Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

December 30, 2019

Richard Greener (1941-2019): a good friend passes on

Filed under: bard college,obituary — louisproyect @ 6:40 pm

For regular readers of this blog, you might recall references to Richard Greener over the years. I’ve reviewed his first novel in the Locator series titled “The Knowland Intervention” and conducted three interviews with him, one of which had him sharing thoughts with Jeffrey Marlin, who has also made several appearances here.

A week ago I learned that Richard had died. He was 78 and living on borrowed time for many years as a heart transplant recipient. An entry for Richard in Encyclopedia.com explains how he became a novelist late in life:

A series of heart attacks in the 1980s sidelined former broadcast industry executive Richard Greener, and over the next decade his health deteriorated to the point that he was confined to bed and named to a heart transplant list. The desire to write fiction came out of a need to alleviate the boredom of bed rest and the pain associated with his heart condition. “I was able to sit at my computer, particularly at night, and avoid chest pains by sitting up straight and writing, it was a great help,” Greener told ForeWord Magazine editor Cymbre Foster. In 2006, his brother-in-law sent Greener’s manuscripts to some agents, and within nine months a publisher agreed to print two completed novels. It was around this time that Greener’s transplant came through, and he was able to celebrate his books’ publication with a new heart.

As for the “broadcast industry” reference, Richard was the president of WAOK in Atlanta, Georgia for decades—a radio station serving the needs of the city’s Black community, whose success was helped by the skills of a white Jew. When Richard used to show up at Black radio conferences, the audience was always surprised to see that its legendary president was not Black. If you want to hear Richard expound on the vicissitudes of radio, the interview below is very much worth listening to. As someone who grew up loving radio, his words as an insider meant a lot to me. Immediately beneath it is an interview I conducted with Richard about James Brown, a business associate of his for many years.

And just beneath that is an interview with Richard and Jeffrey Marlin, who has been a friend for 58 years after I began following him around like a puppy dog at Bard College as a freshman in 1961. Jeffrey and Richard started Bard four years earlier as freshman, so their friendship went back 62 years.

Jeffrey and Richard were two of the leading lights of what we used to call “old Bardians”. This meant representatives of the culture at the college Walter Winchell called “the little red whorehouse on the Hudson”. I can say it was little but not much of a whorehouse or red. The student body was just over 400 and most students were apolitical. What politics there were depended a lot on the initiatives taken by Richard, Jeffrey and the iconoclasts around them. In 1961, they came up with the brilliant idea of forming the Welcome the Bomb Committee that was a reaction to Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s mandatory fallout shelter proposals. They told Bard students that if we welcomed the bomb, it would be less hostile. A ceremony was held on the quad that was culminated by Peter Barney firing off a miniature cannon that he brought back from a sailboat trip around the world. You could hear the thing going off across the Hudson river. The student newspaper reported on the rally:

Welcome Bomb Rally Held Here

The Welcome the Bomb Committee held its first community assembly on the lawn in front of the gym on Sunday, October 1. Grand Imperial Wizard Jeff Marlin presided over the ceremonies, which opened with a cannonade supplied by the deft broomstick of Peter Barney. Chaplain Aaron Goldstein intoned the invocation. He invoked the blessings of the Great Bomb, Lord of Hosts, calling for it to descend to earth quickly so that it might receive a suitably ecstatic reception. Wizard Marlin then made a brief speech outlining the Committee’s policies. He said that if a man arrived at a party in his best attire and found the guests diving under sofas and into closets upon his appearance, he would certainly feel hurt and angry. Similarly, Marlin said, the Bomb is deeply saddened at our frantic preparations for shelters and alarm systems. Unless we make haste to welcome it joyfully, it will come to us in anger. “If we welcome the Bomb,” said Wizard Marlin, “the Bomb will welcome us. If we are hostile to the Bomb, the Bomb will be hostile to us. A hurt Bomb is a hostile Bomb.” Marlin also stated that the Committee was against fresh-man regulations. He refused to clarify this statement. Choral Director Richard Greener next led the audience in a rendition of the Committee’s anthem, “Welcome the Bomb.” Orchestral Director Bob Marrow accompanied on the recorder. Grand Fusilier Barney then set off another symbolic holocaust, and Chaplain Goldstein concluded the ceremonies with the Benediction.

I barely knew Richard at Bard. He lived in Albee dorm with Jeffrey and me but on an upper floor. In my mind’s eye, I can see him walking down the steps wearing blue jeans, a blue denim work-shirt and a green corduroy jacket, usually on his way to the pool hall on campus with a scowl on his face. He was an ace pool player—that’s my strongest memory of him at the time.

It was only after I graduated and moved to New York that I got to know him a bit better. By 1967, I had become a fire-breathing Trotskyist and anxious to convert others to my beliefs. One afternoon I agreed to help Richard move to a new apartment and accompanied him and Jeffrey in a U-Haul van they had rented. For the entire day, I proceeded to give my proletarian revolution spiel to Richard. Jeffrey had heard this numerous times and was smart enough to tune me out. After I was finished, Richard confessed that he found it convincing and worrisome even if he had no intention of going within six feet of the SWP. I only wish that I could turn the clock back and been as skeptical as them.

Both of them came from socialist households, to one extent or another. Richard’s dad was in the CP and Jeffrey’s was a labor lawyer for the SP-dominated garment workers union. Like many Bard students, rebellion was expressed much more in terms of culture than class struggle. Since I was so much in awe of upperclassmen like them, I was willing to forsake my conservative politics just to be socially accepted.

Both Jeffrey and Richard made a trip to Nicaragua in the late 80s as part of a Tecnica delegation. Although I did not join them, I was happy to hear that they made contacts with Sandinista radio management even though a project never materialized.

This was around the time that Richard’s health began to decline and his trips to New York dwindled. Each time he came up, I was always happy to talk to him. As you can tell from the interview I did with the both of them, they remained larger than life well into their seventies.

Over the past ten years or so, I shared two or three phone calls a year or so with Richard—partly to offer some companionship during the shut-in required by his heart transplant and partly to listen to a unique and charismatic personality. Since he took medication to desensitize his immune system from rejecting a foreign organ, it came at a cost. Every time he went out to a concert or any other event with lots of people close by, he always ran the risk of suffering some communicable disease. Despite the drawbacks, including a horrific recovery period after the transplant that he documented here, it was a vast improvement over dying from heart disease 30 or 40 years ago.

For all of the well-deserved contempt that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg deserve, it does provide a social foundation that allows people like Richard to stay in touch with friends. Of all the people who I knew from Facebook, Richard’s comments always were always most welcome even when we disagreed.

This was his last post on FB and well worth including as a measure of his intelligence and humanity:

Common to all human thought, I think, two areas stand alone obliterating truth and fact and instead overwhelmed by lies and invention. They are, of course, Love and History. Love I leave to the memoirists, who truth be told, are little more than novelists writing about themselves. But, History provides the core of most human belief, and here with apologies to my Native American friends (if I had any) is the real story of Thanksgiving, first published about 10 years ago but still worth reading every year and especially to be remembered as the NFL shamelessly thanks the American military for the freedom to play football.

The True Story Of Thanksgiving
By Richard Greener
Novelist, writer, author of The Locator novels, basis of the FOX TV series “The Finder”.
11/25/2010 10:04am EST | Updated November 22, 2016

This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

The idea of the American Thanksgiving feast is a fairly recent fiction. The idyllic partnership of 17th Century European Pilgrims and New England Indians sharing a celebratory meal appears to be less than 120 years-old. And it was only after the First World War that a version of such a Puritan-Indian partnership took hold in elementary schools across the American landscape. We can thank the invention of textbooks and their mass purchase by public schools for embedding this “Thanksgiving” image in our modern minds. It was, of course, a complete invention, a cleverly created slice of cultural propaganda, just another in a long line of inspired nationalistic myths.

Continue reading

 

December 29, 2019

Theodore Postol: Assad was responsible for deadly chlorine attack in Syria

Filed under: Syria — louisproyect @ 12:03 am

WHAT HAPPENED IN DOUMA? SEARCHING FOR FACTS IN THE FOG OF SYRIA’S PROPAGANDA WAR

The Intercept, February 9 2019, 2:32 p.m.

That dropping chlorine gas canisters might be a terror weapon and not a “kill” weapon makes sense. Unlike sarin, which is a colorless, odorless liquid that often kills its victims even before they know they’ve been attacked, chlorine, at least as it’s been used in improvised munitions in Syria doesn’t usually kill; its victims can smell, see, and sometimes even hear it coming, and they run as fast as they can in the other direction. Many Syrians living in rebel-held areas, prepped by rebels or aid workers, know that chlorine is denser than air and quickly sinks, which is why it might find its way so easily from the roof down to the basement. The presence of chlorine might also explain something Abo Salah, the Douma Revolution cameraperson, had told me. The apartment attack site is only 150 meters from the huge tunnel I’d seen by the emergency medical ward and close to an entrance to that tunnel. The toxic gases, he said, “leaked to the main medical center via the tunnel, which contained hundreds of families fleeing the shelling.”

The trajectory taken by chlorine gas and its cloying visibility might also explain why, according to Nasser Hanan, most of his family had run back inside the building to their deaths. When I showed videos of the canisters to Theodore Postol in Boston, he was immediately certain that both had been launched from the sky by the Syrian military and that any “brouhaha” from the Russians to the contrary could be safely ignored. Postol, professor emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy at MIT, is a controversial figure in Syria analysis. Earlier in the conflict his work querying accounts from the OPCW and the UN about the use of sarin in two infamous gas attacks made him deeply unpopular among many Syria analysts, including Higgins, who felt that his analysis wrongly let Assad off the hook for war crimes. Postol, however, has many years of experience analyzing munitions, including the relative efficacy of Saddam Hussein’s SCUD missiles and U.S. Patriot anti-missiles during the first Gulf War. More recently, together with his late colleague Richard Lloyd, he’s devoted considerable attention to the development of improvised munitions in Syria, including chlorine canister bombs. When I showed him the Douma footage, he immediately concurred with the analysis of internet investigators like Higgins, with whom he often ferociously disagrees. The canister, he reckoned, would have weighed around 250 pounds and carried about 120 kilos of chorine. But it landed in an entirely unexpected way. Since the concrete-and-steel-mesh roof wasn’t very strong, the bomb punched a hole in the ceiling. The effect was as if the nose of the canister had been deliberately rammed into the external wall, so as to point gas directly into the room below, creating a gas chamber. That room would have filled with chlorine in one or two minutes. Drawing on Forensic Architecture’s modeling of the building onto which it fell, Postol estimated that the chlorine gas would have poured out into the upper floor at a magnitude several hundred times higher than a lethal dose, its density much greater because the release occurred in an enclosed space. As it made its way down into the two floors below, its density would have decreased, but still would have been much more than enough for a lethal dose.

When it filled the building, the chlorine would have spilled out via open windows and doors and then drifted along the street, like a thick fog, at much lower concentrations. As it sank through the building, the residents hunkered down in the basement would have smelled it too. Many likely ran headfirst onto the street, only to be confronted by a chlorine gas cloud forming all around them. Instinct and training likely kicked in; since chlorine is thicker than air, the instructions they’d been given would have been to head for the roof. Under most circumstances, this would have been excellent advice, like the injunction to workers at the World Trade Center on 9/11 to stay put at their desks, but in this case, it failed the residents of Douma. As they ran back upward through the building, they’d have been rendered unconscious very quickly and dead within minutes. Delivered at that kind of dosage — thousands of milligrams per cubic meter — chlorine could easily have caused the frothing at the mouth, skin burns, and damaged corneas observed by medical workers, as well as the horrible smell and breathing difficulties of which residents complained. It also makes sense of what the motorbike rider had told me: that the whole street had been affected by the foul odor. To panic and terrorize the population was, after all, what this was for.

The murderous result, concluded Postol, was “a very peculiar set of circumstances” and a terrible twist of fate. If the building had had been larger with a firmer roof, the balcony canister would probably not have fallen through; even if it had broken open and begun dispersing its payload, the chlorine would have wafted off into the open air and likely not injured anyone. If the roof had been even weaker and the canister had fallen right through onto the third floor, its valve might not have opened at all, like the one on the bed. But because of the way the canister punctured the concrete, its valve snapped so as to spew the contents directly into the enclosed space below. A lot of stars would have had to align for something like this to happen, just as the former OPCW inspector had said. But in this case, they did.

[Postol no longer holds these views, a clear indication that anything he says had to be taken with a grain of salt.]

Continue reading

December 27, 2019

Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care

Filed under: Counterpunch,Ecology — louisproyect @ 4:35 pm

COUNTERPUNCH, DECEMBER 27, 2019

In the recently published “Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care,” Giorgos Kallis tackles weighty and expansive topics in merely 156 pages. One cannot help but wonder if his brevity (the soul of wit, after all) was in keeping with the book’s theme—how humanity can live an abundant life within material limits.

Kallis is a research professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), who has made both theoretical and practical contributions to environmentalism. In addition to writing articles in defense of “degrowth,” he worked for the European Parliament’s Science and Technological Options Assessment Unit for the preparation of the EU Water Framework Directive.

“Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong” is a critique of Malthusianism, as put forward in the 1798 “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” It also refutes the “neo-Malthusian” writings of Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome. Since the Club of Rome issued a report titled “The Limits to Growth” in 1972, one has to wonder why a degrowth advocate would be its critic. The answer is that Malthus and neo-Malthusianism are entirely different animals.

Continue reading

WSWS, Sean Wilentz, and the Star Spangled Banner

Filed under: racism — louisproyect @ 12:47 am

Francis Scott Key, who composed the Star Spangled Banner, owned slaves. He was a close political ally of fellow slave-owner Andrew Jackson, an icon of democracy according to Sean Wilentz

Without question, this assault on the NY Times Project 1619 is being co-led by WSWS contributor Tom Mackaman and Princeton professor Sean Wilentz. There’s some fancy footwork going on with Mackaman working with the professors who signed Wilentz’s open letter attacking the project and Wilentz lining up support among those who share his liberal Democratic Party politics. Even though it is a united front between the sectarian lunatics of the Socialist Equality Party and the Princeton don who is a close friend of the Clintons and hates any politician to their left, the WSWS is shrewd enough not to solicit an interview with Wilentz since that would give away their sordid game.

In my previous post on this controversy, I referred to Wilentz’s recently published “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding”. This book is consistent with the contents of the open letter that is so upset about Nikole Hannah-Jones’s saying that racism is in the USA’s DNA. That formulation is not that different from the universally acclaimed observation from H. Rap Brown that violence is as American as apple pie. Maybe, if these white professors grew up in the same circumstances as Hannah-Jones’s father, they’d understand her anger:

My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white plantation in Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over cotton from can’t-see-in-the-morning to can’t-see-at-night, just as their enslaved ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was an apartheid state that subjugated its near-majority black population through breathtaking acts of violence.

Wilentz, by contrast, was the son of the man who owned the highly successful 8th Street Bookstore that thrived in the days before Barnes and Noble and then Amazon. Growing up in such privilege, he probably can’t quite see things from the same perspective as someone who grew up picking cotton.

The older Wilentz became, the more he adopted the inside-the-beltway attitudes of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and other historians who saw American presidents as being a lamp onto the feet of backward peoples. Like Schlesinger, who wrote a flattering portrait of Andrew Jackson, Wilentz came up with his own adoring biography in 2005 that was torn apart in the New Left Review by Tom Mertes. (Contact me for a copy of the paywalled article.) Mertes had these choice words for the WSWS’s co-thinker, who made excuses for Jackson’s genocidal attacks on American Indians in the same way he made excuses for Bill Clinton’s war in Yugoslavia:

Far greater exertions are required to burnish Jackson’s bid to construct a Herrenvolk republic free of Indians. Here Wilentz’s contortions are truly exemplary. His Jackson is a ‘sincere if unsentimental paternalist’, who simply wished for the good of the indigenous peoples, killing them only when ‘provoked’—though he lets slip a few pages earlier that he was a ‘fire-eating hater of unyielding Indians’. Yielding Indians were those who agreed to ‘voluntary’ removal from their ancestral lands, for their own protection, to ‘safe havens’ (Kurdistans for the 19th century?), so rescuing them from the ‘obliteration’ that would otherwise have befallen them. If these operations did not go quite as ‘smoothly and benevolently as Jackson had expected’, this was an unfortunate outcome he had in no way intended.

As it happens, one other African-American besides Nikole Hannah-Jones got the reputation of being a “racialist” not too long ago. I am referring to Colin Kaepernick who took a knee for the Star Spangled Banner, an act that “divided the working class”, no doubt.

There’s a tie-in to Andrew Jackson here as well as this article points out. In a neglected verse in the national anthem, it celebrates the killing of slaves who had fought alongside the British in exchange for their freedom:

Kindly put, Key was a nation-builder who lost luster later in life. Perhaps his association with the fierce Jackson turned his character unkind, darker and harder. Like many upper-crust slave owners, including James Madison, Key claimed to favor colonization, shipping free blacks to Africa.

It’s worth looking at Key in better days. At St. John’s College in Annapolis, he played lots of schoolboy pranks. Good-looking and confident, he had a gift for scribbling verse, which he put to good use at age 35, in the crepuscular light of day.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” hails the huge battle flag flying over Fort McHenry after dawn broke and smoke cleared above Baltimore’s waters after a night of British naval bombardment. Key witnessed the scene from a neutral vessel and composed his patriotic poem in the rush of victory that very morning. A sensation, it swept the streets, sung to the tune of an English drinking song.

Pride was palpable. Baltimore saved the early republic after the British army sacked Washington. Madison fled the empty capital, riding ahead of the redcoats, who feasted in the White House before setting fire to it. Baltimore blocked the British advance up the Eastern Seaboard, and the bard bottled the moment. The song was named the national anthem more than 100 years later. If only that were the happy end of the tale. From the third verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner”:

No refuge could save the hireling & slave/

From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave:/

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave/

O’er the land of the free & the home of the brave.

This verse is hardly ever sung these days, but there it is.

Whatever side you’re on, we all need to know the roots of “The Star-Spangled Banner” run deep in slavery’s soil. How deep is seldom told.

Lawyer-poet Key, born to massive slaveholding wealth in Maryland, was one of the richest men in America. He liked it that way.

As he grew older and darker, Key sought to buttress slavery, known as our own “peculiar institution.” He did just that, past his last breath. The U.S. Supreme Court, which he helped shape, stood strongly for slavery. So beside the anthem, his political legacy as a critical political player in upholding slavery is devastating.

In his 50s, Key became an adviser to President Andrew Jackson, who was also a wealthy self-made Southern slaveholder.

At the same time, Key was named by Jackson as the U.S. district attorney for the nation’s capital, where he prosecuted race and slavery laws to the fullest extent, even to the death penalty. He also aggressively prosecuted early abolitionists, who had founded the anti-slavery movement in 1833.

Key often whispered in the ear of Jackson, the plantation owner in the White House. When he wasn’t shouting, Jackson listened. Jackson’s presidency brought brutal, racially motivated mob violence like never before, including a race riot in Washington, D.C. Jackson had no sympathy for mobs, but even less for slaves and free blacks.

Then came the worst cut of all: Key prevailed on Jackson to name Key’s own brother-in-law, Roger Taney, to the Cabinet and then to the ultimate prize: chief justice of the United States.

To be tied to the infamous Taney is a serious stain on Key’s rosy reputation. Like Key, Taney was a native of Maryland, a state steeped in slavery, where Frederick Douglass was born. Taney and Key were friends before Roger met and married Key’s sister. That’s how small the antebellum South was for wealthy white men.

Roundly hated north of the Mason-Dixon line, Taney lived long enough to author the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court opinion, the most starkly racist high court decision in history. Taney struck down the argument that free blacks could become citizens in free states like Illinois and further declared that all blacks, whether slave or free, were never entitled to any rights, period.

The Dred Scott ruling landed as a public outrage. Historians consider it a catalyst for the Civil War, which broke out four years later. Taney swore in Abraham Lincoln as president in 1861, a face-to-face breaking point between the nation’s past and future.

Is racism part of America’s DNA? That so many people could be outraged by Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to kneel while the anthem is being sung suggests it is.

December 24, 2019

Behind the attack on New York Times Project 1619

Filed under: racism,slavery — louisproyect @ 10:16 pm

Last August, the NY Times Sunday Magazine was entirely devoted to Project 1619, an attempt to root the racism of today in the institution of slavery that dates back to 1619, when more than 20 slaves were sold to the British colonists in Virginia. This hypothesis in itself might have not touched off the controversy surrounding the project. Instead, it was another claim that the American Revolution of 1776 was a reactionary rebellion to preserve slavery that probably set the gears in motion that led to an open letter from five prestigious historians to the NY Times that concluded:

We ask that The Times, according to its own high standards of accuracy and truth, issue prominent corrections of all the errors and distortions presented in The 1619 Project. We also ask for the removal of these mistakes from any materials destined for use in schools, as well as in all further publications, including books bearing the name of The New York Times. We ask finally that The Times reveal fully the process through which the historical materials were and continue to be assembled, checked and authenticated.

The letter was written by Sean Wilentz and signed by him and four others: Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, and Gordon S. Wood. All are white with an average age of 71.

It is highly likely that the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) that publishes the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) helped organize this campaign since all of the historians, except Wilentz, have granted interviews to it about their objections to Project 1619. It is even more likely that SEP member Tom Mackaman led this effort since he is a professor at King’s College in Pennsylvania and might have used his academic status to persuade them to take a stand. McPherson probably didn’t need much persuasion since his contacts with WSWS go back to 1999. It is not clear how much contact WSWS had with Sean Wilentz since his liberal Democratic Party politics might have made him much less amenable to any joint project with a bunch of sectarian lunatics.

At any rate, others have connected the dotted lines, including the Wall Street Journal that summed up the conflict a week ago:

‘So wrong in so many ways” is how Gordon Wood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the American Revolution, characterized the New York Times’s “1619 Project.” James McPherson, dean of Civil War historians and another Pulitzer winner, said the Times presented an “unbalanced, one-sided account” that “left most of the history out.” Even more surprising than the criticism from these generally liberal historians was where the interviews appeared: on the World Socialist Web Site, run by the Trotskyist Socialist Equality Party.

The “1619 Project” was launched in August with a 100-page spread in the Times’s Sunday magazine. It intends to “reframe the country’s history” by crossing out 1776 as America’s founding date and substituting 1619, the year 20 or so African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Va. The project has been celebrated up and down the liberal establishment, praised by Sen. Kamala Harris and Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

A September essay for the World Socialist Web Site called the project a “racialist falsification” of history. That didn’t get much attention, but in November the interviews with the historians went viral. “I wish my books would have this kind of reaction,” Mr. Wood says in an email. “It still strikes me as amazing why the NY Times would put its authority behind a project that has such weak scholarly support.” He adds that fellow historians have privately expressed their agreement. Mr. McPherson coolly describes the project’s “implicit position that there have never been any good white people, thereby ignoring white radicals and even liberals who have supported racial equality.”

The project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is proud that it “decenters whiteness” and disdains its critics as “old, white male historians.” She tweeted of Mr. McPherson: “Who considers him preeminent? I don’t.” Her own qualifications are an undergraduate degree in history and African-American studies and a master’s in journalism. She says the project goes beyond Mr. McPherson’s expertise, the Civil War. “For the most part,” she writes in its lead essay, “black Americans fought back alone” against racism. No wonder she’d rather not talk about the Civil War.

To the Trotskyists, Ms. Hannah-Jones writes: “You all have truly revealed yourselves for the anti-black folks you really are.” She calls them “white men claiming to be socialists.” Perhaps they’re guilty of being white men, but they’re definitely socialists. Their faction, called the Workers League until 1995, was “one of the most strident and rigid Marxist groups in America” during the Cold War, says Harvey Klehr, a leading historian of American communism.

“Ours is not a patriotic, flag-waving kind of perspective,” says Thomas Mackaman, the World Socialist Web Site’s interviewer and a history professor at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He simply recognizes that the arrival of 20 slaves in 1619 wasn’t a “world-altering event.” Slavery had existed across the world for millennia, and there were already slaves elsewhere in what would become the U.S. before 1619.

So, Mackaman says that the arrival of 20 slaves in 1619 was no big deal since “Slavery had existed across the world for millennia, and there were already slaves elsewhere in what would become the U.S. before 1619.” Odd that Mackaman, the big-time Marxist scholar, can’t distinguish between pre-capitalist and capitalist slavery. Yes, there were slaves in 1619 but being one in the Ottoman Empire was not the same thing as picking cotton. The Janissaries, who were slaves, were also the Sultan’s elite troops, paid regular salaries, and eventually became part of the ruling class.

If the WSWS was defending Marxism by going on the attack against Project 1619, that didn’t seem to bother the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone who was pleased to hear James McPherson deny that racism was a permanent condition. This is the same Barone who wrote “How Genetic Science Is Undercutting the Case for Racial Quotas” for the Washington Examiner on April 4, 2018. Somehow, the belief in genetic inferiority does not seem consistent with racism not being a permanent condition but I’ll let the dialectical geniuses at WSWS sort that out.

In addition to the Trump-supporting Washington Examiner, Wilentz and company got thumbs up from the City-Journal, the voice of the neoconservative Manhattan Institute, the National Review, and New Criterion, a high-falutin’ journal that once awarded a prize to Charles Murray, best-known for his Bell-Curve theory that finds Blacks genetically inferior.

Most of the fury from the WSWS and its academic allies is directed at an introductory article written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, an African-American staff writer for the NYT Sunday Magazine and the recipient of a Polk Award for her reports on NPR Radio. This paragraph must have made Sean Wilentz’s hair catch fire:

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.

From all the sparks this debate has generated, it is important to recognize that it did not start with her article. To some extent, it reflects both a generational and racial divide with both younger and Black scholars less willing to believe in the purity of our Founding Fathers. The overwhelming majority of the Project 1619 authors were African-American. All the white ones were young.

You can see the generational conflict at work in the June 6th NY Review of Books take-down of Sean Wilentz’s latest book titled “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding” (unfortunately behind a paywall; contact me for a copy). Written by Nicholas Guyatt, it reflects the skepticism of younger scholars about the democratic pretensions of Jefferson, et al. It also puts Wilentz’s reverence for the US Constitution into a political context:

So why is Wilentz so interested in a form of antislavery originalism? The answer, I think, lies in politics rather than history. No Property in Man began as a series of lectures at Harvard in 2015. That year, Wilentz got into a spat with Bernie Sanders after the presidential candidate told an audience in Virginia that the United States “in many ways was created…on racist principles.” Wilentz, in a New York Times Op-Ed, dismissed “the myth that the United States was founded on racial slavery” and accused Sanders of “poison[ing] the current presidential campaign.” To describe the Founding as racist was, Wilentz wrote, to perpetuate “one of the most destructive falsehoods in all of American history.”

Wilentz has long been a liberal activist. For more than a quarter-century, he faithfully supported Bill and Hillary Clinton. During the Lewinsky scandal in 1998, he warned Congress that “history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness” if Bill Clinton was impeached. In a 2008 editorial in The New Republic, he accused Barack Obama and his campaign team of keeping “the race and race-baiter cards near the top of their campaign deck” during their battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. He has been a particularly sharp critic of those who’ve rallied behind candidates to the left of the Clintons. In a recent article lamenting the Sanders phenomenon, Wilentz accused the left of being irresponsible in its economic promises, solipsistic in its embrace of identity politics, and disrespectful toward the achievements of the liberal tradition. Trashing the Founders is, for Wilentz, another sign of progressive immaturity.

Nicholas Guyatt is a 46-year old (that’s young to me!) British professor at the University of Cambridge who has a better grasp of American politics than you might expect. His latest book is titled “Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation”, which addresses the question why the Founding Fathers failed to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that “all men are created equal”? The usual answer is racism, but the reality, according to the Amazon.com blurb, is more complex and unsettling. Namely, “Unable to convince others-and themselves-that racial mixing was viable, white reformers began instead to claim that people of color could only thrive in separate republics: in Native states in the American West or in the West African colony of Liberia.” Some of you might recall that, as Hannah-Jones pointed out, Lincoln’s solution to the North-South conflict was sending slaves to Liberia.

This obviously is not the kind of analysis that sits well with Marxists and leftists who view 1776 as a paradigmatic bourgeois-democratic revolution. As Neil Davidson has pointed out, it is best to think of these revolutions only as bourgeois rather than bourgeois-democratic since in most instances the result was all about class domination rather than Enlightenment values.

Hannah-Jones’s article was not the only one that pissed off the WSWS and their historian allies. There’s also one by Matthew Desmond simply titled “Capitalism” that is based on the groundbreaking scholarship of Sven Beckert, Edward Baptist and Walter Johnson. They make the case that chattel slavery was a form of capitalist exploitation even though there’s very little in Marx’s Capital to buttress that analysis. It was only with the publication of Eric Williams’s “Capitalism and Slavery” that scholars began to reconsider these questions. While he has not lined up with WSWS on whether the Constitution sanctioned slavery, John Clegg informed Jacobin readers that Desmond was all wet in claiming that slavery “helped turn a poor fledgling nation into a financial colossus.” I will be working on a lengthy reply to Clegg but it is important to note that two of the historians who signed the open letter agree with him.

One of them was John Oakes, who in referring to this new scholarship,  takes the accusatory tone so characteristic of WSWS: “What you really have with this literature is a marriage of neo-liberalism and liberal guilt. When you marry those two things, neo-liberal politics and liberal guilt, this is what you get. You get the New York Times, you get the literature on slavery and capitalism.” I’m almost surprised that he didn’t use the term “pseudo-socialist” that is ubiquitous to this sectarian website. For Oakes, Desmond’s fatal flaw is moralism:

Desmond, following the lead of the scholars he’s citing, basically relies on the same analogy. They’re saying, “look at the ways capitalism is just like slavery, and that’s because capitalism came from slavery.” But there’s no actual critique of capitalism in any of it. They’re saying, “Oh my God! Slavery looks just like capitalism. They had highly developed management techniques just like we do!” Slaveholders were greedy, just like capitalists. Slavery was violent, just like our society is. So there’s a critique of violence and a critique of greed. But greed and violence are everywhere in human history, not just in capitalist societies. So there’s no actual critique of capitalism as such, at least as I read it.

This could not be further from the sort of detailed economic analysis Desmond puts forward in his article, such as this:

As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged. By 1831, the country was delivering nearly half the world’s raw cotton crop, with 350 million pounds picked that year. Just four years later, it harvested 500 million pounds. Southern white elites grew rich, as did their counterparts in the North, who erected textile mills to form, in the words of the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, an “unhallowed alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.” The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory, an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the course of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million. Slavery, wrote one of its defenders in De Bow’s Review, a widely read agricultural magazine, was the “nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.” Cotton planters, millers and consumers were fashioning a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor and products across long distances. In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy. “The beating heart of this new system,” Beckert writes, “was slavery.”

The WSWS interviewer confessed to James McPherson, the other critic of the new scholarship on slavery and capitalism, that he finds it “problematic”. Certainly, McPherson must be as bothered as he was by their drawing “an equal sign between what they perceive to be a fully developed capitalist South, and the North.” That is a crude reduction of what Beckert, et al, have written, but just what you might expect from WSWS. McPherson’s response is rather feeble:

Yes, that’s right. That part of it—that the South is as capitalist as the North, or Great Britain—is unpersuasive to me. Certainly, they were part of a capitalist world order. There’s no question about that. Cotton and sugar were central. But the idea that the ideology of the planter class in the South was a capitalist ideology, there I’ve always been a little bit more on the side of Eugene Genovese, who sees the southern ideology as seigneurial.

I have no idea whether McPherson read Desmond’s article carefully but there is nothing about “ideology”, nor is there much to speak of about it in the scholarship of Beckert, et al. Instead, their books focus on commodity production for the marketplace that is central to Marxist theory, even if it is not premised on free wage labor.

Finally, there is the question of why people like Bynum, McPherson, Oakes and Wood would ever sit down with the likes of the SEP/WSWS. You can only conclude that they, like most academics, have a narrow focus on their own work and could not be more indifferent to the hundreds of articles on the WSWS website that have defended Assad from charges of war crimes and other such crypto-Stalinist rubbish. They also probably liked the attention they were getting from this sect that does have a talent for buttering up academics, at least those who are such babes in the wood.

One of the most reactionary elements of the SEP’s program is its characterization of the trade union movement in the USA as an obstacle to progress as if Scott Walker’s crushing of the public service unions in Wisconsin was no big deal. To get an idea of how demented these people are, they published an article this year calling attention to how the Christchurch, New Zealand white supremacist and mass murderer Brenton Tarrant praised trade unions in his 50-page manifesto as if this would warn off someone working in an Amazon warehouse from starting a union.

Unlike other groups on the left, the SEP does not participate in the living mass movement. Except for its website and the election campaigns they run from time to time, you will never run into them at planning meetings for a protest against fracking or police brutality. Its primary goal is to gin up traffic to its website as if reaching some target number of visits will hasten in the socialist revolution.

The main complaint that it has about Project 1619 is a familiar one, namely that it is based on identity politics rather than class. Although he did not sign the open letter, Adolph Reed was happy to sit down with these idiots, another sign of his political myopia. When WSWS asked him to comment on supposedly a dominant tendency in academia is to attribute all social problems to race, or to other forms of identity, he replied:

As Walter Benn Michaels said, and as I have said time and time again, if anti-disparitarianism is your ideology, then for you a society qualifies as being just if 1 percent of the population controls 90 percent of the wealth, so long as that within that 1 percent 12 percent or so are black, etc., reflecting their share of the national population. This is the ideal of social justice for neoliberalism. There’s no question of actual redistribution.

Like all the other people so ready to dismiss the contributors to this project as “neoliberal” or worse, Reed appears to have either only skimmed through the articles or not having read them at all. If he had read Trymaine Lee’s “The Wealth Gap”, he would have seen something complete different from blacks trying to use affirmative action to get a seat at the ruling class table. Showing little reverence toward the New Deal that has become fashionable during the growing popularity of Bernie Sanders, Lee writes:

The G.I. Bill is often hailed as one of Roosevelt’s most enduring legacies. It helped usher millions of working-class veterans through college and into new homes and the middle class. But it discriminatorily benefited white people. While the bill didn’t explicitly exclude black veterans, the way it was administered often did. The bill gave veterans access to mortgages with no down payments, but the Veterans Administration adopted the same racially restrictive policies as the Federal Housing Administration, which guaranteed bank loans only to developers who wouldn’t sell to black people. “The major way in which people have an opportunity to accumulate wealth is contingent on the wealth positions of their parents and their grandparents,” Darity says. “To the extent that blacks have the capacity to accumulate wealth, we have not had the ability to transfer the same kinds of resources across generations.”

Writing for The New Republic, where he has a monthly column, Reed assured his readers that “The New Deal Wasn’t Intrinsically Racist”. That’s some consolation to the children of those men and women who got screwed “accidentally”. Like most of the garbage Reed writes nowadays, it is an attempt to debunk the idea that American society is racist to the core. At the heart of all these historians’ special pleading for the Great American model is a refusal to come to terms with the reality, namely that it was a racist and imperialist genocidal monster that grows more rapacious with each passing year. It is not surprising that the Washington Examiner, The National Review, The City Journal and the New Criterion find the WSWS campaign amenable to their reactionary interests. Whenever I run across this special pleading for an idealized republic in which racial and other “identity” based demands are an obstacle to future progress, I am always reminded of what Leon Trotsky, the greatest Marxist thinker of the 20th century, told his comrades in 1933, when he was an exile living in Turkey:

But today the white workers in relation to the Negroes are the oppressors, scoundrels, who persecute the black and the yellow, hold them in contempt and lynch them. When the Negro workers today unite with their own petty bourgeois that is because they are not yet sufficiently developed to defend their elementary rights. To the workers in the Southern states the liberal demand for ‘social, political and economic equality’ would undoubtedly mean progress, but the demand for ‘self-determination’ a greater progress. However, with the slogan ‘social, political and economic equality’ they can much easier be misled (‘according to the law you have this equality’.

This is the attitude that revolutionaries should adopt when it comes to Project 1619. It is also the attitude that my friend Noah Ignatiev defended as a “race traitor”. For those who reject the “racial identity” politics of the NY Times-backed project simply because a bourgeois newspaper is behind it, I invite you to contact me for copies of the key articles. They are the real deal as opposed to the junk the WSWS is peddling.

December 21, 2019

Pete Buttigieg and the $900 bottles of wine: what they tell us about capitalist politics

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

Last Thursday, during the Democratic Party presidential candidate debate, Elizabeth Warren took a dig at Pete Buttegieg, the gay, neoliberal Mayor of South Bend, Indiana:

So, the mayor just recently had a fund-raiser that was held in a wine cave, full of crystals and served $900-a-bottle wine. Think about who comes to that. He had promised that every fund-raiser he would do would be open-door, but this one was closed-door. We made the decision many years ago that rich people in smoke-filled rooms would not pick the next president of the United States. Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States.

Buttegieg defended himself by pointing out that she too has taken donations from rich people and that he, unlike her and the other people on stage with them, was no millionaire. Clearly anticipating some static over his unabashed sucking up to billionaires, he told her:

Senator, your presidential campaign right now as we speak is funded in part by money you transferred, having raised it at those exact same big-ticket fund-raisers you now denounce. Did it corrupt you, Senator? Of course not. So to denounce the same kind of fund-raising guidelines that President Obama went by, that Speaker Pelosi goes by, that you yourself went by until not long ago, to build the Democratic Party and build a campaign ready for the fight of our lives, these purity tests shrink the stakes of the most important election. We’d like to bring everyone in.

Warren, trying to triangulate between Bernie Sanders’s grass-roots fundraising and the sort of feeding at the trough that routinely goes on in Democratic Party campaigns for President and Congress, had no answer for this. She is clearly a stealth candidate who, if elected, would probably cave in to corporate interests willingly. In the unlikely event that Sanders was elected, the caving would be unwillingly.

With much of the controversy revolving around the ostentation of the fund-raiser, much more has to be said about Craig Hall who was upset over being in the spotlight. Hall, a real estate and winery baron who has donated more than $2.4 million to Democratic Party candidates over the years, felt like they were picking on the wrong guy: “These people don’t know who they’re talking about when they throw me in the class that they did. As much as it’s frustrating, it’s more disappointing to me that Democrats are fighting with each other when we have a common goal, which is to get back to the White House.”

Like most billionaires, Hall is involved in philanthropy, which means that for every $100 he gets in tax cuts, he gives “worthy causes” $10 off the top—and tax-deductible, if you please. Unlike his fellow real estate magnate, the grubby Donald Trump, Hall runs what practically sounds like it was based on Murry Bookchin’s writings: “[W]e strive to do business responsibly. This includes developing environmentally sustainable buildings, encouraging employee volunteerism through paid time off‑, and operating our business with unwavering integrity, morality and a commitment to truth. We believe in doing what is right over what is easy.”

In the mid-80s, Hall was implicated in a crooked deal to avoid bankruptcy with Jim Wright, a member of the House of Representatives from Texas who was as powerful as Nancy Pelosi in his day. Like the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, the 1980s Savings and Loan crisis was all about gambling on real estate. Craig Hall was Texas’s biggest real estate mogul, who had financed his empire with high-interest loans from S&L’s that were never supposed to get into that kind of business, just as banks 30 years later were not supposed to get involved with mortgage-based securities.

Hall used his massive donations to the Democratic Party to influence Jim Wright’s intervention on his behalf. Overseeing the efforts to keep the failing S&L’s afloat was a government agency called the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. In a strong-arm effort reminiscent of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky, Wright told the regulators to look the other way when it came to Craig Hall, who was having trouble making payments on more than $1 billion in mortgages to some 20 S&Ls. If he couldn’t pay, the S&L’s would come tumbling down like dominos, which were under the supervision of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. (FSLIC).

Like Hall, the FSLIC was on thin ice. When the S&L crisis was just beginning in 1986, the FSLIC asked Congress for permission to sell $15 billion in bonds to recapitalize their insurance fund. The “FSLIC recap bill” was approved by the House and headed for a vote.

In late September of 1986, Wright called the Federal Home Loan Bank Board Chairman Edwin Gray and asked him to lay off Craig Hall using the same kind of indirection mafia bosses and Donald Trump use. Gray told House Ethics Committee investigators that Wright did not ask for anything specific, but “anybody who has worked in government for very long knows that when the soon-to-be speaker of the House of Representatives is asking you to look into it, its not just anybody.”

On September 26, Wright put a hold on the bill to recapitalize the FSLIC. As Hall himself put it, “Congressman Wright has in some manner held up the bill and … it appeared it somehow related to us.” Like the cut-off of military aid to Ukraine, Wright’s pressure had the desired effect. Hall got new loans at tax-payer expense and dodged bankruptcy.

One of the other types of pressure that Wright used was to get regulators fired if they were too uppity. Edwin Gray told ethics investigator about one instance:

And so I received a call and it basically was another call about the treatment of Texas S&L; institutions. And then (Wright) said that he understood that (names a federal bank regulator in Texas)) was a homosexual. And he understood from people that he believed and trusted (that the regulator) had established a ring of homosexual lawyers in Texas at various law firms, and that in order for people to deal with the Federal Home Loan Bank supervision people, they would have to deal with this ring of homosexual lawyers.

Wright’s ham-fisted interference eventually led to the end of his career, which unfortunately doesn’t seem in the cards for Trump. He resigned as House Speaker on May 31, 1989, the first on account of a scandal.

Like all financial crises, the S&L crisis petered out and Hall began making out like a bandit again. He wrote a book in 1990 titled “News of My Death Was Greatly Exaggerated: How I Survived the Texas Depression: My Financial Strategies for the ’90s.” Somehow I doubt that it gets too deeply in Jim Wright’s role in keeping him alive.

Once the cash started flowing again, Hall began using it to buy protection if disaster fell again. He got added to Vice President Al Gore’s rolodex and attended a White House coffee gathering. President Clinton nominated his wife Kathryn to serve as ambassador to Austria, undoubtedly because the Halls contributed more than $240,000 to the Democrats during the 1996 election cycle and not because of her expertise in Middle European diplomacy. The Center for Public Integrity’s Charles Lewis said, “The fact that a sitting Vice President would call someone whose failed S&L cost the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars — that’s a metaphor for the whole campaign fundraising scandal itself. … This person Hall should be a pariah that politicians would run away from.” The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that more than $100,000 of the Hall’s contributions to the DNC came after the Halls received a call from Gore’s office in April 1996.

Showing the same inclination to feed at the billionaire’s trough, Hillary Clinton made a pilgrimage to the Halls’ winery in 2015. The invitation-only event, with tickets reportedly ranging from $250 to $50,000, targeted the same rich bastards that showed up last Thursday to greet Buttegieg.

As for the winery, the Halls run the same jive that they run on their real estate business: “Responsibility is one of our core values. This translates to developing LEED certified buildings, sustainable farming and operating our business with unwavering integrity. We are constantly innovating to turn our words into actions.”

The reality contradicts this bullshit as Wine Business reported last year:

A Napa County Superior Court on Tuesday tentatively ruled against the opponents of a vineyard slated to be developed above the Napa Valley floor.

Judge Thomas Warriner’s tentative ruling in favor of Napa County is not final as lawyers representing environmental groups and a residential water district continue to argue their case in court.

Attorneys for Living Rivers Council, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and Circle Oaks County Water District seek to overturn Napa County’s 2016 decision to approve Kathryn and Craig Hall’s plans to develop Walt Ranch on Atlas Peak. The attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity also represents the Sierra Club.

Walt Ranch is the 200-acre vineyard development long proposed by Craig and Kathryn Hall of HALL Wines.

Like Stewart and Linda Resnick, the pistachio and pomegranate juice billionaires, the Halls have little interest in how their wine-making impacts working people. They proposed removing nearly 23,000 trees to develop 271 acres of vineyards on the 2,300-acre Walt Ranch, which occupies a sensitive watershed. Geoff Ellsworth, a member of Wine and Water Watch, told the Food and Environment Reporting Network: “We’re in the middle of a business war. This big corporation is competing against that big corporation, and the collateral damage are the citizens and the flora and fauna.” The worries are the same as when farmworkers living near the Resnick plantations discovered that they often lacked enough water pressure to take a shower or flush a toilet:

While the Napa Valley conjures images of idyllic winery estates and luxurious lifestyles, all is not well in wine country. A growing number of residents decry the region’s proliferation of upscale hotels, the wineries that double as event centers and the strain on Napa Valley’s water resources. In the wake of California’s unprecedented drought, the city of Calistoga—like others—has been under mandatory water rationing. “We’re told not to flush our toilets,” says Christina Aranguren, a vocal critic of the proposed resort, whose guests will be under no such restrictions. “I want to know where the water will come from.”

Yeah, where will the water come from? Who cares, as long as the wine keeps flowing.

 

December 20, 2019

Ovid: a Netflix for the Left

Filed under: Counterpunch,Film — louisproyect @ 3:44 pm

COUNTERPUNCH, DECEMBER 20, 2019

After reading the reviews below, you’d likely agree that Ovid is an invaluable resource for the left. Launched on March 22, it aggregates films from eight different cutting edge film distributors, including some whose documentaries and narrative films I have reviewed over the years: First Run, Bullfrog, and Icarus. These are the kinds of films that show up in art houses like the Cinema Village in NY or the Laemmle in Los Angeles but generally for a week or less. They may show up on Amazon or iTunes, but you will never get a head’s up as you would if you were an Ovid subscriber. The main benefit of subscribing for $6.99 per month (a real pittance) is the convenience of having an intelligently organized website that categorizes films geared to its intended audience. While Netflix groups film by genres such as horror or crime, Ovid groups them, for example, by “Don’t Mourn, Organize.” In that category, you can find “No Gods, No Masters: A History of Anarchism,” “Eugene V. Debs: American Socialist,” and the 1967 groundbreaking documentary “Far From Vietnam.” In addition to such radical documentaries, you will find avant-garde narrative films from Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, and Marcel Ophüls. So, don’t hesitate. Ovid is the Netflix the left has always needed, supporting evidence from the reviews beneath…

Continue reading

December 18, 2019

The Harsh Reality of Job Growth in America

Filed under: Uncategorized — louisproyect @ 1:21 pm

via The Harsh Reality of Job Growth in America

December 17, 2019

Why Jeremy Corbyn lost

Filed under: Britain,Corbyn,Labour Party — louisproyect @ 9:45 pm

In reviewing articles about Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn over the past two days, I was struck by the similarities between British and American politics. With all proportions guarded, Corbyn and Boris Johnson are the counterparts of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Since I regard the Labour Party as qualitatively different from the Democratic Party in class terms, I was much more open to Corbyn’s electoral ambitions than I am to Sanders’s. This would be apparent from the reviews I wrote of two books: Richard Seymour’s “Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics” and Simon Hannah’s “A Party With Socialists in It: a History of the Labour Left”. Hannah’s book helped me understand that despite Lenin’s business about the Communists supporting Labour like a rope supports a hanging man, it is still a working-class party. Or at least it was until Tony Blair got a hold of it. If it was still in New Labour’s clutches, there would be not a dime’s worth of differences between the DP and Labour.

Starting with New Labour, you can say that—dialectically speaking—it was responsible  for the emergence of Corbynism in the same way that Clinton/Obama were responsible for the Sandernistas. By the same token, New Labour’s neglect of working-class interests helped fuel the Brexit campaign and Johnson’s election in the same way that the post-LBJ Democratic Party paved the way for Donald Trump.

Beneath all these political convulsions was the economic transformation of the UK and the USA. With Reagan and Thatcher’s neoliberal turn, the class compromise between the capitalist class and the labor unions came to an end. Reagan’s crushing of the airline controllers strike and Thatcher’s of the miners marked an open season against not only the trade unions but everybody below the ruling and middle classes. Even when the two arch-reactionaries were replaced by “liberals”, the war against the working-class and the poor continued. Through trade agreements like the WTO and NAFTA, it became easier for corporations to take grow wings and take flight. In the case of the EU, open borders allowed labor to escape the misery of post-Communist Eastern Europe and enjoy a higher standard of living in the West. That was the main impetus behind Euromaidan. Ukrainian workers understood that being a plumber or an electrician in England could provide a wage denied in their homeland.

In both the UK and the USA, a rust belt developed in the decades after Thatcher and Reagan. The Midlands of England and the American cities, where steel and auto factories once thrived, now bled jobs. When you combine this long-term tendency with the financial crisis of 2007, you end up with a population looking for radical solutions, sometimes on the right. In the UK, this meant working people lining up behind the nativist Brexit campaign that offered the same kind of demagogic appeal as Donald Trump’s MAGA election campaign. There’s a big difference between the UK and the USA, however. In the UK workers did vote for the rightwing while in the USA they mostly stayed at home, finding Hilary Clinton’s campaign so devoid of incentives that would make a difference to them—the kind that Sanders and Corbyn offered. Does Corbyn’s defeat mean that Sanders faces the same fate? I certainly can conceive of him defeating Trump in the general election but his hands will be tied once in the White House, I’m afraid.

Despite the fact that the Tories were happy with the EU and its predecessors like the European Economic Community, there has always been a nationalist element that ran contrary to any sort of continent-wide political and economic integration. Enoch Powell, a Tory member of Parliament from 1950 to 1974, was dead-set against joining the EEC. He made a “rivers of blood” speech in 1968 that warned against immigrants flooding England. It resembled a Donald Trump speech, if on a 300 percent higher reading level:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century.

Eventually, Powell left the Conservative Party and moved to Northern Ireland where he became an Ulster Unionist party member and a bitter enemy of the Irish struggle. Unsurprisingly, the Ulster Unionists are major supporters of leaving the EU.

Nigel Farage considers Enoch Powell to be a major influence and even unsuccessfully requested his backing in 1994. Ukip later twice asked Powell to stand as a candidate for the party.. Farage was formerly a Tory but left in 1992 after the party signed the Maastricht Treaty that led to the formation of the EU. A year later he co-founded Ukip and remained one of its top leaders for well over a decade. As the leading voice of Euroskepticism, Ukip was responsible for placing the question of Brexit on a 2016 referendum. The same newspapers that told lies about Corbyn in last week’s election also helped to line up people for a “Leave” vote in 2016. Chief among them were two tabloids: the Daily Sun and the Daily Express. In March 2016, the Sun reported on Polish immigrants, who are to England as Mexicans are to the USA. The headline of an article was “How to Be a Pole on the Dole.” (The dole is a term for welfare benefits.) In enlightened London, someone surreptitiously posted leaflets with large letters: “Leave the EU/No more Polish vermin”.

Alan Sked, who was once the top leader of Ukip, regards his replacement Nigel Farage as a racist. In a 2014 Guardian article, he recounts a conversation the two once had:

But even if Farage’s recent statements about not wanting to live next door to Romanians suggest he is xenophobic, is there any proof he was racist when he and Sked worked together in the mid-1990s? Sked laughs at the question and recalls an incident from 1997 when the two men were arguing over the kind of candidates that Ukip should have standing at the looming general election. “He wanted ex-National Front candidates to run and I said, ‘I’m not sure about that,’ and he said, ‘There’s no need to worry about the nigger vote. The nig-nogs will never vote for us.'”

Like Steve Bannon and others who have broken with the old-school John McCain type of Republicanism, you can find people moving in the same direction in England besides the Ukip. One of them is the European Research Group that despite its innocuous name is quite toxic. Unlike think-tanks in the USA that get funded by Koch, the Coors Foundation, et al, the ERG relies on tax-payer funding as a result of its ties to the Conservative Party. It was headed by Jacob Rees-Mogg, who despite the P.G. Wodehouse name and upper-class mannerisms, is pretty scary. In 2006, Rees-Mogg opposed David Cameron’s attempt to increase the number of ethnic minorities running as Tories. Rees-Mogg argued, “Ninety-five per cent of this country is White. The list can’t be totally different from the country at large.”

This year, Steve Baker took over as ERG head. Despite the fact that both he and Rees-Mogg have worked in finance, they strongly opposed the pro-EU stance of other bankers. They may be opposed to “globalization” but they certainly aren’t opposed to capitalist profits. In addition to being a hard-core Brexit advocate, Baker is also a born-again Christian, gay marriage opponent and climate change skeptic. He is also a member of the Cornerstone Group that operates as a Tory party club. It considers the Church of England, the unitary British state and the family as its “cornerstones”. Alan Duncan, a Tory MP, has called it a “Taliban Tendency” inside their party.

Like Bannon, Trump, Stephen Miller, Billy Graham Jr. and company, the Brexit wing of the party has taken over and reshaped the Conservative agenda along the lines of right-populist parties everywhere, from Hungary to Austria. Gone are the commitments to Anglo-American hegemony based on the dollar and NATO. The emerging program has much more to do with racial purity, family values, deregulation, and fossil fuel dependency.

So what would make a former coal miner in the Midlands decide to vote for anything they favor?

The main explanation is that the Labour Party no longer has organic ties to its former social base. Like Hilary Clinton, Tony Blair and his successor Gordon Brown, they focused on getting votes from people living in large cities and who had decent-paying jobs in the technical, financial and health industries. Like most DP presidential candidates, they assumed that the people living in the rust belt would continue to vote for them as a “lesser evil”. That was until Jeremy Corbyn came along.

Corbyn and his chief adviser John McDonnell were elderly members of the Labour Party who never bought into New Labour politics. They identified with Tony Benn who, like them, was a leftwing stalwart. It was only as a result of a procedural change that loosened up Labour Party membership that Corbyn came into prominence.

In 2015, Ed Miliband, the Labour MP with Tony Blair type politics, proposed that the party adopt new membership rules. Instead of trade union officials having the right to use bloc voting on behalf of its powerless rank-and-file, there would be “one member one vote” with the public allowed to take part for a £3 fee. In hoping to weaken the trade union officials, Miliband did not anticipate that this measure would open the door to millions of young people with non-union jobs and radical politics. In essence, it was the same kind of demographic that provided the backbone of support for Bernie Sanders.

For Corbyn, the hope was that by running on a program that would reverse the neoliberal policies of both Tory and New Labour he would be able to become the Prime Minister in last week’s election. Considering the dismal state of those parts of England where coal mines, steel mills and auto manufacturing had disappeared, his hopes seemed reasonable.

Considering the fact that the 2016 Brexit referendum favored the “leavers”, there had to be worries that this would not be a guaranteed victory especially when well over a third of Labour Party members voted to leave. Indeed, the line-up on Brexit did not coincide with predictable party affiliations. The most ardent supporters of “remain” were New Labour politicians who found themselves agreeing with Tory MP David Cameron, a financial industry insider. It was mainly Ukip that pushed for leaving with many rank-and-file Labour Party members lead astray by rightwing demagogy. A July 5, 2016 NY Times article titled “Wigan’s Road to ‘Brexit’: Anger, Loss and Class Resentments” captured the mood:

After jobs as a garbage man, a bakery worker and now a packer at a canned food factory, Colin Hewlett, like most people in Wigan, a gritty northern English town, takes great pride in his working-class credentials. He plays snooker and drinks pints at the Working Men’s Club across the road from his red brick rowhouse, and at every election that he can remember, he has voted, like his father before him, for the Labour Party.

The governing Conservative Party, which last won a parliamentary election in Wigan in 1910, is “for rich sods and second raters on the make,” he explained.

On June 23, however, Mr. Hewlett broke with the habits of a lifetime and bucked the Labour Party line. Ignoring its stand that the European Union is good for Britain, he voted to bolt from the European bloc, along with 64 percent of the population in a town that, according to Will Patterson, a local Green Party activist, would normally “vote for a cow if Labour put one up for election.”

The overwhelming vote here in favor of “Brexit” — much higher than the 52 percent who voted to leave nationwide — delivered a stinging rebuke not only to the Labour Party leadership in London but also to the party’s local politicians. They hold 65 of the 75 seats on the Borough Council and campaigned, albeit with little zeal, for the Remain camp.

The Conservative Party, whose leader, Prime Minister David Cameron, also campaigned for Britain to stay in Europe, got kicked in the teeth, too, as did President Obama and legions of other prominent figures in Britain and abroad who urged voters like Mr. Hewlett not to rock the boat.

But rocking the boat, no matter what the risks, was precisely what he and millions of other Britons — who, regardless of their real economic situation, see themselves as members of a downtrodden “working class” — wanted to do. To them, it was a last, desperate effort to restore a lost world of secure jobs and communities that was far harsher in reality than it is in recollection.

Their votes were stark evidence of how working-class resentments, driven by feelings of being ignored and left unmoored in a rapidly changing world, are feeding nationalism and other efforts to reclaim a sense of identity, upending ideological assumptions and straining ties to political parties and other institutions.

With such sentiments lingering on, Corbyn had an uphill battle that was made even steeper by a concentrated attack from the Tories, the tabloids, the nominally-independent BBC, the rightwing Zionists obviously tied in to the Israeli state, and his own failure to respond effectively.

Even before the election, there were signs that Corbyn was not up to the task. In the July-August 2019 New Left Review, Daniel Finn alluded to some worries in an article titled “Crosscurrents: Corbyn, Labour and the Brexit Crisis” that is both critically important and not behind a paywall:

The Labour Party itself is far from being a reliable instrument in Corbyn’s hands: while the leader and his allies have strengthened their position since the electoral breakthrough of 2017, they still face unremitting hostility from the party’s right wing, to supplement that of their Tory opponents and the mainstream media. Labour’s programme of social-democratic reform may be modest in historical perspective, but it represents enough of a departure from established orthodoxy to provoke fierce resistance from business and the state machine—especially if Corbyn also tries to recalibrate British foreign policy after taking office. Before it can reach that point, Labour has to navigate an issue—Britain’s departure from the eu—that cuts through the heart of its electoral coalition and has no precedent in post-war British experience. Brexit has thrown the whole political field into confusion, and Labour will struggle to achieve a majority in parliament after the next election, even if it emerges as the largest party. The conditions of its likely coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party, could include the extinction of any distinctive Corbyn project.

Just as crucial a read but behind a paywall (contact me for a copy), Colin Leys’s article in the 2019 Socialist Register titled “Corbyn And Brexit Britain: Is There A Way Forward For The Left?” has the same mixture of enthusiasm for Corbyn’s uphill battle and wariness about its success. Leys, like fellow SR editorial board members Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, is skeptical about social democracy’s viability. However, he at least sees Corbynism as a current worth supporting, if for no other reasons that it can galvanize a leftwing opposition movement into a force capable of resisting a deepening of inequality—either from Boris Johnson or from a resurgent New Labour.

Leys describes the tensions between the two wings of the Labour Party, one traditional and trade union-based; the other, urban, young and often either student or professional:

A final problem is Brexit. In opposition Corbyn was able to avoid taking a very clear position, but Labour was no less divided on the issue than the Conservatives. Any eventual agreement with the EU that permitted continued unlimited immigration of EU workers to the UK would likely cost seats in Labour’s old heartlands, which had voted massively ‘leave’, while the young voters whose support had been so important in 2017, and educated middle-class Labour voters in general, were predominantly ‘remainers’. Fashioning a policy on Brexit, above all on immigration, that would not cost votes with both groups of supporters looked extremely difficult. The prospects for socialist advance through the post-EU thicket were, to say the least, hard to envisage.

In addition to this thorny dilemma, Leys pointed out other deficits in Corbyn’s program. Despite his personal opposition to nuclear arms and power, Corbyn could not include any anti-nuclear planks in his otherwise commendable program. This was a result of the UK’s largest trade union, Unite, hoping to maintain its members’ jobs in the nuclear industry. Also missing was any kind of deep engagement with ecological issues. As Jeremy Gilbert has pointed out, his manifesto does not recognize that “what is required to avoid ecological catastrophe is a radical reorientation of economic priorities away from the industrial capitalist obsession with economic growth”. In many ways, fudging the nuclear and ecology questions is a sign that this updated version of the Labour Party still had ties to its productivist past.

But the biggest problem in Leys’s eyes was the failure of the Corbyn’s socialist project to deal with the most pressing issue facing British society, namely how to democratize the state.

There was no suggestion that there should be a written constitution, to make the electoral system more democratic, or to end the exercise of unaccountable executive power through the ‘royal prerogative’ and other archaic institutions. There was nothing on ending the corporate capture of the state – the downsizing of the civil service, the rampant influence of unregulated corporate lobbying, the ‘revolving door’ between the senior civil service and private corporations, or the corporate-style ‘executive boards’ that had been set up for each government department, largely filled with private sector personnel. There was no proposal to end government reliance on management consultancies whose main clients are corporations, or on the undemocratic nature of the BBC, nominally a politically neutral public service but in practice a key component of the capitalist state system. There was no suggestion of ending subsidies to private schools through which the rich constantly renew their dominant positions in the state and corporate elites.

Unlike the self-assured leader of the SWP sect in England Alex Callinicos who took advantage of Corbyn’s defeat to remind his readers of the dead-end of social democratic politics, Finn and Leys (and I) saw value in a Corbyn victory. That being said, the left is caught on the horns of a dilemma that goes back to the 1920s.

Looking at the record of Labour and Social Democratic Parties, there is not much hope that socialism can develop out of their electoral methods. Either they will be thwarted from being elected by dirty tricks as is now the case with Corbyn or once in power thwarted from moving ahead with a redistributionist program, as was the case with Mitterand in France.

So what are we left with? Join Alex Callinicos and sell copies of Socialist Worker to college students? Because of the sectarian character of “Leninist” groups, they will never be afforded the opportunity to make good on their goals. Standing aside from the mass movement, they act as its pedagogues. This might be useful in peeling off some activists into the ranks of the sect but it will never reach the critical mass necessary to overthrow the capitalist system. What’s needed is a party that can reach people on the basis of changing the world but not on the basis of when the USSR became capitalist. Come to think of it, if the Bolsheviks had made taking a position on the Girondist/Jacobin differences an ideological litmus test, there never would have been a revolution in Russia.

 

December 13, 2019

If Time Magazine Celebrates Greta Thunberg, Why Should We?

Filed under: Counterpunch,Ecology — louisproyect @ 5:56 pm

COUNTERPUNCH, DECEMBER 13, 2019

In just over 6,500 words, Time Magazine  makes the case for Greta Thunberg being 2019’s Person of the Year. For much of the left, this confirms that she is a corporate tool. Founded in 1923 by Henry Luce, Time was the flagship of the Luce empire. Print newsmagazines have gone into a steep decline with the advent of the Internet. Despite a steep decline in circulation, Time remains the second-largest weekly after People.

Henry Luce was one of the most powerful Republican Party supporters in the 20th century, the Rupert Murdoch of his day. Luce was a member of the China Lobby that sought the overthrow of Mao Zedong. He also urged JFK to invade Cuba. Unless he did, Luce planned to imitate William Randolph Hearst and push for war, even if involved the big lie. These odious policies and others fell within the rubric of the “American Century,” a concept Luce articulated in Life magazine, another part of his empire. Through such magazines, he shared the dominant view of the American ruling class during its “globalization” phase. He had close social ties to men like John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, and his brother, director of the CIA, who worked overtime to overthrow any government that dared to defy Washington’s will.

So, why should the left celebrate Greta Thunberg being named person of the year given this background?

Continue reading

Next Page »

Blog at WordPress.com.