Thanks for this Sam.

I found it particularly interesting and clarifying when you wrote:

<blockquote>"It is a program oriented towards immediate relief and challenges the ideas 1) that BP can be trusted to pay compensation to those whose lives it has ruined, and 2) that BP has a legal right to its assets (and thus “due process” to hold up the compensation process)."</blockquote>
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Forgive me if i start my reply with a historical digression:</strong>

As a former coal miner (and as a lifelong student of history), I am only familiar with a very few such seizures in U.S. history.

<strong>One of them is this: </strong>U.S. coal miners rose up in hard and controversial strike during World War 2. In 1943 half a million miners walked out -- in violation of the "no strike pledge" of "labor" (backed by the CPUSA). The conditions that led to this were bitter in the extreme -- I have heard it said (from those who experienced it) that miners died underground at a rate higher than soldiers in the U.S. army. Certainly miners were facing starvation conditions -- and there had been numerous case where (<em>Germinale</em> like) miners wives had looted company stores for food.

In response, FDR (the imperialists' commander in chief) and the U.S. government "raised the flag over the mines" -- in order to raise the threat level against the miners. It was a way of underscoring that wartime strikes were disruptive of the war effort, and that the U.S. ruling class would/could respond with extreme violence. This is when the miners responded with "You can't mine coal with bayonets."

(There was a similar event at North American Aviation...in 1941.)

<b>But this episode does underscore one point:</b>

The seizure of private property by the federal government is not a classless event.

The seizure of a criminal corporation by the U.S. government would not be the seizure by some "representative of society." It is the seizure of a private institution by the "committee of the ruling class" (as Lenin put it). That government and state is itself a highly criminal and anti-people enterprise -- in ways that are obvious to all of us here.

This government's crimes make BP look like a Cub Scout troop.

There is very good reason for the people of the Gulf Coast NOT to trust BP "to pay compensation to those whose lives it has ruined." that is the mass sentiment we are seeking to intersect with. And I believe that we need to approach such matters using the mass line -- not some textual nitpicking.

However, I do want to raise whether this demand <em>implies</em> that the people can (or should) trust the federal government to deliver them justice. And doesn't this take place <em>exactly</em> as millions of people have deep <em>dis</em>trust of the federal heights (for all kinds of very complex and diverse reasons).

I don't think we should tail (or embrace) the libertarian, teabagger, states rights hostility toward federal government. But what I am raising in this post above that there is a liberal attempt to promote the imperial state as a hero (in the midst of privatized financial crisis). They have been crowing "the government is back!:

And we (as revolutionaries) should consider whether we are weighing in on that correctly.

Personally, I am reluctant to adopt or promote a political message that says:

"The people don't trust BP to do them right, so let's demand the feds take over the compensation process."

And I note your point that the fine print of ANSWER's campaign may call for popular boards to administer the funds etc.

But aren't we at risk of (oh so militantly) implying that "state regulation" solves the problems of neo-liberal privatization (regardless of what the small print says)?

<b>To put it another way:</b>

When our brothers were blown up in that west virginia mine recently.... the question got raised, how is this possible in the most regulated industry in history?

I wrote a <a href="/http://kasamaproject.org/2010/04/07/blasted-in-a-west-virginia-mine/" rel="nofollow">piece on this</a> --because the state regulation of dangerous production is so obviously not a solution to the horrors of private capitalist production. Just as the state ownership of Chinese coal mining doesn't help the thousands burned and smothered and buried in those mines.

I don't think the solution to death in the mines is more state regulation or state ownership -- it is the replacement of capitalism with socialism which (to me) is radically different in many ways.

Sam writes:

<blockquote>"[the demand] questions in a popular way the sanctity of “private property,” which is the heart of capitalism."</blockquote>

Certainly, this demand challenges a certain KIND of sanctity of property -- a kind of sanctity and property that is particularly entrenched in the U.S. You have a point.

But far too often THAT sanctity is countered with a desire for state intervention -- as if that is an improvement. And there is "on the left" a sanctification of such state ownership -- as if that is the antidote to corporate ownership.

And we also have an obligation to understand and explain the extent to which state capitalism is <em>precisely and literally</em> private property in a <em>Marxist</em> sense.

In U.S. politics, so much is posed (by bourgeois forces) as "private versus state." I remember Kevin Costner's bizarre attempt to make a cultural defense of "government's role" -- when he made "<a href="/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman_%28film%29" rel="nofollow">The Postman</a>"

Shouldn't we (meaning the most radical among the left) find some creative way NOT to play on that deceptive battle ground -- while still connecting with the people, both their need for relief and their deep skepticisms?

To be clear: I'm not opposing the ANSWER call. Like TNL i'm glad to see this initiative. And I assume its impact -- if it gains traction -- could be positive.

But I also think we are at a point in history where we have to really think through how we present the socialist project -- to demand a "second hearing" and to really embody what has been learned over the last century. I am reluctant to recraft our communist/socialist movement as militant sidecar for liberal campaigns....

And I suspect there are other, powerful, agitational ways to demand justice for those who have been ruined -- without slipping in social democratic preferences for the imperial state over the monopoly capitalist corporation, and without (slyly, implicitly, silently) putting forward the Obama-led government as an instrument for correcting the crimes of the Republican-era de-regulation.

<b>We need to help expose that crimes like the Gulf spill arise from the monopoly capitalism of American society. And help give shape to popular demands and outrage. But at the same time, the radical changes we need (and promote) don't appear on the liberal/conservative matrix of "nationalization vs. privatization." </b>