“Unlike many discussions among left activists in the United States today, this essay offers a concept of fascism that speaks to its double-edged reality –- bolstering oppression and tyranny but also tapping into real popular grievances and overturning old conventions and forms of rule…As a movement or a regime, fascism attacks the left and defends class exploitation but also pursues an agenda that clashes with capitalist interests in important ways.”
Two Ways of Looking at Fascism
By Matthew N. Lyons
Introduction
Fascism is an important political category, but a confusing one. People use the word fascism in many different ways, and often without a clear sense of what it means.
Political events since the September 11, 2001, attacks have raised the issue of fascism in new ways. People on both the right and the left have described Islamic rightist forces such as al Qaeda and the Taliban as fascist -– but for very different reasons. Neoconservatives and Bush administration officials have denounced “Islamofascists” to help justify the so-called war on terrorism and the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. By contrast, some leftists describe some of these same groups as fascist -– not to rationalize U.S. expansion, but to highlight the fact that there are major political forces today that are deadly enemies of both the left and U.S. imperialism.
Honduras: Poll Proposed By Resistance Challenges Regime
by Peter Lackowski
“On June 28 (2010) we are going to hold a great poll of our people which is going to express our judgment, massively, in favor of a democratic and participatory constitutional constituent assembly in our country,” said Rafael Alegría of the National Front of Popular Resistance, earlier this March.
The poll is planned for the one year anniversary of a similar non-binding opinion poll that President Manuel Zelaya wanted to hold to determine whether a majority of Hondurans wanted a referendum on a new constitution to be included in last November’s election. The nation’s oligarchic press expressed their horror that this was similar to what had happened in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Those nations have established new constitutions that are more favorable toward the rights, participation, and interests of the popular classes. The Honduran legislative and judicial branches also opposed Zelaya’s initiative, and the army deported him to Costa Rica. In response, a massive movement of labor, human rights organizations, indigenous peoples, gays, community organizers, and virtually every progressive in Honduras came together and began organizing resistance to the illegal regime.
The de facto government that replaced Zelaya went ahead with the elections scheduled for November 29, 2009, but according to Alegría, “The Resistance considers the current regime to be the continuation of the de facto regime of (dictator Roberto) Micheletti. Up to now there has been no reform, it is the same scheme.”
29 March 2010. A World to Win News Service. We have received the sad news that after resisting serious health problems for several years the veteran revolutionary comrade Yousef Momand from Afghanistan died of a heart attack in Frankfurt, Germany. Following is an excerpt from a statement issued by the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan on 11 March.
Comrade Yousef Momand, the secretary of the Committee of Supporters of the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan in Europe, passed away. The kind and sincere comrade is no longer among us but his memory will be alive and stay with us.
Comrade Yousef was very ill with diabetes and related heart problems. But even after several operations, he did not leave his responsibilities and tasks and despite many pressures he remained in the trench of revolutionary ideas and struggle until his last moments.
Comrade Yousef started his political activities when he was a student in Kabul University, where he became one of the activists associated with Shola Javid. (Shola Javid – Eternal Flame – was the very popular newspaper of the Maoist-led Progressive Youth Movement in the 1960s that trained a generation of Maoists in Afghanistan. Many veteran Maoists first became involved in politics through this movement.)
Someone recently made a comment about the Communist Party USA leader Gus Hall, and triggered the following memory:
I was invited (as a young high school student) by my sister’s boyfriend to hear the CPUSA’s Gus Hall speak about a recent trip to the USSR. This was in the mid-60s and it was one of my very first political meeting.
It was held in an auditorium, and the turnout was respectable — this was (after all) New York City, and the CP had real roots and history.
I was first impressed by how truly frumpy and inbred the whole thing was — even the kids. They had no hint of the times, and were decked out in a very particular Pete Seeger-like subculture (with flannels and a lot of Russian embroidery). And the kids my age were mainly socializing with other red-diaper babies as if this was some boring church meeting that their parents made them attend.
Gus Hall started to speak about touring an auto plant in the USSR, and went off on a whole riff about how slowly the workers were moving. And he said he had remarked to his guide, that they “wouldn’t last a day” back in Detroit. His whole tone had an indignant and self-righteous disdain for the laziness of the Soviet workers, taking advantage of the (supposed) benevolence of their system and its bosses.
It was a moment of clarity for me. Because I felt (at that moment) that he was clearly not speaking as someone who connected with or represented those workers… He was on a hand-held VIP tour conducted by the plant manager — who Gus Hall was seeing as his “peer” and whose problems he was identifying with.
This article is from the most recent issue of Monthly Review. WE have published it in several installments as its is quite long, and in the hope that it will generate some serious discussion here on the questions that it addresses. This is the last installment. If you want to read the whole article now, just click on the link above.
by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster
VI. What Can Be Done Now?
In the absence of systemic change, there certainly are things that have been done and more can be done in the future to lessen capitalism’s negative effects on the environment and people. There is no particular reason why the United States can’t have a better social welfare system, including universal health care, as is the case in many other advanced capitalist countries. Governments can pass laws and implement regulations to curb the worst environmental problems. The same goes for the environment or for building affordable houses. A carbon tax of the kind proposed by James Hansen, in which 100 percent of the dividends go back to the public, thereby encouraging conservation while placing the burden on those with the largest carbon footprints and the most wealth, could be instituted. New coal-fired plants (without sequestration) could be blocked and existing ones closed down.52 At the world level, contraction and convergence in carbon emissions could be promoted, moving to uniform world per capita emissions, with cutbacks far deeper in the rich countries with large per capita carbon footprints.53 The problem is that very powerful forces are strongly opposed to these measures. Hence, such reforms remain at best limited, allowed a marginal existence only insofar as they do not interfere with the basic accumulation drive of the system.
Indeed, the problem with all these approaches is that they allow the economy to continue on the same disastrous course it is currently following. We can go on consuming all we want (or as much as our income and wealth allow), using up resources, driving greater distances in our more fuel-efficient cars, consuming all sorts of new products made by “green” corporations, and so on. All we need to do is support the new “green” technologies (some of which, such as using agricultural crops to make fuels, are actually not green!) and be “good” about separating out waste that can be composted or reused in some form, and we can go on living pretty much as before—in an economy of perpetual growth and profits.
“When the word spreads that coal miners are trapped underground, that the ambulances have pulled up, that families have gathered to wait–the hearts of people everywhere go out to them in concern and support. Working people have a sense of what it means to go deep into the earth, to work bent over following the seams of rock and coal. People respect the deep solidarity that miners forge in their difficult struggles, and workers everywhere admire the militancy that miners bring with them into the struggles of our class.”
Sketchy early reports have just arrived that 153 coal miners are trapped in northern China — caught underground as waters swept through their mine. The Wangjialing Coal Mine had reportedly had 261 workers – and only a minority of them were lifted to safety in time.
“Once, years ago, when I was 20 and brand new to the mines, I was sitting wide-eyed in the section dinner hole when one brother decided to confront Steve K., a hateful, old-school, slavedriver of a foreman. ‘Steve,’ he said, ‘I swear, you would risk our lives for one more car of coal.’ Steve K. looked over, with his cold fish-eyed stare, and slowly said, ‘Not for one car, but I will for two.’”
I have a very personal response when miners are trapped. It is hard not to feel there among them. My mind flies over and over to the dark damp corner where any survivers may be holed up breathing their last gulps of air.
The following is a piece I wrote in the summer of 2002 when a flood trapped miners in Pennsylvania’s Quecreek mine.
The conflation of movements with communities makes sure we get neither. When activists conceive of themselves as members of an activist community, it becomes more important to concede to the “community’s consensus values, vocabulary, dietary habits, sexual norms and so on than in breaking new ground, organizing the unorganized, confronting the power structure directly, disagreeing with comrades and struggling out ideas. The focus of attention is on the individual participants, not what they are doing
The inward-focused defensiveness of “community” is a bad legacy of anarchism (and liberalism) in all social movements in the US.
There is no “activist community” – and where such self-described communities substitute space for movement, this weakness lets signifiers (diet, dress, vocabulary) stand in for the signified (unorganized people, systems of oppression, program, etc.). By analogy, the Italian mafia may be a “community” of sorts, but it is essentially a self-involved, parasitic network of people in contradiction with the larger (actual) communities they inhabit. Using a style of dress, language and codes of conduct, they brag of their coherence while hiding their purpose. Self-selecting groups aren’t communities in a healthy sense, and where activists take on mafia forms, they end up with mafia problems.
Titled “Battle at Kruger,” this very widely viewed video shows a battle between a pride of lions, a herd of buffalo, and 2 crocodiles at a watering hole in South Africa’s Kruger National Park while on safari. Anybody care to hazard an allegorical class analysis of this or an explanation of why it got 51 million views?
Exhibition on View in the Partnership Gallery
March 14 – April 11, 2010 The Art of War displays posters from the Vietnam War. The starting point is ten North Vietnamese paintings (original art for posters) from the Shelley and Donald Rubin private collection. These are powerful images that could be hard to look at for many Americans. These images are contextualized with three other selections:
American posters supporting the war effort in Vietnam,
American anti-war posters from the Vietnam era,
and an empty frame representing North Vietnamese anti-war posters (which presumably do not exist).
As for the labels on the walls, we will be asking museums visitors, participants of our New New Yorkers Program, and staff who are Vietnam veterans, to write them. We would also like to ask YOU, the general public, for your input. As we post images of the works on this page, please leave your comments below or tweet @QueensMuseum using the hasthtag #ArtOfWar. Click on the images to see them in full. Please be mindful and respectful of the public forum. Thanks for participating.
We need to come together to take advantage of this remarkable event: that a writer of this skill and stature has dared (and truly risked) to speak the truth about the revolutionary people of remote rural India. Help her. Help them.
We urge all our readers to share and download this new pamphlet. It makes it much easier for people to study this important work by Arundhati Roy describing the revolutionary fighters and people of India’s Maoist political base areas. This pamphlet includes many of Roy’s remarkable photographs from her trip that bring the text to life.
“Mike, A number of your recent posts suggest that you have some opinions–as of yet unstated as far as I can tell- about where where you *anticipate* these faultlines and conjuctural events emerging…I would be interested to hear more about where you find “our Mississippi” emerging…I’d be interested to hear from others on this question too, of course.”
Not all “issues” are equal. Not all conflicts have equal potential for radicalization. The future can be expected to have different features from the past. And we have to conceive of radical upsurges conjuncturally (not as a linear outcome of patient “organizing”) In other words, I think we need to pick, and pick well. And we need to take some time to do that, think it through, pick our place to dig in, identify our best methods and approaches strategically
In the 1970s, the New Communist Movement sent thousands of young communist organizers into workplaces — but for most of them nothing happened. In a very few places, all hell broke loose – and even then that could have been foreseen. Very precious forces were squandered in a series of bad strategic choices. No one would argue that some of those industries shouldn’t have had communist “colonization” by organizers. But a more mature strategic view would have led to a very different spectrum of decisions. And a more sophisticated sense of what communist work should be.
Again: Not all struggles and mass movement are equally amenable to radicalization. Not all just struggles (and faultlines) have an equal potential for shaking up a country and a system. (The anti-Jim Crow movement and Black Liberation generally involved a main vein in how this fucking place works — and involved a struggle where a truly profound systemic and historic injustice of this country was there to expose and oppose.)
This article is from the most recent issue of Monthly Review. We are publishing it in several installments as its is quite long, and in the hope that it will generate some serious discussion here on the questions that it addresses. If you want to read the whole article now, just click on the link above.
by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster
IV. Characteristics of Capitalism in Conflict with Social Justice
The characteristics of capitalism discussed above—the necessity to grow; the pushing of people to purchase more and more; expansion abroad; use of resources without concern for future generations; the crossing of planetary boundaries; and the predominant role often exercised by the economic system over the moral, legal, political, cultural forms of society—are probably the characteristics of capitalism that are most harmful for the environment. But there are other characteristics of the system that greatly impact the issue of social justice. It is important to look more closely at these social contradictions imbedded in the system.
A. As the System Naturally Functions, a Great Disparity Arises in Both Wealth and Income
There is a logical connection between capitalism’s successes and its failures. The poverty and misery of a large mass of the world’s people is not an accident, some inadvertent byproduct of the system, one that can be eliminated with a little tinkering here or there. The fabulous accumulation of wealth—as a direct consequence of the way capitalism works nationally and internationally—has simultaneously produced persistent hunger, malnutrition, health problems, lack of water, lack of sanitation, and general misery for a large portion of the people of the world. The wealthy few resort to the mythology that the grand disparities are actually necessary. For example, as Brian Griffiths, the advisor to Goldman Sachs International, quoted above, put it: “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieving greater prosperity and opportunity for all.”41 What’s good for the rich also—according to them—coincidentally happens to be what’s good for society as a whole, even though many remain mired in a perpetual state of poverty.
With the passage and signing of the Health Care Reform Bill, revolutionaries need to analyze the effects of the bill both on health care and on the political terrain in the United States. This is an editorial from the November/December 2009 issue of International Socialist Review, the bimonthly magazine of the International Socialist Organization. While not every prediction it makes is exactly on target, it offers a good starting point for a discussion of who this bill will serve and why.
by the Editors of International Socialist Review
Most great American fortunes were made by capitalists who used the power of government to gain advantages over competitors or to profit from public resources.
For example, the Gilded Age plutocrats—the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Stewarts, the Goulds—built their railroad-based fortunes on the foundation of $100 million in federal and state grants and 200 million acres of federal land grants.
The Dupont chemical empire owed much to U.S. seizure of German chemical patents and government assistance in building its plants during the First World War. The modern nuclear power industry and the Internet are both products of the privatization of technologies developed in government laboratories.
Or consider the Telecommunications Act of 1996, one of the main legislative achievements (besides ending welfare) that Democratic President Bill Clinton claimed in that election year. The bill, passed overwhelmingly with little public debate and quickly signed by Clinton, took down barriers of ownership and transmission rights of content among major media, radio, phone, and Internet companies.
The following appeared prominently on a new website created by the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist).
“People should have easy access to information and their right to information should always be protected.”
* * * * *
Twenty first century is the century of information revolution. Globalization of information, thanks to the internet technology, has reduced the entire globe into a small rural unit. And, due to this, any positive or negative development in any corner of the earth can have its impact on the whole world in the blink of an eye.
The time we are living in is–as Lenin pointed out– the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution. But, because of internet technology and the globalization, some features of imperialism—its mode of hegemony—are not, needless to say, the same as they were in the 19th century.
It’s obvious and logical consequence is that this very change can have a generous say upon the characteristic of contemporary proletarian revolution, into which the historical document of our party’s second national conference ‘Great Leap Forward : The Inevitable necessity of history’ delves lucidly.
What can be the role of media in the establishment, defense and development of People’s Democracy?
Kasama will host an ongoing discussion of the mass line — an approach to communist leadership deeply connected to the people.
By Mike Ely
Radical Eyes wrote in our ongoing thread on the mass line document of Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) written in the 1980s (made available online by the FRSO/FightBack group):
“Anyway, I love the formulation Mike posted above about communists needing to draw out the future in the present and the universal in the particular….And certainly some struggles may lend themselves to such drawing out more than others.”
The formulation I posted is drawn from Marx and Engels themselves — inspired by the closing section of the Communist Manifesto where it says:
“The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement… The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”
These themes are not just missing in the FRSO document. I read that document as conscious polemic in favor of a real narrowness, a special kind focus on the particular and the immediate that (in effect) would produce indifference toward our “views and aims.” In a separate essay, I started to dissect that FRSO document, line-by-line… let me be more conceptual here.
This was originally posted on Socialism & Democracy Online.
