Commie Curmudgeon

I was happy to learn tonight that Collective Action Notes has just posted a recent translation of FARIDABAD MAJDOOR SAMACHAR (FMS)(FARIDABAD WORKERS' NEWSPAPER), by Kamunist Kranti/Collectivities. Kamunist Kranti, who live in Faridabad, India, have produced some of my favorite anti-authoritarian/autonomist writings of at least the past decade, including SELF ACTIVITY OF WAGE-WORKERS: Towards a Critique of Representation & Delegation.

Here's a great paragraph from FMS:

In fact, in hierarchic social systems, in place of the reality, the image dominates. For image, instead of the normal, the extreme is necessary. Instead of the routine, event is necessary. The stories of slave-owner Ram, slave-owner Ravana, emperor Ashok, emperor Akbar are widely disseminated, propagated whereas things about slaves and serfs are available in small fragments after a great search. The market system speaks of equality but is in fact, the height of hierarchic social systems. The market system that has reached the faceless stage today in the form of companies, institutions has produced an obsession for the desire for faces. The basic tenet has become - "Show that you've achieved something remarkable." The almost universal desire to become leader-actress-player-artist-officer-director-chief carries with it the torture of each body and soul by oneself. The repetition of media-propagated special persons' expressions-looks-lifestyles on our part has become a part of our daily activities. Thinking, discussing about humanness instead of the 'value' of human beings will help us recognize these incessant wounds. Efforts to break from the deceit of images are a step on the path of humane behavior.

I've stumbled across an interesting description of political groups known as "rackets." I have to admit, I'm not so familiar with this term, at least not in a political context, but maybe that's because I spent so much time in anarchist groups, where people dwell on defining and redefining other words, such as "collective" and "affinity group." This article, which deals mainly with Marxists, comes from a left-communist site. It was written in 2001 by someone named F. Palinorc. That's somebody I've never heard of, though it might a pseudonym for someone else. But I have found his/her descriptions to be very interesting. For example, there are these sort-of defining paragraphs:

Political rackets are informal specialist bodies, usually legal and aspiring to state domination. However, their reduced size forces them to an unstable and precarious existence. At most, they become pressure groups for parties that have gone beyond the racket stage. The larger the racket, the more it approximates a party, which contains a few rackets called tendencies or factions. Only extraordinary world and national events propel rackets to become mass parties and even attain state power. But these moments are few and far between. Most rackets have a relatively short existence. A few last for years, as torture chambers for their members....

Though political rackets seldom attain their goal of state power, their internal organisation mimics statist functions. The membership of the racket is its proletariat, and the leaders constitute a sort of portable mini-state. Rackets are essentially conservative, even if some of them, the Marxist and anarchist ones, spout radical or emancipatory messages.

...And I really like the paragraph that follows, which starts to make all of this look very familiar:

But joining a racket is usually exhilarating at the beginning, when the new recruit is convinced that his participation will shape history and that he’s joining a collective venture to help humanity. He also feels that he’s found a heroic community of like-minded comrades. Joining a racket has this hidden libidinal dimension, which explains the enormous attachment and zealotry of the members. At the beginning, a recruit is unaware that he’ll be persuaded to lose most of his individuality and free time, and that the false community of the racket will only accentuate his alienation.

Later on, the article treats us to a list of "characteristics." As people read this, they will almost certainly find resemblances to some groups that they know or others that they've heard about...

- They gyrate around a guru, a charismatic leader (Weber) or ‘egocrat’ (Perlman). The guru is usually male, though rackets run by female gurus have been known to exist;

- The guru fosters and controls a centralised and despotic hierarchy. He relies on an inner faction of conspirators, who plot permanently against the racket’s membership. No racket is ruled by consensus or by transparent participatory methods;

[Actually, I probably should say something here, since I worked/collaborated on a project that dealt with this particular point... I think that in some circles that we know, especially very recently, there are many groups that can adopt an official/superficial consensus "process" (especially at meetings) while managing to be run or ruled behind the scenes in an exclusive or hierarchical way. I wouldn't say that all groups that perform this trick are rackets - far from it - but it is possible that some might be, as might many other groups.]

- Rackets have a political platform or programme, usually of a messianic kind. One of the tasks of the guru is to inherit or draft and uphold this platform. Rackets attempt to influence the world around them by publishing regularly (or maintaining a web site). To them influencing others means recruitment, not contributing to an ongoing clarification of consciousness;

- Rackets recruit individuals who voluntarily join and are systematically persuaded by the guru’s infallibility. Once recruited, the racket’s goals is to alienate individuals further by making them sever many of their links with society. This is not a conscious conspiracy, but a process in which recruiter and recruited delude themselves and each other. The first by his denial of what takes place in the racket, and the latter by his suspension of critical thought;

- Rackets strive to become permanent but are constantly disrupted by internal dissension, splits and competition from rival rackets. Political divergences are rarely addressed – they are replaced by personal factionalism and competition for positions in the hierarchy. Thus the pervasive use of scapegoating and ad hominem attacks;

- Paradoxically, the survival of rackets depends on internal factionalism and external enemies. The climate of paranoia and search for scapegoats strengthens the guru’s control. He is reinforced by recurrent purges. New rivals, often formed by the expelled members, focus the survival instincts of the racket, creating paroxysms of hate and fostering a state of siege mentality. These centripetal and centrifugal ‘crises’, both carefully stage managed, aid the rackets’ survival;

- The more virulent rackets attempt to organise themselves in military fashion. The move illegalises them and places them in direct confrontation with Leviathan. This tends to deplete them of female members and increases the dysfunction of militants enormously. These rackets tend to exist more in the peripheries of the system, where Leviathans are weak and depend mostly on naked terror to survive. This method of rule unleashes an indiscriminate war between Leviathans and opposing rackets, where terror and extermination are the sole methods of asserting domination;

The article also has a lot of interesting words about why rackets are formed and who might join them. A lot of it has to do with the atomization and fragmentation of society, especially under capitalism. I particularly like this discussion of a quote from Karl Kautsky:

In The Socialist Revolution, Kautsky observed that: "The smaller the number of individuals who take part in a given social movement, the less this movement appears as a mass movement – then the less the general and necessary are evident among them, and the more the chance and the personal predominate." Kautsky was referring to socialist sects, without suspecting that this phenomenon, where ‘chance and the personal predominate’, would become common in society once atomisation was generalised. Disaffected individuals are more attracted to rackets, not to large Leviathanic corporations like parties, official churches and unions.

Recently, I took a trip to the Fulton Street branch of the famous used bookstore known as The Strand, because I was desperate for new reading material. This really is not the sort of trip that I can afford, but I figured I could get at least one used book on the soon-to-max-out credit card without feeling too “guilty,” because I’d already dropped my class at the Brecht Forum in part because I couldn’t afford to buy half the books on the reading list (five or six books, I think), which all had to be ordered new at bookstores (for at least $20 each) because they couldn’t be found at libraries or used book places. (This might be because they were all fairly obscure books; the only contributing author whom I recognized in all of them was, coincidentally, the guy who was teaching the class.) I also remember quite a few times when I found a great book about class struggle, the working class, or poverty over at the lefty academic bookstore known as Labyrinth but had to put it right back on the shelf because the price tag was upwards of $35. Anyway, compared to all those lavish hypothetical expenditures, $9 or so spent on a half-price item at The Strand was nothing and, besides, I haven’t recently found anything all that interesting in the way of radical-left political texts at my local library. So, I did spend $9 that day, on a book called What’s Class Got to Do With It?

What’s Class Got to Do with It? is a pretty good collection of articles about class struggle at the beginning of the 21st Century. (The book is new, though it was obviously remaindered for some reason, as it’s copyright 2004, by Cornell University Press.) The introduction to the book is a little annoying because it keeps talking about how the book is intended as a “source” for an apparently new (or newly revived) academic field called “Working Class Studies.” But if you read the articles within the book, you’ll find that they’re very readable for books hypothetically written for an academic field (much less full of academic jargon than most of the lefty books that I’ve stumbled across lately), and their focus is pretty broad. So far, I’ve read some very good articles in this book, such as “Neoliberal Social Policy and Labor Market Discipline” by Frances Fox Piven, “Neoliberalism and Anticorporate Globalization as Class Struggle” by William K. Tabb (and by the way, some of the writing is pretty original, even if these people aren’t very imaginative with regard to titles), and “September 11 and Its Aftermath through the Lens of Class” by Leo Panitch (the best one so far, I think). I am really enjoying this book, and I’m going to try to continue to do so in spite of the fact that I know almost everybody in this book is some kind of professor...

But it’s hard to get away from that fact. I guess part of the reason is that on the back cover, there’s a list of every author and the academic institution that he or she comes from. (Actually, to be precise, 12 of the 13 authors are listed with academic institutions; the 13th is an editor at Monthly Review.) And just seeing that list on the back of a book really causes me to wonder… Doesn’t anyone see the strange irony in the fact that a book all about the working class is written by a bunch of well-to-do prestigious academics, and that this is even used by the publishing company as a selling point?

I’d like to see some work on class struggle really written by people who know what it’s like to be on the frontlines of the class struggle. And by “on the frontlines,” I mean a regular private who’s forced to take the maximum risk with minimal security or reward. (As the band Crass used to say, “The generals sip Bacardi while the privates feel the pain.”) But basically, that’s impossible. This, I guess, is due to the reality of the publishing market. Naturally, the biggest market for these kinds of books is people in academia, and the people most likely to get published in these books are well-to-do academics – not just impoverished adjuncts and the like, but prestigious, tenured, affluent professors or the equivalent. Also, the people you’re most likely to see on the lecture circuit talking about class are academics or educators who have nice incomes, good job security, and colleagues or underlings in the workplace who will support them, maybe even look up to them, and at the very least make them feel as though they’re worth something. If somebody writes an article about class who isn’t in this particular class, that person is very unlikely to get published, or at least get published in any book or journal that will be accessible to a lot of people interested in this field. You’re not going to find a well-published writer in this area who really knows what it’s like to struggle to pay the rent or work at crap jobs or be caught without a job in the present environment. The closest you’ll get is someone like Barabara Ehrenreich (author of Nickel and Dimed), for whom poverty is just a journalism research project and any day-to-day hardship endured during that project is merely a temporary thing that she knows she can escape because she’s actually rich and is only slumming.

And this is a tendency in the writing/publishing field that’s going to last a long time. So, when I look at the list of all those academics published in “What’s Class Got to Do with It?” I’ve got to say to myself (with an ironic chuckle), "Everything."

Before I get into the main topic of this post, I'd like to say a word about Margaret Hassan. The news of her murder is both depressing and sickening. One has to wonder what group that is genuinely interested in the welfare of the people of Iraq would murder a woman who spent 30 years in Iraq helping the poor and who so vocally opposed both war and sanctions. But it would be naive to be too surprised over an incident such as this, as vicious crimes continue to be prepetrated at an escalating rate on all sides within this increasingly chaotic nightmare.

The last few days have felt particularly bleak in general. I've been looking for some shred of hope (for anyone) in some piece of public news somewhere. And after reading a couple of recent letters from the family of Lori Berenson, I'm thinking that maybe I found it. At least one unjustly imprisoned activist (and journalist) might finally be freed. But we've been promised that before, so maybe we shouldn't count on it...

The Inter-American Court on Human Rights initiated a three-week session on November 15. Berenson's case will be the last one that it discusses, on November 24 and 25 (i.e., during our Thanksgiving). If the court actually reaches a final decision during that time, then Berenson might finally be let out of prison after a nine-year ordeal.

Maybe, after all this time, a review of some of the details might be in order: Lori Berenson is a New York Ciy native, a daughter of members of the City University of New York faculty, who was arrested on November 30, 1995 (17 days after her 26th birthday) for alleged involvement in the Cuban-Inspired, Marxist-Leninist protest group/guerilla group called the MRTA or Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. The Tupac Amaru was raided at that time for plotting to occupy the Peruvian congress and hold congressmen hostage in exchange for the release of MRTA prisoners. But Berenson denied involvement in the MRTA. She lived in a building with several members but said that she did not know about their activities. She had come to Peru out of an interest in Peruvian people and culture and eventually became a journalist focusing on the social conditions there, especially the conditions of the 50 percent of Peruvians living in poverty.

The MRTA also denied that Berenson was involved with them. She was tried by a hodded military tribunal that obviously committed numerous violations of due process. These violations were typical within Peruvian society under the regime of Alberto Fujimori, a brutal leader who enforced policies favoring the wealthy class and his own corporate sponsors by committing acts of severe repression and presiding over murder. (Thank goodness this sort of thing doesn't happen in the U.S.A. Ahem...) The Fujimori government has since then gone away, accused of widespread corruption. The MRTA has nearly been exterminated. But Lori Berenson is still in prison...

Berenson was convicted by the military tribunal of "treason" - a charge that logically shouldn't even apply because she wasn't a Peruvian citizen - and sentenced to life in prison. She was kept in brutal, cold jails for several years, then transferred to a place with somewhat better conditions after she showed signs of badly damaged health. Then the military sentence for "treason" was overturned and she was granted a new trial in civilian court, which sentenced her to 20 years for "collaboration." Once again, she was denied due process in many ways, and the conviction was judged by most outside observers to be completely unjustified. During this time, the U.S. congress and presidents did, to their credit, request that Berenson be released, but their actions might be judged to be a bit slow and hesitant, too little too late, etc. But that's to be expected...

Maybe Lori would have gotten a more forceful defense from her home nation if she hadn't been accused of being involved with a Marxist guerilla group (or "terrorist" group, as some people like to label them). Ironically, though, many outside observers might be inclined to say that the MRTA was a hell of a lot nicer and less violent than both the Peruvian government and the other, bigger guerilla group with which the MRTA themselves had feuded. That other guerilla group is the Shining Path, a completely different story. Certain people in the U.S. government and press like to talk about both groups in the same breath, as though there has been hardly any difference between them. Yet, the Shining Path is an extremely violent, authoritarian Maoist group that might be responsible for many thousands of deaths in its war with the Peruvian government and its supporters. The Shining Path has also been said to terrorize villages of peasants in calculated strategic efforts to take over/command parts of the countryside. The MRTA does not at all have the Shining Path's ideology, nor do they have its record of violence. Although they committed some acts of violence (bombings, etc., mostly before the mid-'90s), the MRTA was/is more of a protest and propaganda group. They never expressed a desire to be leaders, themselves, but, rather, to help inspire the Peruvian people to create a revolution that eventually would lead to direct economic and social democracy. And some people claimed that the MRTA's proposed policies weren't even that radical. Some other Leninist groups accused them of being merely "liberals with guns."

In late 1996, the MRTA took a number of rich people hostage during a reception for a Japanese ambassador, which also involved a relative of President Fujimori. They released several hostages fairly soon but kept 71 hostages for four months. They threatened to kill the hostages but backed down during negotiations with the government and did not even seriously hurt a single hostage. (Some hostages later said that they'd been treated very well.) But when the Peruvian military finally raided the scene to rescue the hostages, they killed every member of the MRTA who was there (including the youngest members, who were still only teenagers) and buried them in unmarked graves. Anyone observing the conduct of the Peruvian government and military versus the conduct of the MRTA must come to the conclusion that the real violent criminals in this conflict were not the MRTA.

Lori Berenson reportedly defended the MRTA in a public statement, saying that she would not condemn them as terrorists because they were a "revolutionary organization." Many people believe that she actually did have some involvement with the group, and the possibility certainly can't be dismissed. Of course, that possibility also is irrelevant to the main problem, as she was never granted fair/ due process by any international standards and should have been released on those grounds alone. But given the circumstances and the groups involved, would her alleged involvement with the MRTA have been so awful? In light of the circumstances, many of us would say that she had definitely sided with the relatively good guys. (Moreover, we should consider the nature of her alleged support. Was she going to carry a gun and take part in any actions? Or was she imprisoned merely for supporting them verbally - for her beliefs? It was probably something closer to the latter.)

In any event, whatever people might think of some of her political views, that's not very relevant, either. Lori Berenson just turned 35 last week and she has been imprisoned since the age of 26. With any luck (though we know there isn't a whole lot of that around these days), she will get out soon.

Thank you to Zoe for referring us in her blog to a post from Skarlet in her blog describing typical problems at a radical political meeting. Here are some good passages from that:

There's a discussion going on and the co-gendered, co-facilitators are busy bickering about maintaining gender equity in the discussion instead of, you know, facilitating. This means that the "discussion" is rapidly veering away from the actual subject and into some weird interpersonal territory between Person A and Person B. Often, Person B doesn't even know why the hell Person A is gunning for them. In fact, it seems more often than not that Person A is just looking for attention and has randomly chosen a target, but that's just a theory.
...

Person B says, "I think the sky is blue."

Person A, who has now reached a slow, simmering boil, gets their turn to speak. "What I'm hearing you say is that you would gut and eat my cat if you had the chance."

Person B, completely caught off guard, will repeat, "No, I just wanted to state that I thought the sky was blue."

It's too late though, Person A is now wielding "What I'm hearing you say" as a weapon. He or she restates his or her claim, rewording it for clarity.

"What I'm hearing you say is that you'd gut and eat my neighbors, my mother and me if you thought you could get away with it."

Person B has no chance. The rest of the group pounces to Person A's defense. Because you see, no matter how insane the statement that follows "What I hear you saying..." the group will defend it, because that's what years of touchy feely bullshit group facilitation has drilled into us: you never dispute a "What I hear you saying..." statement.
...

If you're really, really lucky, the "discussion" then escalates to the vicimization stage. At this point all bets are off and the following statements can come from either party.

We have the personal is political maneuver: You hate me because I'm Jewish/Christian/Pagan/Republican/Libertarian/Green/Gay/Straight/Female/Male/White/etc.

If you're really lucky, rather than devolving into rehashing of old incidences of identity-politics-violations, the argument moves to the comparative-stage of recriminations. You hate me because I'm smarter than you/a different racial or ethnic group/taller than you/poorer than you/etc....

I highly recommend checking out the rest of this. If you've ever been to hip radical "anti-authoritarian" meetings, especially (I would guess) in the U.S., a lot of this might look awfully familiar to you.

I wouldn't take this too seriously, but it's sort of fun to take the Political Compass quiz, and many bloggers seem to be doing it. A number here and there have also shown their results.

So, in case there's any curiosity about this matter, this was my score tonight, pretty much identical (if not completely identical) to the time I took it last year:

Economic Left/Right: -9.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.56

By the way, just to make this clear, the score goes from -10 to +10, and a "minus" score indicates the degree to which the respondent is economically left as opposed to right and socially libertarian as opposed to authoritarian.

Of course, although the test is supposed to measure a person's politics in a more complex way than the simple "left/right" scale, it's still very limited. Personally, I resented some of the questions and couldn't answer them with "strongly agree" or "strongly disagree" because I felt that the "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" multiple-choice scale didn't leave nearly enough room for all the possibilities that the question raised. (You can agree with some aspect and not with another, or feel that the question itself raises the issue in a wrong or inadequate way, which is how I felt a few times. But isn't that the case with just about all political surveys?)

Actually, I think I probably deserve a little extra credit in the "Social Libertarian" section for feeling such a strong need to question the questions themselves. But, what the hell, it's just a quick game, and I'm not too unhappy with the results.

This is one of the rare times when I'll be blogging about Iraq. Usually, there are a lot of other people out there who can do that better and I'll tend to focus on other things. But I guess that during the past couple of days, as the U.S. military and the Iraqi provisional puppet government have been launching new massacres of insurgents in Fallujah and a couple of other cities, I've been craving to discuss points that are not about to be discussed in all the shallow and/or blatantly pro-occupation news reports.

Additionally, exploring this subject gives me the chance to look for information that might be free of the lie propagated by the U.S. government and corporate media that the only battle that exists in Iraq is between the occupiers and their supporters on one side and Islamic terrorists on the other side. Now, let's forget for a moment the complicated issue of whether we should be supporting fundamentalist religious elements that we might find repulsive in another context but which we might want to succeed in the battles of insurgency against the U.S. occupation. I say let's forget about this for now because I'd like to talk about other people struggling in Iraq who oppose both the Islamic militants and the U.S. occupiers and, in fact, consider both these parties to be pretty much on the same side.

One group which takes this other perspective is the Workers-communist Party of Iraq. I have heard very good things about this party for a while, as they are organizers of the Unemployed Union in Iraq (UUI) and have contributed a lot to the struggle for women's rights in Iraq. They have been strongly opposed to the war and occupation from the start but also just as strongly opposed to crimes committed by Islamic fundamentalist-terrorist gangs. In the WCPI's own words (from an article written on November 7):

The only way to curb this unleashed and frenzied terrorism is by the cooperation of all liberationist and humanist forces and by coming together in a united front independent of both poles of terrorism; America and political Islam, and by depending on the subjective power of the masses to provide a decisive and resolved answer to the Islamic groups and gangs. The Worker-communist Party of Iraq which reiterates its resolution to face Islamic gangs and gangs of organized crime calls on you to mobilize under the banner of freedom, equality and reorganizing civility in Iraq that it holds.

Ideologically, there has been a debate among anarchists and democratic socialists about whether, as Marxist-Leninists, the WCPI should be regarded with some caution, or whether they should receive our full support. In the present context, I would say that they do deserve our support in whatever way we can give it. They deserve at least as much support as any other group in Iraq that I know of which is fighting to find a way out of the horrific situation that presently exists. It should be said that the WCPI are not like the typical nationalist-authoritarian communist party of the region, such as the Iraqi Communist Party. They consider communist parties like that one to be reformist and set themselves apart as the more "extremist" element. Yet, they use the term "extremist" in a way that is very different form what the U.S. media and politicians talk about when they condemn extremism in the Middle East. The WCPI declare (on the front page of their Web site) :

WCPI is the party of the extreme left {maximalist) and extremely radical. It criticizes religion and stands strongly against racism, and patriarchy. It is an extremist party in its humanism and egalitarianism. It confronts bravely all kinds of reactions, and inequality. It reveals all information to the masses and frankly announces the position of Communism on religion. It exposes religious superstition as a tool for deception, dividing people and imposing deprivation and inequality on the society. It opposes dividing human beings on the basis of nationality, religion, sex, and race. All these characteristics are not only political stands for the WCPI but also organizing principles around which they struggle on a daily basis.

Of course, we are not hearing these words so much in the U.S. media, and it's no wonder. By standing in opposition to all religious fundamentalist movements, the WCPI point out similarities between Islamic fundamentalism and the Christian fundamentalism that plays such an important role in the U.S. government that invaded Iraq (or, at the very least, in the support behind this government). But the WCPI also remain focused on struggling against capitalism - especially, in this context, the extreme capitalism, with its blatant anti-worker tendencies, that is the greatest driving force behind the U.S. occupation and a lot of other events that have resulted in the severe oppression of people in the Middle East.

You don't need to go to a revolutionary communist movement to find the truth about how workers and the unemnployed are really treated by the occupying forces and their puppet government in Iraq. For instance, here are a few paragraphs of good, succinct description from Dick Meister, a labor reporter in the U.S.:

It's a peculiar kind of democracy we're bringing to Iraq. For like Saddam Hussein before them, the U.S. occupation authorities are denying workers the basic democratic right to form unions and to strike or otherwise protest their working conditions.

Although Hussein is gone, the supposed forces of democracy are enforcing his 1987 edict prohibiting union activities in the state-owned enterprises where the vast majority of Iraqis work.

The occupation authority also has frozen wages at the average of $60 a month set under Hussein -- but without providing the bonuses, profit-sharing and food and housing subsidies that workers regularly got in addition to pay.

Most workers, in any case, are not even getting wages. The unemployment rate has soared to 70 percent under U.S. occupation, yet not a cent of the $87 billion that Congress appropriated for rebuilding Iraq is going for unemployment benefits or for raising the wages of those who are fortunate enough to find work.

Workers are faced as well with the serious implications of the occupation authority's plans to privatize and sell off the state-owned factories, mines, mills, refineries and other enterprises to foreign investors, luring them in part with the promise of weak or non-existent unions. The foreigners could own the enterprises entirely, meaning that all profits could be spent outside Iraq. It's likely, too, that foreign owners would add to the country's severe jobless problem by cutting workforces in order to increase profits.

Clearly, the Iraqis are in need of (self-)liberation, but they're not going to get any help in that direction from the government and military of the U.S.

The WCPI-connected UUI laid out a simple statement of goals for Iraq, listed in a letter entitled, The Worker’s Councils and Unemployed Unions in Iraq need your support and solidarity:

1- Immediate pullout of the American and British military forces in Iraq.
2- Recognition of the UUI and FWCUI as the genuine representatives of workers unions in Iraq.
3- Supporting a modern employment law written by the workers’ representatives.
4- Unconditional freedom of organizing, strike and other political rights to be established and ascertained.
5- Equality of men and women in all civil and individual rights and before the law.
6- Religion to be separated from the state, and education.

Personally, I do not feel too confident in trying to guess when or how these goals might ever be achieved. Nonetheless, it looks like a pretty good list to start with.
______________________

P.S. While doing some Web searches, I found an impressive link site for information on Iraq: the Future of Iraq Portal.

For some reason tonight, I’ve been pondering the problem of what to do when you need to work in a small activist group in which there are people with whom you don’t get along too well. Personally, I’ve had experiences in which I was able to collaborate on a great radical project with other people even if I might not have been getting along with them so terrifically all the time, and I’ve also had the experience when interpersonal difficulties interfered tremendously with the focus of the project or my goals within the group and/or seemed to become far too much of a focus of the group itself while we all should have been concentrating on other things. Needless to say, I would like my experiences in collective endeavors, especially challenging, radical ones, to be more often like the former situation than the latter.

This may sound kind of silly, but I'm thinking that we may find a fine example to follow in that late (or mostly late, unfortunately), great old band called The Ramones. The Ramones were not uniformly great politically (Johhny, great as he was as a guitarist, also was a notorious Republican), but they certainly knew how to put aside personal differences to continue a project that was so good and well coordinated, that many people who were affected by their radical rock’n’roll might never have even suspected that they were having serious interpersonal difficulties. In fact, one thing you could say about The Ramones was that their music was really, incredibly tight, which is not a quality you might expect from a group of people who probably couldn’t sit together in a room for half an hour without arguing with each other.

And, yet, judging by reviews and descriptions of the recent Ramones documentary, End of the Century (which I haven’t caught but would love to see sometime), this band, which was so good at collectively creating an aesthetic revolution (which actually did result in a sound that became a soundtrack for a lot of young political revolutionaries), got along together miserably. But the funniest reviews point out the fact that this problem was also inevitable. As Robert Christgau says in the Village Voice, "Of course they didn't get along - they were a rock group.” And as Ty Burr says more pointedly in the Boston Globe, “Clearly, they hated each other in the way only men who have played thousands of shows together can.” Maybe with small political groups, you might change that phrase a little to read, “Clearly, they hated each other in the way only men [or people] who have been to hundreds of meetings and panels and protests together can."

Probably, radical activists and revolutionaries get along particularly miserably in hard, reactionary times such as ours, when the personal becomes political and vice versa in all kinds of bad ways, as all-around bad circumstances leave people with concrete problems having to do with lack of time or money or the need to guard their security, all of which can have awful effects on our collective endeavors. (Although maybe we should also be grateful that we don't live in a time, at least not in the U.S., when radical activists can easily acquire guns, or we'd all be shooting one another like feuding revolutionaries in other places and times.) But also, given that we do live in times that are becoming increasingly inhospitable or dangerous for us radicals, it is probably increasingly important for us to find ways to work together in spite of all the conflict and contention that may develop. We need to overcome interpersonal strife in order to succeed at a project that will be much more important than our petty differences. For that reason, maybe, we can take a lesson from The Ramones. And I think I’d say that even if I hadn’t been a Ramones fan for about 28 years and counting.

I wanted to move on to subjects other than the election, maybe deal with issues pertaining to organizing and struggles in various local communities, where much of the battle against exploitation and oppression is being fought (or not fought) with little attention from the corporate media or the blogs. But clearly, people still want to read and talk about the election, because it's still weighing on everybody's mind.

Looking through a bunch of liberal blogs today, I couldn't help noticing all the bitter anger floating around. Everywhere, people are cursing out America and the religious fundamentalists who helped to reelect Bush. Everywhere, people are saying "Fuck you" and "Drop Dead" and "I'm finished" and "I'm moving out of here." In a way, it's pleasing to see all this, because this is anger that I've felt on and off myself, toward the right-wing "leaders" and capitalist establishment, for a long time. But in a way, it's kind of quaint. I don't mean to be condescending, but that's how it feels. It feels as though I've been there and done that many times.

I'm wondering why the anger exists now among so many relatively mainstream liberals when I didn't see it before. Why the dismay over this particular election when that dismay didn't seem to exist before?

To me, there were election results that were far more shocking than this. I personally was far more shocked in 1980 and 1984. Ronald Reagan was at least as right-wing as George W. Bush, and George W. Bush and his cabinet are either direct descendents or actual former members of Reagan's team of advisers, cabinet, and staff. Reagan funded the murderous Contras and was the politician who made the idiocy of "trickle down" economics an accepted executive policy. Reagan did more than any other president in the 20th Century to crush the labor movement at the same time that he publicly blamed poverty on poor people, rhetorically criminalized welfare recipients, and did everything possible to steal from the poor to give to the rich. Reagan also was supported by, and wholeheartedly encouraged, right-wing Christian fundamentalists. Yet, Reagan was elected and then reelected by a landslide and could claim a real electoral mandate. This, to me, was far more shocking than the reelection of Bush by a slim majority.

But, as I remember, the voting liberal public never exhibited this kind of anger and dismay. Of course, I was much younger during the Reagan years, in my teens and early 20s, all caught up in a youth-punk culture for part of that time. So maybe I was out of touch with what the relatively mainstream liberals were feeling and just didn't witness their anger (which never could come close to the anger of us punk rockers anyway). But I kind of doubt that was the case. If the liberals had felt that kind of anger toward Reagan, then why was there so much relative silence when Reagan died earlier this year and the press and mass media treated the event like the fall of the greatest leader in our history? And if anybody clearly remembers the reign of Reagan, why should the far slimmer success of George W. Bush be such a shocking surprise?

Also, ten years ago, we had an atrocious right-wing Congress that pushed the Contract with - or, rather, on - America. We had vile reactionaries like Newt Gingrich ruling the roost. And these reactionaries spoke about President Bill Clinton as though he was some kind of left-wing menace at the same time that Clinton, himself, was pushing through right-wing policies to "end welfare as we know it." Once again, considering recent history, why should George W. Bush's reelection be such a shock?

I'm thinking that maybe it's because Bush has been able to accomplish unprecedented acts of American aggression on the international front. Maybe after the right-wingers have been pounding away at our society for so long (and after they were helped along so nicely by bin Laden), Bush can get away with more. But certainly, Bush and his supporters are no different from the near-fascist shit heads who gave us Reagan and Gingrich (just to start).

At any rate, there does seem to be some new liberal anger out there, and this can be a good or bad thing. It can be good because if liberals are angry enough and sick enough of trying to compromise, they might become more radical, which is a very good thing, as far as I'm concerned. But I've said that before. The danger here is that people will become too fed up and depressed to do anything. I've always said that this would be a danger (one of a few dangers) of a Bush reelection. But hopefully, the liberals out there who are cursing out America will be able to do something constructive with that anger. It might help for people to understand that, even if today's circumstances and situation seem a little more dangerous, the election and reelection of George W. Bush is nothing new. This kind of crap has been happening in America for a long time.

After looking at a bunch of post-election analyses,I find that my favorite is from the World Socialist Web Site. That makes sense; I usually like their analyses of American politics a lot until the last paragraph or sentence, when they somewhat formulaically declare that the solution to our political problems is the support of their political party, the Socialist Equality Party. I disagree with this tactically, because I do not believe that the answer to anything is the exclusive support of one true and only political party. I also ultimately disagree with the SEP ideologically, because they are Trotskyists (and if anybody doesn't know why this is a problem for me, we can get into that another time). But in the present political context, how important is this? In other words, I just don't see this disagreement becoming so important in the short term (particularly with this group, as Trotskyists go), and I hope that sometime I might be able to work side by side with some of these people in the struggles ahead.

So, I recommend this article, After the 2004 elections: the political and social crisis will intensify. (You can also find this article in the present "News Extra" section at Infoshop.) You don't even need to be a socialist to appreciate some of the insights that the WSWS has come out with regarding this election -- insights which I think a lot of the mourning liberals on the various Web sites and blogs that I've seen during the past day might do well to read and absorb. Anyway, here are a few important points that it makes:

Looking at the electoral map, it is immediately clear that the Republicans, four years after the disputed election of 2000, were not able to shift any sizable population centers to their side. With a few exceptions, those states that went for Gore in 2000—including the most industrialized and urbanized states on the East and West coasts and in the Midwest—went for Kerry in 2004. In other words, the Republicans, despite pulling out all stops in the use of fear-mongering, lies, and other tricks from their grab bag of political reaction, have reached a limit on their ability to extend their base socially and geographically....

In the absence of any consistent and credible appeal to the class interests of working people, the Republican strategy of capitalizing on religious backwardness and confusion proved highly effective. The Democratic Party will not, and cannot, make a serious and direct appeal to the real social and economic needs of the working class, because it is a party of American capitalism and is beholden to the US financial oligarchy. The trade unions, which provide the Democrats with some manpower, phone banks, etc., are utterly useless when it comes to mobilizing the working class....

These attacks can be countered only through the political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist program. This entails systematic opposition to the policies of the Republicans and the American ruling elite, including a merciless exposure of the hypocrisy and cynicism of their religious appeals.

My fellow revolutionaries might be horrified to learn that I have a history of liberal electioneering in my childhood and adolescence. When I was 11 years old, I passed out flyers in The Bronx for George McGovern. That was pretty uneventful except for the time another kid came along and, for no reason, knocked all my flyers all over the street. In 1976, during the primary campaign, I worked at a table a couple of times for Mo Udall. On Election Night, I ambivalently joined a group doing last-minute work for Jimmy Carter. I actually got to hang out at the NY Carter campaign headquarters that night, but the only thing I remember is the person I got to hang out with, a cute Puerto Rican girl who was a year older than me (16) and also lived in The Bronx. Of course, we never exchanged phone numbers or anything. By the time I turned 18, I had already been a total punk rocker for a couple of years, was involved in cultural rebellion, and thought it was really uncool to go around electioneering for a candidate. But, still, when Election Day came around in 1980, I went and voted for Jimmy Carter, because, like a lot of people, I was pretty scared about the prospect of Ronald Reagan getting elected. (And things did get pretty bad after he was elected but, of course, the sky didn't fall and the world didn't end.) Up through 1992, I pretty consistently voted for the Democratic candidates for president, though I tended to vote for various socialist parties in other areas. By 1996, I was utterly disgusted with Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party and was well on my way to becoming a full-fledged Libertarian Socialist. But I still went to the polls, and I voted for Ralph Nader. (I remember also seriously considering voting for Mary Cal Hollis of the Socialist Party USA, but I finally decided on Ralph.) In 2000, I was heavily involved in anarchist work and skipped the polls in order to make time for a DAN Labor meeting. (But I wasn't actually standing on any big principles. If I had a few extra minutes, I might have gone and voted for Ralph, mainly for the sake of a couple of friends who were really into that campaign.)

I know that electioneering doesn't give you the chance to be a (supposedly) direct democratic participant in a radical alternative movement, but I miss the simplicity of it. When you just go out and table or pass flyers or knock on doors for a canddiate, you don't have to deal with miserable meetings and crappy infighting and internal political rivalries. (Although you can also get the same feelings from showing up at a demo, as long as you don't involve yourself in spokescouncil meetings or any other organizing.) And, I hate to say it, but I think the mild socialists and liberals were generally more pleasant to be with than most of the more radical or revolutionary people whom I worked with later on.

Sometimes when Election Day comes along, I find myself getting just a little nostalgic for my Teenage Liberal days.

Some of my fellow revolutionaries have made respectable arguments for not bothering with the polls. So, I'm going to acknowledge that voting for nobody is a very understandable choice. (It's also the choice I made in 2000, actually.) But I still want to make my statement at the polls for Ralph Nader. I think he's been pretty gutsy in the face of the unprincipled and undemocratic attacks from the Democrats, and I've found his speeches incredibly refreshing compared to the speeches of just about anybody running on the major parties for anything. I also think he has done well at letting people know about some real political alternatives and has exposed people to perspectives that they certainly won't hear from the major parties (which is also why I voted for him, as I recall, in 1996). And I think Peter Camejo is a great vice presidential candidate.

To liberals who want to complain to me that I should vote for John Kerry, leave me alone; I don't live in a swing state, so you have no reason to bother me about it. To Greens who want to talk about Cobb, though I actually would support Nader over Cobb anywhere, you don't need to bother me about it anyway, because Cobb isn't on the ballot in New York.

To the Socialists, especially Trots, who want to support some other candidates who will get even less of the vote, I think it would be wiser to go along with the Trots who are supporting Nader, because he is the most vocal and visible electoral opposition to the major, ruling class parties. I don't understand why you would want to split that tiny left opposition even further, but I understand that people draw the line in different places and it's great that you are out to vote your principles.

To people who live in New York, especially (or a place somewhat like it ;), if you oppose the PATRIOT Act and the war on Iraq and want national/universal healthcare coverage and favor policies that could possibly benefit people other than the upper middle class and the rich, I think the choice at the polls should be pretty clear: Ralph Nader for President. On the other hand, you might contemplate staying home altogether. It might be a tough choice for some of you (i.e., Nader or Nobody), but you should do whatever you ultimately feel like doing, and don't let other people bother you about it.

There is a nice debate raging on two blogs now, David Grenier’s Writer/Bowler/Revolutionary and ChuckO’s Monumental Mistake . The debate revolves around the issue of voting, whether anarchists vote, and whether you can call yourself an anarchist if you do vote. But side arguments are cropping up, which range from discussing what options there may be other than voting to the usual personal flame wars.

I’d like to briefly address a side issue that this debate brought to mind. The question on my mind is, do anarchists offer a real alternative to the usual political games? ChuckO says, specifically, that “Anarchists offer an alternative.” But what is that alternative?

I was involved in New York and East Coast anarchist scenes in a fairly heavy way for five years. I was attracted to anarchism in part because I liked the anti-political aspect and thought (foolishly, perhaps) that people who are dedicated to a movement that opposes hierarchy would not engage in the usual political games. This may have been a naïve attitude to have in the mid 1990s, especially since I had already reached my mid 30s. And I wasn’t entirely the wide-eyed optimist anyway; in fact, some people found me to be a bit too critical, especially on e-mail, where I started causing trouble for myself. But for a few years, I really believed in the anarchist cause with all my heart and honestly believed that we were in the process of setting up a wonderful alternative activist community. That all changed by the early 2000s, when I began to see how groups and unofficial leaders handle disagreements.

Before I say more regarding the conduct of groups, let me say that I in no way think that I was completely right and that I didn’t bring trouble on myself. As I’ve said, I was particularly critical of people in e-mail, and sometimes when I got angry, I failed to appreciate the other person’s point of view. I also may have had a bit of a tendency to get a little paranoid, at least at the personal level, though I’m fond of the saying that even if you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean people aren’t after you. And I did discover, as arguments developed, that there were people scheming and stirring up trouble for me behind my back. (They did this, in part, by trashing me on e-mail lists to which I was denied access. But there were ways of finding out about this, especially after the fact.)

For a long time, I have wondered about how much I want to bring my own sorry tale out into the open. I have been reluctant, in part because I actually agreed with an adversary to put our arguments behind us. I don't think that the other person in that case exactly stuck to the spirit of our agreement, but I have tried to do so myself. However, I have always wanted to find a way to make sure that people knew that there were unfair and undemocratic things going on in the anarchist scene. I found a wonderful outlet for doing this, through which I could talk in generalizations about the basic kinds of shit that go on. This outlet was a book initiated by asfo_del, which I have already mentioned (especially in the other blog), the Collective Book on Collective Process. Working on this project not only enabled me to explore some of the problems that I'd encountered and learn about ways that groups might correct them; it also got me in touch with a number of other people who had some of the same bad feelings about the anarchist scene.

A few people whom I’ve mentioned on this blog already have had their own problems with ostracism and purges, which they have been dealing with in their own projects. Asfo_del is one, of course, and so is ChuckO, and so is Warcry. I can think of a few more, but I don’t know if they would want me to mention them right now.

But one thing we maybe didn’t deal with so much in the Collective Book is the comparison between the dirty political games that I encountered in the anarchist “community” and the games that are played in regular old dirty politics, including electoral politics. Thinking about things from this angle, it really leads me to wonder how much of an alternative the anarchist “community” as we know it offers versus the regular political/electoral scene.

There are some dirty tricks that are simply very common to all political rivalries, whether in electoral politics or in the anarchist scene. One, which was clarified for me a great deal through a conversation with Warcry, is the trick of defining your opponent to the public before he has a chance to define himself. A politician can do this through expensive smear campaigns with dirty commercials. An anarchist activist can do this through nasty words spread, and labels tossed around, at hidden meetings and on e-mail lists. It is especially effective if the lists on which a person is slandered are lists to which he or she doesn’t have access. The trick is keep building up an evil picture of someone without giving him the opportunity to correct this picture in an open forum. I have learned that in anarchist infighting, as in electoral-political battles, this is very common.

The anarchist scene also has its successful politicians, who succeed at manipulating others to look up to them and follow their agenda, sometimes religiously. As I learned, people will do well in the anarchist scene when they master political skills of the negative variety – the kind which Murray Bookchin sets apart from the more constructive kind of politics by calling them “statecraft.” This means, for example, that people do very well when they know how to consciously create the right image and market their agenda.

In general, there’s something about the anarchist “movement,” especially, probably, in New York City, that makes a number of people eagerly compete for celebrity. Maybe this is because anarchism, or the revival of anarchism, has been the only hot radical oppositional movement in our part of the world in recent memory. Although the press has one tendency to understate dissent, it has often also showed a tendency to swarm all over anarchists. A certain number of anarchists thrive on this attention, and I suspect that part of their initial attraction to the anarchist movement had less to do with wanting to get rid of the big fish altogether (think of that “Organize” poster in which all the little fish bond together to drive away the big fish) than with wanting to be the big fish, in a little pond. And, the anarchist “movement” certainly has created its semi-famous personae, it’s celebrity spokespeople (who are more often than not professors), and its master politicians.

I couldn’t help thinking about all this when certain statements started popping up in these blog debates, especially in ChuckO’s blog. Someone there said that we have to teach people not to put all their goodwill in politicians, implying that anarchist organizing offers an alternative to politicians -- and, of course, you won’t be supporting politicians if you don’t vote. But do people really avoid supporting politicians when they don’t vote and then become part of the bullshit that goes on in the anarchist scene? Aren’t they really only rejecting politicians of one kind to support politicians of another kind?

I really don’t like to be so cynical about the anarchist “alternative” as it exists today. But my five years of experience with this “community” was ultimately quite disillusioning. As a result, these days, I just won’t devote myself as exclusively to anarchist organizing, nor will I reject other political efforts out of total allegiance to the anarchist camp. I’m happy to work with good anarchist projects such as Infoshop, but I’ll freely wander into other political camps as well. I guess it’s just that these days, I really don’t see as much of a difference anymore. Politics is politics no matter where you go, sometimes more so in places where you least expected it. And these days, I’d like to do as much as I can to avoid the internal politics everywhere while trying in some way or other to work toward worthy political goals.