See you in 2010, meanwhile, this post, originally posted on June 16, 2009, may have some relevance in regard to the new outbreak of violent protests throughout Iran.

Iran, like Honduras, is no longer newsworthy. The protests have abated as the government has apparently successfully suppressed popular opposition to Ahmadijedad's reelection as President. Dissatisfaction instead makes itself known through factional disputes within the governing elite.

As explained here in late June, many on the left were surprised by the eruption of public protest in the wake of Ahmadijedad's announced landslide victory, resulting in a contentious, and frequently acrimonious, debate. Now is a good time to revisit the subject as the intensity of feeling has subsided.

With the benefit of contemplative reflection, several important themes come into view. First, despite their alignment in the anti-globalization movement, as well as their opposition to the US imperialism in the Middle East, the schism between anarchists and Marxists remains. By and large, anarchists were uniformly in support of the protesters. Conversely, some Marxists supported the protesters and others did not. There were even Marxists who initially condemned the protesters while defending the election returns in Ahmadinedad's favor as legitimate. Old lines of division reemerged: anarchist hostility to the state and religion, and its embrace of spontaneous protest, counterposed by Marxist pragmatism and the attempted application of class and anti-imperialist analysis to perceived facts on the ground.

Second, the left response revealed some enduring sources of confusion. While both anarchists and Marxists generally had the right line (foreign non-intervention, deference to the decisions of the Iranian working class, such as it is), some Marxists, as already noted, attempted to justify it by reference to what they described as the credible results of the Iranian presidential election. Of course, this lead to a vigorous, and, to this day, unresolved argument over the credibility of the vote count. Rarely did anyone mention the incongruity of this perspective, given the historic Marxist contempt for the electoral processes of liberal democracy, as given concrete form by the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917.

Given their rejection of the state generally, anarchists had little interest in the election results as they related to the protests, and, by extension, identified with the protesters because of the threat that they posed to the institutional structures of Islamic social control. As'ad Abukhalil was, quite rightly, hostile to elite efforts to limit the protests to liberal demands for fair elections and legitimate political representation within an Islamic society, even as he implicitly celebrated the attempt to dismantle this system under the banner of such protest. Both anarchists and Marxists feared the potential for neoliberal exploitation of unrest.

The initial willingness of some Marxists to accept the election result is connected to another doctrinal dilemma: what is the composition of the Iranian working class, and how can anyone purport to know what it is, much less purport to ascribe a political posture to it? Naturally, Marxists on both sides of the Iranian divide emphasized the importance of acting in the best interests of the Iranian working class. Marxists that accepted the election result therefore contended that much of the Iranian working class voted for Ahmanijedad, while those who rejected it asserted the opposite. But, after 35 years of the Shah, and another 30 years of Islamic rule, how does one define the Iranian working class, especially given the decimation of the left that occurred after the 1979 revolution?

Of course, this raises a question that has bedeviled the left for decades: what, in the wake of the restructuring of the global economy as a result of neoliberalism, is the proletariat, and what are its defining characteristics? Clearly, the industrial proletariat as envisioned by Marx and Engels exists in places like China, Mexico, Japan, Brazil, Taiwan and India, if it can be said to exist anywhere at all anymore. In other words, in the export platforms facilitated by neoliberal policy, as well as the remnants of industrial production within the US and Europe. Certainly, there is such production in Iran and economic sectors associated with it, like transport, but can we say that it exists as an independent subject capable of projecting an ideologically coherent vision of society?

To be fair, Marxists did implicitly recognize the problem, but had little to say about it, other than that the Iranian working class might, at best, exploit developments to gain more freedom to organize and increase its influence. The opportunity to address the more profound dilemma was missed. Anarchists, not being as class conscious, recognized an affinity with socially marginalized groups, such as unemployed and underemployed people, young people and women, valuing their rejection of the governmental instruments of religious oppression, and did not, as Yoshie of the MRZine did, deny their historical agency. Yet, paradoxically, the anarchists (and here, I include myself) and their Marxist allies, like Richard Seymour of Lenin's Tomb, face the prospect that their perspective can be expropriated by neoliberals because of the Marxist failure to give ideological coherence to the class nature of the conflict. After all, secular democracies in Europe and the Americas were part of a process by which capitalism replaced feudalism and the religious controls associated with it.

Finally, the economic development aspect of socialism was completely ignored in relation to the Iranian developments. It is fair to say that the urgency of anti-imperialism has nearly eradicated this essential strand of socialist thought. One gets the sense that people on the left have forgotten that socialism, whether anarchist, Marxist-Leninist, or Social Democratic, was promoted by their advocates as economically more rational, more efficient and more just, than capitalism, with all of its excesses and brutalities. Yet, I do not recall anyone making the effort to develop an analysis that would clarify the nature of the Iranian working class while also explaining how they could empower themselves through the economic development of Iran.

Admittedly, there have been some enlightening efforts to explain how the Islamic Revolution has brought about a more equitable distribution of resources within the country, but socialism is more than Keynesianism, it is an ideology of economic development and worker empowerment, an ideology whereby workers take control of the state and the means of production (communism, Social Democracy) or, alternatively, dismantle the state while transforming the means of production into a collective form of social organization (anarchism), and the larger question as to whether Political Islam, such as the example on display on Tehran, can facilitate such radical social change remains to be engaged.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Barack Obama, From the Archives, Iran, Iranian Protests, Islamic Fundamentalism, Neoliberalism, Religion

See you in 2010, originally posted on December 3, 2009

Yesterday, David Reynolds, a CUNY Graduate Center professor who wrote a courageous, groundbreaking biography of John Brown published in 2005, emphasized the necessity of rehabilitating John Brown:

It's important for Americans to recognize our national heroes, even those who have been despised by history. Take John Brown.

Today is the 150th anniversary of Brown’s hanging — the grim punishment for his raid weeks earlier on Harpers Ferry, Va. With a small band of abolitionists, Brown had seized the federal arsenal there and freed slaves in the area. His plan was to flee with them to nearby mountains and provoke rebellions in the South. But he stalled too long in the arsenal and was captured. He was brought to trial in a Virginia court, convicted of treason, murder and inciting an insurrection, and hanged on Dec. 2, 1859.

It’s a date we should hold in reverence. Yes, I know the response: Why remember a misguided fanatic and his absurd plan for destroying slavery?

There are compelling reasons. First, the plan was not absurd. Brown reasonably saw the Appalachians, which stretch deep into the South, as an ideal base for a guerrilla war. He had studied the Maroon rebels of the West Indies, black fugitives who had used mountain camps to battle colonial powers on their islands. His plan was to create panic by arousing fears of a slave rebellion, leading Southerners to view slavery as dangerous and impractical.

Second, he was held in high esteem by many great men of his day. Ralph Waldo Emerson compared him to Jesus, declaring that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Henry David Thoreau placed Brown above the freedom fighters of the American Revolution. Frederick Douglass said that while he had lived for black people, John Brown had died for them. A later black reformer, W. E. B. Du Bois, called Brown the white American who had “come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.”

Du Bois was right. Unlike nearly all other Americans of his era, John Brown did not have a shred of racism. He had long lived among African-Americans, trying to help them make a living, and he wanted blacks to be quickly integrated into American society. When Brown was told he could have a clergyman to accompany him to the gallows, he refused, saying he would be more honored to go with a slave woman and her children.

Reynolds concludes with a request that Brown receive a posthumous presidential pardon, and you can go here to sign a petition encouraging Obama to issue it. Despite the passage of time, the life of John Brown still touches upon the rawest of nerves in the American experience.

While subsequent revisionist historians succeeded in stigmatizing him as part of a broader project to justify the emergence of the New South and the segregation that replaced slavery, many people, such as myself, have always known better, and held him in our hearts. Many of us preserved a different, almost folkloric, rememberance of Brown at odds with mainstream historical accounts. The intensity of the stigmatization merely reflected the desperation of those who recognized that they could never erase his shining example as a man who, despite his flaws, never shrank from confronting the most horrific injustice of his time.

Make no mistake. Brown retains enemies to this day, not because of his recourse to violence, after all, if there is one common thread that runs through much of American history, it is violence, violence to seize lands from Native Americans, violence to bring African Americans here as slaves and maintain control over them, violence to expand the frontier from the Appalachians to the Pacific Ocean and beyond, violence to impose a neoliberal economic order upon peoples and states who resist it.

Indeed, violence is, as H. Rap Brown once said, as American as apple pie. If Barack Obama proved anything by his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, it is the continuing accuracy of this acid assessment. So, no, John Brown was not maligned because he was violent, because to do so would have required the condemnation of many of the most prominent American social and political figures of the last 233 years. Non violence is for the opponents of American imperial designs, not for those who facilitate them.

Instead, Brown is considered beyond the pale because he ultimately determined that violence was the only means to achieve the liberation of the slaves, and acted upon that belief. And, more than that, he did not insist upon a white monopoly upon the use of violence for this purpose, but sought to empower the slaves to free themselves by seizing the arsenal at Harper's Ferry in order to distribute weapons to them. Brown believed that enslaved African Americans had the ability to free themselves and should be assisted in the endeavor.

In this respect, as well as his reliance upon the past examples of black rebels like Toussaint L'ouverture in Haiti, Brown foreshadowed the national liberation movements of the 20th Century. Not surprisingly, Toussaint L'ouverture also finds himself exiled to the same circle of historical oblivion as Brown because his life runs counter to the modernization mythology that still infuses much of our perspective about US and European imperialism. Brown was no socialist, but, in a sense, he was actually more radical than many leftists of the time, because he embraced the notion of a multicultural society wherein capital did not exploit racial and class divisions to its advantage, similar to the sort of polyglot social formations described by historians like Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker.

Paradoxically, if one believes that Brown made the Civil War inevitable, he accelerated the transformation of the US from an agrarian economy to an industrial one, one in which his utopian vision of white, black, red, brown and yellow struggling together on the frontier as individualists bound together collectively was overwhelmed by the emergence of a working class in the mill and in the slaughterhouse. The steam engine, the railroad and the manufacturing processes that emerged during the war rendered his vision obsolete. As Brown stood on the scaffold, he was frozen in that moment when the workers of America were about to be proletarianized on a massive scale.

But Brown not only rejected the white monopoly on violence, he challenged the state monopoly on it as well. He did not, like the Project for a New American Century, petition the government to launch a war to achieve his end, the eradication of slavery. He trained and provisioned his own group for this purpose, a 19th Century example of an affinity group, as it were, with a well thought out plan for igniting a slave insurrection. In this, he prefigures propaganda by the deed, much as his earlier life, such as his homesteads, his attempt to break the wool monopoly, his farming in an integrated community in upstate New York and his participation in the underground railroad, prefigured the anarchist emphasis upon the creation of social institutions independent of the government, mutual aid and free agreement. No one had to explain the concept of direct action to John Brown, he was too busy living it.

Labels: Activism, African Americans, American Culture, Anarchism, From the Archives, Obituaries, Political Violence, Racism

I am going on vacation and will not return until 2010. So, don't anticipate any new posts until sometime between January 2nd and January 4th. Of course, there's always the slight possibility that something so serious will happen that I just have to comment. Hopefully, 2010 will be a better year than 2009, which was extremely disappointing in many respects. In the meantime, I will post a few items from the 2009 archives.

Perhaps, you haven't heard of the impending Gaza Freedom March:

Israel’s blockade of Gaza is a flagrant violation of international law that has led to mass suffering. The U.S., the European Union, and the rest of the international community are complicit.

The law is clear. The conscience of humankind is shocked. Yet, the siege of Gaza continues. It is time for us to take action! On Dec. 31, we will end the year by marching alongside the Palestinian people of Gaza in a non-violent demonstration that breaches the illegal blockade.

Our purpose in this March is lifting the siege on Gaza. We demand that Israel end the blockade. We also call upon Egypt to open Gaza’s Rafah border. Palestinians must have freedom to travel for study, work, and much-needed medical treatment and to receive visitors from abroad.

As an international coalition we are not in a position to advocate a specific political solution to this conflict. Yet our faith in our common humanity leads us to call on all parties to respect and uphold international law and fundamental human rights to bring an end to the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 and pursue a just and lasting peace.

The march can only succeed if it arouses the conscience of humanity.

Unfortunately, Egypt is not willing to allow the marchers to enter Gaza from Egypt, thus confirming the isolation of the people of Gaza:

We are determined to break the siege

We all will continue to do whatever we can to make it happen

Using the pretext of escalating tensions on the Gaza-Egypt border, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry informed us yesterday that the Rafah border will be closed over the coming weeks, into January. We responded that there is always tension at the border because of the siege, that we do not feel threatened, and that if there are any risks, they are risks we are willing to take. We also said that it was too late for over 1,300 delegates coming from over 42 countries to change their plans now. We both agreed to continue our exchanges.

Although we consider this as a setback, it is something we've encountered-and overcome--before. No delegation, large or small, that entered Gaza over the past 12 months has ever received a final OK before arriving at the Rafah border. Most delegations were discouraged from even heading out of Cairo to Rafah. Some had their buses stopped on the way. Some have been told outright that they could not go into Gaza. But after public and political pressure, the Egyptian government changed its position and let them pass.

Our efforts and plans will not be altered at this point. We have set out to break the siege of Gaza and march on December 31 against the Israeli blockade. We are continuing in the same direction.

Egyptian embassies and missions all over the world must hear from our supporters (by phone, fax and email)** over the coming crucial days, with a clear message: Let the international delegation enter Gaza and let the Gaza Freedom March proceed.

Contact your local consulate here:
http://www.mfa.gov.eg/MFA_Portal/en-GB/mfa_websits/

Contact the Palestine Division in Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cairo
Ahmed Azzam, tel +202-25749682 Email: ahmed.azzam [at] mfa.gov.eg

If you are in the U.S., contact the Egyptian Embassy, 202-895-5400 and ask for Omar Youssef or email omaryoussef [at] hotmail.com

There is also this link where you can send an e-mail directly to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Egypt. For updates related to the March, go here and also here, Jewbonics, a blog maintained by Max Ajl, one of the participants. His most recent post describes the vulnerability of the people of Gaza to viruses like H1N1.

Labels: Egypt, Gaza, Israel, Palestine

Contributions to the Carter Center have apparently declined significantly. Amazingly, Abe Foxman, delighting in Carter's pitiful act of self-flagellation, is oblivious to the fact that Carter is essentially conflating Jewish identity with Israel. Or, perhaps, that's one of the reasons Foxman likes it so much. Carter remains one of the most embarrassingly overrated figures among liberals and even some leftists.

Labels: Democrats, Haiti, Israel, Palestine

Last night, around 9pm, my son was watching a DVD before going to sleep for the night. Nearby, my wife was following the debate on the Senate health care bill over the Internet. Meanwhile, I tried to focus my attention upon reading Beijing Coma.

Even so, I couldn't help but overhear snippets of various speakers like Lamar Alexander, Tom Harkin and John McCain. Of course, they went on and on and on, as if the importance of their declarations rivalled those of Zeus. Brevity is not something for which Senators are known, and, from my limited exposure, they did not disappoint the expectations of the typesetters of the Congressional Record.

The most striking feature of the debate, though, was the mendacity on display by representatives of both parties. Alexander, smooth and polished as always, maligned the bill for provisions that, if included in a bill directed towards the desk of a President Bush, Romney or McCain, he would have enthusiastically supported. McCain, apparently embarrassed by this, focused upon Obama's embrace of secrecy in the negotiations that resulted in the final version, while scrupulously avoiding any substantive engagement. And then there was Harkin, the good liberal, striving mightily to put lipstick on a pig, recharacterizing a mandate to buy insurance on terms set by the insurance industry as the fulfillment of our right to health care, with a reassurance that, if it all doesn't work out, we can fix it.

All three were oblivious to the larger implications of the debate and its outcome. The passage of the health care bill in the Senate is one of the five most important congressional events of the last 20 years, with the others being the narrow passage of the resolution authorizing the Gulf War in 1991, the passage of NAFTA in the face of overwhelming public opposition in 1994, the late 2002 passage of the authorization of force resolution paving the way for the invasion of Iraq in early 2003, and, of course, the October 2008 bailout of the global financial sector. Each of these actions reflected a further dimunintion of the institution's ability to respond to public sentiment during its deliberations, with an accompanying increase in public dissatisfaction. Each also, not coincidentally, also reflected the the marriage between neoliberal economic policy at home with military expansionism abroad.

No doubt, Gaius is correct, the purpose of the Senate, as opposed to the House, is precisely this, to ensure that the majority does not infringe upon the perogatives of elites, but it was never supposed to be this blatant. Accordingly, we are now entering uncharted territory, a period that will be marked by intense populist eruptions against politicians and the government more generally. Liberals, seeing over the horizon, are already in disarray, with Jane Hamsher of firedoglake extending an olive branch to those willing to work with her on specific issues of concern, while Kossacks appear horrified at the prospect of people marching upon the iron triangle in DC with pitchforks. In any event, the notion that Democrats, and by extension, existing establishment relationships, can survive by saying that this health care bill is just the beginning of a larger generational enterprise is ludricrous. Instead, the bill is the last straw for a populace enraged by a government that perpetually socializes the needs of the wealthy while privatizing those of everyone else.

Or, to put it more colorfully, the earthquake at the bottom of the Pacific has already happened, it cannot be reversed, and the only questions remaining are where the tsuanami will strike and the severity of the devastation. Liberals are especially alarmed, because, after having rejected several opportunities in the last 20 years to harnass populism, they are now synonymous with the militaristic plutocracy that runs the country, and, indeed, much of the world, despite, paradoxically, having periodically expressed opposition to some aspects of US foreign policy. Much of the liberal discourse that one encounters at places like DailyKos entails distinguishing liberals as better educated, more rational and less prone to superstitution and bigotries than those who do not agree with them. Needless to say, there is little to support this perspective, but it does have the effect of isolating them for much of the American public.

Most importantly, they have willingly distanced themselves from the everyday economic problems of people, as noted by Sam Smith the other day:

Most of all, however, Obama represented a triumph of a generation of liberals dramatically different from their predecessors, most markedly in their general indifference to issues of economic as well as ethnic equality.

This heavily professional liberal class never once - in the manner of their predecessors of the New Deal and Great Society - took the lead in pressing for economic reforms. It wasn't that they opposed them; they just never seemed to occur to them.

They, after all, had risen in status even as much of the rest of the country was slipping. Over a quarter of a century passed and the best the liberal Democrats could come up with was to slash welfare and raise the age for Social Security.

Obama was the epitome of this new generation: well educated, well connected and well toned in rhetoric. But far distant from the concerns of so many.

Most of us out here in the real world recognize this, even as people in DC do not. Hence, the argument that we will only get worse from the Republicans if we do not turn out for the Democrats in future elections, no matter how odious we find the prospect, has no resonance. People feel defensiveless in the face of a neoliberal onslaught in which members of both political parties participate. There is no political comprehension of the scope of the failure of the Obama economic program, a program in which millions remain unemployed, millions continue to have their homes foreclosed and millions, despite this economic distress, now find themselves handed over to the insurance industry through a requirement that they purchase health insurance.

Through Obama, the Democrats have finally succumbed to the neoliberal state just as it is about to be repudiated. They, not the Republicans, are going to get blamed for the ruthless restructuring of the economy that they are allowing transnational finance to impose upon us. Conversely, the Republicans are going to harvest a bushel of populist votes next fall, as they cynically play the game of serving as a vessel for discontent that will allow them to return to power. It worked for Reagan, it worked for the second Bush, and it will work yet again. But this time, will the public mood tolerate an intensification of the policies that precipitated the current crisis? I doubt it.

And, finally, some liberals get it. Hamsher, through an astute reading of the current climate, is consciously seeking to create a liberal, progressive alternative that is independent of the parties, willing to challenge anyone, Republican or Democrat, who continues to insist upon the current orthodoxy. While she will not say it publicly, she recognizes that Obama has made the old progressive blogosphere slogan, More and Better Democrats, laughable. Naturally, the reaction from many hidebound Kossacks was arrogant and insulting. Hamsher understands that not only liberalism, but the legitimacy of the government itself, are in peril, and that it is essential to slip the establishment noose. Otherwise, the right will run wild.

Will it work? That's hard to say. Liberals and Democrats often resort to fearmongering to impose strict conformity with the neoliberal orientation of the party, and, naturally, they are falling back upon it now. As a leftist, not a liberal and definitely not a Democrat, I read such dystopian alarms with care. People, even those within the tea party scene, cannot be reduced to a simple right, left or center program. Instead, it is critical, as Chomsky recently said, that the left begin to directly engage people who are experiecing severe economic distress so that they can actually improve their lives. An alternative discourse is urgently needed to counter the illusory one provided by the right.

I guess that you could say that I am suggesting a popular front program centered around class conscious economic policies and demilitarization as a means of alleviating the distress of millions of Americans, and, ultimately, billions around the world. No doubt, you consider that strange coming from someone who purports to be anarchist influenced, but the immediate necessity is to address the suffering of people and prevent it from becoming worse, much worse. There is no way to do that in the absence of a political movement that emphasizes such a perspective over party identification, while allowing for the involvement of people all across the spectrum who agree with a radical assertion of personal and economic equality.

Personally, I believe that it would be most effective in the form of a non-electoral, direct action protest movement, but that's why you have a popular front, so that liberals, Marxist-Leninists and anarchists can act in ways that they consider most appropriate. I also believe that such a movement, should it succeed, would eventually result in a dramatic transformation of the US, if not its disintegration, much as what in relation to the USSR, given the intensity of the conflict required to dismante the military-industrial complex and redirect resources towards the populace. It is, as Lou Reed sang many, many years ago, the beginning of our new age.

Labels: Activism, Barack Obama, Democrats, firedoglake, Global Recession, Health Care, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Republicans, Sub-Proletarianization of America

The embrace of expediency by the Obama administration continues unabated. Just announced:

President Barack Obama declared Friday a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough" had been reached among the U.S., China and three other countries on a global effort to curb climate change but said much work was still be needed to reach a legally binding treaty.

"It is going to be very hard, and it's going to take some time," he said near the conclusion of a 193-nation global warming summit. "We have come a long way, but we have much further to go."

The president said there was a "fundamental deadlock in perspectives" between big, industrially developed countries like the United States and poorer, though sometimes large, developing nations. Still he said this week's efforts "will help us begin to meet our responsibilities to leave our children and grandchildren a cleaner planet."

The deal as described by Obama reflects some progress helping poor nations cope with climate change and getting China to disclose its actions to address the warming problem.

But it falls far short of committing any nation to pollution reductions beyond a general acknowledgment that the effort should contain global temperatures along the lines agreed to at a conference of the leading economic nations last July.

Meanwhile, cue the music, the AFL-CIO is against the evolving Senate health care bill . . . well . . . sort of. As is Andy Stern of SEIU. Given that both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win are now singing from the same songbook, all the way down to self-serving press releases about ongoing faux resistance, while the White House, the Congress and industry lobbyists decide the provisions of the health care reform bill in secret, one wonders why the split in the union movement persists. The only plausible explanation is that it would require SEIU to stop raiding the members of AFL-CIO affiliated uinons.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Health Care, Neoliberalism, SEIU, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions