The past has a future we never expect. Exterminate All the Brutes is a four-part HBO documentary series from filmmaker Raoul Peck that challenges how history is being written. Exterminate All the Brutes is currently airing on HBO Max. Q&A with Raoul Peck, Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz, and Mahmood Mamdani, moderated by Eugene Hernandez.
April 10, 2021
April 9, 2021
Exterminate All the Brutes
“Where art is a weapon, it is only so when it is art”
–Albert Maltz, one of the Hollywood Ten
Last night, HBO launched “Exterminate All the Brutes”, a four-part docudrama by Raoul Peck that is both art and weapon. As a director of the great narrative film “The Young Karl Marx” and the equally great James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro”, Peck includes staged performances by professional actors to highlight the cruelties visited on native peoples in the Americas and in Africa. In the first episode, we see a scripted reenactment of a massacre American soldiers carried out against Seminoles and their escaped slave allies in 1836 who dared resist ethnic cleansing.
We also see a savage attack on the Congolese people in 1892, during King Leopold’s reign. In this reenactment, a Catholic mission founded by the Swedish priest Edward Sjoblom witnesses a white rubber plantation owner storming into the modest church, gun in hand, and forcing a Black parishioner from his pew. As everyone gathers outside the church, the colonist fires a bullet into the man’s head and then forces a young parishioner to cut off his hand to be proof to the authorities that law and order was being upheld, just as white settlers often took Indian scalps in the USA.
April 5, 2021
Did China use a sock puppet to bolster support for its forced assimilation of the Uighurs?
Until this week, I had never heard of the China Global Television Network (CGTN). Essentially, this is the Chinese version of RT.com that has a presence globally with each unit broadcasting in the local language. An old friend emailed me about a controversy that had developed in the French outlet of CGTN over its publication of a March 28 article by one Laurène Beaumond titled “’My’ Xinjiang: stop the tyranny of fake news” that defended the Chinese government against charges of the forced assimilation of the Uighur people in Xinjiang. The article was par for the course propaganda making the case that China had been the Uighur’s best friend, delivering all sorts of benefits in keeping with the government’s respect for national minorities. This snippet will give you a sense of the article’s shamelessness:
In Xinjiang, all signage and shop signs are in Mandarin and the Turkic language spoken by Uyghurs. Administrative documents are also in both languages. Having been the victim of a health problem that forced me to stay hospitalized for a week in Urumqi in 2016, I was treated by a team of Uyghur doctors at a facility right next to one of the city’s largest mosques. Every morning, I was awakened by the song of the muezzin who called the faithful to prayer and the hospital canteen was 100% halal [conforming to Muslim dietary laws].
An editor’s note preceding the article stated:
Freelance journalist based in France, with a double degree in art history and archeology at the University of Sorbonne-IV and holder of a master’s degree in journalism, Laurène Beaumond has worked in various editorial offices in Paris before settling down in Beijing, where she lived for almost 7 years.
Apparently, someone at Le Monde was suspicious enough about her journalism bona fides to do some digging into her past. The result was an article that charged China with creating a sock puppet to spread government propaganda. Wikipedia’s definition is as good as any: “A sock puppet or sockpuppet is an online identity used for purposes of deception. The term, a reference to the manipulation of a simple hand puppet made from a sock, originally referred to a false identity assumed by a member of an Internet community who spoke to, or about, themselves while pretending to be another person.”
Titled “Controversy over Chinese state TV propaganda article on Uighurs”, Nathalie Guibert’s March 31 article stated flatly: “The problem is that Laurène Beaumond does not exist as the state media wants to present it. Unknown, officially, to the French press battalion. Le Monde was able to verify that no person of this pseudonym appears in the file of the Commission of the identity card of French professional journalists.”
Stung by this report, CGTV tried to cover its tracks in an April Fool’s Day article titled “China and ‘fake news’: this Manichaeism which will lose some French intellectuals”. It stood by the authenticity of the article but refuted the sock puppet charge by referring to Laurène Beaumond as a pseudonym. In my view, this is just a crock of shit since editors customarily indicate when a pseudonym is being used:
The journalist from Le Monde used the term “invent” in her title. We are stunned by this total lack of professionalism. How could she not have thought of someone writing under a pseudonym? This shows that his judgment is biased from the start. Using a pen name is common. Today, French public opinion – and Western public in general – is particularly hostile to China, it is no secret to anyone. Laurène Beaumond wished to use a pseudonym and we respected her choice, because we know the risk that this represents for certain French journalists to express their opinion in favor of China.
We’ll never know whether Laurène Beaumond was a sock puppet or not but it is worth taking a look at her article to see how cynical and duplicitous it is. As was the case with Ukraine, another colonized nation that expected a socialist revolution to provide rights that had been denied under dynastic rule, language rights are key. Beaumond obviously understands how this serves as a litmus test for a nominally socialist government: “In Xinjiang, all signage and shop signs are in Mandarin and the Turkic language spoken by Uyghurs. Administrative documents are also in both languages.” If you’ll recall, Euromaidan protests involved many exchanges over whether Russian speakers were going to be persecuted by a Kiev victory over the separatists. Freud would call this projection based on the Kremlin’s long-standing hostility toward Ukrainian self-determination. Taking Beaumond at her word, no such conflict existed in Xinjiang.
With its 12 million Uighur citizens, you’d think it would be important not only to have a newspaper written in their native language but one upheld its aspirations as a people. Once there was one. Titled the Xinjiang Daily, it was the voice of the Communist Party but apparently not so determined to squelch the voices of the colonized people. In September 2018, Ilham Weli, Xinjiang Daily’s deputy editor-in-chief, Memtimin Obul and Juret Haji, directors at the newspaper, and Mirkamil Ablimit, the head of the newspaper’s subsidiary Xinjiang Farmer’s Daily, were arrested. The charge? Being “two-faced”, a typically Orwellian term that is broad enough to cover any act or opinion that defied Xi Jinping’s priorities.
Ironically, there were no articles that appeared in the Xinjiang Daily that could be offered as evidence of being “two-faced”, even in a kangaroo court. The crime these editors committed was supporting secret nationalist goals, kept to themselves. Likely, their crime was simply discussing articles that could be written that challenged Beijing’s colonizing agenda.
While Ms. Beaumond might be assuaged by shop signs being in both Chinese and Uighur, one might expect 12 million Uighur-speaking people to be served by a newspaper that was uncompromisingly devoted to their national aspirations and in their own language. There was a time when Communists would have identified with and supported such an initiative as I pointed out in a CounterPunch article. Even under Stalin, a bureaucrat condemned by Lenin for his Great Russian Chauvinism, there was respect for Uighur national aspirations:
In October 1944, the Soviets helped the Uighurs mount a revolt across Xinjiang that led to a major step forward. Armed with Soviet weapons, they were able to secure a victory that led to the formation of the East Turkistan Republic (ETR).
Through the rest of the 1940s, the ETR adopted all of the features of a modern state with Soviet aid. It published literature in the Uighur language, had its own uniformed army, school system, national flag and even a national anthem. Stalin was even able to persuade the Kuomintang to adjust to new realities. It accommodated itself to Uighur power and even mandated that the Uighur language have the same official status as Mandarin in government departments.
March 29, 2021
The use and misuses of Ralph Miliband: a reply to Chris Maisano
As a member of the Bread and Roses DSA caucus, which functions as an informal think-tank for Jacobin, Chris Maisano shares the heavy lifting of producing ideological justifications for work in the Democratic Party with fellow caucus member Eric Blanc. Both have elevated Karl Kautsky into a pantheon after the fashion of my generation worshipping at the altar of Trotsky, Mao, Castro or even Stalin. Lately it came to my attention that Kautsky’s star has fallen a bit in the Democratic Socialist firmament, to be replaced perhaps by Ralph Miliband, the editor of Socialist Register until his death in 1994.
Before delving into Maisano’s wrongheaded attempt to turn Miliband into a lodestar for the current epoch, it is worth saying a word or two about who Miliband was and what he stood for. Born in 1924, Miliband was a Marxist intellectual and a secular-minded Jew who fled Nazi persecution with his family. As refugees in England, the Milibands lived in a working-class neighborhood and barely scraped by. His introduction to radical politics was through Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist-Zionist youth group. From there, he evolved into a Marxist academic after graduating from the London School of Economics. It is reasonable to state that Miliband was a forerunner to Leo Panitch, another Jewish Marxist academic who assumed the helm of Socialist Register after Miliband’s passing. Although many of SR’s articles become available online, it is primarily a paywalled academic journal just like New Left Review, with contributions by academic leftists writing for others in their professional orbit. I never had any idea that SR existed until getting on the Internet in 1991 at Columbia University.
Despite sharing Karl Kautsky’s rejection of socialist revolution except through parliamentary means, Miliband’s ideology reflected trends that became fashionable in the 1960s, especially state theory. Alongside Nicos Poulantzas, Miliband was preoccupied with the question of how capitalism could be superseded on a basis other than what Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, and Trotsky advocated. This is obviously the same concern that the Jacobin/DSA think-tank has given its rejection of what it regards as “insurrectionary” illusions.
In a famous debate between Poulantzas and Miliband, they offered clashing views on how a non-revolutionary strategy might work. For Miliband, the state functions to serve capitalist interests because of the class basis of the government and the personal ties and influence between members of the government and ruling-class elites. His perspective showed the influence of C. Wright Mills, who was a friend. As for Poulantzas, he offered an Althusserian analysis of the state, which prioritized “structure”. It didn’t matter which class occupied government posts. It was the capitalist system that dictated which class interests were upheld. I haven’t read much Poulantzas but his writings on fascism were persuasive, given their ability to explain how Hitler—despite his class origins—could create a system that satisfied German big business. Of course, their debate had very little impact outside of the academy.
Maisano first made the case for Miliband in a polemic against Philly Socialist’s Tim Horras in a 2019 article written for The Call, the Bread and Roses magazine. Titled “Which Way to Socialism?“, its subtitle warned against “insurrectionary strategies” as if Tim, a librarian by trade, was out drilling with an AR-15 on the weekends. Maisano cites NYU sociology professor Jeff Goodwin to make his case:
As Jeff Goodwin reminds us in his comprehensive study of twentieth century revolutions, “no popular revolutionary movement, it bears emphasizing, has ever overthrown a consolidated democratic regime”
And to drive the point home, he buttresses Goodwin with a blast from Miliband:
There has been no such ‘fit’ between revolutionary organisation and leadership and the structures and circumstances of advanced capitalism and bourgeois democracy. Another way of saying this is that advanced capitalism and bourgeois democracy have produced a working class politics which has been non-insurrectionary and indeed anti-insurrectionary; and that this is the rock on which revolutionary organisation and politics have been broken.”
Is there a possibility that highly-placed academics who spend perhaps 8 hours lecturing per week and making over $140,000 per year might not be in the best position to hold forth on the working class being non-insurrectionary? In fact, it would probably be a good idea to retire the word insurrectionary since it is such a red herring when it comes to revolutionary strategy. Marx never wrote about insurrection, after all. That was more the bailiwick of Bakunin and the anarchists who never gave much thought about drawing workers into a mass movement.
More importantly, Maisano was citing a Miliband article written in 1978 and titled “Constitutionalism and Revolution: Notes on Eurocommunism” that hardly spoke to our contemporary situation. Miliband drew a picture of “Leninist” groups that people like Bhaskar Sunkara and Chris Maisano would guffaw at:
In a broader perspective, it is obvious that conditions in advanced capitalist countries would have to become enormously worse, in ways which it is at present difficult to envisage, for the necessary basis of mass support to be engendered which would significantly advance the prospects of a “vanguard party” bent on an ultimate seizure of power. Those groupings which see themselves as embryonic (or actual) “vanguard parties” do in fact work on catastrophist assumptions, and expect that economic collapse, the replacement of bourgeois democracy by some form of authoritarianism and fascism, and even war, will eventually bring about the necessary conditions of revolutionary success and make it possible to repeat the Bolshevik scenario of 1917.
By 1978, there were few on the far left who thought in such terms. After seeing the roadside detritus of the Maoist and Trotskyist groups, most Marxists had already begun to rethink the “democratic centralist” formulas that had led to sect-cult formations. This is not to speak of the political deep freeze that could hardly be ignored with Jimmy Carter in the White House and cocaine flooding the discotheques. In essence, Miliband was beating a corpse over the head.
Even if “vanguard” parties had bitten the dust, it would have been a mistake for Miliband to view 1978 as a permanent state. Between 1978 and 2021, a period of 43 years, catastrophist assumptions and economic collapse have become realities. Keep in mind that if the Communist Manifesto seemed out of whack with bourgeois normality in 1848 (except of course for those pesky struggles against feudal remains), 1889—41 years later—would have set the stage for the imperialist rivalries that would bring capitalism crashing to its knees in 1914.
This, of course, is the fatal flaw of Jacobin/DSA. It expects to see a renaissance of the Scandinavian welfare states when they are already being dismantled. Even with Joe Biden’s bailout and proposals for a massive infrastructure investment, we are facing a Sixth Extinction according to some of the world’s leading scientists. Does anybody expect that such catastrophic threats can be overcome by electing liberal Democrats, even if they like to call themselves socialists?
Whatever Miliband’s flaws, respects have to be paid for his insistence on the need for socialism. Just like Leon Panitch and Sam Gindin’s Socialist Project, Ralph Miliband created the Socialist Society in 1981 in collaboration with Raymond Williams to help launch a socialist party that could challenge both Labour and the Conservatives. The Socialist Society involved New Left Review leaders like Tariq Ali and worked closely with the British Trotskyists of the Ernest Mandel-led Fourth International. Like Peter Camejo’s efforts to develop a non-sectarian left in the USA, it was a product of its time. Unfortunately, the Socialist Project and before it The Socialist Society lacked the foot-soldiers of a mass movement to turn this dream into a reality. You can see the harbingers of such a mass movement in BLM that most leftists identify with, even if Jacobin/DSA continues to provide a platform for Adolph Reed Jr.’s academic sect that warns about BLM being a tool of the corporate elite rather than the most important Black struggle organization since the 1960s.
Turning now to Maisano’s latest on Ralph Miliband, an article written for the DSA magazine titled “A Left That Matters” (a briefer version appears in Jacobin), it restates the Jacobin/DSA think-tank’s by-now calcified support for the Democratic Party:
I was more sympathetic to arguments against tactical use of the Democratic line before the catalytic effects of the Sanders campaigns became fully clear. But the political developments of the last few years have effectively settled the Democratic Party question, at least for now. Whether we like it or not, working-class organizers will continue to use major party primaries so long as they exist and bear fruit. Though the Democratic Party establishment proved to be cohesive enough on a national level to defeat Sanders’ 2020 primary campaign, traditional party organizations at the state and local levels are, to a significant extent, moribund and hollowed out. In many cases they cannot effectively defend themselves and their incumbents, and can’t depose insurgents after they win office through election on the Democratic Party ballot line.
After this bedraggled post-Michael Harrington argument is put forward, Maisano summons up the ghost of Ralph Miliband to give it the stamp of authority. Once again, we hear about the sectarian left as if it were 1971 or so: “The political currents which flow from the Leninist and Trotskyist traditions are exhausted. They cannot break out of their debilitating marginality because their strategic orientation is fundamentally incompatible with the political and social conditions of advanced, welfare-state capitalism and bourgeois democracy.” For Christ’s sake, who is this directed at? Like a creature from outer space, particularly the green Jell-O like monster in “The Blob”, the DSA has already absorbed the ISO and is about gobble up Socialist Alternative for dessert.
Maisano would have us read Ralph Miliband’s 1976 article titled “Moving On” just to make sure that we have learned our lesson properly:
The political currents which flow from the Leninist and Trotskyist traditions are exhausted. They cannot break out of their debilitating marginality because their strategic orientation is fundamentally incompatible with the political and social conditions of advanced, welfare-state capitalism and bourgeois democracy. In the U.S. context, they are further constrained by an aversion to electoral action as well as a dogmatic sectarianism regarding the Democratic Party.
If you take the trouble to read Miliband’s article, you’ll see that much of it is directed against the Labour Party. Indeed, most of his career, as I pointed out earlier, was devoted to creating a non-sectarian socialist party that would finally leave the dead-end of Fabian Socialism behind. Just substitute the words “Democratic Party” for “Labour Party” and you’ll understand why poor Ralph Miliband would be spinning in his grave if he was aware of the words Chris Maisano put in his mouth, so much so that a transformer attached to his big toe could probably serve Phoenix, Arizona’s electrical needs for six months at least. This is not to speak of the fact that Labour broke with the Liberal Party in England, their equivalent of the Democratic Party. Oh, did I mention that Eric Blanc advocates staying with the Democrats for as long as possible based on the “success” of Labour only breaking with the Liberals after far too many years of tail-ending a capitalist party?
Inevitably, one must start with the Labour Party. There cannot now be many socialists in the Labour Party (and even fewer outside) who believe that most of its leaders are concerned with the task of effecting the ‘fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families’ of which the Labour Manifesto spoke in 1974. But there are many socialists in the Labour Party who do believe very firmly that they can eventually and by dint of great pressure compel their leaders to adopt left-wing policies and even to translate these policies into practice; or alternatively that they can bring to the leadership of the Labour Party men and women who will want to adopt and put into practice such policies.
There is no point in rehearsing here arguments which have been endlessly canvassed as to whether this is a realistic prospect or not. That controversy has gone on for three quarters of a century, that is ever since the Labour Party came into existence; and insofar as it cannot be conclusively proved that the Labour Party will not in any serious sense be turned in socialist directions, the chances are that the controversy will go on for a long time to come, without leading anywhere. My own view, often reiterated, is that the belief in the effective transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of socialist policies is the most crippling of all illusions to which socialists in Britain have been prone. But this is not what I propose to argue yet again here. It will be more useful to take up some of the more important considerations which are commonly advanced by socialists for working in the Labour Party, whatever the odds, and for not looking farther afield.
March 22, 2021
A Short History of the Syrian Conflict
COUNTERPUNCH, MARCH 22, 2021
When the Arab Spring came to the Middle East ten years ago, most on the left welcomed the protests, except in Libya and Syria largely out of geopolitical concerns. If the world was made up of opposing camps, you had to support Washington’s enemies even if their secret police were torturers and their governments little more than family dynasties. Libya was far more up-front about being the wholly-owned property of the Gaddafi clan but didn’t Syria have elections? Most notably, you can find references to Bashar al-Assad being re-elected to President in 2014 with close to 90 percent of the vote, a seeming anomaly given the depth of the civil war.
It turns out that he did even better in 2007, when he got 97.29 of the vote, a total redolent of Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman’s studies of demonstration elections. But you had to avoid making such a charge since you didn’t want Assad to be mistaken with José Napoleón Duarte’s victory in El Salvador in 1984. He got 54 percent of the vote but—who knows—maybe Assad deserved such overwhelming support. Yes, it’s true that it wasn’t exactly an election but a referendum on whether he should take over for his father after Hafez’s death that year. With word of posters being plastered on Damascus’s walls and songs blaring from cars and loudspeakers “We love you”, who could deny his popularity? Of course, anybody caught writing graffiti on the walls denouncing such a rigged election might end up hanging upside down in a police station and beaten for hours. That would the norm in 2011, when Syrians lost their fear.
Between 2007 and 2011, not much attention was paid to Syria. For many, the charms of the country were irresistible. Visits to Damascus and Aleppo were a perfect alternative to the usual resort spots. What could be more fun than strolling through the bazaars in search of cheap rugs? Even after the country had been torn apart by civil war, you could always count on Vanessa Beeley and Max Blumenthal to report back on the glories of the nightlife and their favorite hotels.
March 18, 2021
Whither DSA/Jacobin?
A word of explanation about the title of this article. It is shorthand for Jacobin and the Bread and Roses Caucus in DSA, overlapping entities as Doug Henwood pointed out in a New Republic article:
There are six votes from the Bread and Roses caucus on DSA’s national political committee (NPC), effectively its board of directors, not quite a third of the total of 19, giving the caucus a serious, if not dominant, presence. Two of them are on the Jacobin masthead (Chris Maisano and Ella Mahony), and another prominent Bread and Roses member, Micah Uetricht, is the magazine’s managing editor. The strong presence on the NPC and the affiliation with Jacobin, the most influential publication on the American socialist left these days, gets people to talking about a sect with its own propaganda arm plotting to control the organization.
Probably most DSA’ers don’t have a clue about this ideological bloc and are content to carry out worthy struggles in the hundreds of chapters around the country but it is worrisome that people with so much power over Jacobin, the de facto official journal of the DSA, can set the tone for the organization.
Lately, several articles came to my attention that reflect a deepening rightward dynamic in DSA that this bloc might push at the same time there is a rise in the class struggle in the USA. It is as if they believed it was still 1964, Johnson was in the White House, and Bayard Rustin had the Democratic Party’s fawning attention. This social democratic wet-dream is the sort of thing you’d expect to see in Dissent, not a magazine that is named after French revolutionaries who waged a bloody class struggle against feudal institutions.
Behind a paywall in the latest Jacobin, there’s an article by Dustin Guastella titled “Everyone Hates the Democrats” that reduces the party’s woes to focusing on the affluent, progressive-minded suburbs rather than the white, blue-collar bastions that exist mostly in Guastella’s imagination as if steel and auto defined the American economy rather than Amazon. I use the word white even though it is implicit throughout the article.
Basically, there’s not much difference between his recommendations and what Columbia professor Mark Lilla wrote in “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.” It is also what Thomas Frank argued in “Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?” These frequent guests on cable talk shows warn the Democratic Party that unless it dumps “identity politics” and prioritizes white working-class interests (white is implied, not stated for obvious reasons), the Republicans will continue to win elections.
This nostalgia for the Great Society when white workers were attached to the Democratic Party as if they rooting for the home team lasted long after the objective conditions had ceased to exist as a result of runaway shops, NAFTA, and all the other neoliberal policies both Democrats and Republicans had supported.
You can get a good idea of how attached Jacobin/DSA is to this notion of the good old days of DP and white working-class comity from a recent article commemorating John Sweeney, the former head of the AFL-CIO who hoped to reignite the Great Society. Titled “John Sweeney: The Man Who Wanted to Be a ‘Big Labor’ Leader” and written by John Yeselson, it rapturously described “The Fight for America’s Future: A Teach-in with the Labor Movement,” held at Columbia University in October 1996 as an event that was to mark the reunification of leftist intellectuals and academics with much of organized labor, “a coalition that had foundered during the sclerosis of the ’50s.” A real Jacobin/DSA wet dream.
You might remember that 1996 was the same year that a movement to build a Labor Party was launched in the USA by progressive trade union leaders. Like Sweeney’s teach-in, it led nowhere. You are not going to see a revitalized labor movement until you see people at the bottom being moved into action by insufferable conditions. On February 18th, the NY Times Sunday magazine described just such a possibility in an article titled “Amazon’s Great Labor Awakening” that drew an analogy between the 1930s and today:
Throughout history, and especially during the Great Depression, company towns also became central hubs for labor movements. In 1936, General Motors, with its main plants in Flint, Mich., was the biggest automaker and the most profitable company in America. It had 262,000 employees at 57 plants across North America. In his book, “There Is Power in a Union,” Philip Dray writes that Flint “had long been a company town — its workers, elected officials and even its daily press loyal to the town’s majority employer.” The General Motors president at the time “may not have fully grasped the extent to which the individuals who manned the assembly lines in the big auto plants had grown frustrated by the increasing levels of automation and the speedups that disregarded their needs as human beings.”
On Dec. 30, 1936, workers at two G.M. Fisher Body plants in Flint “simply stopped working” during a peak busy season, according to Dray. This strike “would be the first large-scale use of the sit-down, a tactic to which automobile assembly lines were especially vulnerable because manufacturing in the auto industry was based on the continuous flow of production.”
Like the Depression-era strikes in those G.M. plants, today’s labor movement has been fueled by a national crisis. Reese, of U.C. Riverside, led a team of students in interviewing 47 former and current Amazon employees throughout the Inland Empire about living and working conditions. When the pandemic began, Reese noticed labor activity spike in ways that mirrored historical patterns. Even when unemployment was at a high during the Great Depression, people were still organizing, “despite the risks of getting fired and replaced.”
Turning now to Guastella’s article, you get the obligatory swipe at the “woke” activists who regularly get spanked by Tucker Carlson and Matt Taibbi. They “embrace…niche cultural attitudes found only in highly educated urban districts and among Twitter users — 80 percent of whom are affluent millennials.” Despite his aversion to their pretensions, he admits that they make up the activist core that goes out to ring doorbells for democratic socialists. Yet at what terrible costs:
Winning the loyalty of the majority of working people in this country will require breaking out of the existing liberal fortresses and appealing to workers across our massive continental democracy. But pairing a popular economic program with alienating rhetoric, chic activist demands, and identity-based group appeals only weakens the possibility of doing so.
Later on, he spells out his orientation versus that of the woke, suburban, quiche-eating, white-wine drinking viewers of MSNBC:
According to a report from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, Democratic-leaning working-class voters ranked their top five issues as follows: health care, social security, Medicare, the economy, and jobs. But liberal professionals listed theirs as: environment, climate change, health care, education, and racial equality.
Get it? Racial equality is backed by liberal professionals but not Democratic-leaning working-class voters. What’s missing from this word association game? The word “white” before Democratic-leaning. I mean, really, why would any self-respecting white worker who voted for Trump now vote for a Democrat who made a stink about racial equality with all those buildings being burned during the George Floyd protests?
You can understand where Guastella is coming from. Last year he wrote an article that attempted to clarify the question of whether cops are racists. Written naturally for Adolph Reed Jr’s Nonsite, it takes aim at “woke” demands such as defunding the police that alienate construction workers and those working in aerospace, etc. For a thorough dismantling of this article, I recommend Peter Ikeler’s reply to Guastella in Spectre titled “To End Police Violence, End Racial Capitalism”. He exposes the faulty data used by Guastella and ends his article with this pithy observation: “Guastella is clear where he falls on these questions. The DSA and the wider left should make it equally clear where such anti-activist sentiments and class reductionism belong: in a goddamn trash can.”
The practical policy recommendations that come out of Guastella’s article are that workers should run for office in the Democratic Party. He names Mark Pocan, a longtime member of the painters’ union, and Donald Norcross, the House’s only electrician, who have recently announced a new labor caucus in Congress that could inspire other workers to run. Like the “squad”, such representatives are never going to become dominant in a capitalist party that learned 100 years ago at least how to co-opt the left. It’s really a shame that James Clyburn and Nancy Pelosi have a stronger grasp of the class differences that will keep such workers impotent than someone writing for Jacobin.
Most importantly, how is Jacobin/DSA supposed to relate to the most important labor struggle since the Flint sit-down strike when one of its leading spokesman ties racial equality to woke suburbanites? Anybody who has been following this mainly black-led organizing drive at Amazon realizes that it is joined at the hip to long-standing struggles in the South for racial equality.
An PBS article titled “Black Lives Matter backs Amazon union push in Alabama” fills in the details:
Organizers trying to form the first union at an Amazon warehouse are getting support from another big name: Black Lives Matter.
The group plans to hold an event Saturday near the warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, making it the latest high-profile supporter of the union push, which is the biggest in Amazon’s nearly 30-year history.
Most of the workers in the warehouse are Black, according to union organizers, and the backing from Black Lives Matter could help further legitimize the cause. Besides higher pay, organizers are also asking for more break time and for Amazon to treat workers with respect.
“Black workers have historically been the backbone of this country, its institutions, and innovations,” said Patrisse Cullors, the executive director of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, in a statement. “Therefore, it is fully within our rights and dignity that we be treated and compensated fairly. Just as we have the right to live, we also have the right to work.”
In the same issue of Jacobin, you can find an article by Chris Maisano, who is on DSA’s national political committee (NPC) that Doug Henwood described as effectively its board of directors. Titled “A Left that Matters”, it is a de facto editorial introduction to the issue.
After reaffirming the wisdom of backing candidates of the Democratic Party, Maisano brings up the question of revolution in the USA. Given the pandemic and a continuing economic crisis, one might think that this highly placed democratic socialist apparatchik might be giving it some new consideration. But no, instead it is a return to what apparently works, building the leftwing of the Democratic Party:
Even if we witness state breakdown or systemic collapse in the coming years, an eventuality many base builders take as given, it’s likely they won’t be able to take advantage of the situation because their strategy will keep them too small and isolated beforehand. Why should the desperate masses turn to organizations they’ve never heard of for salvation?
The failure of revolutionary socialism to grow even in the midst of major capitalist crises underscores its lapse into futility. But just because “Marxist reformism” is the only road available to us doesn’t mean it won’t be filled with potholes, switchbacks, and other drivers trying to run us off a cliff.
What a statement! If there is state breakdown or systemic collapse in the coming years, don’t count on small groups involved with base-building to play a role because they will be to small and isolated beforehand. So we can’t count on them to lead a revolution.
What about the DSA, which will likely have 200,000 members by then and continue to be lionized in the NY Times, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, The Nation, Field and Stream, and Motor Trend? Sorry, they’ll be too busy ringing doorbells for Democrats, not lending their massive numbers and influence to build a revolutionary movement.
Finally, saving best for last, we come to Eric Blanc, the éminence grise of the DSA and neo-Kautskyite par excellence. In a Jacobin article not behind a paywall, he advises that “The Birth of the Labour Party Has Many Lessons for Socialists Today”. In it, he reminds us that the Conservative and Liberal Parties in England amounted to a two-party system similar to our Republican and Democratic Parties until the trade unions and socialists were able to carry out a “dirty break” and form the Labour Party.
Like the DSA, the British radicals who believed in class independence patiently bored away in the innards of the Liberal Party until they had reached a critical mass capable of forming the party that would fight for socialism, even if according to Fabian Society nostrums. These radicals were referred to as lib-labs.
Our counterparts back then considered lib-lab politics as an exercise in futility. Blanc writes:
Some leftist critics lambasted Liberal-Labour MPs for their ties to a capitalist party, arguing that their moniker itself was a contradiction, “as if a man could be a sober drunkard.” While it’s true that their identification with a business-led party muddied their political independence, such condemnations of the Lib-Labs were short-sighted.
Have patience, Blanc advises:
Whatever their limitations, Liberal-Labour representatives did constitute a distinct working-class current in national political life and, as such, a step forward in the process of class formation. Flash forward to today and you can see a similar process unfolding with democratic socialists recently elected to local, statewide, and national office on the Democratic Party ballot line. Like in the UK, a consistent growth in the US left’s electoral power over the coming years will necessarily put us on a collision course with the tens-of-thousands of Democratic politicians and operatives whose careers and prestige depend on preserving the status quo.
Missing entirely from this utterly self-serving flim-flam is any engagement with the question of whether a “dirty break” resulted in anything except a dirty Labour Party. The Labour Party that emerged out of the bowels of the Liberal Party was led by people who make Joe Biden look like Che Guevara.
More than any other party at the time, it was the poster child for reformism. Indeed, the Fabian Society that gave its name to Fabianism, the doctrine of reformism par excellence, was one of the major architects of Labour Party ideology.
Labour essentially was a kind of hybrid political formation like one of those half-man/half-animals from Greek mythology. It was midwifed by Liberal Party figures who superimposed their Christian/free market dogma on a nascent socialist formation that, unlike other Social Democratic parties, especially Kautsky’s, had little engagement with Marxism. Frustrated with the Liberal Party’s concessions to the Tories in Parliament, the Fabians and the Independent Labour Party founded the Labour Party in 1900, with its main purpose to put pressure on the Liberal Party from the left. In a way, the strategy was similar to the DSA’s hope of serving as the Tea Party of the left, even though they have never articulated this as such, to my knowledge.
Instead of being led by a fire-breathing radical like Eugene V. Debs, the Labour Party was in the hands of Ramsey MacDonald who promised that when it became a minority government in 1923 with backing from the Liberals it would “not be influenced…by any other consideration other than the national well-being.” His colonial minister, a former railway union leader named J.H. Thomas, promised that there would be “no mucking about with the British Empire”.
In 1926, the Tories were in power again and facing a general strike led by coal miners. Despite Labour’s institutional ties to Labour and MacDonald’s vow to back them in their struggle, he wilted under pressure and told Parliament that “with the discussion of general strikes and Bolshevism and all that kind of thing, I have nothing to do at all.”
Is this what the Jacobin/DSA is aspiring to? Comrade Blanc sounds more like Irving Howe in his seventies than the perpetually cap-wearing young socialist image he carefully cultivates. I just don’t get it. I became a socialist in 1967 and remain committed to the same principles I had 53 years ago, even if I have dropped the “Leninism”.
He, on the other hand, started off as a member of an obscure Trotskyist sect maybe a decade ago that his father led and then joined the ISO. His politics at the time are reflected in the video above. After a brief time in the ISO, he migrates to the DSA where he dispenses with their class-based opposition to the Democratic Party and becomes an advocate of the “dirty break”, trying to adapt Karl Kautsky’s Marxism to the USA. Eventually, the neo-Kautskyism goes by the wayside and he now identifies with the men who founded the Labour Party. My head is spinning at these ideological mutations. How deep were convictions picked up and cast aside like fast fashion from Zara? I guess given the cap that must be cemented to his head by Gorilla Glue, the politics are easier to pick up and then discard.
March 16, 2021
Genocide and Survival
I moderated this panel discussion this afternoon. I think it went very well.
March 14, 2021
A Simple Explanation of Black Holes
Louis N. Proyect:
I was trying to follow a one-hour lecture on Black Holes [podcast] but gave up after fifteen minutes and switched to Jay Leno’s garage to hear what he had to say about the 1955 Packard Caribbean.
Manuel García, Jr.:
Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” is a pretty good book about it, for the general public.
Theoretically, Black Holes are a consequence of Einstein’s General Relativity (the effect of gravity on space-time): with enough concentrated mass, and insufficient thermal-nuclear energy generation (a star uses up its “fuel”) to keep that mass puffed out, its mutual gravity draws it into a spherical center, and since mass-gravity “curves” space-time (an effect that diminishes with radial distance from the center) and since space-time curvature is expressed/observed as the bending of light rays; at a particular radial distance (the Schwarzschild Radius) light rays are curved completely by 360 degrees – into circles.
March 12, 2021
Socially Relevant Film Festival 2021
COUNTERPUNCH, MARCH 12, 2021
Starting next Monday and ending on Sunday March 21st, the Socially Relevant Film Festival will present dozens of films through a virtual theater. Like last year, the pandemic has had an impact not only on this festival but all theaters in New York that cater to leading edge independent work. The big commercial theaters like AMC have opened under conditions of social distancing but the best leading-edge houses like Film Forum are streaming only. On the plus side, people everywhere will be able to see SR Festival films for $7 each, with a festival ticket available for $75. If you need any motivation to see one or all the films and have also found yourself appreciating films I recommended on CounterPunch, let me repeat my testimonial to the SR Film Festival in 2015. I would only add the words “unending economic crisis and pandemic”:
I had an epiphany: “socially relevant” films have a higher storytelling quotient than Hollywood’s for the simple reason that they are focused on the lives of ordinary people whose hopes and plight we can identify with. With a commercial film industry increasingly insulated from the vicissitudes of an unending economic crisis, it is only “socially relevant” films that demand our attention and even provide entertainment after a fashion. When the subjects of the film are involved in a cliffhanging predicament, we care about the outcome as opposed to the Hollywood film where the heroes confront Mafia gangsters, CIA rogues or zombies as if in a video game.
The four documentaries s under review below constitute just a tiny minority of the festival offerings. As is universally the case, I found all of them compelling. Except for the last, they deal with issues close to my heart and I suspect that they will be close to yours as well.
The Boys Who Said NO! (Monday, March 15, 4:00 PM)
Directed by Judith Ehrlich, who made the superlative “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” in 2009, the film is a history of the anti-draft movement that began in 1964 and lasted until 1972. While focused on the civil disobedience wing of the antiwar movement, it also serves as a terrific overview of the war and a reminder of why people my age were willing to go to prison for up to five years for burning a draft card or joining a “subversive” organization and risk careers because of a COINTELPRO. Hoover’s FBI provocations even caught me in its web.
March 10, 2021
A Short History of Uighur Resistance
COUNTERPUNCH, MARCH 9, 2021
In a by now familiar pattern, Grayzone has taken up the cause of a powerful and oppressive state against a weaker enemy using a geopolitical litmus test. Since the USA has invaded and occupied dozens of Third World countries for over two hundred years, there’s no point in taking the side of any oppressed nationality or ethnic group since willy-nilly they are acting on behalf of Wall Street, the CIA, NATO, George Soros, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
Why bother looking at the deeper historical roots of a conflict when all you need to do is dredge up some evidence that the State Department has paid off some dissidents. Long before Max Blumenthal and his cohorts launched Grayzone, Michel Chossudovsky had perfected this methodology at Global Research. When young people filled Tahrir Square in Cairo to demand the overthrow of Mubarak, Tony Cartalucci took Mubarak’s side in a Global Research article because the National Endowment for Democracy had funneled some cash to his opponents. I am surprised that Chossudovsky did not sue Grayzone for the theft of intellectual property.
