By Todd Chretien
March 28, 2019
March 27, 2019
A reply to Paul Le Blanc on the ISO crisis
Paul Le Blanc
Rumor has it that the ISO is all set to dissolve itself, a consequence of the membership’s wholesale rejection of a leadership that had covered up the rape carried out by a leading member. He has been expelled and the old guard leadership, including Sharon Smith, Ahmed Shawki, Lance Selfa, Paul D’Amato and Joel Geier, have all resigned. Some speculate that the ISO membership will join DSA en masse. If that takes place, it will be a tragedy. In my view, the best of all possibilities would be for them to reconstitute themselves organizationally in the spirit of their Canadian comrades, whose March 21 communication can be read on the ISO website:
We’re concerned that some people will respond to the ISO’s crisis by jettisoning revolutionary socialist politics and/or the effort to politically organize around them in some way. This letter doesn’t address the range of challenges with which you are grappling at this difficult moment. We write at this time to argue a single point that we think is important: the tendency to jettison socialism from below politics and organizing is increased when people mistakenly believe that the “Leninist” way the ISO has long organized itself — using what we call the micro-party model — is an essential part of revolutionary socialism.
A day later, the ISO posted a letter they received from David McNally, a leader of the Canadian group, that had been sent to them in 2009. It advised them to break with “Leninism”:
As I see it, the necessity of “a new left for a new era” forces all of us to confront — and break with — the legacy of the micro-party approach. At its heart the micro-party perspective consists in believing that building a small revolutionary group is in essence the same thing as constructing a revolutionary party. Fundamentally, then, this perspective involves a simple syllogism:
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- There can be no socialist revolution without an authentically revolutionary party;
- Our group is the custodian of the authentic revolutionary tradition;
- Therefore, there can be no socialist revolution without our group (i.e., building our organization is the key to constructing a mass revolutionary party)
Rather than address the really crucial questions — how is the left to rebuild practices, organizations and cultures of working class self-mobilization so that a working class vanguard might actually be re-created, and a meaningful party built in its ranks — real social-historical problems get reduced to questions of building the small group: recruiting more members, selling more papers, creating new branches.
Essentially, the Canadians were making the same recommendation I had made here on March 20th. Of course, I doubt that my article would appear on the ISO website even though it makes exactly the same points: “One of the side-effects of the rape crisis in the British SWP was a re-examination of Leninism, the poorly understood organizational model embraced not only by the ISO, the British SWP but just about every other group on the left that has a schematic understanding of the Bolshevik Party.”
In 2011 or 2012, I began funding a website called The North Star in honor of the network that Peter Camejo founded in the early 80s. Edited by someone who preferred to remain anonymous (although his identity was an open secret), it became a pole of attraction for ex-members of the ISO who were advocating the same organizational principles as the Canadians. In addition, some of them were trying to cleanse the ISO of sexual abusers. The disgraced ex-leader Sharon Smith characterized their efforts as slander.
Perhaps if the editor at the time had been more stable politically (now he is an anonymous Sandernista), he would have been able to create a pole of attraction for people leaving the ISO. You can get a feel for the affinities between North Star and the ISO’ers at the time from a blogpost on Red Atlanta that had been started by an ex-ISO’er from the Renewal faction whose criticisms have now been adopted by the new ISO leadership.
To summarize my story in very brief, I was booted out of the ISO in February alongside my comrades in the (now officially disbanded) ISO Renewal Faction. During the course of our hard-fought factional struggle within the ISO, members of the Renewal Faction discussed a number of articles critical of “Leninism” and socialist sects. To mention a few pieces in particular, at the height of the factional fight, we passed around and debated Hal Draper’s “Toward a New Beginning” (1971) and “Anatomy of the Micro-sect” (1973), as well as a number of more recent documents, including Scott Jay’s “On Leninism and anti-Leninism.”[2] Naturally, these pieces helped us make sense of the stultifying, undemocratic environment within the ISO and our experience of being ostracized and defamed by the leadership and their loyalist followers. Notably, since being purged from the ISO, members of the Renewal Faction appear to have adopted differing views on the subject of Leninism – and, for that matter, Trotskyism, as well. Nonetheless, it’s safe to say that our experience has led us all to develop profound critiques of the party-building approaches adhered to by socialist sects like the ISO.
Unfortunately, the North Star was just too weak organizationally and politically to have served the kind of regroupment efforts seen during the breakup of the SWP in England that went through the same kind of crisis. Perhaps the most viable remnant of the large-scale exodus is Revolution in the 21st Century that has been superseded to some degree by the Corbynista movement. I suspect that if the ISO transforms itself into a model similar to the Canadians, it will be under the same kind of pressures from the Sandernistas.
When I noticed that Paul Le Blanc had written a long article titled “Reflections On Coherence And Comradeship” on the crisis in the ISO that did not go too deeply into the specifics, I decided to write this reply. Since Paul and I were both members of the American Socialist Workers Party, we were both used to the experience of a party imploding. After being expelled in the early 80s, he became part of the Bulletin In Defense of Marxism group (BIDOM) that hoped to persuade the SWP to return to the road of Cannonism. At the same time, I became part of Peter Camejo’s North Star Network that shared David McNally’s perspectives.
I am not sure when Paul became an ISO member but it did not take him long to become a leading spokesperson on Lenin within the group. As a member of BIDOM, Paul wrote a very good book in 1990 titled “Lenin and the Revolutionary Party” that made effective criticisms of the sectarian approach of groups like the SWP but that remained wedded to the Cannonist model. In fact, leading SWPer George Breitman advised Paul to write such a book since it would help to make sense out of “what went wrong”.
When I got on the Internet in the same year that Paul’s book came out, I began writing a series of articles inspired by Peter Camejo’s North Star orientation but that were much more grounded in a reading of early Soviet history and the emergence of “Zinovievism” as an organizational model shared by virtually every “Leninist” group in existence, including the ISO.
Before long, my articles must have attracted some interest in the ISO since Paul spent virtually an entire chapter in his 2014 “Unfinished Leninism: The Rise and Return of a Revolutionary Doctrine” answering me. The book is a collection of articles written by Paul to shore up the Leninist foundations of the ISO, including one similar to the one responding to me in the book that can be read online. I can’t be sure how close it is to what appeared in the book but for what it’s worth I respond to what’s in the book here.
Needless to say, I was curious to see if Paul’s latest article contained the same old defense of Leninism as the group he belonged to appears ready to leave it behind.
Unfortunately, Paul seems wedded to the past:
Focusing on the matter of organizational structures for a moment, it occurs to me that the old and much-maligned and sometimes grotesquely distorted term democratic centralism continues to make a considerable amount of sense.
I am absolutely opposed to the follow-the-leader interpretation which tells us that some central authority (the wise leader, the top cadres, the central committee or whatever) should be the brain that does the thinking and gives the orders — after which we should “democratically” discuss it all and then carry it all out as disciplined little soldiers. That is the opposite of the actual democratic centralism I believe in — a phony “Leninism” associated with pretentious clowning and the organization falling flat on its face (to paraphrase Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder).
All this is well and good but it does not really address the dynamic that exists in such organizations. The “wise leader, the top cadres, the central committee or whatever” emerge out of the subsoil of groups that are constituted on the basis of the organizational model that goes back to the Bolshevization Comintern of 1924 in which Zinoviev’s schemas were ordained as “Bolshevism”. It had the unintended consequence of turning such parties’ key leader into a demigod, whether it was Jack Barnes or Bob Avakian. Even in the case of groups that were fairly sane, it meant that an Ahmed Shawki or a Alex Callinicos had enough unchallenged power to cover up a rape.
I should add that democratic centralism does not lead to sexual attacks but it does facilitate cover-ups when and if they occur.
Paul continues:
If the organization has a full, democratic discussion regarding actions to be taken and makes a decision (determined by majority vote) — then the organization carries out the decision that was democratically decided upon. If the decision is to support a strike action, or an antiwar action, or an antiracist action, then no comrade is to work against the action.
On the other hand, if a majority of comrades in the organization have a specific position regarding a philosophical question, or an understanding of history, or a specific political analysis, there is no reason why dissident comrades cannot openly, publicly state their own views, if they have them. Nor are they prohibited from expressing disagreements with the leadership or with majority decisions on other matters as well, even publicly.
Once again, this sounds reasonable but in practice it goes by the wayside. Groups such as the ISO, the American SWP, Progressive Labor, the CPUSA are all characterized by ideological homogeneity. A new member will tend to hold the teachings of the masters close to his breast. I say that from experience going through indoctrination in the SWP back in 1967. You read something like “In Defense of Marxism” early on, which defends Trotsky and Cannon against Shachtman, Burnham and Abern. For a young, new member to say in a study group that such debates have little bearing on current society takes more nerve than anyone can muster, including someone like me. I only began to think for myself after leaving the SWP in 1978.
In order for true democratic centralism to work, a party has to have what might be considered a minimal program today. Instead of wrangling over when the USSR became capitalist or remained a “workers state”, it should focus on the basics such as ecosocialism, building militant trade unions, free speech rights such as the kind that the IWW fought for, abortion rights, GLBT rights, Black liberation, etc. Marxist principles should underpin the party’s campaign around such issues rather than tailing after the Democratic Party. If a group of 4 to 5 hundred Marxists staked out such an approach, who knows how far it can go?
Other than Paul’s attempt to revive the dying patient called democratic centralism, the rest of his article makes many good points and is worth reading.
March 25, 2019
Russiagate and the left
Dialectically related
Those hoping to see Russiagate finally disappearing from MSNBC and CNN will be disappointed. The talking heads (David Corn, Jeffrey Toobin, et al) will pivot now to discussing obstruction of justice. If the real purpose of these nominally liberal cable channels was to torpedo the Trump administration, they’d begin to cover the Midwestern floods that have devastated the farm belt. Most of the farmers are Republicans who voted for Trump but need to be educated about the relationship between the flooding and climate change. Although Trump has approved flood relief for Iowa and Nebraska, it will certainly not prove adequate for the farmers’ needs. They should also be reminded that in January, Trump was considering the possibility of robbing the disaster relief piggy-bank to pay for his filthy wall.
But why would these networks want to lose money by becoming a real news outlet when there’s money to be made focusing on Donald Trump? Only three months ago, the head of CNN said that the station would lose money if it didn’t revolve around Trump. In a Vanity Fair article, Jeff Zucker admitted as much:
“People say all the time, ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about Trump. I’ve had too much Trump,’ ” he told me. “And yet at the end of the day, all they want to do is talk about Trump. We’ve seen that, anytime you break away from the Trump story and cover other events in this era, the audience goes away. So we know that, right now, Donald Trump dominates.”
According to a 2017 Forbes article, “total primetime viewership was up 50% from last year across CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, and viewership in the lucrative 25-54 demographic was up 55%.”)
Politics probably doesn’t matter very much to the liberal networks when it comes to ratings. A little over a month ago, CNN hired Sarah Isgur Flores, who was Jeff Sessions spokeswoman, as a “political editor.” Before taking CNN’s offer, she interviewed at MSNBC for the same kind of gig. Like the networks, Flores is a mercenary. When she made an appearance on Chris Hayes MSNBC show on May 16, 2016, she told him: “Donald Trump has again and again shown himself to be an authoritarian, a tyrant and a bully who’s corrupt and doesn’t deserve to be in the White House.” Seven months later she took a job with the tyrant.
You get the same thing at Fox News. They just hired Donna Brazile, the erstwhile interim chairwoman of the Democratic Party, as an on-air commentator. She’ll obviously play the same kind of role that Alan Colmes played on Sean Hannity.
Why would any leftist want to make an appearance on Fox News? Brazile and Colmes were obviously in it for the money but there are people like Stephen F. Cohen and Max Blumenthal who go on the Tucker Carlson show out of an ideological calling (like Mueller’s refusal to charge Trump with conspiracy, I cannot say for sure that Blumenthal is actually on the take from Putin.) Like Jimmy Dore, Glenn Greenwald, and Aaron Maté, they make useful points about the bankruptcy of the Clinton campaign being responsible for her loss but the overarching interest is in siding with Russian foreign policy goals. Every one of these jerks have spent the last 8 years pimping for Assad and Putin on the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine.
I do believe that the Kremlin is messing around in American politics but the impact on elections is probably negligible. If Hillary Clinton had not been acting so underhandedly against Bernie Sanders and had taken even a few baby steps further to the left, she probably would have won the electoral college votes as well as the popular vote. The real damage, as far as I am concerned, is the ability of a foreign power to drive a wedge between its own interests and that of the American people as a whole. The best example of how it is done is obvious. The Israel lobby spends millions buying votes for its ongoing apartheid policies.
The Putin lobby has a different dynamic. It exploits the understandably progressive attitudes of the American people against war in order to make sure that opposition to its war crimes in Syria and its Great Russian domination of Ukraine is drowned out by louder voices. I am sure that Tulsi Gabbard never got a penny from Russia but she is as devoted to its cause as someone would be if on its payroll. As it happens, she is just as devoted to the Israeli state. In 2015, she was a keynote speaker at Christians United for Israel conference. This is an organization led by John Hagee, who is on record as believing that Adolf Hitler hastened God’s plan by forcing Jews back to Israel.
You might say that Stephen F. Cohen, Max Blumenthal, Jimmy Dore, Glenn Greenwald, and Aaron Maté are dialectically related to Rachel Maddow, David Corn, and Debby Wasserman-Schultz. Once the latter group pivots to blathering on about obstruction of justice rather than collusion with Russia, the first group will make money writing articles or appearing on RT.com and Tucker Carlson debunking their claims. It’s a business, when you get right down to it.
What should the left be doing about this con game? If the networks don’t pay attention to the plight of farmers or the continuing assault on working people epitomized by the shutdown of the Lordstown GM plant, then it should be the job of the left to take these issues to the people. If the DSA was truly committed to winning Red State voters to its “democratic socialist” cause, it would send brigades out to Nebraska and Iowa with literature on climate change and the flooding.
The Lordstown plant is in the Mahoning Valley region of Ohio that traditionally votes Democratic but decided to back Trump after he made his demagogic appeal about making sure such plants stay open. John Russo, the former co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, was told by union officials that about 40 percent of UAW members at Lordstown voted for Trump.
These are the kinds of people who will become our Yellow Vests once they learn they have been sold out by both capitalist parties. The left has to find a way to reach them and get out of its Brooklyn hipster cocoon once and for all.
March 22, 2019
Tigerland
As the title suggests, “Tigerland” is a documentary about the efforts in both Far Eastern Russia and Bengal, India to prevent tigers from going extinct. It opens today at the Monica Center in Los Angeles and at the Cinema Village in N.Y. next Friday. It will also be available as VOD on the Discovery cable network tomorrow. As a genre, it resembles what you would see on channels like Discovery, Smithsonian and National Geographic. However you decide to see this beautiful but worrisome film, it is worth your time because it gets to the heart of the species extinction that confronts humanity today. As a symbol of wilderness, probably nothing can top the tiger, a creature that inspired William Blake to write:
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
At the start of the 20th century, there were 100,000 tigers living across Asia. Today there are less than 4,000. The same socio-economic forces that are acting to exterminate them are arrayed against us. The loss of forests across Asia not only threatens tigers but us as well since forests absorb greenhouse gases. With people like Modi, Putin, Trump and Jinping in control of natural resources, including tigers, our days are numbered.
When the film starts, you do a double-take since it shows a tiger walking through deep snow. After a minute or so, you learn that this is a Siberian Tiger—one of the few of the species living outside of India and Southeast Asia. Pavel Fomenko operates a tiger preserve in the Bikin National Park funded by the World Wildlife Fund.
In the years following the collapse of Communism, poaching became a major problem in Russia. Since there is a market for tiger organs as sexual potency aids in China, just as there is for rhino horns, tiger numbers fell precipitously. The film does not identify Putin as helping to reverse this trend but if he was, that’s one good deed in his sorry life.
Much of the film is devoted to Fomenko’s team trying to track down two tiger cubs who were separated from their mother. She was taken into the tiger preserve after attacking and eating a couple of dogs in a Bikin village. They finally succeeded in reuniting the family but nearly at the cost of Fomenko losing his life. When tending to the cubs, the mother smashed through a fence and mauled him badly. Fomenko said: “The tigress is not to blame. This is typical behavior of a predator defending its offspring.” If there is any hope for Russia, a country even more warped by consumerist appetites than the USA, it is that there are people like Pavel Fomenko living there.
The Bengal segment of the film features conservationists Amit Sankhala and Jai Bhati, the grandson and great-grandson of the original “Tiger Man of India,” Kailash Sankhala. Kailash Sankhala was motivated to campaign for the protection of tigers when he became Director of the Delhi Zoological Park in 1965. Appalled by the willingness of the government to promote hunting safaris that were drastically reducing the number of tigers, he took on the political elite that was fixated on “development”. This meant turning the habitat of tigers into plantations or mining sites, while coveting the foreign currency pouring in through big game hunting expeditions. Fortunately, he found a sympathetic ear in Indira Gandhi who pushed through legislation banning the killing of tigers.
It should be mentioned that the Indian gentry was just as bad. It was as addicted to killing tigers as Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway were to killing animals at the top of the food chain. One of the more disgusting historical footage seen in the film is an Indian hunting expedition that culminates in the killing of a tiger. As the creature lies dying on the ground, it is shot several more times at close range and topped off by the elephant ridden by some Mughal wannabe stomping on the head of the dead tiger. Seeing this, I was reminded of Bruce Cockburn’s “If I had a Rocket Launcher”:
I don’t believe in guarded borders and I don’t believe in hate
I don’t believe in generals or their stinking torture states
And when I talk with the survivors of things too sickening to relate
If I had a rocket launcher, if I had a rocket launcher
If I had a rocket launcher, I would retaliate
The film was directed by Ross Kauffman, who won an Academy Award for “Born into Brothels” and produced by another Academy Awardee Fisher Stevens, who helped make “The Cove” possible. “The Cove” was a powerful documentary that helped to put a stop to killing whales for Japanese grocery stores. Let’s hope that “Tigerland” will help shore up the resistance to killing tigers.
You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance
COUNTERPUNCH, MARCH 22, 2019
On a number of different levels, John Levin and Earl Silbar’s “You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance” is a must-read book. To start with, it represents an important piece of the jigsaw puzzle known as SDS. For many, SDS meant either the New Left of the Port Huron Statement or the organization that imploded in 1970, leaving behind the wreckage strewn behind it, including the Weathermen and the various Maoist sects such as Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party that came out of RYM and RYM2. Missing until now from this puzzle was arguably SDS’s most disciplined and serious component, the Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) that was well-represented in the landmark student strikes at San Francisco State and Harvard University.
In addition, it is a close look at the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), a group that was the backbone of the WSA as well as the group that had the official blessing of Beijing in the 1960s until the party leadership broke with China over its “revisionism”.
While being essential for professional historians and those simply trying to understand what was happening on the left 50 years ago, it is also a breathtakingly dramatic story of how people from my generation burned their bridges in order to become revolutionaries. As someone who has read and written about a number of Trotskyist memoirs, none of them comes close to the story-telling power of the 23 people included in this 362-page collection that you will find impossible to put down.
March 20, 2019
The ISO, #MeToo, and the need for a fresh start
In recent years, I have developed a grudging admiration for the International Socialist Organization for its outspoken opposition to the Assadist left and for its refusal to adapt to the DSA’s “inside-outside” Democratic Party orientation. Furthermore, its willingness to open its newspaper up as an open forum to debate out whether to support the Sandernista movement impressed me as a sign that rigid “Leninist” norms are being abandoned even if with baby steps. Finally, someone I have deep respect for is an ISO member and a highly regarded journalist whose membership is an open secret. I was able to have lunch with him about four months ago and the topic of the ISO came up. I told him that I was pleased with the growing openness and flexibility of the group. So was he, he said, but added that it still had a long way to go.
So, despite all the articles I have written for the past 20 years holding the ISO’s feet to the fire, I am saddened by its current crisis that reflects both a malignant misogyny in the organization as well as a tendency by some of the top leaders to tolerate it, if not participate in it personally.
This has been a simmering dispute since 2014 when ISO members complained about a rape culture in the organization that ironically mirrored the British SWP being torn apart by the refusal of the Callinicos leadership to expel a party leader charged with raping a rank-and-file female member. Both state capitalist groups were going through the same crisis simultaneously and both were in a state of denial.
In the SWP’s case, the denialism led to a massive loss of members. Like a time-bomb with a very long fuse, the ISO’s denialism has finally caught up with it. At least you can say that unlike Callinicos and company, they seem up to the task of cleaning house.
At the 2014 ISO convention, there were concerns about the leadership not giving due weight to the woman’s side in a rape investigation in an article titled “Believing Survivors: A Response to Concerns”:
The first disagreement S raises in her document is an argument that due process is fundamental to democracy, and that the changes we suggest would eliminate due process. We believe our policy would not eliminate due process, which is fair treatment in adjudication. We maintain that anyone accused of sexual assault or intimate partner violence in our organization should have an opportunity to defend themselves, make a statement, produce evidence, and, if desired, appeal a decision.
Our disagreement is centered around what constitutes sufficient evidence to find that someone has violated our organization’s code of conduct in these cases. The Steering Committee document suggests we should be predisposed to believing accusers, while simultaneously presuming the innocence of the accused. Here we run up against a problem: Is it desirable – or even possible – to believe both accuser and accused? We believe that logically, practically, and politically speaking, the answer is no. [emphasis in the original]
The S referred to above is Sharon Smith who was the National Organizer of the ISO at the time and who emphasized in her article titled “The complexities of rape and sexual assault: a contribution” the need for “due process” in judging whether an accused member was guilty or not.
In this year’s convention, not only was Sharon Smith’s “due process” argument rejected, she and other long-time members were voted off the Steering Committee and replaced by those who would have agreed with the authors of “Believing Survivors: A Response to Concerns”. A letter by a former member [FM] to the convention was the trigger:
You have recently elected the respondent in the NDC’s (National Disciplinary Committee) first sexual misconduct case to the ISO’s highest leadership body. This member was accused of rape. My committee voted to expel him, but we were pressured to rescind our verdict. This is not a document I want to write. But my conscience will not allow me to keep quiet. Few in the organization know about this case, in part because the former leadership obscured its existence. The fact that the accused ultimately rose in stature within the ISO is a testament to how unevenly sexual assault cases have been handled.
This was enough to foment a determined revolt against the Steering Committee members aligned with Sharon Smith, Lance Selfa, Paul D’Amato and Ahmed Shawki and to produce badly needed reforms. (I only mention these people because of their high profile.)
The SC [Steering Committee] had an emergency meeting last night to begin a discussion of the implications of this document and what next steps need to be taken. Here are some of the immediate steps we have taken:
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- We immediately responded to FM and to the allies who were copied on the email to thank her for sending it, informing her that we would be sending it out and discussing as a leadership and stating that we take this very seriously.
- After SC members asked that the respondent identify himself and resign, Joe R identified himself and voluntarily resigned from the SC and said he would take a leave of absence. We voted to suspend him and stipulate that a decision will be made on his membership status after a body independent of the SC had deliberated, created a process and made recommendations based on further investigation into this case.
- In addition to a process for taking up these very serious allegations, we need to empower a body independent of the current SC who can investigate the conduct of the 2013 SC and the central participants in that 2013 process. Whether that should be the recently formed #MeToo commission, the NDC or some other body still needs to be determined, but will be soon.
- We are organizing a joint meeting with the NC this week to discuss this fully and to develop a process for a public statement about this. We will also be inviting the original NDC members to this meeting. In addition, this meeting will be discussing how to create a space for membership-wide discussion.
- Nikki W from Portland is organizing a support call for survivors or others triggered by this document. It will include trained mental professionals who can help comrades to process this. We will send these details out today; you can also reach out to her at nikkiwilliams23@gmail.com if you need resources or support before the call. The document is very clear and rather than editorializing, we will leave comrades to read and assess it for themselves. We will be writing assessments, a public statement and providing space for analysis and discussion of what took place, lessons learned from it and what needs to change in the coming weeks. We believe it speaks both to failures of our political culture that we have identified as well as failures to adequately address the needs of survivors, a lack of understanding of the dynamics of rape and sexual assault and the failure to create a process that could prioritize doing our best to determine the truth of what happened over bureaucratic proceduralism. This is not separate from the issues we have been reckoning with and the culture we are fighting to transform – though this experience is a particularly acute and devastating manifestation of this culture. There is no way to move forward from this without the utmost honesty and critical assessment.
One of the side-effects of the rape crisis in the British SWP was a re-examination of Leninism, the poorly understood organizational model embraced not only by the ISO, the British SWP but just about every other group on the left that has a schematic understanding of the Bolshevik Party.
Richard Seymour, who was one of the leaders of the SWP that resigned over the rape cover-up, wrote an article titled “Is Zinovievism finished? A reply to Alex Callinicos” that drew a dotted line between covering up sexual predation and Leninism:
Alex Callinicos’ article on the crisis in the SWP purports to be a defence of Leninism in the face of a ‘flood of attacks’ – by which Alex means the crisis that has engulfed the party over the mishandled investigation of allegations of rape and sexual harassment against a Central Committee member.
The piece does nothing of the sort, but is rather an encapsulation of the flaws that have brought us to this pass. It is clearly intended as an opening salvo in the CC’s response to the growing opposition within the party. In particular it draws on the long tradition of dealing with dissent over particular issues by means of the absurd implication that that dissent is an attack on the heritage of the October revolution, accompanied by an airy dismissal of the actual facts. This maneouvre assumes the following equivalences: that ‘revolutionary party’ means the model of democratic centralism adopted by the SWP in the 1970s; that this model replicates that of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the decisions of the current leadership therefore embody the legitimacy of that revolution, which we can expect to be replicated in the conditions of the UK in the 21st century. This is pure substitutionalism – and on its own measure of providing strong interventionist leadership, is a complete failure.
Isn’t this the same dynamic that was at work in the ISO?
There is just too much of a pattern in these “vanguard” organizations for it to be only a coincidence. The first major occurrence was when Gerry Healy got booted from his own sect-cult after imposing himself on just one too many young female members. It took years for him to be punished, just as it took such a long time for Harvey Weinstein to face arrest.
My own former organization has had the same track record. A member named Mark Curtis was arrested for the attempted rape of a 15-year-old African-American girl in 1988 and served 8 years of a 25-year sentence. At the time and even now, Jack Barnes insisted that he was innocent. After Curtis was released from prison, he was arrested for soliciting prostitution by an undercover cop. This time, he was expelled from the SWP. When Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s “When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir” appeared, I characterized his account of being molested as a young child by an SWP member who baby-sat for him as bogus. I refused to believe that the party, no matter its other deep faults, would not let such behavior go unpunished. Now, I am not so sure.
What do all these groups have in common? To start with, rape and sexual harassment are not universal. Some groups are totally innocent. It is not as if reading “What is to be Done” gives some alpha male the idea of raping a female member. But when and if an alpha male does carry out such a crime, there is a tendency to clear his name because the thought of losing a star member who might be the Lenin of our age is too much to bear.
It is a fixation on the idea, even if unstated, that all are led by Lenin’s avatar. Whether it is someone batshit crazy like Jack Barnes and Gerry Healy, or relatively sane like Alex Callinicos and Ahmed Shawki, there is undue confidence in the helmsman. You can see how ruffled the feathers of a leadership can become when faced by such charges. They say that the fish rots from the head downward. This is just as true of Leninist formations as it is for the mafia. On February 19, 2014 The Steering Committee and National Committee of the ISO issued a statement titled “A Response to Slander” that fired back at the Renewal Faction, whose views are now embraced by a new steering committee. The statement says:
The former members, grouped together in the “Renewal Faction,” cynically distorted an account of a case–written in a document meant to be for internal discussion about the process of dealing with such cases, given their rarity in our organization–in order to falsely equate a local situation in the ISO with the mishandling of rape charges against a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party-Britain that caused a profound crisis in that organization.
In fact, the equation was mathematically, morally and politically correct. I have no idea whether the new leadership can do everything that is necessary to restore confidence in the organization but I wish them the best. I don’t believe that the ISO is a nucleus of a vanguard party that is so necessary but until the real thing comes along, they are the best people on the left as far as I am concerned, warts and all.
March 18, 2019
Making kosher half-sour dill pickles
In the 50s and 60s, my father had a fruit store in Woodridge, NY that was famous for the kosher half-sour dill pickles made in the back of the store. By the time I was 14 years old, I began making them using his time-honored recipe. It consisted of the standard spices that he bought wholesale, garlic, dill and vinegar. You put about 25 pounds of Kirby cucumbers into a huge barrel, mixed in the other ingredients, put the lid of a peach basket on top of all this, and topped it off with a heavy stone to keep everything compacted together with the pickling ingredients. People used to come from miles around to buy his pickles.
The kind of barrel I used, about four feet tall.
In recent years, I have gotten into the habit of buying what my Turkish relatives call turşu, which is pronounced turshu. There was a great store that sold turşu on 85th and First but like so many small businesses became a casualty of extortionist rental leases.
We then started buying kosher dill pickles from Fairway, even though they didn’t sell the entire range of turşu products, which in addition to pickles can include mixed vegetables. Since Fairway is owned by Blackstone, a company I really hate for personal reasons, I decided to look into making them myself. It turned out to be a roaring success.
If you have access to a Whole Food store, you can buy Kirby cucumbers there. Then, you order the Ball spicing mix from Amazon (or buy it from Whole Food or your local supermarket, even though I think you’ll have to end up ordering it online since it is not an everyday product.)
Kirby cucumbers
If you are making two quarts of pickles, as the Ball instructions indicate, make sure to use 2 ½ pounds of pickles rather than the 3 ½ it calls for since that would require a third quart jar. But still use the same amount of pickling ingredients. Don’t bother buying fancy gourmet vinegar. Heinz works just fine. This is what you’ll end up with after a week in the fridge. Trust me, they taste great. I say that as a bona fide expert on kosher pickles learned as an apprentice to my master pickle-maker Jack Proyect.
The next step is to make turşu with the other ingredients, a mixture of cauliflower, long green peppers, carrots and cabbage. Goes great with barbunya pilaki and kuru fasulye.
March 16, 2019
From a Bookforum review of Bhaskar Sunkara’s “Socialist Manifesto”
These are the closing paragraphs of a review of Bhaskar Sunkara’s “Socialist Manifesto” by Frank Guan in the latest Bookforum (April/May 2019) that arrived in my mailbox last night. It is not even on their website yet. I was so anxious to cite it that I used OCR from the print copy. It should be up on their website in a couple of weeks or so. My advice is to check https://www.bookforum.com/inprint/ then and if it is up, and you want the entire article, drop me a line at lnp3@panix.com and I’ll be not only happy to send you a copy but urge you to spread it near and far. Guan is razor-sharp and has taken Bhaskar’s measure like a skilled surgeon.
How does one review a manifesto fairly? As Sunkara’s fifteenth point says, “History matters.” Like The Communist Manifesto, his book exemplifies how the past dictates the future. The reading of what was determines the horizons of what will be. The difference is that while Marx interpreted the history of capitalism to justify the future emergence of world communism, Sunkara is interpreting the history of Marx’s own apostles as he hopes for the future emergence of American socialism. The novelty of Marx’s manifesto electrifies; knowing that nothing like communism has existed before, it speeds toward the day when communism will be everything. The Socialist Manifesto is restrained, almost apologetic; it is haunted by the specters of pessimism and belatedness, the knowledge that socialism has already been tried, already been found wanting.
Lacking dialectical prowess, what’s left to fall back on? It’s no accident that Sunkara’s approach to facts resembles nothing so much as that of a Southern Baptist youth pastor; readers are coached like kids ready to stray at the slightest indication that faith is difficult to keep. The book applauds the lively disputes between socialists in prewar Germany and Russia, but the existence of Western Marxist currents other than its own is buried in silence. The pervasive and all but insoluble bigotry that characterized most of the American labor movement throughout its “long and distinguished history” is stowed away in endnotes. The critical role of the American state in exterminating socialist movements across the Third World is mentioned once; its role in shutting socialist parties out of power in Western Europe is not mentioned at all. The Cold War is barely mentioned and never examined.
The intent behind this airbrushing appears to be tactical, to render American socialism more palatable by playing down the degree to which socialism has been anti-American and America has been anti-socialist. Yet what is lost, really, by acknowledging how much the extreme hostility of the American capitalist state to socialist freedom movements across the world has contributed to their failure? By demonstrating how that state’s tremendous military, covert, and financial power has been consistently deployed to besiege and undermine its enemies, to the point that socialists must adopt a paranoid, militarized, hierarchical organization to survive (thereby surrendering democracy), open up to capital investment and exploitation (thereby surrendering socialism), or else surrender unconditionally? Why obscure the fact that capital, in the West, under neoliberalism, is on permanent strike, its primary profits divorced from both employment and the manufacturing sector, and thus essentially immune to labor agitation? Why pretend that an America under socialism would retain its privileged status in the world economy, despite that status being dependent on the linked imperial rents of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve, fossil-fuel conglomerates, and the military-industrial complex? “Better than others, we [socialists] can perceive class relations and how they offer common avenues of struggle,” Sunkara claims. But a sustained and penetrating analysis of present-day America—its economy, society, culture, and politics—is as absent from The Socialist Manifesto as the hard accounting of how much risk one runs in seeking to improve America for its most oppressed citizens. Not only does this book begin with make-believe, its unrealness never ends.
March 15, 2019
Ben is Back; Beautiful Boy
COUNTERPUNCH, MARCH 15, 2019
Given the enormity of the drug crisis in the USA, particularly centered on opioid overdoses that are the largest cause of death of people under the age of 50, it was inevitable that Hollywood would begin to produce “problem” movies such as “Ben is Back” and “Beautiful Boy”. It also just as inevitable that such films would be based on the suffering of well-to-do families and suffused with clichés.
“Ben is Back” stars Julia Roberts as Holly Burns, the matriarch of a generally happy family eagerly awaiting Christmas day, the happiest time of the year, especially if you live in the suburbs and have lots of money to lavish on presents. Pulling into her driveway with a carload of gifts to place under the Christmas tree, she sees the ghost of Christmas past, namely her college-aged son Ben (Lucas Hedges) who has cut short his stay in a drug rehabilitation facility to return home from the holidays.
The entire family treats Ben as if he was the scariest ghost showing up in Scrooge’s bedroom. He is there not to remind them of their lifetime of sins but the pain he has visited on them in the past as an opioid addict. Hoping to enjoy a happy time with the family, he is put on the defensive by his mom’s insistence that he take a drug test in the upstairs bathroom right off the bat. As he pees into a bottle, she stands behind him with her arms folded to make sure he is not turning in a fake sample.
March 12, 2019
The Boeing 737 Max 8: a case-study in uncreative destruction
Wreckage at the scene of an Ethiopian Airlines crash near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Monday. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)
On October 29, 2018, a Boeing 737 Max 8 belonging to Lion Air in Indonesia crashed into the Java Sea 12 minutes after take-off. All 189 passengers and crew members were killed instantly. It is extremely unusual for planes to suffer such accidents in clear weather after having reached their cruising altitude. Flight experts concluded that the pilots were not adequately trained in the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), a robotics technology that lowers the nose of a plane to prevent a stall. Although there is no definitive judgement on exactly what happened, it appears to be a combination of inadequate training for the pilots and a malfunctioning MCAS.
On Sunday, another 737 Max 8 owned by Ethiopian Airlines had the same kind of accident resulting in the death of 157 passengers and crew members. In the aftermath of the tragedy, this has led to Australia, China, Germany, France, Indonesia, Ireland, Malaysia, Singapore, and the United Kingdom grounding the planes.
Looking at these two horrible tragedies that will make me think twice about getting on a plane again, I keep thinking of the title of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s classic “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”. In essence, the use of MCAS is akin to an experimental, driverless car owned by Uber killing a pedestrian who was jaywalking on a dark road in Tempe, Arizona on May 18, 2018. The back-up driver, who was supposed to keep a sharp eye on the road to prevent such an accident, was watching reruns of the reality TV show “The Voice” at the time.
Despite such incidents (there have been 4 fatalities already), the bourgeoisie is determined to push ahead since the savings in labor costs will make up for the collateral damage of dead pedestrians. While I am skeptical that completely driverless cars will ever become the norm for Uber or Lyft, I can see people with little driving experience being paid minimum wage just to be a back-up to the computer system—as long as they don’t watch TV on the job. (Fat chance with such a boring job.)
This morning Donald Trump tweeted about the airline crash. “Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are….”
To begin with, the issue is not planes becoming too complex. It is rather that they are becoming too simple in terms of the amount of deskilling the airlines favor. As for the issue of replacing human labor with robots, he is all for it—reflecting the priorities of a ruling class bent on driving down wages.
In a US News and World Report article titled “The Race Is On After Feds Pave Way for Driverless Trucks”, we learn:
The most optimistic analysts project that trucks with empty cabs and a computer at the wheel will travel on U.S. highways in as little as two years with no escort or safety driver in sight now that the Trump administration has signaled its willingness to let tractor-trailers to become truly driverless.
The U.S. Department of Transportation this month announced that it will “no longer assume” that the driver of a commercial truck is human, and the agency will even “adapt the definitions of ‘driver’ and ‘operator’ to recognize that such terms do not refer exclusively to a human, but may in fact include an automated system.”
Already, automated truck developers such as Embark and TuSimple have made freight deliveries where the computer takes control on the highway, overseen by a human “safety driver.” Companies have also successfully tested “platooning,” where a truck with a human driver leads a convoy of as many as five computer-driven trucks following at close distance to reduce drag and save fuel.
The technologies promise big savings, with driverless trucks potentially slashing 40 percent from the cost of long-haul freight – much of it in saved labor expenses – and platooning cutting 10 to 15 percent in fuel costs.
If it is good for cars and trucks, why not airplanes?
Two years before the Indonesian 737 crash, the Guardian published an article titled “Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster” that it clearly anticipated. Interestingly enough, it was not even a Boeing plane that was discussed in the article. It was an Airbus 330 that had the same kind of systems as the Boeing NCAS. With pilots much more used to relying on automation than manual control of the plane, they failed to override the system that was forcing the plane to plunge into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009 at about 125 miles an hour. Everyone on board, 228 passengers and crew, died instantly.
While pilots flying to major airports will continue to be highly paid, the wages of those working for regional airlines has fallen drastically. In 2010, the Guardian reported on “A pilot’s life: exhausting hours for meagre wages”. They lead a decidedly unglamorous life:
Many are forced to fly half way around the country before they even begin work. Others sleep in trailers at the back of Los Angeles airport, in airline lounges across the country or even on the floors of their own planes. Some co-pilots, who typically take home about $20,000 (£12,500) a year, hold down second jobs to make ends meet.
All that will change when airplanes go the route of driverless cars as the NY Times reported last July in an article titled “Are You Ready to Fly Without a Human Pilot?” In the same fashion that Trump backed driverless trucks, the move toward pilotless planes seems inexorable:
Regulators are already taking steps toward downsizing the role of humans on the flight deck. The bill to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration included language to provide funding to study single-pilot operations for cargo planes, a move that the Air Line Pilots Association opposed. Captain Canoll said that a single-pilot aircraft must be safe to fly without anyone at the controls in case the pilot takes a bathroom break or becomes incapacitated.
At the recently concluded World Economic Forum, there was a big focus on artificial intelligence and robotics. On the website, you can find breathless articles about “Meet Stan: the robot valet that parks your car at the airport” and “US companies created a record number of robot workers in 2018”. In a Washington Post article on the WEF, the title betrayed a certain unease about the replacement of human beings by robots: ‘The aristocrats are out of touch’: Davos elites believe the answer to inequality is ‘upskilling’. It cited Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman about how to keep the masses docile: “The lack of education in those areas in digital is absolutely shocking. That has to be changed. That will very much lessen the inequalities that people have in terms of job opportunities.”
What world are these people living in? Schwarzman has a 32-room penthouse in 740 Park Avenue and spent $5 million for his birthday party in 2017. He just made a gift of $1 billion to MIT to launch a new school for Artificial Intelligence. Is that supposed to create jobs? Maybe for someone with an MIT degree who will go to work writing software to replace the people working for Jeff Bezos’s slave labor-like warehouses with machines but what is someone out of a job at an Amazon warehouse then supposed to do? Apply to MIT?
The handwriting is on the wall. The USA is moving into a two-tiered system. In places like NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, you get people working in high-tech industries that in contrast to the Fordist model of the 1930s employ far fewer bodies. Meanwhile, in Detroit, Cleveland, and other places where Fordism once held sway, the jobs are there if you are willing to work at Walmarts, at local hospitals emptying bedpans or as guards in a jail or prison. Class divisions between those with advanced technology skills and those left out will only increase, leading to the kind of showdown taking place in France between the neoliberal state and the Yellow Vests.
You get a feel for the Two Americas reading a March 7th NY Times article titled “Thousands of New Millionaires Are About to Eat San Francisco Alive”:
In cities like Oakland and Berkeley and San Francisco, millennials obsess over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter and attend Democratic Socialists of America meetings. But the socialist passion doesn’t seem to have impacted the city’s zeal for I.P.O. parties, which the party planning community says are going to surpass past booms.
Jay Siegan, a former live music club owner who now curates private entertainment and music, is gearing up. He has worked on events for many of the I.P.O. hopefuls, including Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Postmates and Lyft.
“We see multiple parties per I.P.O. for the company that is I.P.O.ing, as well as firms that are associated to them,” Mr. Siegan said. Budgets for start-up parties, he said, can easily go above $10 million. “They’re wanting to bring in A-list celebrities to perform at the dinner tables for the executives. They want ballet performers.”
The only comment I would add to this tale of two cities is that it would not be surprising if some of these high-flying technology workers might also plan to vote for Bernie Sanders. They probably don’t feel happy about living in a city where their wealth has driven up the cost of housing to the point that homelessness is an epidemic. Whether President Sanders can do much about these class divisions is open to debate.
The replacement of human labor by machinery has been described as “creative destruction”. The assumption is that the temporary pain is worth it since there will always be the growth of new jobs. As my seventh grade social studies put it, the invention of the automobile put the blacksmith out of work but it created far more jobs in a Ford plant.
On May 12, 2010, the New York Times ran an article by economics editor Catherine Rampell titled The New Poor: In Job Market Shift, Some Workers Are Left Behind that focused on the largely middle-aged unemployed who will probably never work again. For example, 52 year old administrative assistant Cynthia Norton has been working part-time at Walmart while sending resumes everywhere but nobody gets back to her. She is part of a much bigger picture:
Ms. Norton is one of 1.7 million Americans who were employed in clerical and administrative positions when the recession began, but were no longer working in that occupation by the end of last year. There have also been outsize job losses in other occupation categories that seem unlikely to be revived during the economic recovery. The number of printing machine operators, for example, was nearly halved from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009. The number of people employed as travel agents fell by 40 percent.
But Ms. Rampell finds the silver lining in this dark cloud:
This “creative destruction” in the job market can benefit the economy.
Pruning relatively less-efficient employees like clerks and travel agents, whose work can be done more cheaply by computers or workers abroad, makes American businesses more efficient. Year over year, productivity growth was at its highest level in over 50 years last quarter, pushing corporate profits to record highs and helping the economy grow.
The term “creative destruction” might ring a bell. It was coined by Werner Sombart in his 1913 book “War and Capitalism”. When he was young, Sombart considered himself a Marxist. His notion of creative destruction was obviously drawn from Karl Marx, who, according to some, saw capitalism in terms of the business cycle. With busts following booms, like night follows day, a new round of capital accumulation can begin. This interpretation is particularly associated with Volume Two of Capital that examines this process in great detail. Looking at this material, some Marxists like Eduard Bernstein drew the conclusion that capitalism is an infinitely self-sustaining system.
By 1913, Sombart had dumped the Marxist commitment to social revolution but still retained the idea that there was a basis in Karl Marx for upholding the need for “creative destruction”, a view buttressed by an overly positive interpretation of this passage in the Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
By the 1930s, Sombart had adapted himself fairly well to the Nazi system although he was not gung-ho like Martin Heidegger or Carl Schmitt. The wiki on Sombart notes:
In 1934 he published Deutscher Sozialismus where he claimed a “new spirit” was beginning to “rule mankind”. The age of capitalism and proletarian socialism was over and with “German socialism” (National-Socialism) taking over.
But despite this, he remained critical. In 1938 he wrote an anthropology text that found fault with the Nazi system and many of his Jewish students remained fond of him.
I suspect, however, that Rampell is familiar with Joseph Schumpeter’s use of the term rather than Sombart since Schumpeter was an economist, her chosen discipline. In 1942, he wrote a book titled Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that, like Sombart, retained much of Karl Marx’s methodology but without the political imperative to destroy the system that utilized “creative destruction”. He wrote:
The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. . . .
The wiki on Schumpeter claims that this theory is wedded to Nikolai Kondratiev’s “long wave” hypothesis that rests on the idea that there are 50 year cycles in which capitalism grows, decays and enters a crisis until a new round of capital accumulation opens up. Not only was the idea attractive to Schumpeter, it was a key part of Ernest Mandel’s economic theories. Unlike Schumpeter, Mandel was on the lookout for social agencies that could break the cycle and put development on a new footing, one based on human need rather than private profit.
Returning to Rampell’s article, there is one dimension entirely missing. She assumes that “creative destruction” will operate once again in order to foster a new upswing in the capitalist business cycle. But how exactly will that manifest itself? All the signs point to a general decline in business activity unless there is some kind of technological breakthrough equivalent to the computer revolution that fueled growth for decades. Does anybody believe that “green manufacturing” will play the same role? I don’t myself.
One thing does occur to me. Sombart’s book was written in 1913, one year before WWI and was even titled eerily enough “War and Capitalism”. One wonders if the Great War would be seen as part and parcel of “creative destruction”. War, after all, does have a knack for clearing the playing field with even more finality than layoffs. Schumpeter wrote his book in 1942, one year into WWII. My guess is that he did not theorize war as the ultimate (and necessary?) instrument of creative destruction but history will record that WWII did introduce a whole rafter of new technology, including aluminum, radar, nuclear power, etc., while bombing old modes of production into oblivion. What a great opportunity it was for capitalism to rebuild Japan, especially after firebombing and atomic bombs did their lovely work.
In my view, there’s something disgusting about this “creative destruction” business especially when it is articulated by a young, pro-capitalist Princeton graduate like Catherine Rampell who wrote for Slate, the Village Voice and other such b-list publications before crawling her way up into an editorial job at the NYT. She clearly has learned how to cater her reporting to the ideological needs of the newspaper of record, growing more and more reactionary as the crisis of capitalism deepens.
