Archive for the 'Theory' Category

The Sino-Soviet Split as Revisionism versus Global Race War

Published November 26, 2020 Marxism , Nationalism , Theory Leave a Comment

 …the second world conference of Communist parties was held in Moscow in November 1960. Though its proceedings were secret, enough information leaked out afterward to make clear this was a vituperative, no-holds-barred fight between the Soviet and Chinese representatives and their respective supporters. The Peking representatives denounced the attitude of the Soviet government toward their country and the Soviet support for India. They accused the Soviet Communist party of fostering a political line that encouraged surrender to the imperialists. They demanded greater militancy and willingness to take risks, arguing that talk of peaceful coexistence [which the USSR was pursuing the US] was useful only to secure the moral disarmament of the capitalist peoples and the material disarmament of their governments. The Chinese struck out at Khruschev’s criticism of Stalin’s “cult of personality” and accused him and his followers of revisionism and opportunism. Khruschev and his supporters gave as good as they got. Khruschev called Mao Tse-tung a “megalomaniac warmonger” and accused the Chinese of failing completely to understand the nature of modern war and its dangerous consequences. The Soviet representatives accused the Chinese of trying to disrupt various Communist parties and slandering Khruschev and seeking to have him purged from his posts in Moscow. This was clearly the bitterest and stormiest meeting in the history of the world Communist movement. The document that emerged from it as the platform of world Communism was a compromise so worded that each side could point to it and claim that its own position had been vindicated and supported. This document was a device aimed at avoiding an open break, not a means for healing the chasm that had developed.

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Finally he [Khruschev] came to the nub of the matter. “The left sectarian disorder is fed by nationalism, and in turn it feeds nationalism.” By this statement he really accused the Chinese of serving their own national interests under the guise of being ultra-revolutionary Communists.

The Chinese point of view was expressed in a number of lengthy statements. Here we shall present only the key points made by Peking in these declarations.

First, Peking made clear that it regarded the struggle in the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America as the center of all revolutionary activity in the world, declaring that to further this struggle it was necessary to be prepared to take risks of a spark setting off a general conflagration. The Soviet effort to curb the militancy of revolutionaries in these countries was denounced bitterly. Later Moscow was to charge that by this line the Chinese were trying to make themselves the heads of an Asian-African-Latin American bloc based on racism—on a struggle of non-whites against whites—rather than on Marxist principles of class struggle between workers and employers.

Without naming the Chinese directly, a Soviet commentator writing in the spring of 1963 described the Chinese policy at the Afro-Asian Peoples Conference held in Moshi, Tanganyika in February 1963, a meeting where the right of Soviet delegates to participate was contested on the ground that they came from Europe not Asia:

Some of the more chauvinistically-inclined leaders would like to direct the solidarity movement not against imperialism, colonialism and its agents, but against all white people. They are ready to sacrifice the truth, as they did, so far cautiously, in Moshi, and to shrug their shoulders at the participation (even though only partial) of international organizations such as the World Council of Peace. … They sacrifice the truth because they pretend the liberation of Asia, Africa and Latin America is possible even without the participation of progressive organizations throughout the world, without those white people who because of their views actively fight against imperialism and its colonial attributes.

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The Russian reply of March 30, 1963 was a lengthy and mildly worded exposition of the Soviet ideological position. … This letter was written after the Afro-Asian Solidarity meeting in Moshi, Tanganyika at which the Chinese had shown they had looked on the Russian as whites having no place in Asia. Hence, in one of the most significant sentences of the Soviet letter, the men in Moscow warned: “The militant call ‘Workers of all countries, unite!’ formulated by Marx and Engels means that at the basis of this unity lies anti-imperialist class solidarity and not any principle of nationality, color or geographical location. The German magazine, Christ und Welt, reported on July 5, 1963 that Chinese delegates at the Afro-Asian Journalists Conference in Djakarta in the spring of 1963 declared that Russia would have to return the former Chinese areas of Siberia if it wished to be welcomed at Afro-Asian meetings. The Chinese called the delegates from Soviet areas in Asia ‘marionettes of a white imperialist power.’”

On June 14, 1963, they [the Chinese leaders] sent the Soviet leaders their answer to Moscow’s March 30 letter. …

On the major policy issues dividing the two sides, the Chinese broadside repeated the customary demands for greater militancy, the old skepticism of peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism, the usual advocacy of reliance on armed revolution and the like. But it was on the issue of the struggle in Asia, Africa and Latin America that the Chinese laid down their harshest dictum, one which came close to accusing Premier Khruschev of being an advocate of continued colonialism and white supremacy. The passage merits quotation:

The various types of contradictions in the contemporary world are concentrated in the vast areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America; these are the most vulnerable areas under imperialist rule and the storm centers of world revolution dealing direct blows at imperialism…

The anti-imperialist revolutionary struggles of people in Asia, Africa and Latin America are pounding and undermining the foundations of the rule of imperialism and colonialism, old and new, and are now a mighty force in defense of world peace. In a sense, therefore, the whole cause of the international proletarian revolution hinges on the outcome of the revolutionary struggles of the peoples in these areas who constitute the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. Therefore, the anti-imperialist revolutionary struggle of the people in Asia, Africa and Latin America is definitely not merely a matter of regional significance but one of overall importance for the whole cause of proletarian revolution.

Certain person’s now go so far as to deny the great international significance of the anti-imperialist revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American people and on their pretext of breaking down the barriers of nationality, color and geographical location, are trying their best to efface the line of demarcation between the oppressed and oppressor nations and between oppressed and oppressor countries and to hold down the revolutionary struggles of the peoples in these areas. In fact, they cater to the needs of imperialism and create a new ‘theory’ to justify the rule of imperialism in these areas and the promotion of policies of old and new colonialism. Actually, this ‘theory’ seeks not to break down the barriers of nationality, color and geographical location but to maintain the rule of the ‘superior nations’ over the oppressed nations. It is only natural that his fraudulent ‘theory’ is rejected by the people in these areas.

Here the Chinese were hitting the Soviet leaders at an extremely important and sensitive point. The Chinese demand could be read as urging that the Communist movement concentrate not only against Western imperialism, but also against the Russian position in Asia, against rule by the “superior” Russian nation over the Uzbecks, the Turkmens, the Bashkirs, the Yakuts and the numerous other Asian nations incorporated in the Soviet Union.

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The Soviet reply to the Chinese was published on July 14 [1963]…. The next long section of the letter deals with the Chinese demand for primacy of revolution in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Before taking up this issue, the Soviet statement had already thrown out broad hints that the Chinese were really anti-white racists, declaring, for example, that the Chinese

…came out against the participation of representatives…of the European socialist countries in the Third Afro-Asian Conference in Moshi [Tanganyika]. The leader of the Chinese delegation told the Soviet representative that ‘there was nothing for whites to do.’ At the journalists’ conference in Jakarta, the Chinese representatives followed a line against allowing Soviet journalists full participation on the ground that the Soviet Union is not an Asian country!

The Soviet letter also points to the racist implications of the favorite Chinese slogan, “The wind from the East will prevail over the wind from the West,” noting that slogan was one “lacking all class content.” But it is in the refutation of the Chinese demand for a special position for Asia, Africa and Latin America that the Soviet statement makes the sharpest accusations that the Chinese have deserted Marxism-Leninism for a racist approach. Peking, the Soviet letter charges, is trying “to win popularity among the peoples of Asia, African and Latin America in the easiest way.” The Chinese, by insisting on the national liberation movement as the decisive force in the struggle against imperialism, are actually “isolating the national-liberation movement from the international working class and its offspring, the world system of socialism.” The Chinese are violating the Leninist injunction that the working class must head the struggle against imperialism, the Soviet letter charges, and “the Chinese comrades want to ‘correct’ Lenin and prove that it is not the working class but the petty bourgeoisie or the national bourgeoisie, or even ‘certain patriotic-minded kings, princes and aristocrats,’ who should be the leaders of the world struggle against imperialism.” And this hinting that racism rather than Marxism animates the Chinese, the Soviet letter asks darkly:

What is the explanation for the false tenets of the Chinese Communist party leadership on the vital problems of our time? Either the complete estrangement of the Chinese comrades from actual reality, a dogmatic bookish approach to the problems of war, peace, and revolution, a lack of understanding of the concrete conditions of the modern epoch: Or do other goals, having nothing in common with revolution, hide behind the deafening noise about ‘world revolution’?

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On October 1, 1963, another bitter Chinese article assailed the Soviet leaders as “apologists of neocolonialism.” It accused them of having failed in their obligations to the Algerian revolution and of working with the United States to use the United Nations to put down the Congolese people’s armed struggle against colonialism. The Soviet leaders’ policy and purposes in giving aid to newly independent nations was declared “open to suspicion” since these leaders “often take an attitude of great power chauvinism and national egoism in matters concerning aid to newly independent countries, harm the economic and political interests of the receiving countries, and as a result discredit the socialist countries.” But the most serious attack came on the subject of racism. The Soviet leaders were accused of emulating German Kaiser Wilhelm II in his strictures a half century ago about the “yellow peril.” The motives of Soviet leaders in attacking alleged Chinese racism were described in these terms:

When they peddle the ‘theory of racism,’ describing the national liberation movement in Asia, Africa and Latin America as one of the colored against the white race, the leaders of the Communist party of the Soviet Union are clearly aiming at inciting racial hatred among the white people of Europe and North America, at diverting the people of the world from the struggle against imperialism, and at turning the international working class movement away from the struggle against modern revisionism.

The Chinese summed up their case in October by declaring Khruschev had joined in a new “Holy Alliance” with President Kennedy against the people of the world, hinting broadly that the goal is a Soviet-American condominium over all mankind.

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On October 1, 1972, China celebrated the twenty-third anniversary of its Communist regime. … The occasion was marked in Moscow, too. A statement of congratulation to the Chinese people was issued, a statement that included a reference to the “complete theoretical incompetence of Maoism and its incompatibility with scientific socialism.”

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Harry Schwartz, Tsars, Mandarins and Commissars: A History of Chinese-Russian Relations, Revised Edition (Anchor: Garden City, NJ, 1973); 200; 210–11; 219–20, 223, 230–31; 233, 238–40; 256–57; 282

Max Shachtman on Democratic Workers Councils and the “Workers’ Government”

Published May 28, 2020 Marxism , Theory Leave a Comment

Shall economic life be democratically managed and controlled?

Absolutely! It is the maintenance of capitalist domination of society that demands, more and more, the abandonment of democracy. A Worker’s Government would have to extend democracy continually, not merely because it is a desirable ideal, but because it is indispensable to the planning of production for use. …

If, however, production were carried on for use, to satisfy the needs of the people, the question immediately arises: Who is to determine what is useful and what would satisfy these needs? Will that be decided exclusively by a small board of government planners? No matter how high-minded and wise they might be, they could not plan production for the needs of the people. Production for use, by its very nature, demands constant consultation of the people, constant control and direction by the people. The democratically-adopted decision of the people would have to guide the course of production and distribution. Democratic control of the means of production and distribution would have to be exercised by the people to see to it that their decision is being carried out.

Otherwise, the government and its planning would undergo a complete perversion of its purpose. At best, we would have a benevolent regimentation of the people “for their own good.” A government which declares itself to be “for” the workers, but is not a government of and by the workers, is a Workers Government only in name. Instead of being regulated by the blind market, as under capitalism, production would be regulated by the autocractic, uncontrolled will of a bureaucracy. Economic distortions, social conflict, exploitation and oppression would inevitably result. Production for use, aimed at satisfying the needs of society and freeing all the people from class rule, would be impossible.

Democratic control, the continual extension of democracy, is therefore an indispensable necessity under a Workers Government. The idea of a Workers Government is this inseparably connected with the idea of nationalization of the means of production and exchange, the centralized organization and planning of production and distribution, and the continual extension of democracy and democratic control. No one of these can exist in the absence of others. To have democratic control of industry, there must be planning of production. To plan production, the economic machinery of the country must be socially owned and centrally operated. To nationalize the means of production and exchange, a Worker’s Government must be established with power to act. For it to be a Workers’ Government, it must be democratically run and controlled by workers. None of these is possible without having all. ….

[Shachtman then argues that initially the Workers’ State would have to remain an instrument of force, in order to hold back reactionary attempts to end the revolution; and that the new State would inherit social inequality from the prior, capitalist society—something the Workers State would struggle against.]

These characteristics of the Workers’ Government show its similarities with the preceding state. But it is in its fundamental differences with it that the workers’ state shows, as the founders of scientific socialism have put it, that it is no longer a state in the classic sense of the word. A whole world of difference separates the two.

First, the force at the disposal of the workers’ state would not reside in bodies of armed men separated from the people, and under capitalism or feudalism or slavery. The arms would be in the hands of the workers themselves. The government which could summon these arms into action would be in the hands of the workers themselves.

Second, the state power would no longer be the instrument of an exploiting minority for the domination of the exploited majority. For the first time in history, the state would be in the hands of the majority to be used whenever necessary against the reactionary or anti-social minority.

Third, the state power would no longer be governed by a special or professional bureaucracy. It would be ruled and controlled by the people. It would have no permanent officials, and all elected officers would be subject to immediate recall by their electors. By virtue of its system of democratic representation, which will be dealt with in detail further on, every worker will participate directly in the affairs of government, from the humblest to the most prominent.

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The parliamentary form of government, supposed to be the best expression of the will of the people, is nicely suited to cover up the actual rule of the enormously wealthy minority which monopolizes industry, banking and transportation.

The workers cannot possibly rule by means of such a governmental machine. It will have to be replaced from top to bottom by an entirely different form and machinery of government. A workers’ government has as its main task the centralization and planned organization of production, under democratic control, for the welfare of the people. This task can be accomplished only if there is a form of government suited to it.

If the workers are to be assured of control of the administration of industry, and if the centralized planning of production and distribution is to be under their democratic control, it follows that the government must be based directly on the workers and under their constant control. The only way in which this can be effectively done is by having the government elected directly by the workers in the industries. Just how would this work?

Every factory and other center of production or distribution would be administered by a Council, elected by the workers and subject to recall at any time. These Workers’ Councils themselves would run the factory and see to it that the plans [145] and other decisions of the national planning council, or board, are carried out promptly and properly. At the same time, however, these Councils, which are the direct representatives of the producers, would have to have the power to participate democratically in the selection of the national planning council and in the decisions that it makes. Without such democratic participation and control, planning would soon become bureaucratic and would not represent the interests of the masses.

The municipal, state and federal governments would therefore be composed of direct representatives of the Workers’ Councils, elected by popular ballot and likewise subject to recall at any time. (In the agricultural regions, the Councils would of course be elected by the agricultural workers and farmers.) The National Congress of Councils would elect its officers, committees and boards, again under its direct control and subject to recall. Legislative and executive functions would be exercised by a single power. The decisions of the Council government would not be carried out by a professional bureaucracy, separated from the people and beyond their control. They would be carried out, instead, by the state, municipal and industrial Councils, composed of workers themselves and constantly subject to their control.

Only under such a form of government can we have a genuine workers’ democracy, in which millions and ten of millions actually rule, in contrast with the most advanced capitalist democracy in which thousands, or tens of thousands at most, are the actual rulers.

If the laws adopted or the work carried out by the National Councils’ Congress are not satisfactory, it can be recalled and replaced by the direct action of the Workers’ Councils, without having to wait for two or four or even six years to change the government. If the decisions and plans of the National Congress are satisfactory, but are not being carried out satisfactorily by the Municipal or Factory Council, the latter can be recalled and replaced by the same direct action.

Every worker becomes a direct part of the government administration. His power is not confined to marking a ballot once a year. He exercises his power, his control, his participation in making decisions and carrying them out, every day in the year, year-in and year-out.

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From Max Shachtman, The Fight for Socialism: The Principles and Program of the Workers Party (New York: New International Publishing Co, 1946).

first section is from “Chapter VII: A Workers Government and Socialism”: pp. 115, 116-17, 125.

second section is from “Chapter VIII. The Need for a Revolutionary Party”: pp. 144-46.

Transcriptions from the original book; it is available online as both text and PDF at Marxists.org.

Sinclair Lewis – Profile of an American Demagogue (excerpt from ‘It Can’t Happen Here’)

Published June 6, 2019 Antisemitism , Christianity , Fascism , Nationalism , Theory Leave a Comment

Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, portrays a world where several of the popular Far Right and populist demagogues of the 1930s—including Louisiana Senator and corrupt oligarch Huey Long, antisemitic priest and radio show host Father Coughlin, and  pro-Nazi Kansas minister Gerald Winrod—combine forces. They win the presidency and turn the country into a dictatorship wrapped in a kitschy Americana. (Although Long was assassinated before the 1936 presidential campaign, Coughlin and several others did join together, forming the far right Union Party. Their candidate, William Lemke, received over 900,000 votes in the race.)

It Can’t Happen Here’s protagonist is Doremus Jessup, a liberal who is the editor of a small town Vermont newspaper. Senator Buzz Windrip—based on Long—is the book’s successful presidential candidate and, soon after, the first dictator of the United States. Lee Sarason is Windrip’s Steve Bannon—a circus-show svengali who guides Windrip’s ambitions and later takes the crown himself.

The famous passage below isn’t so much an eerie prognostication of Donald Trump—although it is that, too—so much as a description of the canned shtick of the American right-wing demagogue. Trump is merely the latest incarnation of this hackneyed role, which seems to have a perpetual audience. Far RIght demogaguery allows talented speakers to harness the emotion of the public and tap into their disenchantment at the systemic problems of capitalism. But instead of directing this anger at the system, it is channeled toward Jews, blacks, immigrants, and finance capital; and the the very structures that created these problems are reinforced.

* * *

“Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas” almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.

Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his present credo—derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder, Rocco, and probably the review Of Thee I Sing—little Buzz, back home, had advocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef stew in the country poor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal machine politicians, with jobs for their brothers-in-law, nephews, law partners, and creditors.

Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of oratory, but he had been told by political reporters that under the spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you could not remember anything he had said.

There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.”

But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability to be authentically excited by and with his audience, and they by and with him. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat—a homespun Jeffersonian-Lincolnian- Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat—and (sans scenery and costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe.

Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional Common Man.

Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers, and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate.

But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.”

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Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (NY: New American Library/Penguin, 1935/2005), pages 70­–71.

Notes From Some Portland Anarchists (1999)

Published October 12, 2015 Anarchism , Counterculture & Punk , Theory Leave a Comment

pdx @.1.imagepdx@.2.imageNotes From Some Portland Anarchists
#1 April 1999

Introduction

This broadsheet is the result of a group effort arising from the Portland General Anarchist meetings. While this has come out of those meetings, it does not represent it. At the present our idea is simply to distribute this for use as a resource sheet. In the future we are interested in seeing it grow, to be used as a forum for a Portland anarchist network – a place for groups and individuals to share ideas, as well as information on gatherings and actions. A question that we had to answer at the outset of the project was whether we should try and draw an ideological line between anarchism and the Left in Portland as criteria for selecting items to print – does it even matter? We say it doesn’t. So while all of these groups are not specifically anarchist, they do express anarchist ideals and are part of the larger anarchist milieu in Portland. One more thing that should be noted is that we wrote all of the descriptions that appear below-please contact us if you would like to see things added, subtracted or generally changed in any way.

Centers

Sisters of the Road Cafe was founded on three principles: to be a safe public space, to offer nourishing meals that are affordable, and to offer work experience. “The entire community is welcome to eat in this little restaurant and break the myths that say we are so different from one another” – “come on down order, a cup of coffee, order up a meal and sit down with the rest of our customers.” You can also barter for the cup of coffee and the meal – this is based on Oregon’s minimum wage, which is around six dollars an hour. So if you come in and volunteer an hour of your time, you get six dollars credit to put towards a meal. “It ‘s not a dollar, it’s not a wage exchange, it’s an exchange of work for meals in the cafe.” (info from Street Roots, January 1999, v 1, n 1). Phone them or drop in, 133 NW 6th.

Laughing Horse Books Volunteer run collective sells used/new books and periodicals dealing with political theory, environmentalism, labor history, queer, gender, and minority issues. Offers meeting space for local groups. 3652 SE Division – Portland, OR 97202.

City Bikes 1914 SE Ankeny – Portland, OR 97214.  Monday-Friday 11:00am- 7:00pm, Saturday-Sunday 11:00am-5:00pm.

City Bikes Annex Worker owned bike shop. Sells used bikes plus new and used parts. Offers repairs and bike repair classes. 734 SE Ankeny- Portland, OR 97214.

Independent Publishing Resource Center For a small membership fee you get access to a zine library, computers, presses and inks. Everything you need to start a zine or make your own handbills. 917 SW Oak St. #304.

Reading Frenzy Volunteer run. Has a wide selection of independently produced zines, comics, books and pamphlets. Has a good selection of anarchist related materials. 921 SW Oak St – Portland, OR 97205.

Journals

Fifth Estate Publishing out of Detroit since 1965 makes this one of the older active anarchist papers. Inside are anarchist views on our national and international social/political/ecological & economic milieu. Available at Laughing Horse Books.

Earth First! Journal The radical environmental journal – or the forum for the no compromise environmental movement. National and international coverage of environmental actions and events from a deep ecology slant, as well as news on the corporate world’s maneuverings to destroy the blue planet in search of a profit. Available at Laughing Horse Books.

Anarchy Magazine (C.A.L. Press – PO Box 466 Columbia, MO 65205-1446) More theory than news. This publication has been around for awhile. Published quarterly and available at Laughing Horse Books.

Slingshot (3124 Shattuck Ave Berkley, CA 94705;  website – http://burn.used.edu/~resistslingshot.html) Anarchist paper published quarterly by the Longhaul info shop. Provides national focus on the Berkley/San Francisco area. A good read full of anger and humor. Available at Laughing Horse Books.

Portland Alliance (NW Alliance for Alternative Media and Education – 2807 SE Stark St Portland, OR 97214) Local Portland paper covers local/national, and international events with a socialist/leftist slant. Published monthly and distributed around town (Laughing Horse Books, coffee shops, Laundromats). Contains monthly calendar of events.

Groups

Cascadia Forest Alliance works to inspire non-violent grass roots involvement in the protection of the forests of Cascadia. Meetings are held on the first and third Wednesdays of each month at 6:30pm at the Activists Resource Center, SW 3’d and Burnside. You can also pick-up a copy of their monthly publication Cascadia Forest Roots there.

Portland IWW (PO Box 15005 – Portland, OR 97293-5005) Local branch of the radical labor movement that’s been agitating for social revolution since 1905. They distribute the Industrial Worker and have weekly meetings on Mondays at 8:00pm.

Anarchist Black Cross (Portland ABC (SG)) – PO Box 40660 Portland, OR 97240; 287-6467) Provides info on political prisoners and encourages support of prisoners through letter writing campaigns and pen pals.

Liberation Collective is an all-volunteer, nonprofit organization dedicated to linking social justice movements to end all oppression. Focuses on nonviolent direct action and animal rights. Located at the Activist Resource Center- 2 NW 3rd Ave (corner of 3rd and Burnside) which houses their office and community activist library and low-cost merchandise. Mailing address PO Box 9055 Portland, OR 97207; website http://www.aracnet.com~libcoll/. Meetings second Tuesday of every month.

Peace and Justice Works (PJW) is a nonprofit corporation whose main purpose is to educate the general public on important issues including but not limited to: peace, justice, the environment, and human rights. Located at the Portland Alliance office – 2815 SE Stark. Mailing address: PO Box 42456 Portland, OR 97242; website http://www.rdrop.com/~pjw.

Portland Copwatch, a civilian group (an outgrowth of the People Overseeing Police Study Group) promoting police accountability through citizen action. Publishes People’s Justice Report. Meets the second and fourth Mondays of each month at the King Facility (4825 NE 7tt. – rm. 142) at 7:00pm. Incident report line: 321-5120; website http://www. teleport.com/~copwatch.

Iraq Affinity Group Meets first Tuesday of the month at the P JW office at 7: l 5pm. Protests sanctions on and continuing bombing of Iraq by the US government every Friday in front of the Federal Building (SW 3rd & and Jefferson) 4:00 – 6:00 pm. Website http://www.rdrop.com/~pjw/irag.html.

Portland Central American Solidarity Committee (PCASC) meets the second Wednesday of every month at 7:00pm at WOC office (8th and Burnside). Send mail to: 3558 SE Hawthorne Blvd Portland, OR 97214.

Cross Border Labor Organizing Coalition (CBLOC), a joint effort by PCASC and Jobs With Justice, meets first Wednesday of every month at 7:00pm at 5726 N Missouri. Address and phone same as PCASC.

Portland Jobs With Justice is a coalition of community organizations and labor unions that mobilize for all issues, mainly labor. Steering committee meets first Monday of every month, call for info and the more exciting sub-committees meeting times. Send mail to 815 NE Davis, Suite 200, Portland, OR 97232.

Fair Trade Coalition (anti-MAI) (anti-MAI) meets every second Thursday at 6:30pm at AFSCME, 815 NE Davis, Suite 200 Portland, OR 97232.

Emilio Zapata Anarchist Collective at Reed College – email [only]

Portland Free Mumia Coalition A group of concerned activists educating about the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal and demanding a new trial, as well as issues about the death penalty and political prisoners. Weekly meetings: Sundays, 3:00pm at PSU Smith Memorial Food Court.

Chiapas Urgent Call Education and tabling in support of the Zapatistas (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico. Officially recognized by the National Commission in Mexico – the legal, US wing of the movement. English/Spanish co-learning class, Friday at 6:00pm at the Ainsworth United Church of Christ.

Portland Cacophony Society Trouble. Fun trouble. Creating situations and chaos through the provocation and the absurd. Last actions were dressing in postal worker uniforms and going to a gun show soon after postal shooting, and videotaping Santas in the woods shooting stuffed animals. Meetings: last Sunday of every month, 6:00pm-ish at the Alibi (4024 N Interstate), they have a newsletter.

Actions

Food Not Bombs Serves free, hot vegetarian (usually vegan) food and groceries to protest militarism and the unequal distribution of wealth. Wednesday: 5:00pm under the Burnside Bridge. Thursday: 5:30pm under the Burnside Bridge. Friday: 5:00pm under the Burnside Bridge, by Max tracks. Saturday: 5:00pm, Park Blocks (Park and Burnside). Sunday: 6:30pm, Park Blocks (Park and Burnside).

Spurcraft has an ongoing free school with classes in math, massage, drawing, foreign languages, yoga, etc. Pick-up a schedule at the Activist Resource Center.

Direct Action/Civil Disobedience Training for groups of 8 or more in preparation of negative developments in Mumia Abu Jamal’s situation. Contact the Portland Free Mumia Coalition.

Critical Mass Mass bike ride to demonstrate/educate about using bikes for daily transportation instead of cars. Meet: last Friday of every month under the Burnside Bridge (on Waterfront Park – by the maze) at 5:00pm.

Send Off/Pre-Birthday Party For Mumia MLK & Prescott, community room of McCoy Building, Thursday, April 22 from 5:00pm to 8:30pm, donations accepted.

Anarchist Reading Group Know your roots. Held every Sunday at 3:00pm at the Activist Resource Center – readings provided.

Portland General Anarchist Meeting

Meets the first Thursday of each month at Laughing Horse Books (email us to make sure of location). Open meetings to discuss current events, actions, and to network and generally share ideas with other Portland Anarchists.

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RADICAL ARCHIVES NOTE:

A snapshot of what was going on in Portland, Oregon directly before the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle, which launched the anti-globalization movement. About one-quarter of the blockade groups there came directly from the Portland scene. Despite the dishonest claims of certain academics, the milieu that created those demonstrations was theoretically self-conscious of its political choices, and did not valorize “direct democracy” as a central idea — as this snapshot shows.

James and Grace Lee Boggs on race, radicalism, and standpoint perspective (1974)

Published October 9, 2015 Marxism , Nationalism , Theory Leave a Comment
Most rebels, black or white, react to an idea purely in terms of the social position of the person advancing the idea. Usually they will not even consider an idea unless it comes from someone in the most oppressed strata of society. They never stop to consider that any ideas of serious value will have to be highly advanced ideas — they cannot be ideas of the past, because, like it or not, the United States is a highly advanced country, and one in which the contradictions are not material or economic, but within the realm of human choice. ….
How to project an advanced idea in tune with our unique stage of human development is a serious revolutionary problem…. Malcolm X used to chide the masses, because he began with the idea that the masses are not perfect, and that they had to be transformed. He had the courage to attack the Establishment while chiding the masses for their backwardness, their superstitions, their myths and fears. Malcolm realized that the masses would have to repudiate much of what they had accepted as normal and natural, and transform themselves into new people with new values, and with a new vision, of new tasks to be performed, if black people were ever to be free. In fact, Malcolm repudiated his own past as inconsistent with a new life and new values.
But in the years since Malcolm’s death, when we should have been developing a new revolutionary vision, we have wasted our time in so much rhetoric that black and white radicals today make a virtue of irresponsibility and a virtue of vice – so long as it is the vice of an oppressed person. Today anything can be called revolutionary, regardless of how inhumane it is, so long as an oppressed militant is involved. The result is that, despite the spreading militancy and rebellion, we are moving further away from, rather than closer to, the revolutionary goal of building a new society.
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James and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 191-92.

David Macey – Foucault, the French Communist Party, and the Doctor’s Plot (1993)

Published September 14, 2015 Antisemitism , Marxism , Theory Leave a Comment
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Foucault approached the final hurdle of the agrégation in spring 1950. This was also the year in which he finally joined the PCF. The Parti Communiste Français [PCF] had emerged from the war as the single most important political grouping in France, and was able to win five million votes in 1945. By the middle of 1947, its membership reached a high point of 900,000. Authoritarian, highly centralised and disciplined, the Party was a classic Stalinist formation, complete with a somewhat absurd personality cult dedicated to its secretary-general, Maurice Thorez. It was also highly patriotic and still enjoyed and exploited the reputation it had won in the wartime Resistance; this was le parti des fusillis—the party which had lost more members than any other to German repression. …

This was the party which Foucault chose to join in 1950. He took out his Party card at the urging of Althusser, who had taken the same decision two years earlier. In subjective terms, Foucault’s newfound commitment was largely a reaction to the apocalyptic despair he had felt as an adolescent living through a disastrous war. Politics had little meaning when the only choice available was one between Truman’s America and Stalin’s Russia. …

Many of those who joined the PCF at roughly the same time as Foucault left it after only a few years. Mass resignations followed the revelations about Stalin’s Russia made in Khrushchev’s ‘secret report’ to the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] in 1956, and Soviet intervention in Hungary that same year led to many more departures. In Foucault’s case, the disaffection set in earlier. At the beginning of 1953, Pravda announced the arrest of nine doctors on very serious charges. They had allegedly murdered Zhdanov, had planned to murder a number of Soviet marshals and had plotted against the life of Stalin himself. Immediately after Stalin’s death from natural causes on 3 March, Pravda announced that the nine had been released and rehabilitated; they had been the victims of a machination. Seven of the nine were Jewish. In. France, the PCF’s press covered the ‘doctors’ plot’ in slavishly pro-Soviet terms, commenting that the security services of the USSR had ‘picked off the murderers in white coats, the secret agents recruited among the Zionists and Jewish nationalists’ and implying that the entire plot had been hatched in Tel Aviv.

Foucault attended a meeting at which André Wurmser attempted to justify the arrest of the nine. Wurmser laid down the Party line, and his audience of normaliens did their best to believe the unbelievable. For Foucault, believing the unbelievable was a way of existing within the Party: continued membership was the source of such tension that it became an exercise in ‘dissolving the ego’. After the death of Stalin, the PCF let it be known that there had been no plot, that it had been pure invention. The ENS [École Normale Supérieure, where Foucault was a student] cell wrote to Wurmser to ask for an explanation, but received no reply. Shortly afterwards, Foucault quietly left the PCF. The incident left a ‘bitter taste’ in his mouth, and resulted in both a life-long loathing for the PCF and a distinctly jaundiced view of the USSR.

The ‘doctors’ plot’ had revealed the existence of an ugly strand of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. The French Party press was not to be outdone in the matter of anti-Semitism. According to Annie Besse, writing in Cahiers du communisme, ‘Hitler…refrained from harming the Jews of the big bourgeoisie… Who will ever forget that Leon Blum, his wife at his side, contemplated from the windows of his villa the smoke from the ovens of the crematoria!’ Zionism was ‘a mask behind which to conceal espionage operations against the Soviet Union’. Whether Foucault ever read these statements is not known, but in 1953 he was already denouncing the ‘odious’ attitude taken towards Israel by both the superpowers. His pro-Israeli sentiments were as unswerving as his dislike for the PCF, and it is difficult to believe that there was no connection between the two.

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from David Macey, The Lives of Michael Foucault: A Biography (NY: Pantheon Books, 1993), pages 37-38, 39-40.

R.J. Lambrose – “Chomsky Unplugged” (1996)

Published September 8, 2015 Anarchism , Counterculture & Punk , Theory Leave a Comment

As recently as the 1980s, the farthest an academic could make it in the world of popular culture would have been a brief appearance on the Today show to flog a new book. But cultural studies has changed all that. Now that professors have been churning out books and articles about rap, Elvis, and Madonna, the bemused performers are beginning to scratch the occasional academic back, or better, blurb the occasional academic book. Consider, for example, the quotes on the back cover of Michael Eric Dyson’s recent Making Malcolm, from Oxford University Press. In addition to the more predictable endorsements from Cornel West, Angela Davis, Jesse Jackson, and Carol Moseley-Braun, we also hear from Chuck D of Public Enemy: “With the situation getting more hectic, the real troopers come far and few. And with misinformation spreading, it is a necessity to follow Michael Eric Dyson. He’s a bad brother. Check out his new book Making Malcolm by all means.”R-468022-1118177447.jpg

The rappers’ reverence for cultural studies scholars hardly comes as a big surprise; Dyson, after all, testified on behalf of rap music at a congressional hearing in 1994. More startling, however, was the recent report that MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky is a major fave with top rock musicians. Rock & Rap Confidential magazine describes Chomsky—the embodiment, we had always thought, of old-fashioned leftist rectitude—as “a quote machine with all the rockers.” Chomsky’s anarchism has also made him a hero to punkers: Bad Religion put an entire Chomsky lecture on the B-side of one of their seven inch singles. And Maximum Rock’n’Roll, a leading fanzine with a circulation of 10,000, reprints Chomsky’s speeches for its Generation X readership. Other tributes abound: In 1994 an Austin-based band called The Horsies did a single they titled “Noam Chomsky.” U2’s Bono has called Chomsky a “rebel without a pause” and “the Elvis of academia.” And Peter Garrett, shaven-headed lead singer for the Australian rockers Midnight Oil, launched into a song called “My Country” at a Boston-area concert by invoking the following trinity: “Thoreau, Noam Chomsky, and…the Hulk!”

The Chomsky connection appears all the more remarkable when one learns more about the linguist’s own rather unusual relationship to mass culture. Because Chomsky can speed-read any document, he apparently grows impatient with the slowness of the fast-forward mode on a VCR. A friend who sought out a Chomsky blurb for a radical video was told by a go-between that the professor might consider wiring an endorsement after he read the script, but he refuses to screen films. He even declined to watch Manufacturing Consent, the documentary about him, and instead insisted the producers give him a transcript. (Unfortunately, he’ll never see Pulp Diction, Quentin Tarantino’s soon-to-be-released homage to Chomsky’s 1965 best-seller, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.)

All of this raises the intriguing question of whether Chomsky has vetted the rock encomiums to his work. If he has, we would guess that this means that there are now two people who actually read rock lyrics: Noam Chomsky and Tipper Gore.

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Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life, May/June 1996, page 10.

Murray Bookchin, in praise of hippie “Youth Culture” and “life-style” (1970)

Published August 26, 2015 Anarchism , Counterculture & Punk , Theory Leave a Comment
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hip cultureWe must break away from the traditional Marxian outlook, with its limited interpretation of the class struggle, of the motive forces for revolution, and of the revolutionary process, to understand the revolutionary implications of the Youth Culture. …

Nourished by the relative abundance produced by a new, potentially revolutionary technology, young people began to develop a post-scarcity outlook—however confused, rudimentary, and intuitive its forms—that has been slowly eroding the ages-old psychic complicity between oppressor and oppressed—a complicity that had made hierarchy, domination, patriarchy, renunciation, and guilt a condition of the human spirit, not only the institutional and psychological instruments of class-rule and the state. It is difficult to convey what a historic breach this emerging Youth Culture produced in the social desert that was once America. …

The explosion of the Youth Culture shattered this decade-long edifice and its mythology [i.e., the social conformity of the 1950s—RA] to their very foundations and, almost alone, is responsible for the massive alienation that permeates American youth today. For the first time in the history of this country, every verity not only of bourgeois society but of hierarchical society as a whole is now in question. Mere critique of the kind so endearing to the orthodox Marxists might have produced nothing more than a sense of cynical engagement, so similar to Salinger’s young hero in “Catcher in the Rye.” But the Youth Culture went further—into the realm of positive, utopian alternatives. In its demands for tribalism, free sexuality, community, mutual aid, ecstatic experience, and a balanced ecology, the Youth Culture prefigures, however inchoately, a joyous communist and classless society, freed of the trammels of hierarchy and domination, a society that would transcend the historic splits between town and country, individual and society, and mind and body. Drawing from early rock-and-roll music, from the beat movement, the civil rights struggles, the peace movement, and even from the naturalism of neo-Taoist and neo-Buddhist cults (however unsavory they may be to the “Left”), the Youth Culture has pieced together a life-style that is aimed at the internal system of domination that hierarchical society so viciously uses to bring the individual into partnership with his/her own enslavement. …

The Youth Culture has spread from the Haight-Eastside axis into the most remote towns of the United States, areas that no radical movement in the past could have hoped to colonize, disrupting all the time-honored ties, institutions, and values of these communities. Owing to its increasing influence on working class youth, the culture has now begun to rework the labor reserves of bourgeois society itself—the reservoirs from which it recruits its industrial proletariat and soldiers—until recently, perhaps the most intractable element to radical ideas and values.

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Murray Bookchin, “The Youth Culture: An Anarcho-Communist View,” in Hip Culture: 6 Essays on Its Revolutionary Potential; Yippie, Third World, Feminist, Marxist, High School Student, Anarchist (New York: Times Change Press, 1970), 54, 55, 58–59, 60.

RADICAL ARCHIVES NOTE: Bookchin became quite well-known late in life for his scathing attacks on a bogeyman he called “lifestylism”—a ridiculous strawman composed of wildly disparate parts of the early 1990s anarchist milieu, united mostly by the fact that he didn’t like them. But Bookchin’s early, favorable view of the 1960s counterculture made a coherent argument in favor of its potential, and, if it had a failure, it was that it was too uncritical in its assessment.

Deleuze: Nietzsche is “the dawn of counterculture” (1973)

Published January 27, 2015 Counterculture & Punk , Marxism , Nietzsche , Philosophy , Theory Leave a Comment
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“Probably most of us fix the dawn of our modern culture in the trinity Nietzsche-Freud-Marx. And it is of little consequence that the world was unprepared for them in advance.  Now, Marx and Freud, perhaps, do represent the dawn of our culture, but Nietzsche is something entirely different: the dawn of counterculture.”

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Gilles Deleuze, “Nomad Thought,” in David B. Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (New York: Delta/Dell, 1977), page 142. Translated from the French by Allison; original is “Pensée nomade,” in Nietzsche aujourd’hui (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1973).

Gramsci on Lukács and the dialectic in human vs natural history

Published October 19, 2013 Marxism , Philosophy , Theory 2 Comments
“Note: One must study the position of Professor Lukács towards the philosophy of praxis. It would appear that Lukács maintains that one can speak of the dialectic only for the history of men and not for nature. He might be right and he might be wrong. If his assertion presupposes a dualism between nature and man he is wrong because he is falling into a conception of nature proper to religion and to Graeco-Christian philosophy and also to idealism which does not in reality succeed in unifying and relating man and nature to each other except verbally. But if human history should be conceived also as the history of nature (also by means of the history of science) how can the dialectic be separated from nature? Perhaps Lukács, in reaction to the baroque theories of the Popular Manual, has fallen into the opposite error, into a form of idealism.”
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Antonio Gramsci, ‘The Concept of ‘Science’ section of “Problems of Marxism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), page 448.
The Popular Manual Gramsci is referring to is Nikolai Bukharin’s Historical Materialism.

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