The Hudson Valley Radical September 7-15, 2012
Local Action, International Solidarity
Subscribe to our e-mail list and get this newsletter sent to your inbox weekly be contacting us at leftunited@gmail.com
Contents
1. What is a Radical?
2. Strike! Chicago Teachers Go Out
3. What Obama has Wrought
4. #S17!
5. Report: Poughkeepsie Labor Day Rally
6. A Speech for Labor Day
7. The Two Souls of Socialism: Chapter 9
8. Read On (and Take Action)
What is a Radical?
As Marxists, we see the root of society's problems in the capitalism, a system which thrives on the exploitation of workers. This newspaper was established as a voice for insubordinate workers and students in the process of uprooting the capitalist system. We uncompromisingly support all efforts on the part of the working class to take back what has been stolen from us. In the process of organizing, striking, and marching, we believe that the capitalist system must fall and be replaced by a revolutionary new world based on workers' control. This is what radical democracy looks like.
Strike! Chicago Teachers Go Out
After the city of Chicago has repeatedly refused to negotiate on a contract that increases the school day by 20%, increases the class size, and extends the school year by 2 weeks with only a 2% raise in pay, the Chicago Teachers Union has called a strike. Teachers in Chicago voted almost unanimously to strike earlier in the year should the city not negotiate, and on Monday, September 10th teachers walked the picket line for the first time. Additional teachers' demands include the continued use of seniority-based pay as opposed to pay based on "merit," which is entirely subjective.
The attacks on teachers in Chicago are part of a national effort on the part of the capitalists to dismantle public education as we know it and institute market "reforms." In Chicago, the war on teachers' rights is being waged by former White House Chief of Staff and lead Obama fundraiser Rahm Emmanuel. In the President's home town, it's clear which side he's on.
A solidarity campaign has already been set up to support the teachers in Chicago, and teachers across the country are seizing the moment to mount a national fight back against the war on public education. The Hudson Valley Radical unapologetically supports all workers demanding a fair contract, and stands in solidarity with the courageous struggle of the Chicago teachers.
What Obama Has Wrought
She also serves on the board of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the corporate foreign policy outfit to which her husband dutifully reported, each year, in his pucker-up to the presidency. The Obamas are a global capital-loving couple, two cynical lawyers on hire to the wealthiest and the ghastliest. They are no nicer or nastier than the Romneys and the Ryans, although the man of the house bombs babies and keeps a kill list. Yet, former “green jobs” czar Van Jones, a convention night chatterer on CNN who was fired by Obama for no good reason, chokes up when he speaks of the Black family that fronts for America – a huge act of national camouflage.
It is as useless to anchor a serious political discussion to this year’s Democratic and Republican convention speeches, as to plan the liberation of humanity during Mardi Gras. Truth is no more welcome at the former than sobriety is at the latter. So, forget the conventions and their multi-layered lies. Here are a few highlights of what Barack Obama has inflicted on the nation and the world:
Preventive Detention: George Bush could not have pulled off such an evisceration of the Bill of Rights, if only because the Democrats and an aroused street would not have allowed it. Bush knew better than to mount a full-court legislative assault on habeas corpus, and instead simply asserted that preventive detention is inherent in the powers of the presidency during times of war. It was left to Obama to pass actual legislation nullifying domestic rule of law – with no serious Democratic opposition.
Redefining War: Obama “led from behind” a 7-month Euro-American air and proxy ground war against the sovereign nation of Libya, culminating in the murder, after many attempts, of the nation’s leader. The president informed Congress that the military operation was not subject to the War Powers Act, because it had not been a “war” at all, since no Americans were known to have been killed. The doctrine was thus established – again, with little Democratic opposition – that wars are defined by the extent of U.S. casualties, no matter how many thousands of foreigners are slaughtered.
War Without Borders: Obama’s drone war policies, greatly expanded from that inherited from Bush, have vastly undermined accepted standards of international law. This president reserves the right to strike against non-state targets anywhere in the world, with whatever technical means at his disposal, without regard to the imminence of threat to the United States. The doctrine constitutes an ongoing war against peace – the highest of all crimes, now an everyday practice of the U.S.
The Merger of Banks and State: The Obama administration, with the Federal Reserve functioning as a component of the executive branch, has funneled at least $16 trillion to domestic and international banking institutions, much of it through a virtually “free money” policy that could well become permanent. This ongoing “rescue” of finance capital is unprecedented in sheer scope and in the blurring of lines between Wall Street and the State. The routine transfer of multi-billions in securities and debts and assets of all kinds between the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve and corporate accounts, has created de facto structures of governance that may be described as institutional forms of fascism.
These are world-shaking works of Obama-ism. Even Obama’s “lesser” crimes are astounding: his early calls for austerity and entitlement-axing (two weeks before his inauguration) and determined pursuit of a Grand Accommodation with the GOP (a $4 trillion deal that the Republicans rejected, in the summer of 2011) reveal a politician intent on ushering in a smoother, more rational corporate hegemony over a thoroughly pacified civil society. Part and parcel of that pacification is the de-professionalization of teaching – an ambition far beyond de-unionization.
Of course, Obama begins with the delegitimization of Black struggle, as in his 2004 Democratic Convention speech (”…there is no Black America…only the United States of America.”) To the extent that the nation’s most progressive, anti-war constituency can be neutralized, all of Obama’s corporate and military goals become more doable. The key to understanding America has always been race. With Obama, the corporate rulers have found the key that fits their needs at a time of (terminal) crisis. He is the more effective evil.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
Editor's Note: If you are interested in voting for the greater good instead of the more effective evil, consider writing in Stephen Durham for President and Christina López for Vice-President. A national protest vote campaign, Durham and López stand for socialist feminist solutions to solve the capitalist crisis. Visit VoteSocialism.com for more information
#S17!
One of Occupy's recent victories has been its work with workers in New York who occupied their branch of the Hot and Crusty's bakery chain after owners shut in down in retaliation for union organizing. Following the 24-hour occupation, a "Workers Justice Cafe" was set up outside the store to spread their message and operate a store in a democratic manner. Although it was the workers themselves who took the initiative, Occupy provided support and heightened awareness of the struggle.
So, in one year, activists have gone from occupying the squares to occupying the workplaces, as activist movements must if they are to truly tackle the capitalist system and stand for workers' democracy. In practice, Occupy has refuted the anarchist theory that the state and the capitalist system can be broken solely through occupying public space. In turn, Occupy has given fresh life to the socialist argument that activists must actively engage in struggles in the workplace. These struggles must go hand-in-hand with struggles in the inner-city against police brutality, at the abortion clinic defending a women's right to control her own body, and at the chapel where gays and lesbians are not allowed to marry. None of this can be accomplished simply through occupying a space like Zuccotti Park. And yet these occupations and mass demonstrations ARE venues to show the world that we are here and we are ready to fight.
So for the weekend of September 15-17, let's show the world that the American workers are waking up and fighting back. Let's build a movement that will truly give the capitalists a run for their money.
Report: Poughkeepsie Labor Day Rally
As far as I am concerned, any rally that has Joel Tyner, some folk music, and labor leaders speaking is worth attending. Yet, the Real Majority Project's 17th Annual Labor Day Rally seemed to be particularly momentous. Maybe it was just because I got to speak for the first time at an event. Regardless, it was clear that the annual rally has quite a bit of life left in it, and we were successful in securing both media attention and a sizable crowd.
And that crowd had something to say, with around 20 individuals speaking, extending the rally well beyond its original time of one hour. One of my favorite speeches from the rally was delivered by a member of the SEIU, who emphasized how we must remember the history of labor day, how we must never forget the men and women who struggled and even died to give us the labor standards we have today. How regardless of how much the media and the Establishment want to delegitimize Labor Day, it must always be an occasion for struggle. Donna Goodman of the Hudson Valley Labor Federation and Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter discussed how women have been hit hardest by the attacks on workers' rights, and how the struggle for equality at the workplace continues to this day. A speaker from the International Socialist Organization discussed how the Chicago teachers strike demands national solidarity to be successful. Other speakers addressed issues such as fracking and the urgent need to raise the minimum raise.
While Joel Tyner and other speakers appeared critical of the Democratic Party, one speaker in particular gave an impassioned defense of Barack Obama. While the impulse to attach oneself to a politician such as Obama is understandable, more than one speakers at the event called for an independent labor movement. This was the key point I attempted to convey in my speech, which is reprinted in the next article in its entirety.
At the end of the day, the rally was an important event in the process of building the Hudson Valley's workers' movement. The rally gave opposing views an opportunity to be heard, and united us in the fight for goals such as the Robin Hood Tax, an end to cuts in entitlement programs, and card-check union elections. Following the rally, participants marched through Poughkeepsie, stopping at the local branches of two major banks and the county office building before re-grouping for a General Assembly at Hulme Park, home of Occupy Poughkeepsie.
Onward!
A Speech for Labor Day
Four years ago, I made phone calls for the Obama campaign, believing that his presidency would bring change. It hasn’t. This year, I’ve been volunteering for a different campaign, that of Stephen Durham for President and Christina Lopez for Vice-President, a national, socialist feminist write-in campaign. Through talking with Stephen and looking into socialism, I realized that there is a war in America and around the world that neither Obama nor any politician can stop. It is a war that is being fought on many fronts:
Against women, blacks, gay, lesbian, transgender, and transsexual people, Hispanic, Arabs, Muslims, immigrants, the disabled, Native Americans, and a slew of other oppressed communities in a coordinated attempt to break the solidarity of the global working class. It is a war that is attempting to stop any organization of workers and is thus in the process of busting unions and rolling back any and all gains made by the workers over the years. Sisters and brothers, this is called a class war.
Sometimes, it seems as if this class war is pretty one-sided. Yet, from all four corners of the globe workers are fighting back. In the United States, that fight-back is exemplified by the Occupy movement, which is very much a presence right here in Poughkeepsie. Unions, too, are waking up, and those such as the National Union of Healthcare Workers in California are breaking with the Democratic Party. Rank-and-file unionists are demanding a strong, militant, and independent labor movement driven by the workers themselves, especially women, people of color and others who are the most oppressed in our society. Sisters and brothers, our success or failure in building this movement will determine the future for workers in America and around the globe.
In late 1921, the American Communist James P. Cannon addressed the first convention of the Workers Party. In his address, he said that the difference between their party and more reformist forces “does not arise just because we declare for the final revolution and they do not, nor because we are willing to hold before the workers the final goal and all of these others are not, but because, upon the basis of the class struggle, on questions of bread and butter, on housing, on labor organization, wages and hours, they are afraid to fight, and the Workers Party says it will fight on every single one of these issues. That is the difference between a betrayers organization, a cowardly organization, and a workers organization.”
Now, 91 years after these words were spoken, we have no such organization. However, we do have this workers’ movement that everybody here today is a part of. This workers’ movement that must fight on all fronts where the capitalists are attacking us. This workers’ movement that must feature the leadership of the most oppressed in our society and must fight against all forms of oppression. This workers’ movement that must eventually result in the establishment of a workers’ organization like the one Cannon was addressing those many years ago, a workers’ organization that will stop the domination of man over women, white over black, and employer over employee, a workers’ organization that will end once and for all the reign of globalized capital and usher in a new era of freedom and workers’ democracy.
The Two Souls of Socialism: Chapter 9
We have seen that there are several different strains or currents running through Socialism-From-Above. They are usually intertwined, but let us separate out some of the more important aspects for a closer look.
1. Philanthropism. – Socialism (or “freedom,” or what-have-you) is to be handed down, in order to Do the People Good, by the rich and powerful out of the kindness of their hearts. As the Communist Manifesto put it, with the early utopians like Robert Owen in mind, “Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.” In gratitude, the downtrodden poor must above all avoid getting rambunctious, and no nonsense about class struggle or self- emancipation. This aspect may be considered a special case of –
2. Elitism. – We have mentioned several cases of this conviction that socialism is the business of a new ruling minority, non-capitalist in nature and therefore guaranteed pure, imposing its own domination either temporarily (for a mere historical era) or even permanently. In either case, this new ruling class is likely to see its goal as an Educational Dictatorship over the masses – to Do Them Good, of course – the dictatorship being exercised by an elite party which suppresses all control from below, or by benevolent despots or Savior-Leaders of some kind, or by Shaw’s “Supermen,” by eugenic manipulators, by Proudhon’s “anarchist” managers or Saint-Simon’s technocrats or their more modern equivalents – with up-to-date terms and new verbal screens which can be hailed as fresh social theory as against “nineteenth-century Marxism.”
On the other hand, the revolutionary-democratic advocates of Socialism-from-Below have also always been a minority, but the chasm between the elitist approach and the vanguard approach is crucial, as we have seen in the case of Debs. For him as for Marx and Luxemburg, the function of the revolutionary vanguard is to impel the mass-majority to fit themselves to take power in their own name, through their own struggles. The point is not to deny the critical importance of minorities, but to establish a different relationship between the advanced minority and the more backward mass.
3. Plannism. – The key words are Efficiency, Order, Planning, System – and Regimentation. Socialism is reduced to social-engineering, by a Power above society. Here again, the point is not to deny that effective socialism requires over-all planning (and also that efficiency and order are good things); but the reduction of socialism to planned production is an entirely different matter; just as effective democracy requires the right to vote, but the reduction of democracy merely to the right to vote once in a while makes it a fraud.
As a matter of fact, it would be important to demonstrate that the separation of planning from democratic control-from-below makes a mockery of planning itself; for the immensely complicated industrial societies of today cannot be effectively planned by an all-powerful central committee’s ukases, which inhibit and terrorize the free play of initiative and correction from below. This is indeed the basic contradiction of the new type of exploiting social system represented by Soviet bureaucratic collectivism. But we cannot pursue this subject further here.
The substitution of Plannism for socialism has a long history, quite apart from its embodiment in the Soviet myth that Satification = Socialism, a tenet which we have already seen to have been first systematized by social-democratic reformism (Bernstein and the Fabians particularly). During the 1930’s, the mystique of the “Plan,” taken over in part from Soviet propaganda, became prominent in the right wing of the social-democracy, with Henri de Man hailed as its prophet and as successor to Marx. De Man faded from view and is now forgotten because he had the bad judgment to push his Revisionist theories first into corporatism and then into collaboration with the Nazis.
Aside from theoretical construction, Plannism appears in the socialist movement most frequently embodied in a certain psychological type of radical. To give credit due, one of the first sketches of this type came in Belloc’s The Servile State, with the Fabians in mind. This type, writes Belloc,
“loves the collectivist ideal in itself ... because it is an ordered and regular form of society. He loves to consider the ideal of a State in which land and capital shall be held by public officials who shall order other men about and so preserve them from the consequences of their vice, ignorance and folly. [Belloc writes further:] In him the exploitation of man excites no indignation. Indeed, he is not a type to which indignation or any other lively passion is familiar ... [Belloc’s eye is on Sidney Webb here.] ... the prospect of a vast bureaucracy wherein the whole of life shall be scheduled and appointed to certain simple schemes ... gives his small stomach a final satisfaction.”
As far as concerns contemporary examples with a pro-Stalinist coloration, examples-a-go-go can be found in the pages of Paul Sweezy’s magazine Monthly Review.
In a 1930 article on the “motive patterns of socialism,” written when he still thought he was a Leninist, Max Eastman distinguished this type as centered on “efficiency and intelligent organization ... a veritable passion for a plan ... businesslike organization.” For such, he commented, Stalin’s Russia has a fascination:
“It is a region at least to be apologized for in other lands – certainly not denounced from the standpoint of a mad dream like emancipation of the workers and therewith all mankind. In those who built the Marxian movement and those who organized its victory in Russia, that mad dream was the central motive. They were, as some are now prone to forget, extreme rebels against oppression. Lenin will perhaps stand out, when the commotion about his ideas subsides, as the greatest rebel in history. His major passion was to set men free ... if a single concept must be chosen to summarize the goal of the class struggle as defined in Marxian writings, and especially the writings of Lenin, human freedom is the name for it ...”
It might be added that more than once Lenin decried the push for total-planning as a “bureaucratic utopia.”
There is a subdivision under Plannism which deserves a name too: let us call it Productionism. Of course, everyone is “for” production just as everyone is for Virtue and the Good Life; but for this type, production is the decisive test and end of a society. Russian bureaucratic collectivism is “progressive” because of the statistics of pig-iron production (the same type usually ignores the impressive statistics of increased production under Nazi or Japanese capitalism). It is all right to smash or prevent free trade-unions under Nasser, Castro, Sukarno or Nkrumah because something known as “economic development” is paramount over human rights. This hardboiled viewpoint was, of course, not invented by these “radicals,” but by the callous exploiters of labor in the capitalist Industrial Revolution; and the socialist movement came into existence fighting tooth-and-nail against these theoreticians of “progressive” exploitation. On this score too, apologists for modern “leftist” authoritarian regimes tend to consider this hoary doctrine as the newest revelation of sociology.
To be continued in next week's issue...
Read On (and Take Action)
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Local Action, International Solidarity
Subscribe to our e-mail list and get this newsletter sent to your inbox weekly be contacting us at leftunited@gmail.com
Contents
1. What is a Radical?
2. Strike! Chicago Teachers Go Out
3. What Obama has Wrought
4. #S17!
5. Report: Poughkeepsie Labor Day Rally
6. A Speech for Labor Day
7. The Two Souls of Socialism: Chapter 9
8. Read On (and Take Action)
What is a Radical?
Radical (adj.): Of or going to the root or origin
Synonyms: Uncompromising, Insubordinate, Revolutionary
As Marxists, we see the root of society's problems in the capitalism, a system which thrives on the exploitation of workers. This newspaper was established as a voice for insubordinate workers and students in the process of uprooting the capitalist system. We uncompromisingly support all efforts on the part of the working class to take back what has been stolen from us. In the process of organizing, striking, and marching, we believe that the capitalist system must fall and be replaced by a revolutionary new world based on workers' control. This is what radical democracy looks like.
Strike! Chicago Teachers Go Out
Now we must organize in solidarity
After the city of Chicago has repeatedly refused to negotiate on a contract that increases the school day by 20%, increases the class size, and extends the school year by 2 weeks with only a 2% raise in pay, the Chicago Teachers Union has called a strike. Teachers in Chicago voted almost unanimously to strike earlier in the year should the city not negotiate, and on Monday, September 10th teachers walked the picket line for the first time. Additional teachers' demands include the continued use of seniority-based pay as opposed to pay based on "merit," which is entirely subjective.
The attacks on teachers in Chicago are part of a national effort on the part of the capitalists to dismantle public education as we know it and institute market "reforms." In Chicago, the war on teachers' rights is being waged by former White House Chief of Staff and lead Obama fundraiser Rahm Emmanuel. In the President's home town, it's clear which side he's on.
A solidarity campaign has already been set up to support the teachers in Chicago, and teachers across the country are seizing the moment to mount a national fight back against the war on public education. The Hudson Valley Radical unapologetically supports all workers demanding a fair contract, and stands in solidarity with the courageous struggle of the Chicago teachers.
What Obama Has Wrought
Here, we reprint Glen Ford's indictment of the Obama presidency. Ford's sweeping analysis points to the conclusion that the president is not the lesser but rather "the more effective evil." The article was originally published at Black Agenda Report.Most people don’t want to be a perceived as party-poopers – which is why the principled folks that have protested the evil antics of the corporate, imperial parties, in Tampa and Charlotte, are so much to be admired. Frankly, who wants to be the one to point out, in the middle of the festivities, that Michelle Obama was just a Chicago Daley machine hack lawyer who was rewarded with a quarter million dollar a year job of neutralizing community complaints against the omnivorous University of Chicago Hospitals? She resigned from her $50,000 seat on the board of directors of Tree-House Foods, a major Wal-Mart supplier, early in her husband’s presidential campaign. But, once in the White House, the First Lady quickly returned to flaking for Wal-Mart, praising the anti-union “death star” behemoth’s inner city groceries offensive as part of her White House healthy foods booster duties.
She also serves on the board of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the corporate foreign policy outfit to which her husband dutifully reported, each year, in his pucker-up to the presidency. The Obamas are a global capital-loving couple, two cynical lawyers on hire to the wealthiest and the ghastliest. They are no nicer or nastier than the Romneys and the Ryans, although the man of the house bombs babies and keeps a kill list. Yet, former “green jobs” czar Van Jones, a convention night chatterer on CNN who was fired by Obama for no good reason, chokes up when he speaks of the Black family that fronts for America – a huge act of national camouflage.
It is as useless to anchor a serious political discussion to this year’s Democratic and Republican convention speeches, as to plan the liberation of humanity during Mardi Gras. Truth is no more welcome at the former than sobriety is at the latter. So, forget the conventions and their multi-layered lies. Here are a few highlights of what Barack Obama has inflicted on the nation and the world:
Preventive Detention: George Bush could not have pulled off such an evisceration of the Bill of Rights, if only because the Democrats and an aroused street would not have allowed it. Bush knew better than to mount a full-court legislative assault on habeas corpus, and instead simply asserted that preventive detention is inherent in the powers of the presidency during times of war. It was left to Obama to pass actual legislation nullifying domestic rule of law – with no serious Democratic opposition.
Redefining War: Obama “led from behind” a 7-month Euro-American air and proxy ground war against the sovereign nation of Libya, culminating in the murder, after many attempts, of the nation’s leader. The president informed Congress that the military operation was not subject to the War Powers Act, because it had not been a “war” at all, since no Americans were known to have been killed. The doctrine was thus established – again, with little Democratic opposition – that wars are defined by the extent of U.S. casualties, no matter how many thousands of foreigners are slaughtered.
War Without Borders: Obama’s drone war policies, greatly expanded from that inherited from Bush, have vastly undermined accepted standards of international law. This president reserves the right to strike against non-state targets anywhere in the world, with whatever technical means at his disposal, without regard to the imminence of threat to the United States. The doctrine constitutes an ongoing war against peace – the highest of all crimes, now an everyday practice of the U.S.
The Merger of Banks and State: The Obama administration, with the Federal Reserve functioning as a component of the executive branch, has funneled at least $16 trillion to domestic and international banking institutions, much of it through a virtually “free money” policy that could well become permanent. This ongoing “rescue” of finance capital is unprecedented in sheer scope and in the blurring of lines between Wall Street and the State. The routine transfer of multi-billions in securities and debts and assets of all kinds between the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve and corporate accounts, has created de facto structures of governance that may be described as institutional forms of fascism.
These are world-shaking works of Obama-ism. Even Obama’s “lesser” crimes are astounding: his early calls for austerity and entitlement-axing (two weeks before his inauguration) and determined pursuit of a Grand Accommodation with the GOP (a $4 trillion deal that the Republicans rejected, in the summer of 2011) reveal a politician intent on ushering in a smoother, more rational corporate hegemony over a thoroughly pacified civil society. Part and parcel of that pacification is the de-professionalization of teaching – an ambition far beyond de-unionization.
Of course, Obama begins with the delegitimization of Black struggle, as in his 2004 Democratic Convention speech (”…there is no Black America…only the United States of America.”) To the extent that the nation’s most progressive, anti-war constituency can be neutralized, all of Obama’s corporate and military goals become more doable. The key to understanding America has always been race. With Obama, the corporate rulers have found the key that fits their needs at a time of (terminal) crisis. He is the more effective evil.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
Editor's Note: If you are interested in voting for the greater good instead of the more effective evil, consider writing in Stephen Durham for President and Christina López for Vice-President. A national protest vote campaign, Durham and López stand for socialist feminist solutions to solve the capitalist crisis. Visit VoteSocialism.com for more information
#S17!
Next weekend, members of the 99% will converge on Wall Street to commemorate the 1st anniversary of the occupation that changed everythingBeginning on September 15th, thousands will descend into downtown Manhattan yet again for Occupy Wall Street's first birthday celebration. While it would be foolish to predict the outcome at this point, all indications are that it will be quite a large gathering. Will the media discount it? Probably, Reuters was running an article about the failure of the May Day demonstrations (impressive, without a doubt) before they had hardly begun. In any event, the real test will be whether #S17 can be used as a springboard for larger demonstrations down the road and concrete actions in solidarity with workers and the oppressed in the near future.
One of Occupy's recent victories has been its work with workers in New York who occupied their branch of the Hot and Crusty's bakery chain after owners shut in down in retaliation for union organizing. Following the 24-hour occupation, a "Workers Justice Cafe" was set up outside the store to spread their message and operate a store in a democratic manner. Although it was the workers themselves who took the initiative, Occupy provided support and heightened awareness of the struggle.
So, in one year, activists have gone from occupying the squares to occupying the workplaces, as activist movements must if they are to truly tackle the capitalist system and stand for workers' democracy. In practice, Occupy has refuted the anarchist theory that the state and the capitalist system can be broken solely through occupying public space. In turn, Occupy has given fresh life to the socialist argument that activists must actively engage in struggles in the workplace. These struggles must go hand-in-hand with struggles in the inner-city against police brutality, at the abortion clinic defending a women's right to control her own body, and at the chapel where gays and lesbians are not allowed to marry. None of this can be accomplished simply through occupying a space like Zuccotti Park. And yet these occupations and mass demonstrations ARE venues to show the world that we are here and we are ready to fight.
So for the weekend of September 15-17, let's show the world that the American workers are waking up and fighting back. Let's build a movement that will truly give the capitalists a run for their money.
Report: Poughkeepsie Labor Day Rally
On September 3rd, around 50 activists gathered on the steps of the Poughkeepsie Post Office to build a fighting workers' movement in our area
And that crowd had something to say, with around 20 individuals speaking, extending the rally well beyond its original time of one hour. One of my favorite speeches from the rally was delivered by a member of the SEIU, who emphasized how we must remember the history of labor day, how we must never forget the men and women who struggled and even died to give us the labor standards we have today. How regardless of how much the media and the Establishment want to delegitimize Labor Day, it must always be an occasion for struggle. Donna Goodman of the Hudson Valley Labor Federation and Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter discussed how women have been hit hardest by the attacks on workers' rights, and how the struggle for equality at the workplace continues to this day. A speaker from the International Socialist Organization discussed how the Chicago teachers strike demands national solidarity to be successful. Other speakers addressed issues such as fracking and the urgent need to raise the minimum raise.
While Joel Tyner and other speakers appeared critical of the Democratic Party, one speaker in particular gave an impassioned defense of Barack Obama. While the impulse to attach oneself to a politician such as Obama is understandable, more than one speakers at the event called for an independent labor movement. This was the key point I attempted to convey in my speech, which is reprinted in the next article in its entirety.
At the end of the day, the rally was an important event in the process of building the Hudson Valley's workers' movement. The rally gave opposing views an opportunity to be heard, and united us in the fight for goals such as the Robin Hood Tax, an end to cuts in entitlement programs, and card-check union elections. Following the rally, participants marched through Poughkeepsie, stopping at the local branches of two major banks and the county office building before re-grouping for a General Assembly at Hulme Park, home of Occupy Poughkeepsie.
Onward!
A Speech for Labor Day
by Schuyler Kempton, originally delivered at the Real Majority Project's Labor Day Rally in Poughkeepsie, September 3rd, 2012Sisters and Brothers, I’m so glad you’ve all come out today. I’m feeling a little under the weather, so excuse me if I sound like a have a cold. But let me tell you that this cold will never compare to how sick I am of the attacks on working people and their families that we have had to endure. As a student who will soon be a part of the next generation of workers, I am not optimistic about the future of our capitalist system. Workers around the globe are hurting and the capitalists have been profiting off of our misery. We are told by the media that we have simply been caught in the crossfire of an economic downturn. But that is a straight-up lie: Workers have not been caught in the crossfire, we have been put in the crosshairs of capitalism. The guns are pointed at us, the workers, seniors, and students of the world.
Four years ago, I made phone calls for the Obama campaign, believing that his presidency would bring change. It hasn’t. This year, I’ve been volunteering for a different campaign, that of Stephen Durham for President and Christina Lopez for Vice-President, a national, socialist feminist write-in campaign. Through talking with Stephen and looking into socialism, I realized that there is a war in America and around the world that neither Obama nor any politician can stop. It is a war that is being fought on many fronts:
Against women, blacks, gay, lesbian, transgender, and transsexual people, Hispanic, Arabs, Muslims, immigrants, the disabled, Native Americans, and a slew of other oppressed communities in a coordinated attempt to break the solidarity of the global working class. It is a war that is attempting to stop any organization of workers and is thus in the process of busting unions and rolling back any and all gains made by the workers over the years. Sisters and brothers, this is called a class war.
Sometimes, it seems as if this class war is pretty one-sided. Yet, from all four corners of the globe workers are fighting back. In the United States, that fight-back is exemplified by the Occupy movement, which is very much a presence right here in Poughkeepsie. Unions, too, are waking up, and those such as the National Union of Healthcare Workers in California are breaking with the Democratic Party. Rank-and-file unionists are demanding a strong, militant, and independent labor movement driven by the workers themselves, especially women, people of color and others who are the most oppressed in our society. Sisters and brothers, our success or failure in building this movement will determine the future for workers in America and around the globe.
In late 1921, the American Communist James P. Cannon addressed the first convention of the Workers Party. In his address, he said that the difference between their party and more reformist forces “does not arise just because we declare for the final revolution and they do not, nor because we are willing to hold before the workers the final goal and all of these others are not, but because, upon the basis of the class struggle, on questions of bread and butter, on housing, on labor organization, wages and hours, they are afraid to fight, and the Workers Party says it will fight on every single one of these issues. That is the difference between a betrayers organization, a cowardly organization, and a workers organization.”
Now, 91 years after these words were spoken, we have no such organization. However, we do have this workers’ movement that everybody here today is a part of. This workers’ movement that must fight on all fronts where the capitalists are attacking us. This workers’ movement that must feature the leadership of the most oppressed in our society and must fight against all forms of oppression. This workers’ movement that must eventually result in the establishment of a workers’ organization like the one Cannon was addressing those many years ago, a workers’ organization that will stop the domination of man over women, white over black, and employer over employee, a workers’ organization that will end once and for all the reign of globalized capital and usher in a new era of freedom and workers’ democracy.
The Two Souls of Socialism: Chapter 9
Here, we reprint the first half of chapter 9 in Hal Draper's classic socialist pamphlet, "The Two Souls of Socialism." The entire text can be found at Marx.org9. Six Strains of Socialism from Above
We have seen that there are several different strains or currents running through Socialism-From-Above. They are usually intertwined, but let us separate out some of the more important aspects for a closer look.
1. Philanthropism. – Socialism (or “freedom,” or what-have-you) is to be handed down, in order to Do the People Good, by the rich and powerful out of the kindness of their hearts. As the Communist Manifesto put it, with the early utopians like Robert Owen in mind, “Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.” In gratitude, the downtrodden poor must above all avoid getting rambunctious, and no nonsense about class struggle or self- emancipation. This aspect may be considered a special case of –
2. Elitism. – We have mentioned several cases of this conviction that socialism is the business of a new ruling minority, non-capitalist in nature and therefore guaranteed pure, imposing its own domination either temporarily (for a mere historical era) or even permanently. In either case, this new ruling class is likely to see its goal as an Educational Dictatorship over the masses – to Do Them Good, of course – the dictatorship being exercised by an elite party which suppresses all control from below, or by benevolent despots or Savior-Leaders of some kind, or by Shaw’s “Supermen,” by eugenic manipulators, by Proudhon’s “anarchist” managers or Saint-Simon’s technocrats or their more modern equivalents – with up-to-date terms and new verbal screens which can be hailed as fresh social theory as against “nineteenth-century Marxism.”
On the other hand, the revolutionary-democratic advocates of Socialism-from-Below have also always been a minority, but the chasm between the elitist approach and the vanguard approach is crucial, as we have seen in the case of Debs. For him as for Marx and Luxemburg, the function of the revolutionary vanguard is to impel the mass-majority to fit themselves to take power in their own name, through their own struggles. The point is not to deny the critical importance of minorities, but to establish a different relationship between the advanced minority and the more backward mass.
3. Plannism. – The key words are Efficiency, Order, Planning, System – and Regimentation. Socialism is reduced to social-engineering, by a Power above society. Here again, the point is not to deny that effective socialism requires over-all planning (and also that efficiency and order are good things); but the reduction of socialism to planned production is an entirely different matter; just as effective democracy requires the right to vote, but the reduction of democracy merely to the right to vote once in a while makes it a fraud.
As a matter of fact, it would be important to demonstrate that the separation of planning from democratic control-from-below makes a mockery of planning itself; for the immensely complicated industrial societies of today cannot be effectively planned by an all-powerful central committee’s ukases, which inhibit and terrorize the free play of initiative and correction from below. This is indeed the basic contradiction of the new type of exploiting social system represented by Soviet bureaucratic collectivism. But we cannot pursue this subject further here.
The substitution of Plannism for socialism has a long history, quite apart from its embodiment in the Soviet myth that Satification = Socialism, a tenet which we have already seen to have been first systematized by social-democratic reformism (Bernstein and the Fabians particularly). During the 1930’s, the mystique of the “Plan,” taken over in part from Soviet propaganda, became prominent in the right wing of the social-democracy, with Henri de Man hailed as its prophet and as successor to Marx. De Man faded from view and is now forgotten because he had the bad judgment to push his Revisionist theories first into corporatism and then into collaboration with the Nazis.
Aside from theoretical construction, Plannism appears in the socialist movement most frequently embodied in a certain psychological type of radical. To give credit due, one of the first sketches of this type came in Belloc’s The Servile State, with the Fabians in mind. This type, writes Belloc,
“loves the collectivist ideal in itself ... because it is an ordered and regular form of society. He loves to consider the ideal of a State in which land and capital shall be held by public officials who shall order other men about and so preserve them from the consequences of their vice, ignorance and folly. [Belloc writes further:] In him the exploitation of man excites no indignation. Indeed, he is not a type to which indignation or any other lively passion is familiar ... [Belloc’s eye is on Sidney Webb here.] ... the prospect of a vast bureaucracy wherein the whole of life shall be scheduled and appointed to certain simple schemes ... gives his small stomach a final satisfaction.”
As far as concerns contemporary examples with a pro-Stalinist coloration, examples-a-go-go can be found in the pages of Paul Sweezy’s magazine Monthly Review.
In a 1930 article on the “motive patterns of socialism,” written when he still thought he was a Leninist, Max Eastman distinguished this type as centered on “efficiency and intelligent organization ... a veritable passion for a plan ... businesslike organization.” For such, he commented, Stalin’s Russia has a fascination:
“It is a region at least to be apologized for in other lands – certainly not denounced from the standpoint of a mad dream like emancipation of the workers and therewith all mankind. In those who built the Marxian movement and those who organized its victory in Russia, that mad dream was the central motive. They were, as some are now prone to forget, extreme rebels against oppression. Lenin will perhaps stand out, when the commotion about his ideas subsides, as the greatest rebel in history. His major passion was to set men free ... if a single concept must be chosen to summarize the goal of the class struggle as defined in Marxian writings, and especially the writings of Lenin, human freedom is the name for it ...”
It might be added that more than once Lenin decried the push for total-planning as a “bureaucratic utopia.”
There is a subdivision under Plannism which deserves a name too: let us call it Productionism. Of course, everyone is “for” production just as everyone is for Virtue and the Good Life; but for this type, production is the decisive test and end of a society. Russian bureaucratic collectivism is “progressive” because of the statistics of pig-iron production (the same type usually ignores the impressive statistics of increased production under Nazi or Japanese capitalism). It is all right to smash or prevent free trade-unions under Nasser, Castro, Sukarno or Nkrumah because something known as “economic development” is paramount over human rights. This hardboiled viewpoint was, of course, not invented by these “radicals,” but by the callous exploiters of labor in the capitalist Industrial Revolution; and the socialist movement came into existence fighting tooth-and-nail against these theoreticians of “progressive” exploitation. On this score too, apologists for modern “leftist” authoritarian regimes tend to consider this hoary doctrine as the newest revelation of sociology.
To be continued in next week's issue...
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