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Seymour Martin Lipset on the Black Panthers and Antisemitism

Published May 5, 2019 Antisemitism , Marxism , Nationalism , Zionism/Israel/Palestine Leave a Comment

Thus Stokeley Carmichael who was a leader of both the Student Nonviolent (now “National”) Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and of the Black Panthers before abandoning the struggle in America for residence abroad, accounted for the resentment expressed toward Jews by black militants as a result of “the exploitation [of blacks] by Jewish landlords and merchants,” in an article published in The New York Review of Books in 1966. Elsewhere, he wrote: “You let just one Negro get a Molotov cocktail and throw it at some Jew’s liquor store and they call out the whole damn National Guard.” In an interview with David Frost on April 13, 1970, Carmichael declared that, in his judgment, Adolf Hitler “was the greatest white man.” He went on to say that he could not describe men like Johnson, Nixon, Truman or Churchill as “great people,” since they “were doing things against my people.”

The most overt expressions of anti‐Semitism have come generally from the most militant of the black organizations, the one with closest ties to sections of the white New and Old Lefts, the self‐described Marxist‐Leninist Black Panther party. The party goes out of its way to identify as Jews those in the Establishment who oppose it and who happen to be Jews. Thus, in the Dec. 21, 1968, issue of The Black Panther, Eldridge Cleaver attacked Judge Monroe Friedman, who presided over the Oakland, Calif., trial of Huey Newton in the following terms: “If the Jews like Judge Friedman are going to be allowed to function, and come to their synagogues to pray on Saturdays, or do whatever they do down there, then we’ll make a coalition with the Arabs, against the Jews….”

The Panthers have even argued that Judge Julius J. Hoffman gave the Jewish defendants in the Chicago conspiracy trial better treatment than he gave Bobby Seale. Connie Matthews, international coordinator of the party, wrote in The Black Panther of April 25, 1970, that there was an alliance between the Jewish judge and the Jewish defendants:

“It was a Zionist judge, Judge Hoffman, who allowed the other Zionists to go free but has kept Bobby Seale in jail and sentenced him to four years for contempt charges. Bobby Seale alone stands trial again in April on conspiracy charges. With whom did he conspire? The Zionists?

“The other Zionists in the… trial [i.e., Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin] were willing and did sacrifice Bobby Seale and his role in the conspiracy trial to gain publicity.”

Now clearly Rubin and Hoffman are in no way “Zionists.” This is simply a code word for Jew, just as it has become in Eastern Europe.

Though opposed to all capitalists, the Panthers single out Jewish businessmen for attack. Thus, a statement in the May 19, 1970, issue of the party newspaper declares that they are against “Zionist exploitation here In Babylon, manifested in the robber barons that exploit in the garment industry and the bandit merchants and greedy slum lords that operate in our communities.” In describing a tenants’ action in Atlantic City against a landlord, an article in the June 13, 1970, Black Panther praises the tenants for “gathering together to form a United Front against Zionist Pig Sobel….” The article concludes with the exhortation: “ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE — DEATH TO THE ZIONIST PIGS.” And as if to prove that the reference to Sobel was not fortuitous, the paper a week later carried a story on “Substandard Housing in America” which referred to buildings “owned by a Zionist by the name of Rosenbaum.”

= = =

from Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Socialism of Fools,” New York Times, January 3, 1971, page 6.

Alison Weir on Clay Douglas’s ‘The Free American Hour,’ Aug, 25, 2010

Published June 8, 2017 Antisemitism , Zionism/Israel/Palestine Leave a Comment
Tags: , , , ,

Recently the website IfAmericansKnewAlisonWeir went down, which documented some of cryptoantisemite Alison Weir’s more outrageous statements. We’ve pulled it out of archive.org to make it more available. The first post was a transcript of one of her appearances on the Clay Douglas show, and the second showed that one the first things she did upon becoming Council for the National Interest president was to send out propaganda based on classic antisemitic tropes.


SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/20160308024336/http://ifamericansknewalisonweir.com

Transcript: Alison Weir on The Free American Hour, August 25, 2010

originally posted March 25th, 2011

Below is a complete transcript of Alison Weir’s August 25, 2010 appearance on the Free American Hour internet radio show, hosted by far-Right and anti-Semitic activist Clay Douglas (freeamerican dot com). The full audio of this broadcast is available here. Alison Weir has also appeared on the Free American Hour on April 23, 2010 and February 9, 2011.


 Continue reading ‘Alison Weir on Clay Douglas’s ‘The Free American Hour,’ Aug, 25, 2010′

Irving Howe: Bundist Vladimir Medem on Bolshevik dictatorship

Published January 28, 2017 Uncategorized Leave a Comment

More serious were the warnings of Vladimir Medem, the Bundist leader recently come to the United States, who argued at the [Jewish Socialist] Federation’s 1921 convention that “the dictatorship of the proletariat” must necessarily degenerate into a dictatorship of the ruling party over the proletariat. Only through democracy, Medem insisted, could socialism be fulfilled.*

* In a long-forgotten article published in a 1918 issue of the Warsaw Bundist paper, Lebns-Fragen, Medem wrote: “The guns of the conscripted Bolshevik soldiers are directed not only at the bourgeoisie. They are turned against the socialist working class. The day is not far when revolutionary tribunals of the more ‘kosher’ Bolsheviks will be set up to shoot the more ‘suspect’ of their own comrades… And if today Lenin years to shoot Abramovitch [a Menshevik leader], may he not wish to shoot Trotsky tomorrow?

“A socialist government that turns to the methods of terror signs its own death warrant.”

###

The debate over Bolshevism brought the Forward to a major crisis. It was not possible to keep these differences locked into the inner circles: polemical articles spilled across the pages of the paper. Opposition to [Forward founder and Bolshevik supporter Abraham] Cahan was led by Vladimir Medem, a leader of the Bund who had recently arrived from Poland and was acknowledged in all segments of the Jewish world as a figure of moral and intellectual authority. Medem launched a principled attack on the enthusiasm so many Jewish socialists were displaying for the Bolshevik dictatorship, and he was especially sharp in the polemical assaults he directed at Cahan. Neither before or since has Cahan been treated so roughly, even unceremoniously, in his own pages. Though other anti-Bolsheviks were briefly kept out of the Forward pages, Medem carried too much prestige to be treated that way. A dying man, he wrote scathingly about the Bolsheviks, attacking Lenin as a kalter gazlen (a cold-blooded thug). The worst apologists for the Bolshevik dictatorship, he wrote, are not those who deny it violating socialist or democratic ethics, but those who say, “Yes, they are doing it and it’s right.” Arguing against Cahan’s quasi-Leninist notion of a “transitional dictatorship,” Medem stated what would become the classical socialist critique of Bolshevism:

This is the same revolutionary conceit which looks upon a cluster of “conscious ones” as the heroes who represent…the wise, the adept, the leaders. … The mass is nothing but inert material to be molded. If it balks at going along peacefully, then it must be dragged along forcibly. If the truth has no effect on it, then lies must be employed.

If a reversion to the Spanish Inquisition is necessary for the realization of socialism, then we can do without such a socialism.

# # #

Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the Eastern European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pages 328–29, 541

Update December 31, 2017: I recently found a scan the Medem article which Howe refers to at the Marxist Internet Archive: see Vladimir Medem, “On Terror.”

Edward Bellamy Disses Anarchists in “Looking Backward”

Published January 17, 2017 Anarchism Leave a Comment

Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward 2000–1887 is often praised as the best-selling agit-prop socialist novel of the late 19th century. In fact, it’s a wooden didactic piece which praises a purely technocractic future, disses the radical left, and is complete with the main character having a super-creepy marriage. In this passage, Bellamy clearly tries to promote the idea that the radical left of his day was a “false flag” operation:

“By the way,” said I [main character Julian West], as the doctor read aloud to us some of these items, “what part did the followers of the red flag take in the establishment of the new order of things? They were making considerable noise the last thing that I knew.”

“They had nothing to do with it except to hinder it, of course,” replied Dr. Leete. “They did that very effectually while they lasted, for their talk so disgusted people as to deprive the best considered projects for social reform of a hearing. The subsidizing of those fellows was one of the shrewdest moves of the opponents of reform.”

“Subsidizing them!” I exclaimed in astonishment.

“Certainly,” replied Dr. Leete. “No historical authority nowadays doubts that they were paid by the great monopolies to wave the red flag and talk about burning, sacking, and blowing people up, in order, by alarming the timid, to head off any real reforms. What astonishes me most is that you should have fallen into the trap so unsuspectingly.”

“What are your grounds for believing that the red flag party was subsidized?” I inquired.

“Why simply because they must have seen that their course made a thousand enemies of their professed cause to one friend. Not to suppose that they were hired for the work is to credit them with an inconceivable folly.* In the United States, of all countries, no party could intelligently expect to carry its point without first winning over to its ideas a majority of the nation, as the national party eventually did.”

* I fully admit the difficulty of accounting for the course of the anarchists on any other theory than that they were subsidized by the capitalists, but at the same time, there is no doubt that the theory is wholly erroneous. It certainly was not held at the time by any one, though it may seem so obvious in the retrospect.

###

source: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bellamy-ed/works/backward/ch24.htm

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000–1887, originally published 1888.

U.S. Green Party’s Ajamu Baraka Linked to Holocaust Denier

Published August 10, 2016 Antisemitism 2 Comments

The U.S. Green Party is well-known to be a home for antisemites and conspiracy theorists. In fact, this seems to be such an accepted fact in the party that it has nominated Amaju Baraka for vice president, even tho he has a very public history of working with Holocaust Denier Kevin Barrett. This includes being in an anthology Barrett edited, and appearing on his radio show.

  • It was not a fluke that Baraka was in the anthology; he appeared on Barrett’s Truth Jihad radio show at least twice: see here and here.
  • For Barrett’s views on Holocaust Denial, see here and here.
  • A Green Party national co-coordinator replied by smearing those who pointed this out as an attempt to “run interference for apartheid in Israel” — despite the fact that the discussion was in reference to Holocaust Denial, and had no references to Israel.
    Screen Shot 2016-08-10 at 2.01.50 PM
  • Jill Stein, or whoever is running her twitter account, has refused to reply to tweets, but has “liked” a tweet saying it’s acceptable that Baraka is working with a  Holocaust Denier.

Screen Shot 2016-08-10 at 12.48.33 AM

There is no justification for anyone on the Left working with Holocaust Deniers. This is not a new issue for the Greens either; the Canadian party just expelled a member for Holocaust Denial.

The Green Party needs to publicly denounce Holocaust Denial, break links with deniers, and institute mandatory education about antisemitism for all national and state-level staff.

UPDATE: According to Gawker, Baraka claims he knew nothing about Barrett’s views — despite the fact that they were public before his radio shows appearances. He claims he is the victim of a vast media conspiracy, saying,

“This witch-hunt against Ajamu Baraka is utterly bizarre, and the people participating it—from the media barons who ordered it to the lowly reporters who carry out those orders—are pathetic cowards who disgrace the name of journalism.”

It seems that everyone is to blame except Ajamu Baraka.

afff-front-cover

Barrett’s anthology, which includes a contribution from Ajamu Baraka, alongside a host of well-known neofascists and antisemites.

Follow Radical Archives on Twitter!

Published February 1, 2016 Uncategorized Leave a Comment

You can now follow Radical Archives on twitter! @radarchive77

Prague’s massive Global Street Party action (1998)

Published October 25, 2015 Anarchism , Counterculture & Punk Leave a Comment
Tags: , , , , ,

czech-cover.pix“It was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration to draw attention to the effects of globalization on the environment. Up to 3,000 people attended the so-called Global Street Party on náměstí Miru on 16 May [1998], which featured music and dancing. The event was organised by Earth First!, Proti proudu/Rainbow Keepers, and the Czechoslovak Anarchist Federation, was authorized by police, and took place peacefully. But in the later afternoon, an estimated 2,000 participants, mostly youths, started an unauthorized march across Prague. Eventually the march wound its way down to Prague’s Old Town. At that point, a smaller group headed off for Wenceslas Square, where some participants started breaking the storefront windows of McDonald’s and KFC outlets in the square and on Vodičkova Street. After violent clashes, the police managed to disperse the crowd. Initially, more than 60 people were detained and 25 of them were charged with breaking the peace and other offenses. A handful of people filed official complaints about police brutality during the arrests. The entire incident, the first of its kind in the Czech Republic, has sparked a debate in the Czech media about the country’s youth and the police’s ability to handle such demonstrations. The following is a selection of articles that appeared in the Czech press after the incident.”

czech street party.pix= = =

from The New Presence: The Prague Journal of Central European Affairs, June 1998, pages 18-19.

RADICAL ARCHIVES note: The 1998 Global Street Parties were Reclaim the Streets actions held around the world. They were one of a number of events that were direct precursors to the Seattle demonstrations against the WTO in November-December 1999. The Prague one is of note for both its size, location in Eastern Europe, and the fact that it was explicitly sponsored by a self-identified Anarchist federation along with semi-anarchist groups.

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.

= = =

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.
= = =
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
Tags: , , , ,

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.

= = =

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

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