A fascinating interview of Iranian trade unionist Homayoun Pourzad, a representative from the Network of Iranian Labor Unions, by Ian Morrison of the Platypus Review. Morrison interviewed Pourzad following Pourzad's appearance at a US Labor Against the War conference. It is well worth reading in its entirety.

Here is an excerpt:

IM: Do you think there are any possibilities for a party of labor in Iran? That is a problem all over the world. Different labor organizations meet up, and there are groups that believe in various trade union rights, and they release statements to that effect. But there is no political body that consistently stands up for working people.

HP: I may have sounded too much of an alarmist, for I emphasized the dangers. But the opportunities are also great. Like I said, you have almost eight million workers in need of organizing. They will even be able to organize themselves, if the situation changes. The Green Movement holds promise, I think. It came totally out of the blue; no one expected it, from the Ministry of Intelligence to the opposition and the foreign governments. This means there are elements that could coalesce into a progressive and democratic labor party. It should not be forgotten that Iran not only has a huge working class, but also a tradition of left-wing activity going back some 100 years. The working class in Iran, moreover, is not semi-proletarian as it was during the Iranian Revolution. This generation of workers has advanced political skills and a mature political worldview. You are no longer dealing with peasants just come to the city. Iran is fairly industrialized in many ways and these workers have their own subcultures. We have a good situation in that sense. So yes, there is a good possibility that we will have a strong labor party. The conditions are there, but none of this will materialize without a strong, deeply rooted labor movement.

So what needs to be done? We must put across to other sectors of society what the working class stands for. The protest movement is now primarily middle class. That is its primary weakness. But once labor strikes get under way in the next few months, we hope they will change how the Green movement sees the workers, themselves, and their moment. It is our job as labor activists to put across a genuine working class platform and to familiarize the country with working class demands.

We cannot, as some Left groups do, start condemning the Green Movement just because it lacks a strong Left component. It is the Left's job to influence the movement and to see that its demands and wishes are incorporated -- not just with respect to Mousavi, but to the movement as a whole.

Again, please consider reading the interview in its entirety. Pourzad also has some enlightening things to say about the conflict between the US and Iran over the country's nuclear program and the consequences for the left if the US launches a military attack.

If the left outside Iran expects to play any meaningful role in relation to events within the country, it should consider starting with understanding the perspective of workers who are actually organizing there. By incorporating such an indigenous perspective, it can escape the extremes of romanticizing the revolutionary prospects of the Green movement, describing the movement as one manipulated by US/Israeli covert operations and pessimistic acquiescence to the perpetuation of the theocratic regime, extremes that have dominated left discussion to date.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Iran, Iranian Protests, Unions

With the war on terror approaching its 9th anniversary, the pathological consequences of it domestically are becoming more and more evident. First, there are the suicides:

Of the more than 30,000 suicides in this country each year, fully 20 percent of them are acts by veterans, said VA Secretary Eric Shinseki at a VA-sponsored suicide prevention conference on Monday. That means on average 18 veterans commit suicide each day. Five of those veterans are under our care at VA.

Second, there are the chilling instances of domestic violence that immediately commenced upon the return of troops from Afghanistan to Fort Bragg, N. C. in 2002:

On June 11, 2002, Sgt. First Class Rigoberto Nieves fatally shot his wife Teresa and then himself in their bedroom. On June 29, Sgt. William Wright strangled his wife Jennifer and buried her body in the woods. On July 9, Sgt. Ramon Griffin stabbed his estranged wife Marilyn 50 times or more and set her house on fire. On July 19, Sgt. First Class Brandon Floyd of Delta Force, the antiterrorism unit of the Special Forces, shot his wife Andrea and then killed himself. At least three of the murdered wives had been seeking separation or divorce.

And, finally, there is this, as reported today in the Daily Mail:

A soldier waterboarded his four-year-old daughter because she was unable to recite her alphabet.

Joshua Tabor admitted to police he had used the CIA torture technique because he was so angry.

As his daughter 'squirmed' to get away, Tabor said he submerged her face three or four times until the water was lapping around her forehead and jawline.

Tabor, 27, who had won custody of his daughter only four weeks earlier, admitted choosing the punishment because the girl was terrified of water.

War without end, at home and abroad.

Labels: "War on Terror", Afghanistan, American Empire, Sadomasochism, US Military

NPR apologizes for their Zinn obit, which someone mentioned in comments a few days ago:

Writing an obituary can be a challenging assignment because it is often the last thing that will be said about someone, and the subject can no longer speak on his own behalf. It must be fair. It must provide context and it must tell warts and all -- all in a limited space.

Critics are right that NPR was not respectful of Zinn. It would have been better to wait a day and find a more nuanced critic -- as the Washington Post did two days after Zinn died --than rushing a flawed obituary on air.

From the Hunger in America 2010 report, issued by Feeding America:

In the annual USDA survey on food insecurity, the number of Americans found to be food insecure in 2008 rose sharply to 49 million individuals (17.1 million households), a 36% increase over the prior year. The Hunger in America 2010 analysis reveals that Feeding America’s network of food banks and their partner agencies provide emergency hunger-relief services to an estimated 37 million low-income individuals (14.5 million households) in the United States annually. This represents an increase of 46% in unduplicated annual clients since the Hunger in America 2006 report. The 37 million annual client estimate falls within a 95% confidence interval ranging from 33.7 to 40.2 million unduplicated clients. Even if the true number falls at the lower end of the confidence interval, it still represents a substantial increase over 2005.

Among the key findings of the report:

Many of the client households served by Feeding America food banks report that their household incomes are inadequate to cover their basic household expenses.

--46 percent of client households served report having to choose between paying for utilities or heating fuel and food.

--39 percent of client households said they had to choose between paying for rent or a mortgage and food.

--34 percent of client households report having to choose between paying for medical bills and food.

--35 percent of client households must choose between transportation and food.

One in four client households (24 percent) do not have health insurance and nearly half of our adult clients report that they have unpaid medical and hospital bills.

Thirty percent of households report having at least one member of their household in poor health.

For the entire report, go here. As you might expect, it makes for pretty disturbing reading.

Labels: American Empire, Food Crisis, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Poverty, Sub-Proletarianization of America

Amazingly, Oakland, California has not one, but two anarchist book publishing firms. AK Press has been a fixture for quite some time, but the new one, PM Press, was founded in 2007. To its credit, PM Press has embarked upon an effort to publish works of fiction as well as ones related to theory, economics and social history.

Last year, PM Press published a translation of Tomoyuki Hoshino's Lonely Hearts Killer, and, apparently, more translated works of international fiction are forthcoming. In Lonely Hearts, Hoshino seizes upon the Japanese identification with the Emperor as a point of entry to confront troubling questions about the nature of hierachy and the purposes that it serves within society. The brilliance of the novel lies in Hoshino's decision to put two distinctively Japanese cults in conflict with one another, the cult of the emperor and the suicide cult of seppuku and jigai.

As the novel begins, the people of Japan are mourning the loss of their young, vibrant, charismatic young emperor. The ascension of such a young person (about 40) to the throne broke excited the populace, who hoped that he could ignite the reinvigoration of an increasingly routinized society. But, instead, the Young Majesty died after contracting an unknown illness, plunging much of the country into an isolative despair, with the exception of two young film students, Inoue and Iroha. But Iroha's lover, Mikoto, entered a comatose state for days on end.

Upon his reawakening, Iroha introduces him to Inoue, resulting in the death of Mikoto at the hand of Inoue and Inoue's suicide in a sleeping cafe, the Dormir. Inoue leaves behind an Internet statement to the effect that, inspired by His Young Majesty, he was going to kill himself to escape this illusory, demoralizing world, going so far as to encourage mass suicide:

I will lead the vanguard and sacrifice myself. If enough of you identify with my dream, and, we can really bring back this world to what it is truly meant to be. We can extinquish this phony world, and return to the real, natural, authentic world of the dead.

In his penetrating study of anarchism in China, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, Arif Dirlik observes that . . . anarchist ideology, in its peculiar formulation of questions of conflict and interest in society, lent itself to counterrevolution almost as easily as to revolution. In Lonely Hearts, Hoshino confronts us with the troubling insight that such an observation warrants a global instead of a site specific application by describing a reactionary public response to the deaths of Inoue and Mikoto.

Instead of recognizing that Inoue sought to induce a rejection of hierarchy and the deference to authority that it necessarily entails, the public became more and more hostile to his memory as suicides proliferated. Predictably, the government seizes upon the crisis as an opportunity to seize greater police powers for itself, posthumously condemning Inoue as a terrorist, and thereby suppressing all of his cyberspace statements and videos. A small minority answered his call, but a majority either rejected him or remained indifferent as the state assumed more control over their lives. During the period, a woman ascends the throne for the first time as His Young Majesty's successor. Caught between the constraints of her personality, her role as empress and the requirements for reaching people through the media, she proves herself incapable of alleviating public feelings of unease and aimlessness.

To the extent that there was an individualistic response to the deaths of Inoue and Mikoto, it was in a social Darwinist direction, as people could only fall back upon past cultural experience. Suicides became love suicides and love suicides became assassination suicides, analogous to propaganda by the deed, and assassination suicides became indiscriminate love suicides, ones in which a person randomly selected someone to die with them. As you might have guessed, some responded by adopting the rationale of the war on terror, kill them before they kill us. In one celebrated incident, a young man kills his best friend because he thought his friend was running towards him to kill him. A court finds him not guilty, and he subsequently becomes a politically powerful figure.

Through this narrative, which he presents reflectively through his three primary characters, Inoue, Iroha and Mokuren, Hoshino mines a rich vein of social conformity and autocracy that the Japanese left has been unable to transcend, as explored in the films of Nagisa Oshima. But some reject the false choice between suicide and submission. After the deaths of Inoue and Mikoto, Iroha goes to live in a retreat center nestled in a cedar forest, a retreat operated by her high school friend, Mokuren. As she lives there for several years, she deals with her grief over the deaths of Inoue and Mikoto, and imperfectly strives to assert an independent identity. She does so in a way that Mokuren condemns as perpetuating the circle of cynicism, self-centered rebellion and sacrifice initiated by Inoue.

By contrast, Mokuren challenges the emerging social Darwinism in an editorial entitled, I Won't Kill, and rightists direct their rage towards her and the residents of her retreat center. Her challenge, and the violent rightist response to it, becomes the center of a media circus, reducing her attempt to emotionally reach people into yet another form of entertainment. If there is a moral to Hoshino's postmodern fable of alienation and impotence, it is that before there can be a political revolution, there must first be a social one within our hearts and minds. Or, even more, a social one renders the need for a political one superfluous.

Labels: "War on Terror", Anarchism, Book Reviews, Japan, Political Violence, Postmodernism

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Pakistan, Sadomasochism, US Military

In response to last Friday's post about Howard Zinn and the future of left politics in the US, Joe remarked that he "liked" Obama. It's understandable. Despite his frequent episodes of mendacity, I like him, too, and I can understand why others like him as well. He's an engaging, thoughtful person, one that we'd probably enjoy talking about things as diverse as film, literature, sports and pop music, or even personal things like our families and friends. We'd promptly go over to his house if he called and said that he needed help to move furniture out of his house and into his garage. With the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, he's the only president in recent memory that comes across as accessible and personable. Paradoxically, also much like Reagan, I'm not sure that he likes us all that much, but I've already addressed that subject.

In any event, the future is going to be increasingly bleak if we don't recognize that capital is exploiting Obama's personal appeal, much like it did Reagan's, to the detriment of the rest of us. While the election of an African American president is an undoubted achivement that was unimaginable until, literally, the moment it happened, I do not consider it to be an achievement of the New Left of which Zinn was one of its most prominent figures. Or, to be more precise, it was a limited achievement related to one of the New Left's objectives, social inclusion. After all, the New Left recognized that the transformation of American society required more than racial integration. Indeed, drawing upon Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and pan-Africanists of that period warned that people in power would attempt to coopt the movement through elevating people of color politically.

Along these lines, one of the consequences of Obama's election has been the proliferation of a revisionist view of the past, especially as it relates to Martin Luther King. With the election of Obama, we are now told that King's vision has been achieved, whereas, in fact, Obama is pursuing policies that run contrary to King's world view in every way. King has been reduced to the role of modern successor to Booker T. Washington. We should be alarmed at the extent of the embrace of this revisionism throughout much of American society, especially within the media, as the intention is to sanitize the rememberance of the 1960s and 1970s of all traces of radical perspectives about the necessity of anti-imperialism and socialism. It is a global enterprise. During his successful 2007 campaign for president in France, Sarkozy asserted that the legacy of May 1968 must be liquidated.

And, what exactly, must be liquidated within the US? Clearly, it's not civil rights, at least as defined within a legal, liberal context, although there is a good argument that another Obama legacy will be the elimination of the infrastructure of civil rights protections constructed over the last 40 years. Perhaps, that will happen. Presently, though, the targets are the New Left emphasis upon anti-imperialism and capitalism, along with civil rights, into a coherent social critique that once appealed to millions around the world. But, in recent decades, if people like Zinn may be taken as representative, the economic component was deemphasized, primarily, it seems, because of the need to preserve the fiction that the Democratic Party was a pathway to a more equitable society. Hence, Zinn's recent comment defending Obama on domestic policy, which, contrary to Joe, I believe speaks directly towards economics (note the emphasis upon "ordinary people").

Middle class and working class Americans are far ahead of people with roots on the New Left on this. They know that Bush, and now, Obama, are pushing them towards marginization. But, the allegiance of many New Left figures to the Democratic Party has prevented the creation of any avenue for them to organize on the left. Unions are complicit in the development of the health care bill even as the EFCA remains dormant, and they have, if Jane Hamsher is to be believed, abandoned a populist public campaign targeting the bailout and the abuses of the financial sector at the behest of the White House. Hence, many Americans are responding to the historic allure of nativism, anti-intellectualism and hostility to the government being put forward by the corporately sponsored Tea Party scene.

Interestingly enough, Chomsky perceives the peril. During an interview late last fall, he emphasized the importance of attempting to reach alienated, working Americans, many of whom have been attracted by Tea Party rhetoric, through an understanding of their economic distress. His remarks were in marked contrast to what one often encounters on the liberal site, DailyKos, where all participants in the Tea Party scene are treated as idiots and racists because of some of the signs that have been encountered there. My suspicion is that these posts are an organized effort to prevent the emergence of a populist movement in the US that would threaten the neoliberal orthodoxy within the Democratic Party.

Of course, Chomsky's advice is consistent with his anarchist background, and his knowledge of what transpired in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. He is encouraging us to try to reach people individually at the level of their personal struggles and hardships, instead of writing them off collectively, as many liberals appear to be willing to do (with the notable exception of Hamsher, and, naturally, other liberals are excoriating her for it). His advice evokes the left touchstone that race, class and religion are used to divide workers against themselves, so as to prevent them from assuming their rightful position of power within society. While such an outreach is fraught with difficulties, and may well fail, he is cautioning us that abandoning these people to the cynical manipulations of others will ensure bad, possibly even horrific, outcomes, as the sub-proletarianization of America runs its course.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Anarchism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

A moving personal tribute by Ellsberg for his dear friend. Over the past year, the left has lost several prominent male figures with roots in the New Left of the 1960s: Europeans like Peter Gowan, Giovanni Arrighi, Chris Harman and Daniel Bensaid and Americans like Ronald Takaki and, now, Howard Zinn. With the emergence of more women on the left as a consequence of the women's liberation movement, we shall soon sadly experience their departure as well.

All of these figures deserve the praise that has accompanied their deaths, but, perhaps, it is time for reflection as well. Recently, Diana Block, an American radical of the 1970s and 1980s, wrote a moving autobiography entitled, Arm the Spirit, published by AK Press. I posted a two part review of it here last April and May. In it, Block relates her experiences of personal empowerment against the backdrop of political failure. She encourages readers to ponder to what extent she, and those that she worked with, succeeded, and to what extent they failed, and, even more importantly, why they were unable to persuade more people to rally in support of their vision of society.

It is a central question for these radicals, especially American ones like Zinn, Takaki and Block, as the Europeans, Gowan, Arrighi, Bensaid and Harman, are manifestations of a culture that encourages more self-reflection. Block, to her credit, confronted it as best she could, and it would have been mesmerizing to hear or read what Zinn had to say about it as well. Perhaps, he did, and I missed it. I concede that I have not followed his statements and writings avidly. My impression, however, is that Zinn, like most others of his era, evaded the question by treating as a problem of inadequate education. If we just keep telling people why bigotry, militarism, poverty and, yes, even capitalism, are bad, they will eventually figure it out.

Well, maybe so. But it didn't happen during Zinn's lifetime, and his insistence upon support for Democratic presidential candidates, while emphasizing the necessity of social movements to push them into doing the right things (much like his contemporary, Takaki), did not spark the popular imagination. Indeed, the Open Letter to Barack Obama that he, and many other activists and academics, signed in the summer of 2008 helped to motivate me to abandon the electoral process entirely, and post an ongoing critique of it under the label Vote or Die. If it wasn't obvious at the time, it is now evident that the letter represents an abject capitulation of the left in the face of the most rigorous rationalization of the global economy by finance capital since the late 1970s and 1980s. Interestingly, Ellsberg was not an initial signatory of the letter posted on the The Nation website, although I can't say as to whether he added his name afterwards.

As I said, perhaps Zinn addressed this subject in the final years of life, and was unable to get people to listen. If so, I'd be very interested in what he said or wrote, if anyone visiting this site can direct me to places where his remarks can be found. Because, if we really want to show respect for people like Zinn and others of his generation, we should seek to understand and learn from their failures as well as celebrate their personal bravery, integrity and accomplishments. Otherwise, we risk reducing the significance of their lives to the sterility of an innocuous personality cult.

Labels: Activism, AK Press, Civil Rights, Daniel Ellsberg, Imperialism, Neoliberalism, Obituaries, Vote or Die