Saturday, December 23, 2017

There is no Shortcut on the Path to Power

A response to "A Path to Power for the American Left"


1. The ruling class has no interest in destroying bourgeois democracy. A turn to fascism (true fascism, not the bogeyman facsimile conjured up in the minds of frightened liberal petty bourgeois) requires two preconditions: the inability of the apparatus of bourgeois democracy to serve the interests of the capitalist class, and the existential threat of proletarian revolution. US bourgeois democracy continues to serve its purpose well enough, with another round of massive tax breaks for the investor class having made its way through Congress a few days ago. The threat of working class revolution is nonexistent under current historical conditions.  Our analysis must be based on a sound understanding and application of theory, not subjective thinking.

2. “The country and the world are at a critical tipping point.” This is a vulgarization of dialectics. We hear this from certain sections of the left every time a Republican is elected President, or the Republican Party manages to achieve a majority in Congress. Then, when these offices inevitably flip back to the Democrats, those same people call for patience and compromise even as conditions for the working class worsen. We have sacrificed organizing and political education on the altar of these ‘critical defensive struggles’. Study? No one has time for that; we must stop Trump.
Inevitably, the low level of class consciousness and political education among the politically active masses leads them to being duped into demobilizing by left-sounding Democratic promises. This is the true lesson of 2008 and 2012, the “social movement-centered successes”. These so-called social movements evaporated the day after the election, as they were not social movements at all, but well financed marketing campaigns. And where was the “political space for the left” that these electoral victories were supposed to bring? The left was ruthlessly suppressed under the Obama Administration: the raids on left organizations in Minneapolis; the coordinated attacks on Occupy Wall Street encampments; the forcible shutting out of single-payer advocates during the development of the ACA. Democratic politicians, with a very few exceptions, are resolute enemies of the left and the working class.

3. Fragmentation and isolation are undoubtedly a problem. How do we combat them? By improving our work, chiefly by fighting against individualism and egotism, developing a new theory that is accessible and applicable to current conditions, and building durable organizations, starting at the local level. This is difficult political work, and we must be prepared to face the fact that it may not bear fruit in our lifetimes, but it is critically necessary. History shows us that there is no shortcut to political power for the working class. If we truly do have a world to win, we must have the discipline and the resolve to see the fight through.

Friday, December 22, 2017

Ethan Young: A Path to Power for the Left


Living through this era of rotten feelings is like being trapped in an endless dystopian movie. We now live under an alliance of the old-guard conservatives and the far right (evangelicals, Tea Party and overt white supremacists), funded up the yin-yang by billionaire lunatics. This alliance includes theocrats like Vice President Mike Pence and open fascists, and their beliefs are surging into the mainstream.

The goal of this real-life hydra, which now dominates all three branches of government, has gone beyond the old conservative dream of dismantling the social benefits brought about by the New Deal. Now they are set on destroying what’s left of bourgeois democracy. A Hunger Games story is emerging in its place: a tightly controlled state, militarized police, unregulated monopolies, privatized services, a powerless and destitute working class and a culture pulsing with the venom of war and racial hatred.

The role of the electoral opposition largely falls to the corporate-friendly Democratic Party centrists, now decidedly in the minority in Congress despite the GOP’s low polling numbers. The centrists did not plan it that way. They play that role because no one else is in any position to put up a fight at that level of politics. But they’re lousy at it. They blew the election and they know it, but they don’t want to confront their mistakes.

Instead, they are praying for the cavalry, a fairy godmother, any superhero from the power centers of society to come to their rescue. Their appeal has always been to the moderate wing of capitalists: You need us, keep us funded and we’ll keep them dogies rollin’. To the public, their appeal is: We’ll protect you if you come through with the votes. Between the money guys’ indifference and being out-organized in key sectors of key states, those appeals fell flat. Yet they seem to know no other way to play politics.

The Democratic centrists’ main hope right now is that the Mueller investigation will bring Trump down with a crash, à la Watergate. They envision a scenario in which Trump’s Russian ties get him legally branded a traitor to America. This would get them off the hook for their bungling the election and tarnish the Republicans’ image enough to give them a path back to power. It would also enable them to win without offering a strong alternative that would draw on their base’s eagerness for change; for more, not less, social welfare and stability, for peace at home and abroad and for democratic rights.

This works out nicely under the tunnel-view formula the center-clingers have cultivated for decades. Follow the shift to the right halfway, keep the left at bay and eventually the public will get sick of the Republicans and return to Old Faithful. So in the face of an active attack on every principle they purport to be about, the centrists still insist on a half-assed response. They are afraid of their party’s base. They are afraid of losing favor and financial support from big business and Wall Street.

That’s their problem. Our problem is that the stakes are much more than just win or lose for the Democratic Party. The country and the world are at a critical tipping point. Government is being transformed amid widespread voter disenfranchisement, rampant privatization and monopolization, shrinking wages and the destruction of basic democratic and human rights. And, of course, all the money in the world can’t deal with the ravages of a wrecked environment.

We can’t afford the Democrats trying to fight the rightist siege with their usual tactics of “bipartisan” halfway tradeoffs. Their working assumption is that the more balls-out crazy Trump performs, the more power he’ll lose, as Republicans and more moderate supporters defect. Some see Roy Moore’s defeat in that light. But generally, without a strong progressive alternative, the crazy becomes normal.

When the media talk about “the resistance,” they are usually referring to Democrats in office. Secondarily, they mean the crowds of angry civilians confronting elected officials in town halls, on the heels of the massive women’s marches in January. Below the radar, there is widespread opposition, anger and revulsion. This is where the left should come in. Situations like this call for a solid, politically coherent left, but that’s what seems to be missing.

The left’s role is to move this unrest and opposition in the direction of politics — enabling working-class people to apply pressure where and when it can change the situation in their favor, building their (small-d) democratic strength. This is our mission inside and outside the Democratic Party, in social movements, in unions and in intellectual settings.

The next move should be away from fragmentation and isolation. Each fragment tends to confuse building the left with keeping its own particular project afloat. This is a problem even in the suddenly expanded Democratic Socialists of America and more spontaneous self-conscious resistance groups like Indivisible. There’s so much going on in every state and territory, but most of those involved are unaware of it. All of us need to find and connect the pieces into a coordinated mutual project, one with a unified focus on democratic action and potential power.

The focus we need comes down to an immediate, defensive political operation: Unseating and defeating every Republican and “blue dog” (conservative-friendly) Democrat we can, between now and November 2020.

This is workable, based on the electoral wins in 2017, and even the social movement-centered successes of 2008 and 2012. The Bernie Sanders campaign won 13 million votes and opened up space for a class-conscious left populism within the Democratic Party that had not existed since Jesse Jackson ran for President in 1984 and 1988. We have gained ground on popular support for Medicare-for-all, dignity for women and raising the minimum wage, and forced the issues of income inequality, police terror and climate destruction into the discussion, despite the right’s offensive.

One reason to play on this field is to isolate the right inside and outside the party. The left is in no position to drive out the Trumpoids without allying with the center, as much as we (and they) might like to avoid it. This worked in Virginia this year, when a centrist Democrat was elected governor over a Trump imitator spewing anti-immigrant urban legends, and progressives won a number of legislative seats, including socialist Lee Carter and Danica Roem, Virginia’s first transgender state legislator.

This should not be confused with “pushing the Democrats to the left.” Centrists will be centrists, dependent on support from corporate donors even when they use leftish-sounding rhetoric for votes or back some leftist goals. But if they actively push back against the GOP, it will create more political space for the left.

Nor does it mean dropping other issues. Single-payer health care? Hurts the rightist regime. Ending police murder and violence? Also. Every social movement that confronts the attack on democratic rights shakes a pillar of the right-far right alliance’s influence on voters.

Third-party efforts and campaigning for socialists as Democrats can sometimes be feasible tactics. But in order to cut Trump & Co. off at the knees, we’ll also have to work for some lesser evils to break the GOP stranglehold on Congress and state legislatures. A center-left alliance will be necessary over the next three years, even if the centrists have to be dragged into it to avoid collapse.

Politically-minded leftists need to practice solidarity as something more than just mutual sympathy and support. We’ll have to make connections across old, entrenched and increasingly obsolete barriers. No single group will achieve this. Competing sects hooking up momentarily won’t cut it. It’s up to individual group leaders and movement organizers to make up their minds that this approach should be the priority over tending their own gardens. This is happening to a limited extent, and people are finding each other and beginning to talk seriously.

One potential national rallying point is the Poor People’s Campaign being organized by Rev. William Barber and Rev. Liz Theoharis of Kairos Center. They are reviving Martin Luther King’s unfinished Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. They plan to draw organized poor people into direct action targeting state and federal authorities to demand that poverty and inequality be addressed. It grows out of the Moral Mondays movement, which helped slow North Carolina’s race to the far right after the state government fell under total Republican control in 2012.

The project’s goals bridge the gulf between left populism and the crucial sector of working people who are already well acquainted with their fate in the 21st-century U.S. economy. To win the political goal of economic justice, the campaign frames it as a moral issue, in which inequality and lack of workers’ rights are simply wrong.

Mass organization + political action = power. Or as Rev. Barber says, “Forward together, not one step back.”

Monday, December 18, 2017

Happy birthday, Koba!


"It is difficult for me to imagine what 'personal liberty' is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society, personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper."

Thursday, December 14, 2017

A Profound Post By Kali Akuno Taking Up Key Questions Of Strategy & Tactics

Kali Akuno is an especially advanced thinker working as co-director of Cooperation Jackson, an organization we have often supported on this blog. A recent post on Kali Akuno's blog takes up many questions we are working with locally in Salem: what is criticism/self-criticism, how do we define victories, how do we correctly clarify our understandings and agreements, what are our best and tested points of reference as we do socialist political work, what opportunities really exist for our work?

Of course, the Movement in Jackson is taking up questions we're not yet dealing with, or even prepared to deal with: what are the reasonable political expectations we should have at this point, what does socialist regional political organizing around an advanced program really look like, what ids our relationship to other parties and to the Democrats, what might socialist (re)construction look like in our situation right now?

The article begins with a fundamental quote from Amilcar Cabral:

“Our agenda includes topics whose importance and acuteness are beyond doubt and in which one concern is predominant: The Struggle. We note, however, that one type of struggle we regard as fundamental is not explicitly mentioned in this agenda, although we are sure that it was present in the minds of those who drew it up. We are referring to the struggle against our own weaknesses. We admit that other cases may differ from ours. Our experience in the broad framework of the daily struggle we wage has shown us that, whatever the difficulties the enemy may create, the aforenamed is the most difficult struggle for the present and the future of our peoples. This struggle is the expression of the internal contradictions in the economic, social and cultural (therefore historical) reality of each of our countries. We are convinced that any national or social revolution which is not founded on adequate knowledge of this reality runs grave risks of poor results or of being doomed to failure” – Amilcar Cabral

The article demonstrates what criticism/self-criticism should consist of, and adds the necessary ingredient--solidarity in a spirit of revolution and internationalism. Take in the depth of Kali Akuno's wisdom here:

For my part, I will continue to struggle for the realization of the Jackson-Kush Plan through the work and contributions of Cooperation Jackson and the construction of a new political organization to help fill in some critical gaps that exist in the movements for revolutionary social transformation in the US. It is my sincere hope that the New Afrikan People’s Organization, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and the administration of Chokwe Antar Lumumba will make the course corrections suggested herein. Our movement has nothing to gain by pursuing the path of collaboration and compromise. If anything, without a major course correction, the Lumumba administration is structurally poised to reenact an “American” version of the neo-liberal tragedy currently being executed and administered on the Greek people by Syriza. It is only by pursuing a revolutionary path, however difficult it may appear in the short-term from the perspective of having to be a “responsible” administrative force, that we, as a movement, will gain. This would entail pursuing things like a comprehensive food sovereignty program, with the elicit aid of working class vehicles like Cooperation Jackson and the People’s Assembly, to eliminate the threat of food being used as a weapon, that would require converting most, if not all, of the cities vacant properties into urban farms. This would entail creating administration supported people’s markets and distribution centers, and support for a local alternative currency or token, to help facilitate the exchange of this community produced value.

The Syriza Trap is not completely inevitable. Clear leadership, with a clear plan, and uncompromising will can still go another route. I say this because I know all conscious political actors make mistakes and we all have the ability to learn from them, and most importantly, correct them. It is in this light that I note that despite our present differences, we have to be cognizant of that fact that in the face of the concentrated power of our enemies, that none of our differences ultimately rise above those posed to us collectively by the systems of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, and hetero-patriarchy and their conscious and willing agents and enablers. The process of “unity-struggle-unity” is still applicable on the level of alliances, fronts, and blocs. When and where possible, I look forward to allying with the Lumumba administration, NAPO, MXGM and many other organizations in the common struggle to dismantle the systems of hierarchy, alienation,
and oppression and construct a new world, beginning in Jackson, but in no way limited to it.


In a few paragraphs we get a leading activist's view which transcends and pushes beyond the usual discourse of the U.S. left. We get necessary connections made between Syriza and Jackson, a point we have been discussing here, and a dialectical view of how necessary contradictions or tensions between a politically advanced urban administration and the New Afrikan People's Organization and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement move all of us forward. It helps that there is a crucial distinction made in this article between primary and secondary contradictions. It's not that I agree with everything in the post so much as that there are important new starting points here which should cause us to reexamine our thinking and deepen a specifically socialist consciousness and work, realigning our thinking, consciousness, and practice. I don't agree with much that I hear from Black Agenda Report, but I have to respect the differences, and I know that many Marxist-Leninists do support BAR. When some local socialists threw some of Kali Akuno's words at us recently I did not know how to understand this. The post referenced here explains his thinking and also puts those socialists on the spot: they quoted selectively and without context. As Mao said, "No right to speak without investigation." 

Read the post here.

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Vito Marcantonio---12/10/02--8/9/54


Vito Marcantonio was born on this day in 1902 and died in August 9 of 1954. Marc was a leading progressive politician in his day and his influence is still being felt.

Marc’s career demonstrates how people can move across a political spectrum and grow and affect others. He started as a Republican in Fiorello LaGuardia’s wing of the Republican Party. With a change in the times, which is to say a change in the balance of social forces, he moved further to the left. Marc ably represented East Harlem, which then had large Italian, Jewish, Puerto Rican, and Cuban neighborhoods. His movement brought those enclaves together into an all-peoples’ political machine and sent him to Washington as a people’s representative repeatedly.

Vito Marcantonio worked his way up from the poor and tough Italian neighborhoods and became an attorney in the mid-1920s. He moved to the left and to Marxism as he matured. The people gathering around the liberal or progressive Fiorello La Guardia and Robert M. La Follette recognized Marc’s special abilities. He was able to build on this and win a seat in the House of Representatives in 1934 as a Republican. His loss in the political race of 1936 was likely more due to splits in the New Deal administration and corruption at the city level than it was to any failures by Marc and the interracial and militant movement he was building.

Marc gave us everything that he could. He was immigrant-friendly, one of labor’s strongest allies, a heavy-handed and militant defender of civil rights, and some people have credited him with being a founding father of the modern Puerto Rican and Cuban independence movements. A former member of the Young Lords in New York once told me that she saw the Young Lords building in part on Marc’s legacy, and she said that had Marc lived longer the Young Lords would been a different organization than they were. His outstanding failure at the time was his support for the wartime internment of the Japanese in the United States, a failure he shared with many others. This was a terrible and serious error and contradicted everything else he did in his life’s work.

For some context, there were also Italians and Italian-Americans interned and deported in those years. The difference between these people and the Japanese who were interned was that among the Italians were many fascists who had been involved in building a violent fascist movement in the United States. They did indeed threaten national security and the war effort, and they threatened the safety and lives of Italian-American anti-fascists in their communities. The Italians were interned for political reasons, the Japanese for racial and racist reasons. At the time it may have been difficult for sincere anti-fascists to tell the difference. And for what it's worth, the very able Communist leader Gus Hall wrote personally to every Japanese family who he could reach who had been interned in order to apologize and do self-criticism on behalf of the Communist Party. I am not aware of any other party or leader having done that.

Marc’s steady move to the left took him into the American Labor Party, and back into the House in 1938 on the American Labor Party line. He served in the House from 1939 to 1951. For a period of time he could run in multiple primaries and did so, usually winning on the Labor, Democratic, and Republican lines. His popularity was so strong that the establishment changed the law on ballot access in New York in order to block him. He lost the 1949 mayoral election, again due to corruption and to the onset of the Cold War. His principled stands for civil rights and against war brought down the wrath of the right wing. He was a strong backer of Henry Wallace’s 1948 campaign for the presidency, and it is impossible for me to conceive of Wallace’s campaign without Marc as a guiding influence. Wallace lost, but he was not defeated---the civil rights work that his campaign built on and encouraged, his antiwar stand, and his pro-labor stands were all vindicated in the 1950s and 1960s. Marc and Wallace were both victims of Cold War hysteria and McCarthyite smear tactics, and sometimes racist and vigilante violence. Marc sponsored bills to prohibit the poll tax and to make lynching a federal crime. He also helped lead the great International Workers Order, a cultural and mutual aid and benefits organization which provided insurance to working-class people without discrimination. The IWO was a special target of the McCarthy-led forces.

Marc held office and was active in Depression-era America and during the toughest times of the Second World War. He was opposed to war and then joined the war effort with others when the Soviet Union was attacked. It is now fashionable to criticize those who changed positions in these years, particularly Communists and their progressive allies at the time, but the status quo of the day could not hold, the allies’ half-hearted peace with armed security doctrine had its limits and was untenable, the British government was not anti-fascist when it most needed to be, and the speed of the fascist advance left the liberals and social democrats lost and isolated. Defending the Soviet Union meant defending world progress. Vito Marcantonio thought clearly about the situation, as did all principled people, and strongly supported the opening of a second anti-facist front. Many liberals and socialists could not adjust to changing times and turned instead to pacifism, which was indensible under the circumstances, or so wed themselves to Washington that they surrendered their critical thinking skills and joined in the postwar red scare.

Marc was always denied committee chair positions in Washington. At the time of his death, he was working as an attorney in a private practice and was running for Congress on the Good Neighbor Party. He died from a heart attack. He was denied a Church funeral; his red politics had angered the Catholic hierarchy. At a time when McCarthyism and the Cold War were in nearly full swing and when Italian-Americans were expected to reconfigure our identities Vito Marcantonio was pointing in another direction.

Great politicians came up in the ranks of Marc’s movement. Pete Cacchione and Ben Davis were associated with Marc. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s progressive period overlapped with Marc’s movement. Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan were influenced by Marc’s movement. Stanley Novak, the great radical political leader in Michigan, mirrored Marc’s approach to politics and cross-racial working-class unity alongside Coleman Young in the late 1940s and 1950s. And let’s not forget Frank Barbaro. What, you don’t know these names? Study! Their approach to politics is fully relevant today. Great community and labor activists also came forward through Marc’s movement. His political popularity rested on his ability to get things done in the neighborhood, translate important left-wing concepts into everyday practice, hold mass street corner meetings, build coalitions between unions and people of color, take on landlords and corporations and the political establishment and win, and stay just a step ahead of the rest of us.

I have a photo of Vito Marcantonio and some longshoremen on my desk. Only Marc looks fully at ease, but everyone looks fully determined, and maybe worried a bit about something. Marc is well-dressed and the others are in their work clothes, but Marc is not putting himself out there and apart from the group. Nothing about his style or bearing says “Hey, look at me! I’m in the center!” This was our radical practice in the past: be one with the workers and the people and don’t be the attention-getter.

When I worked in the factories the men who were my father’s age still talked about Vito Marcantonio and still loved him. It was hard to talk radical or union politics with them sometimes because they would cut me off with something like, “Hey, kid, Vito Marcantonio said it all before you, and even better!” They would then tell some story about Marc saving a family from eviction or honoring a union picketline or speaking at a May Day rally.

When I think of Italian-American pride I think first of Vito Marcantonio. From a Marxist point of view, whatever pride we take in our race or ethnicity should derive from an understanding of these as accidents of birth and as something to transcend through work and integration into the world beyond ourselves. That is to say that there are indeed real Italian-American characteristics, as there are characteristics of any racial or ethnic group, and these characteristics have a basis in history and in existing material and social conditions. But they do not remain static or spiritual or abstract. They find their meaning, emerge, and change through our necessary and life-giving encounters with others. The path to being a good Italian-American runs through being a good human being first, as an old Italian radical once told me. Vito Marcantonio lived it.

Vito Marcantonio's collection of speeches, I Vote My Conscience, edited by Annette Rubenstein, was first published in the mid-1950s and was reissued in 2002. Put it on your necessary reading list for 2018.

Friday, December 8, 2017

Israeli, Palestinian and Greek Communists Denounce Trump's decision on Jerusalem

Israeli and Palestinian Communist Parties have reacted to U.S. President Donald Trump's provocative decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Below you can read statements by parties such as Hadash, the Communist Party of Israel, the Palestinian Communist Party and the Palestinian Peoples' Party.

Hadash/Communist Party of Israel (CPI)



According the official website of the Communist Party of Israel (CPI), the intention to transfer the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem "provoked reactions of outrage" among the ranks of the CPI, including the members from the Joint List of the Democracy Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) in the parliamentary assembly of Israel, Knesset.

“Trump is a crazy pyromaniac capable of setting the entire region ablaze with his madness,” stated the leader of the Joint List, Members of Knesset (MK) Ayman Odeh. “If there is one thing that the past few days have proved, it’s that the US shouldn’t remain the sponsor for discussions between Israel and the Palestinians,” Odeh added. “If the Israeli government wishes for the world to recognize West Jerusalem as the Israel’s capital, all it needs to do is recognize East Jerusalem as the capital city of Palestine.”

Joint List MK Aida Touma-Sliman (Hadash) attacked the decision of US president Donald Trump to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. “The decision to move the embassy cripples the peace process and the chances of reaching a diplomatic agreement in the region,” Touma-Sliman said. “As long as Israel refers to Jerusalem as a ‘united’ city and occupies the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Trump’s decision will significantly harm the rights of the Palestinian people to liberty and self-determination in its future capital, East Jerusalem.”

Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas warned on Sunday, December 3, against US plans to relocate its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, saying that such a move “would endanger the future of the political process in the region.” According to Palestine’s official news agency WAFA, Abbas expressed his outrage and concern in a meeting with a delegation from the Hadash in Ramallah. President Abbas added that Arab countries, including Palestine, and the international community would not recognize such a move by the US administration.

Earlier Sunday, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad al-Maliki called on the Arab League and Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to convene to discuss the situation regarding Jerusalem. Al-Maliki warned that such a US move “would have grave consequences” and would “blow up the situation in the Palestinian territories and throughout the region.”

Jerusalem remains at the core of the perennial Israel-Palestine conflict, as Palestinians want Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem as the capital of a future independent state of their own.
* * *
 
Palestinian Communist Party (PCP)




The statement reminded that the historical Zionist occupation of Palestinian land would not have occurred without the support of British and American imperialism forming this usurper entity, which since its inception is confiscating the land and deporting the people of Palestine.

The Communist Party of Palestine named the transfer of the US Embassy to Jerusalem as "a declaration of war" on the people of Palestine and its national cause. "This obliges us to unite and end the Palestinian division quickly and properly, the only viable option remaining before our people is massive resistance" said the statement.

It was observed that the American attack on the rights of the Palestinian people regarding its defeat "by the axis of resistance" in the region means that the arrogance of US policy is challenging the Palestinian people, free Arab nations and the world.

The statement underlined that the central focus in the face of the Trump attack is the masses of the Palestinian people, its national resistance. It said that this requires to draw a policy of confrontation including;

- Unifying of all factions on the Palestinian arena and the restoration of the PLO on the basis of a revolutionary democracy.
- Re-considering the Charter of the PLO and replacing the two-state solution with the one-state democratic solution, which requires a struggle by all means.
- Meeting all the factions of the national action to prepare for a third uprising, led by the factions of resistance.
- Emphasizing the need to overcome regional agendas or commitments.
- Giving a larger role for the masses through the people's congresses, a General People's Congress, in the homeland and among the diaspora, to draw a policy of confrontation.
- Resisting to the division of the Palestinian party concerning the Oslo commitments based on the Decisions of the General People's Congress.
 
The Palestinian CP ended the statement with the slogans "Long live Jerusalem, the eternal capital of an independent Palestinian state", "Freedom to the prisoners of the Palestinian Communist Party".
* * *

Palestinian Peoples' Party (PPP)


In a press statement, the PPP said that the implementation of the US administration’s decision would have serious repercussion on the security and stability of the region, cutting away the chances of “political settlement” of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The decision was assessed as a blatant attack on the Palestinian people in their struggle for a independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem being its capital. The PPP underlined that the shrewd policy pursued by the US will lead to further ignition of chaos in the Middle East, especially in light of its efforts to impose “solutions” that do not meet the minimum rights of the Palestinian people.

The PPP called not to succumb to Trump’s blackmail policy and his administrations efforts to force the Palestinian leadership to deal with his vision of reviving the “peace process”. Pointing out to Israel’s projects to undermine the legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people, including the right to an independent state on the occupied territories since 1967, Jerusalem being its capital, the PPP stated the need for the US administration to play a positive role.

In order to resist US efforts to diminish the rights of the Palestinian people stipulated in all charters and resolutions of international legitimacy, the PPP called to accelerate the process of ending the division among Palestinian political actors, restoring a comprehensive national unity and adopting a strategy based on further escalation of the struggle. According the statement of the PPP, in the forefront, the popular resistance should be based on the international recognition of the State of Palestine in 2012 with Jerusalem as its capital.
***
And from Greece:

Regarding the announcement of U.S. President Donald Trump to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital city, the Press Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece issued the following statement of condemnation:

"The decision of the USA to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital shows the cynicism with which American imperialism actively participates in the crime that is being committed against the people of Palestine by Israel and its allies, primarily the USA, as well as the EU. The later, not only deepens constantly her relations with Israel, but also identifies the perpetrator and the victim, proclaiming as 'terrorism' the righteous struggle of the people of Palestine."

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

What does it mean to be a revolutionary in our time?

What does it mean to be a revolutionary in our time? Tim Horras of Philly Socialists offers this trenchant reflection in an answer to the question and also comments on Jacobin Magazine as a point of departure. Some readers will stumble over what "reformism" means---look here for your first answer. Some readers may not know what Jacobin Magazine is or what it represents.See Jacobin here. The magazine is a weak attempt at reflecting divergent socialist opinion and likely captures the views of many of the folks who lead Democratic Socialists of America. A liberal critique of Francis Fukuyama can be found here; Fukuyama's ideas are something we take particular exception to. The fact is that people new to the socialist movement or socialism may not understand the differences of opinion expressed here or why such differences matter. With some reflection, though, readers can see that we have a number of contesting schools of thought in the socialist movement, we always have, and that if you want this to be your movement then you will study the questions and form your opinions in dialogue with other.

Tim Horras writes:

Despite the accusations to the contrary, revolutionary socialists don't take isolation from the masses as a point of pride. We're not afraid to get reformist cooties.

The fact that the revolutionary left has been cut off from an organic connection to working class life for some time is a structural phenomenon correlated to decades of political defeat rather than idiosyncratic attachment to hammer and sickle iconography. And, let's be real: the reformist left is equally disconnected from working class life, and y'all have your own sacred cows which similarly lack any rational relation to either strategy or social base.

There are trends among the revolutionary left which are clumsily grasping toward a path forward in both theory and practice. But the gatekeepers at Jacobin Magazine aren't interested in engaging with these thinkers and activists, because it would be handing over ammunition to their political opponents. The hope is that we can get frozen out of the discussion.

However, while barred entry into the mainstream of the movement, they can't cordon us off entirely, and our successes in working around the edges has seeped into the very center of their political organizations and discourse. Today, even our opponents are forced to articulate how reformist strategy "builds a base" and defend their favored tactics against "politicized service work." We're weak and fragmented, it's true. But we're growing. We don't have the mic; nevertheless we're helping to set the agenda.

What does it mean to be a revolutionary in our time? Primarily it's about being more open to contingency, to the unexpected, anticipating a roller coaster of political twists and turns rather polishing a left gloss on Fukayama end-of-history triumphalism. Being a revolutionary means recognizing that the future won't look like the past or the present; that whatever the coming decades hold, it won't be a permanent status quo, an endless haggling with class enemies over budgetary line items.

The foundation of the capitalist regime is crumbling; the house is sinking. It won't cave in tomorrow, but neither will it continue to stand without the application of new scaffolding to every single pillar of the base.

Reformists would like to think we can remodel the house; paper over the cracks and add some colorful window dressing. But none of their prescriptions will address the rot in the foundation below. Our choices are to stand idly and let the structure collapse or to tear it down and build ourselves a new home.


Tuesday, December 5, 2017

A Theoretical Justification of the Struggle for Constitutional Rights


In socialist work, it is not enough to simply develop a plan of action willy-nilly. A theoretical justification must be provided that lays out the overall goals of the plan, how it will advance the struggle for worker sovereignty, and demonstrates that the plan is made in accordance with known principles of social development (or explains precisely why said principles do not apply). We do this not because all socialist political action must conform with some Marxist ‘canon’, but because we approach political problems in the same manner as scientists and engineers approach physical problems; that is, we define problems and develop solutions based on a systematic method, and we further refine that method according to the real-world results of our attempted solution. The following article is a Marxist theoretical justification for the proposal outlined in “For Workplace Rights”. It may contain terms which are unfamiliar to some readers. Go here for an introduction to Marxist theory.

The contradiction between the formal rights granted to workers by the Constitution and their negation in the workplace is one that is most obvious to the vast majority of the working class at the present moment. It is a contradiction that is deeply felt, particularly by non-union workers, nearly every working day. We do not mean to say that the Constitutional rights contradiction is necessarily the ‘main’ or most important contradiction, but only that it is the most easily comprehensible and visible to the greatest number of people. It is a starting point for developing class consciousness and political literacy. Taking up the banner of Constitutional rights does not mean that we ignore other struggles; we do not here advocate for ‘class over race’ or other such vulgarization. Rather, it is the most effective starting place, a weak point in the whole rotten edifice of racist, misogynist, anti-LGBT+, anti-immigrant, chauvinist ideology.

Most politically active workers think about politics in terms of the Constitution and rights talk, and have little or no familiarity with Marxist terms. In an ego-driven, anti-communist society such as ours, in which unfamiliar ideas are often greeted with hostility, it does us no good to talk to people straight away in terms of the dictatorship of the proletariat, surplus value, and the like. Instead, we must choose carefully where to begin, where the weakest point in the official narrative is, and how we can approach people with respect. Make no mistake: we should not discard the underlying theory, merely consider how best to convey it. We can start by developing the idea that people have rights at work, and that they need to retake their Constitutional rights in the workplace; through this initial struggle, we can begin to create a shared identity among people who, generally speaking, view themselves as isolated individuals or family units. Once people accept the idea of Constitutional rights at work, the question naturally arises as to how those rights are exercised and protected. We can then start speaking in terms of a ‘civil society’ at work to introduce the idea of democracy in the workplace, that workers should have power in the economic life of society. From there, we can develop the idea of democracy into worker sovereignty. We do not expect, however, for each step to proceed smoothly from one to the next. On the contrary, we expect the capitalist class to fight tooth and nail against the introduction of Constitutional rights at work and all the derivatives thereof. It is, in fact, this very opposition that will drive the process forward and increase the class consciousness and level of political education of the working class; for in order to explain why the ruling classes so vociferously oppose the idea of expanding their supposedly most cherished rights and ideals into the workplace, we will have to make full use of Marxist theory. In their struggle against Constitutional rights at work, the bourgeoisie will graphically illustrate the theory that they deny. In this way, liberal ideas that once served to obscure or justify capitalist exploitation will become weapons in the arsenal of working class ideology.

Does this mean that we will make the struggle for Constitutional rights at work our only goal? It does not. The struggle for Constitutional rights is firstly a vehicle for deepening other struggles by exposing the hypocrisy of bourgeois ‘rights’ that in reality only apply fully to the bourgeoisie and its lackeys. Secondly, it is a mechanism for building unity among the entirety of the US working class. While it is true that sections of the nonwhite working class are more advanced politically than their white counterparts, no part of the working class can hope to contest power on its own. The backwardness of the white working class is no reason not to organize white workers. In fact, our “backwardness” highlights the need for organization and special efforts made by the most aware and advanced workers.  Marx encouraged us not to “despise” workers for taking backward positions, but to do our best to educate and enlighten them in a respectful way.

Does employing rights talk and appealing to the Constitution mean that we are making concessions to bourgeois ideology? It does not. We must meet the politically engaged sections of the working class where they are, not where we wish them to be. Like it or not, rights talk and the Constitution are the terms in which most of the US working class, especially its white contingent, thinks about politics. We employ these terms, not in the opportunist fashion, but as a vehicle for advancing more progressive positions and to highlight the hypocrisy of bourgeois ‘rights’.

We see, then, that the only route to the final victory over capitalism lies in the unity of the entire US working class, not its component parts individually. We can achieve this unity by emphasizing the glaring contradiction between formal rights and actual rights, igniting a struggle for full Constitutional rights at work, and build upon this initial struggle a new ideology: an ideology of the US working class.

For Workplace Rights

How many of us are free, truly free? We are told over and over that we are ‘free’, that we possess inalienable rights, guaranteed by the Constitution. But, all across the US, there are innumerable places in which the right to free speech, to be secure in our persons and effects, to due process of law, are routinely ignored. Indeed, we spend most of our waking hours in these places: they are our places of work.

At work, we can be disciplined or fired for the things we say, even if we say them outside of work; even using the wrong tone can lead to discipline. You can’t be insubordinate and expect to keep your job most of the time. The standard of proof you need as a worker to win in a grievance, an arbitration, or a court case is far beyond what you think justice is. There is no legal protection for you if you are disciplined or fired for expressing political opinions different than your employer’s. You can be fired for a hairstyle your employer doesn’t like. The courts have held that women can be fired for “being too pretty” or because their presence at work might tempt a male boss and put his marriage at risk. Most Constitutional rights either do not exist at work or exist in limited ways. We are subject to near-total surveillance and arbitrary searches. Human Resource departments maintain secret files, not on a select few ‘dissidents’ or troublemakers, but on all employees. Their officers carry out secret investigations into our conduct and performance. With the help of outside consultants, they conduct background checks, prying into the most intimate details of our lives. If a state security service behaved this way, it would be denounced as totalitarian.

We are told constantly by the media that this or that is ‘un-American’ or ‘anti-American’. Is it American to be subjected to arbitrary searches and thought policing? Employers do not even have the excuse that their repressions will bolster national security. We should demand that all authority, whether public or private, should not be arbitrary, but lawfully constituted, just as the Founders insisted. Our rights and freedoms as citizens---people with full rights described in law and in the U.N. Declration of Human Rights---should apply in all spheres of life, public and private.

What is the path to freedom? How do we emancipate ourselves from the dead hand of tyranny in the workplace? We do so first by joining together and insisting that, first and foremost, workers are citizens with full human rights, regardless of legal status. Most of U.S. labor law comes to us from old English master/servant law, so this is actually a revolutionary idea for our country! From this idea, we begin to build worker sovereignty, or worker self-determination, the idea that those of us who do the work should make the decisions, too. Another name for worker sovereignty is socialism.

Our right to collective action still exists. We can, we must, organize our coworkers to support one another. Here are some concrete examples of efforts to get involved in right now: getting real “just cause” standards for discipline and discharge into law; removing barriers to union organizing; covering free speech at work as a protected right; removing all barriers to the hiring and advancement of women and people of color at work; higher minimum wages for all workers without exception; strengthening the laws in Oregon which protect workers against last-minute schedule changes; linking rent control to a higher minimum wage; banning aerial pesticides and protecting farmworkers, health and safety monitors, and medical workers who are in the fields; and changing the laws defining insubordination. Some organizations or unions or worker centers are working on these issues, so reach out to them. Don’t give up---things can, and will, change!

Organizations to get started:

Fight for $15

Portland Jobs with Justice

Portland Workers' Rights Education Project