez was a product of the subculture of a fashion industry deeply influenced by the 1960s radicalization that unlike Depression-era has left profound markers on race, gender and sexuality. As distant as the labor struggles of the 30s seem today, the 1960s remains relevant 50 years after its passing as symbolized by the endless controversies over “diversity”.
In 1938, E.A. McIlhenny, whose Tabasco sauce is a key ingredient of Bloody Marys, started a nutria farm on Avery Island, Louisiana near his factory. For reasons unknown, he decided to release them into the wild where they began to proliferate. For the next 30 years or so, they had no big environmental impact comparable to the introduction of rabbits into Australia, another invasive species.
This was because they were a plentiful and cheap alternative to mink, chinchilla, ermine and other furs that wealthy women could afford. Trappers poured into the wetlands and bagged dozens per day, which were turned into coats in New York’s garment industry. For the wives of the men working in garment factories making mink coats, it was only nutria or muskrat that their wives could show off in Catskill hotels.
PETA changed all that when activists began to throw red paint on fur coats, not distinguishing between a 2,000 dollar mink coat and a 200 dollar nutria. This led to a collapse of the trapping industry and a mammoth expansion of the nutria population that led to vegetation being consumed to the point that swamps were turned into deserts. Under assault already from oil and gas exploration, the nutrias were destroying the natural obstacles to flooding that devastated New Orleans in 2005.
One of the victims of Hurricane Katrina was a septuagenarian fisherman whose 5 bedroom house near the shoreline was destroyed by flooding. Ironically, his part-time work trapping and shooting nutria has helped him to rebuild.
“Rodents of an Unusual Size” provides insights into the Cajun world that has had a remarkable talent for survival going back into the 19th century. We hear one man liken the local hunters to the beasts they are killing for bounty money. They feel a duty to thin their numbers in the interests of environmentalism even though they have an admiration for an animal that has become part of the local culture, to the point where sports teams use mascots resembling the 20-pound, orange-fanged rodents.
The film is currently playing at the Laemmle in Los Angeles and will open at the IFC Center in New York on October 23rd. Consult http://www.rodentsofunusualsize.tv/screenings.html for screenings elsewhere.
Now playing at the IFC in New York, “Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco” chronicles the life and times of a Puerto Rican artist who worked for Vogue Magazine and other glossy periodicals. I say the word artist advisedly since he was as much of a visionary as Andy Warhol who not only greatly admired Lopez’s work but began as a commercial artist just like him.
For those of you who were born after 1975 or so, the film might come as a surprise since it reveals the porousness between a milieu largely considered decadent and what veterans of the 1960s, like me, were all about.
Lopez was not political in an obvious way but he was the first to begin using African-American models who became part of his entourage, including Grace Jones. He was also the first to push the envelope in terms of how women were represented in his drawings. Instead of being stiff and mannequin-like, they were bold and defiant. Grace Jones represented that aesthetic perfectly.
Lopez was also a gay icon who like his good friends Karl Lagerfeld and Yves St. Laurent were open about their sexuality. Lopez, who had the faun-like appearance of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, loved being the center of attention and was adored by men and women alike.
He died of AIDS in 1987, although the film only mentions that close to the end. Instead, it is an affirmation of a life lived to the fullest and a testament to the spirit of the time where rebelliousness was reflected in both campus sit-ins and fashion shoots for Vogue.
