Yeltsin Schmeltsin

It is whispered,,in fine old Stalinist fashion, that at the passing of the Great Leader Yeltsin nobody knew for sure at first because they thought he was dead....drunk.

Vodka Part II: Sobering Up the USSR by Alexei Bayer

When the Soviet Union finally disintegrated at the end of 1991,

Vodka rationing exposed the true misery of everyday Soviet life — without any alcoholic shock absorber.

Boris Yeltsin — the new Russian leader — decided not to repeat Mr. Gorbachev’s error of restricting access to vodka.

That was to be expected not just on grounds of political smarts. After all, Mr. Yeltsin himself was far from a teetotaler.

From abroad, Mr. Yeltsin might have appeared rather ridiculous. But to Russians, his drunkenness was a hopeful sign that their own love of vodka would never be denied.

A poll done shows 70% of Russians consider Boris Yeltsin a failure and the reason for the collapse of their political economy and social order. He is not their hero.

A poll by the Levada Analytical Centre in December found 70 percent think the Yeltsin era did more harm than good. Half thought he should be prosecuted.

He is however a hero to the Cold War leaders in the West, which is why they showed up at his funeral, while the common people stayed away in droves.

The Legacy of Boris Yeltsin
Corruption, crony capitalism, and Russia's near-demise

The real Yeltsin legacy Far from introducing freedom and democracy, the late president helped discredit them in Russia

While praised for bringing Democracy to Russia he did so in fine old Stalinist fashion by using tanks.

In August 1991, Yeltsin won international plaudits for casting himself as a democrat and defying the August coup attempt of 1991 by hard-line Communists. But he left office widely despised as a desperate, ailing autocrat among the Russian population. As president, Yeltsin's conception of the presidency was highly autocratic. Yeltsin either acted as his own prime minister (until June 1992) or appointed men of his choice, regardless of parliament. His confrontations with parliament climaxed in the October 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, when Yeltsin called up tanks to shell the Russian White House, blasting out his opponents in parliament. Later in 1993, Yeltsin imposed a new constitution with strong presidential powers, which was approved by referendum in December.

All the praise for Yeltsin is misplaced, he was a mere opportunist in the right place at the right time to become America's Man to run in the first American style elections for an American style Presidency, in post cold war Russia. His legacy? Putin.

While some in the media will foist on the public the myth that Yeltsin was some how responsible for the end of the Soviet Union, that too is American wishful thinking. He will go down in history as a footnote in biographies of Gorbachev.

The Soviet Collapse

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive. The Soviet leadership was confronted with a difficult decision on how to adjust. There were three options--or a combination of three options--available to the Soviet leadership.

First, dissolve the Eastern European empire and effectively stop barter trade in oil and gas with the Socialist bloc countries, and start charging hard currency for the hydrocarbons. This choice, however, involved convincing the Soviet leadership in 1985 to negate completely the results of World War II. In reality, the leader who proposed this idea at the CPSU Central Committee meeting at that time risked losing his position as general secretary.

Second, drastically reduce Soviet food imports by $20 billion, the amount the Soviet Union lost when oil prices collapsed. But in practical terms, this option meant the introduction of food rationing at rates similar to those used during World War II. The Soviet leadership understood the consequences: the Soviet system would not survive for even one month. This idea was never seriously discussed.

Third, implement radical cuts in the military-industrial complex. With this option, however, the Soviet leadership risked serious conflict with regional and industrial elites, since a large number of Soviet cities depended solely on the military-industrial complex. This choice was also never seriously considered.

Unable to realize any of the above solutions, the Soviet leadership decided to adopt a policy of effectively disregarding the problem in hopes that it would somehow wither away. Instead of implementing actual reforms, the Soviet Union started to borrow money from abroad while its international credit rating was still strong. It borrowed heavily from 1985 to 1988, but in 1989 the Soviet economy stalled completely.

When the situation in the Soviet Union is examined from financial and hard currency perspectives, Gorbachev's policies at the time are much easier to comprehend (see figure 6). Government-to-government loans were bound to come with a number of rigid conditions. For instance, if the Soviet military crushed Solidarity Party demonstrations in Warsaw, the Soviet Union would not have received the desperately needed $100 billion from the West. The Socialist bloc was stable when the Soviet Union had the prerogative to use as much force as necessary to reestablish control, as previously demonstrated in Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. But in 1989 the Polish elites understood that Soviet tanks would not be used to defend the communist government.

The only option left for the Soviet elites was to begin immediate negotiations about the conditions of surrender. Gorbachev did not have to inform President George H. W. Bush at the Malta Summit in 1989 that the threat of force to support the communist regimes in Eastern Europe would not be employed. This was already evident at the time. Six weeks after the talks, no communist regime in Eastern Europe remained.

Tags
state capitalism, USSR, Russia, Putin Lenin, Bureaucratic Collectivism, , Soviet Union, Bolsheviks, Boris Yeltsin, socialism, marxist, communist, state-capitalist,

Commodity Fetish a Definition

I like to find short sharp clear (humorous) definitions of Marx's ideas to share with my readers. This is another one: Commodity Fetish. LOL this ones got that JimBobbySez kinda of style....

One of the most charming witticisms of Marx is the term "commodity fetishism". "Fetishism" spoofed Hegel, who had concocted a famous lengthy, crackpot, faux-learned justification for racialised subjection, imperialism and slavery in the Philosophy of History founded on the infantile, primitive nature of neeeegrows as evidenced by their relations to fetishes. Fetish=degradation. To Hegel's mystical ecstasy of yerupeen triumph over fetishes and fetishists, Marx replied; And who are you, my fine fellow, to sneer at fetishes? At least those guys utilise their fetishes and create them in moderation. Your fetishes proliferate like fungus, lord it over you like gods; you grovel before them in every minute of life.

I came across it after coming across a critique of Hegel's view of Africa showing the author knew where of he spoke.

Hegel’s Europe (Spirit) Hegel’s Africa (Nature)

For Hegel, Africans fail at achieving substantial notions of the universal. Hegel
says that, “in Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet
attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence—as for example, God, or
Law—in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realizes his
own being.”xxiv African religion is, for Hegel, actually magic and fetishism. Law is
nothing but unruly despotic control. African social organization is the slavery of Africans
by each other, resulting in cannibalism, violence, and chaos in the interior of Africa.
Specifically, in Africa, Hegel finds “the most reckless inhumanity and disgusting
barbarism” be displayed by the people of the continent.

In reference to the African, according to Hegel, “we must put aside all thought of
reverence and morality—all that we call feeling—if we would rightly comprehend him;
there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character.”xxvi For
Hegel, a sense of humanity, as cultivated from a conception of the universal, is lacking in
Africans. The African lacks the ability to see beyond himself, in the humanity of another,
or in the necessity of the community. The African tries to organize socially, but fails.
Hegel says, “the political bond can therefore not possess such a character as that free laws
should unite the community.”xxvii They try to express themselves religiously, but exist in
fetishism. Hegel refers to Africans as believers in “sorcery” in which they have no “idea
of a God, or a moral faith.”

For Hegel, it is impossible for the African to actualize concepts of religion, law,
or society due to their own sensuousness. Hegel manipulates the ways in which the text
displays the manner in which the African character expresses itself in terms of religion,
law, and social organization.”xxix For Bernasconi, “An examination of Hegel’s sources
shows that they were more accurate than he was and that he cannot be so readily excused
for using them as he did.”xxx Myth creation and African esoticization occur in Hegel.
Hegel is constructing an archetype of what and where the unhistorical would be in Space
and History. As the archetype of the unhistorical, Bernasconi says that in Hegel, “Africa
served as a null-point or base-point.”

Why would Hegel proceed to have these declarative statements about a people
that he claims he does not understand? Hegel says that Africa is unknown only to proceed
in explaining the intricacies of its identity. Is this a problem of inherent duplicity? Hegel
makes the African an incomprehensible element to compliment the comprehensible. In
Hegel, “awakening consciousness takes its rise surrounded by natural influences alone,
and every development of it is the reflection of Spirit back upon itself in opposition to the
immediate, unreflected character of mere nature. Nature is therefore one element in this
antithetic abstracting process.”

The development of Spirit out of Nature requires Nature to antithetically reflect
Spirit’s identity and see this reflection, and movement away, as an antithesis in all aspects
to its stagnated self. For this reason, Hegel must construct Africa as an incomprehensible,
irrational, unreasoned, and unhistorical entity. Hence, Europe blossoms historically out of
Africa as an opposite posed specifically for Europe’s ascension. This incomprehensibility
forces Africa to remain outside the realm of logical, historical development. The African
has no hopes of cohabiting the same conceptual space as the rest of humanity. They fail
to rise out of Nature for they lack the mechanism of the threshold and antithesis that they
exist as for Europe, against which this rising can occur. Rising above the threshold is
impossible when a culture is that threshold. Africa does not have the capability of rising
because this rising has to occur over and against Africa.

And here are a couple of more definitions of Commodity Fetish

A commodity, for Marx, is an object which is
1.) the product of human, creative labor, that is, human labor manifested in an object and 2.) an object of human labor which is put in relation to other objects of human labor, that is, it is an object which is circulated.

If you sat down and build a bird-house for yourself, you have produced an object, but not a commodity. If you sit down and build a bird-house and sell it to someone else, you have produced both an object and a commodity. Marx's central argument here is that the world of commodities, of objects which circulate in an economy, takes on a life of its own. When you go to the store and see a bird-house for sale on a shelf, you see only the object, not the labor that went into it.

The commodity seems to you to have magically appeared on the shelf for you consumption. That sense that commodities have a life of their own, that they magically appear for people to purchase or exchange, is what Marx means by the fetishism of commodities.

The Reality behind Commodity Fetishism

After having clarified Marx’s methodological point of departure I shall now carefully discuss his laying out of what the "mystical character", the "metaphysical subtleties", "the sensory supernatural character” and the "theological manners" of the commodity specifically consist in.

The term fetish or to fetishize which originally derives from religious discourse means to invest something with powers it does not intrinsically possess. But while the religious fetish, if my picture of the world is not totally mistaken, does not through an act of being thought about or believed in acquire powers which previously were foreign to it, the situation is different in the case of the kind of fetish Marx is concerned with. ( The commodity fetish is being realized, not created by the minds of the individual actors and thus needs to be sharply distinguished from allusions to hallucinations, false illusions and the like. The kind of fetishism Marx is describing, can neither be understood as a mere individual misrepresentation nor as an abstract phenomenon of social consciousness. It has to be seen in light of the society as a whole. Fetishism is not merely an ideological category. While ideology in Marx understanding of it as "necessary false consciousness" is not confined to capitalist societies, but is closely linked to all societies that are divided into classes, the notion of commodity fetishism is a historical distinct phenomenon of capitalism. Marx goes as far as claiming that commodity fetishism is inseparably linked to Capitalist modes of production. He writes:

[In capitalist societies] it is o­nly the definite social relationships of men themselves, which in their eyes takes o­n the phantasmagorial form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world, the products of the human mind appear as independent beings endowed with life, as entering into independent relations both with o­ne another and the human race. The same way are in the world of commodities the products of men’s hands. This I call the fetishism which is attached to the products of labor, as soon as they are produced as commodities, and which therefore is inseparable from the production of commodities.

And a more sinister meaning of it as an aspect of Gothic Capitalism.

The Ends of the Body--Commodity Fetishism and the Global Traffic in Organs
SAIS Review - Volume 22, Number 1, Winter-Spring 2002, pp. 61-80

Amidst the neoliberal readjustments of the new global economy, there has been a rapid growth of "medical tourism" for transplant surgery and other advanced biomedical and surgical procedures. A grotesque niche market for sold organs, tissues, and other body parts has exacerbated older divisions between North and South, haves and have-nots, organ donors and organ recipients. Indeed, a kind of medical apartheid has also emerged that has separated the world into two populations--organ givers and organ receivers. Over the past 30 years, organ transplantation--especially kidney transplantation--has become a common procedure in hospitals and clinics throughout the world. The spread of transplant technologies has created a global scarcity of viable organs. At the same time the spirit of a triumphant global and "democratic" capitalism has released a voracious appetite for "fresh" bodies from which organs can be procured. The confluence in the flows of immigrant workers and itinerant kidney sellers who fall prey to sophisticated but unscrupulous transnational organ brokers is a subtext in the recent history of globalization. Today's organ procurement transactions are a blend of altruism and commerce; of science and superstition; of gifting, barter, and theft; and of voluntarism and coercion. International Organ Markets, Bioethics, and Social Justice The problem with markets is that they reduce everything--including human beings, their labor, and their reproductive capacity--to the status of commodities that can be bought, sold, traded, and stolen.

But not to anticipate, we will content ourselves with yet another
example relating to the commodity-form. Could commodities themselves
speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men.
It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as
objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it.
In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values. Now listen
how those commodities speak through the mouth of the economist. "Value"
(i.e., exchange-value) "is a property of things, riches" (i.e., use-
value) "of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges,
riches do not."(35) "Riches" (use-value) "are the attribute of men,
value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a
pearl or a diamond is valuable... A pearl or a diamond is valuable" as a
pearl or a diamond.(36) So far no chemist has ever discovered
exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economic discoverers
of this chemical element, who by-the-by lay special claim to critical
acumen, find however that the use-value of objects belongs to them
independently of their material properties, while their value, on the
other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What confirms them in this
view, is the peculiar circumstance that the use-value of objects is
realised without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the
objects and man, while, on the other hand, their value is realised only
by exchange, that is, by means of a social process. Who fails here to
call to mind our good friend, Dogberry, who informs neighbour Seacoal,
that, "To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and
writing comes by Nature."


The Fetish Speaks — 
Fredy Perlman's graphic rendition of Karl Marx's "Commodity Fetishism"

Rather, fetishism or animism is a set of ritual practices, stances, and attunements to the world, constituting the way we participate in capitalist existence. Commodities actually are alive: more alive, perhaps, than we ourselves are. They “appear,” or stand forth, or “shine” (the word Marx uses is scheinen) as autonomous beings. Commodities don’t just “believe” for us; much more, they usurp our day-to-day lives, and act pragmatically in our place. The “naive” consumer, who sees commodities as animate beings, endowed with magical properties, is therefore not mystified or deluded. He or she is accurately perceiving the way that capitalism works, how it endows material things with an inner life. Under the reign of commodities, we live — as William Burroughs said we did — in a “magical universe.”

And so, our encounter with commodities and brands is an affective experience, before it is a cognitive one. It’s not belief that is at stake here, but attraction and revulsion, euphoria and disgust, a warm sense of belonging, nostalgia, panic, and loss….

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
use value, commodity, labour, labor, Marx, commodity fetish, labour theory of value, social-factory, proletariat, capital, capitalism, profit, Hegel, Africa

Venezuela From the Left

Some Left views of the current political situation in Venezuela.

One from the Trotskyist critical support solidarity perspective;

The political situation in Venezuela – interview with Yonie Moreno, member of the CMR in Venezuela

And these two from the critical support perspective of Anarchist Venezuelans;

Proudhon's Ghost Stalks Venezuela

An Anarchist Analysis of Venezuela


See

Chavez

Venezuela

Latin America


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Chavez, Venezuela, Latin America, South America, Socialism, anarchism, anarchists, Trotsky, Trotskyists, Trotskyite, Trotskyism,

Spot the Difference

Joseph Lavoie and Adrian MacNair have a joint blog project; Popular Doctrine is a project in political discourse; a place where a socialist and a conservative debate the day's issues in search of a healthy discussion.

The right side is generally represented by Joseph Lavoie, a 23-year old conservative activist and university student from Toronto.

The Left is generally represented by Adrian MacNair, a father of a 5 year old wonderkid from Vancouver, BC.

Except if you read this article you have to wonder which one is the socialist.

In fact Adrian's argument sounds strikingly like the Canadian Taxpayers Federations Revisionist History.

Marx For Beginners

An excellent short precise definition of the Labour Theory of Value; The Heritage Foundation and Karl Marx


Also see Paulitics Marxist Dictionary


And my articles:

Radical Capitalists Not So Radical

The End Of The Leisure Society

Variable Labour=Variable Captial

Suplus Value

Labour Produces All Wealth

Libertarian Labour

Peter Drucker RIP

It's the Labour Theory of Value, stupid

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workers, variable costs, labour, labor, Marx, variable capital, labour theory of value, social-factory, proletariat, capital, capitalism, profit, working conditions, service workers

IWD: Raya Dunayevskaya

Since today is International Women's Day I thought I would blog about an overlooked founder of the New Left and Marxist Feminism; Raya Dunayevskaya.
Founder of News and Letters, and a Marxist philosopher whose praxis focused on the revolutionary potential of youth, women and black workers and the anti-war movement.

I cannot recommend highly enough Eugene Gogol's historical biography of her life and work which she termed Marxist Humanism. Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist-Humanism, Wipfandstock Publishers: Eugene, Oregon, 2003. This extraordinarily accessible work covers the development of her ideas and theories in relation to her life which was a revolutionary praxis.

I can think of no higher praise then the fact that I lent the book to a friend who while a Leftist had not heard of Dunayevskaya. He read the whole work in week, and while the work deals with Hegelian and Marxist Philosophy, Gogols presentation, within the context of her life and political development, my friend was suitably impressed that he went in search of her works online. He returned the book, and related to me that not being as computer literate as some, this was the first time he had downloaded her papers to read later. If you know nothing of her, then this is the political biography to read.

This philosophical comprehension of Marx's mature work of political economy needs to be reckoned with by today's "anti-globalization" movement. That movement is largely motivated by the injustice of the huge disparity in wealth between the northern, advanced capitalist nations and the nations of the south. The rallying cry is for a more just distribution of the world's wealth. Marxism and Freedom moves beyond this politics of equity. It illuminates how deeply capital must be uprooted in order to transform labor into an activity for human development and the realization of individual potentialities.

Dunayevskaya highlights the question, "What are we for?" Typically it is more immediately clear what we are against-capital's globalized reach, or imperialism. The question of the kind of society we are working for is usually ducked as too remote or potentially divisive. Dunayevskaya nonetheless insists on the need for full-fledged discussion within the movement and a collective focus for working it out.

This orientation comes out of Dunayevskaya's embrace of Hegel's method of the negation of the negation. She likens it to Marx's concept of "revolution in permanence," which "made it clear that the revolution does not end with the overthrow of the old but must continue to the new, so you begin to feel this presence of the future in the present" (12). The revolutionary impulse thus seeks the creation of a new human being beyond the uprooting of the old society. Only this ceaseless negation, including the negation of the initial attempts at negation, can lead us beyond a reshuffling of the cards so as to achieve an equitable redistribution of the world's wealth.

For Dunayevskaya the dialectic of negativity is the notion that forward movement emerges from the negation of obstacles to freedom. Negation needs to go further than the refutation of the given, because the first negation is still imprinted with the old. Only when negativity goes on to become self-directed, self-related, or in Hegelian terms "absolute," does it create the positive and the truly new.

While the aim of a humanistic transformation of society has this dialectical philosophical basis, it emerges out of actual human struggles. Dunayevskaya anticipates the focus on fighting for "new human relations" that later became central to the women's, Black liberation and workers' struggles. She quotes a young worker from Los Angeles who asked: "What skill do you need in this day of Automation? What pride can you have in your work if everything is done electronically...? What about the human being?"

She was raised in the Ukrainian diaspora in Chicago. Amongst the immigrant workers who shared the ghetto and jobs in the meat packing plants with their African American neighbors. It was in this community that Raya began as a young Communist to identify the indigenous class struggle in America as dealing with the Negro Question and Womens Liberation. They were not side issues, or matters simply of oppression, for her they were were key to class struggle.

"Those who have dedicated their lives to the creation of more just societies stand back now and take stock of the disintegration of so many of the socialist experiments. Feminism was palpably missing from those plans drawn up by men. Raya Dunayevskaya knew the importance of a feminist vision and hers informed the Marxist-Humanism she explained so well. Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution is as relevant today as when it was written, perhaps more so. This is necessary reading for all who want to know what went wrong and how to do it better next time."— Margaret Randall

While many will point to others as founders of the New Left, in reality it was her and her comrade's C.L. R. James and Grace Lee Boggs that really gave birth to the American Marxist New Left. While much of the New Left in America was shaped by the baby boom and subsequent proletarianization of post secondary education and the consequences of the draft which created a youth revolt, it was the change in production that is Fordism that really was key to Dunayevskaya's work.

under capitalism machines exploit labor. “Capital is then a material thing which exploits labor” (p. 13). Instead of analyzing the capitalist labor process and thus discovering how a material thing becomes an exploiting force, ........that the thing, means of production, has become the social relation, capital, because of what Marx calls “the contradiction between the personification of objects and the representation of persons by things.”

The focal point of Marx’s analysis of capitalist society is his critique of capitalist production. The ideology which flows from this historic mode of production is enveloped in the perverted relation of dead to living labor. Marx pointed out that the very simple relation—capital uses labor—expresses “the personification of things and the reification of people.” That is to say, the means of production become capital and are personified as capitalists at the same time that the workers become reified, that is, their labor becomes objectified into the property of others.

Marx’s critique of capitalist society, based primarily on this inverted relation of dead to living labor at the point of production, extends also to the surface of society (the market), where the social relation between people assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”This is the fetishism of commodities.

Marx proceeds to analyze the capitalist mode of production. Now that the worker is in the factory, the “social relation” becomes a production relation.

By virtue of that fact his relationship to the boss is very clear; it in no sense assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things. On the contrary, there the worker overestimates the capitalist’s might. He thinks that the capitalist alone is responsible for his plight instead of seeing the cause in the mode of production which the capitalist represents. There the worker personifies things: the means of production used as capital become the capitalists. We are here confronted with what Marx called “the personification of things and the reification of people.” Marx was most emphatic in laying bare this “reification of people” because that is the very heart of his critique of political economy. He grasped this very early. “When one speaks of private property,” wrote the young Marx in 1844, “one thinks of something outside of man. When one speaks of labor, one has to do immediately with man himself. The new formulation of the question already involves its solution.”

Dunayevskaya Outline of Marx's Capital--volume one

In evolving through the Communist party to Trotskyism, Dunayevskaya and James became the Forrest Johnson Tendency after Trotsky's death as a political crisis shook the Fourth International. They articulated the earliest State Capitalist critique , within Trotskyism, of the Soviet Union and subsequently of historical capitalism as it evolved through WWII and the Cold War.

She became Leon Trotsky’s Russian-language secretary in 1937 during his exile in Mexico, but broke with him in 1939 at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Her simultaneous study of the Russian economy and of Marx’s early writings (later known as the 1844 Humanist Essays) led to her 1941-42 analysis that not only was Russia a state-capitalist society, but that state-capitalism was a new world stage.

It was this articulation plus their emphasis on women, blacks and youth as part of the class struggle, culturally as well as politically and economically that set them apart from the rest of the Left. They were part of a movement known as the third way, but different from its other proponents because even though they were steeped in Leninism, they confronted the failure of the Vanguard of professional revolutionaries and their parties, to really speak for the whole of the class.

When we reach state-capitalism, one-party state, cold war, hydrogen bomb, it is obvious that we have reached ultimates. We are now at the stage where all universal questions are matters of concrete specific urgency for society in general as well as for every individual. As we wrote in The Invading Socialist Society:

“It is precisely the character of our age and the maturity of humanity that obliterates the opposition between theory and practice, between the intellectual occupations of the ‘educated’ and the masses.” (p. 14.)

All previous distinctions, politics and economics, war and peace, agitation and propaganda, party and mass, the individual and society, national, civil and imperialist war, single country and one world, immediate needs and ultimate solutions – all these it is impossible to keep separate any longer. Total planning is inseparable from permanent crisis, the world struggle for the minds of men from the world tendency to the complete mechanization of men.

State-capitalism is in itself the total contradiction, absolute antagonism. In it are concentrated all the contradictions of revolution and counter-revolution. The proletariat, never so revolutionary as it is today, is over half the world in the stranglehold of Stalinism, the form of the counter-revolution in our day, the absolute opposite of the proletarian revolution.

It is the totality of these contradictions that today compels philosophy, a total conception. Hence the propaganda ministry of Hitler, the omnipresent orthodoxy of Stalinism, the Voice of America. The war over productivity is fought in terms of philosophy, a way of life. When men question not the fruits of toil but the toil itself, then philosophy in Marx’s sense of human activity has become actual.

World War I plunged the world into complete chaos. Lenin between 1914 and 1917 established in theory: (a) the economic basis of the counter-revolutionary Social Democracy (The economic basis of imperialist war had been established before him.); (b) the Soviet democracy in contradistinction to bourgeois democracy. But before he did this, he had to break with the philosophical method of the Second International. He worked at this privately in a profound study of the Hegelian dialectic applied to Marx’s Capital, the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Thirty years have now passed. Lenin’s method of economic analysis is ours to use, not to repeat his findings. His political conception of complete abolition of bureaucracy and all ordering from above is today to be driven to its ultimate as the revolutionary weapon against the one-party state. But today the problems of production which Lenin had to tackle in Russia in 1920 are universal. No longer to be ignored is the philosophical method he used in holding fast to the creation of a new and higher social organization of labor as "the essence” of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is not the Marxists who have compelled society to face this issue. Today in every layer of society, the great philosophical battles that matter are precisely those over production, the role of the proletariat, the one-party state, and many of the combatants are professed dialecticians.

The crisis of production today is the crisis of the antagonism between manual and intellectual labor. The problem of modern philosophy from Descartes in the sixteenth century to Stalinism in 1950 is the problem of the division of labor between the intellectuals and the workers.

Source: State Capitalism and World Revolution, by C.L.R. James in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya & Grace Lee; with a new introduction by Paul Buhle. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986. Chapter XI, pp. 113-135. Original publication: 1950. Note: Asterisks were changed to numbered footnotes for greater clarity.

News and Letters, Dunayevskaya's organization evolved out of the post war Cold War as the Left faced the crisis of Imperialism and Stalinism. Those who came out of the Trotskyist movement created a new force on the Left called the Third Way, neither supporting Stalinism or American Imperialism. In Europe they moved beyond Trotskyism into Libertarian Marxism and Socialism.

Like News and Letters, these organizations were small and centered around the need to build radical rank and file based proletarian organizations, like the ICC and Socialism and Barbarism in France and England. These organizations originated out of the crisis of the Fourth International as well as the Left/Council Communist movement.

What made News and Letters unique, was they did not give up on class struggle, instead they focused on the new wave of post WWII Fordist industrialization and the new proletarianization of African Americans, women and youth.

While originating out of Leninism, James and Dunayevskaya's praxis made them critical of the Leninist, Trotskyist and Stalinist left, and its failure to see the working class as a broad based movement of race, sex and class. Most of the left had identified with the white industrial working class, rather than understanding the key to class struggle in America was the self organization of the most oppressed and exploited proletarians.

The New Left would mistakenly identify this later as groups who were the revolutionary vanguard, always looking for a vanguard to be the vanguard party of. Third Worldism, support for Black Power and the Black Panthers, the very origins of todays 'identity politics' by the New Left saw youth, blacks, the oppressed in general as revolutionary and rejected the white industrial working class as reactionary.

Such was not the case with Dunyaveskaya and her group News and Letters. In fact one of her collaborators for many years was Martin Glaberman. Together they identified with and worked in building rank and file movements in the Detroit area unions, the very heart of modern and post modern Fordism.

In 1953, Dunayevskaya split with Lee and James, leading to the formation of Marxist-Humanism by Dunayevskaya (later solidified into the group News and Letters), while James and Lee would go on to form a new group, Facing Reality, which would eventually see the split between James and now Grace Lee-Boggs. James' work would continue to influence other people through the journal started by longtime co-revolutionary Martin Glaberman called "Radical America", whose writers are a virtual "Who's Who of the Marxist critique of racism and white supremacy, including George Rawick and David Roediger. The group Sojourner Truth was influenced by James' work and took up the name of autonomist Marxism, but independent of James' practical organisational efforts. The work of Noel Ignatiev and Race Traitor would form the other well known tendency within the Marxist critique of white supremacy through the theory of 'white skin privilege.'

Dunayevskaya and News and Letters have been influenced by the early Hegelians and the Frankfurt School and themselves represent one of the more vocal defenders of a Hegelian Marxism which they refer to as Marxist-Humanism, having made theoretical contributions to the study of Marx and Hegel and the post-Marx Marxist world, as well as innovative readings of Lenin and issues of race, gender and sexuality. The group is also influenced by Rosa Luxemburg and did much to resurrect her in the English-speaking world as a major theorist.

Rank and file organizing against the union bosses and bureaucracy, self organization, the need for revolutionaries to recognize all struggles of the oppressed in America as part of the class struggle took News and Letters and Glaberman and Dunayevskaya, into a different non-Leninist non-vanguard form of revolutionary organization and praxis. As their detractors have pointed out; There is also a close internal relationship between Dunayevskaya and the morality of anarchism.

Indeed Dunayevskaya, Glaberman and James influenced many of the anarchist and autonomists of the 1970's. In Canada their works influenced a Toronto Libertarian Socialist mileux called Lotta Continua, aka The New Tendency which was situated in the Post Office. Most of the Left at this time was adopting a back to the factories approach to revolutionary politics. The failure of the social revolution to occur through and around the Anti-War and Youth movements, led the socialist groups in Canada to identify student and anti-war movements as petite-bourgeoisie and they needed to hone their revolutionary practice by engaging the working class.

What they overlooked was that they were the proletariat, whether in school or in the factory. Many went to work in auto plants in Southern Ontario, but by far the vast majority went to work at the Post Office. The Post Office struggles became the class struggle for the left in Canada, every one of Canada's socialist groups had a cell in the Post Office, and still do today, their influence is felt in CUPW the postal workers union they helped build in practice. Which is why CUPW still to this day uses the slogan Lotta Continua, the Struggle Continues.

That praxis was far more in keeping with the class struggle as Glaberman and Dunayevskaya saw it than the ideologies of the Heinz 57 varieties of Leninist organizations that headed back to the factories.

I was introduced to their works from having heard CLR James speak in Edmonton, in the Seventies, and we carried their books at our anarchist bookstore Erewhon Books.

All her life as a revolutionary Dunayevskaya was an optimist, she saw the revolution not as armed struggle, or a mere moment in history, she like Marx saw class struggle as the evolution of society towards a better more human future.
And her view of that class struggle was inclusive formulated as it was in the Chicago ghetto where she grew up.


Her work is approachable, important and still relevant.

MARX AND CRITICAL THOUGHT.

Raya Dunayevskaya Archive

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Black History Month; C.L.R. James

Today is the last day of Black History Month and this is the final biography for this year, of black radicals whom I admire and who have influenced me.

CLR James is one of the great and underrated Marxists of the 20th Century. He was a Pan-African, in the tradition of Bakunin, and influenced Aime Cesar and Franz Fanon

His Pan-Africanism called out to the oppressed not only in Africa but the Caribbean, his home, to mobilize not around the narrowness of nationalism, but to strive to see the importance of Africanism as a counter to the colonial ideology of racism and oppression.

“this independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights ... [and] is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.”.
The C L R James Internet Archive

He was a philosopher, an author, and a cricket fan.

He always came back to cricket and soccer as the great icon of working class democracy and plurality. And he always spoke highly of his favorite British Novel; Vanity Fair.

I had the pleasure of hearing him speak at the University of Alberta on four occasions through out his life. And he was always challenged by the Trotskyists in the city because being Trotsky' former secretary, he had split with the old man over the issue of whether the Stalinist Soviet Union was a 'degenerated workers state' or if it was state capitalism. He and his political partner Raya Dunayevskaya took the latter position as the Johnston-Forest tendency.

It was during this time that the Johnston-Forest tendency reached the conclusion that as they felt there was no true socialist society existing anywhere in the world, they called for a return to Marxist philosophy. Their return to Hegel's philosophy as being the foundation of Marx's philosophy was largely due to Dunayevskaya, who was deeply immersed in both Marx's and Lenin's writings. Johnson-Forest remained in the Socialist Workers Party until 1950, exiting with the book co-authored by James and Dunayevskaya, State Capitalism and World Revolution. In the three years Johnson-Forest remained in the Socialist Workers Party, James also participated in party discussions on the American “Negro question” (as it was then called), arguing for support for separate struggles of blacks as having the potential to ignite the entire U.S. political situation, as they in fact did in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

He was a vibrant speaker, even in his final years suffering from Parkinsons. He spoke of Hegel and Lenin, with a passion and an approach that clarified complex ideas and arguments in a language that was clear and straight forward. Bereft of sloganeering or jargon. And he was always approachable after his speeches, to discuss his ideas.

I had read his Black Jacobin's which we carried at our Anarchist bookstore; Erewhon Books. Whenever I watch the movie Burn! I think of it as an excellent example of the lessons taught by CLR James in that book.

But to hear the perpetual Old Man speak was always a treat and a joy. I was young, he was a grandfather figure. Even in his last years, fighting the spasms, he spoke with a vibrancy of life fighting death, spirit fighting oppression. He was an inspiration.

His influence in the Caribbean cannot be underestimated even today. His influence on Marxism cannot either, for he gave birth to the New Left when he and his tendency split with Trotsky and Trotskyism.

CLR James was a 20th Century Renaissance man.

West Indian émigré, political organiser, Marxist theorist, historian, literary and cultural critic, novelist, playwright and short-story writer, teacher, cricketer, sports commentator. C.L.R. James’s life work covered a strikingly wide range of interests. All of these were tied together by James’s rigorous method and integrated political vision. In the obituary published in The New York Times on May 31, 1989, his third wife and former political collaborator, Selma James, wrote:

C.L.R. James was fundamentally a political person and his great contribution was to break away from the very narrow and white male concept of what Marxist politics was. He saw the world, literature, sports, politics and music as one totality, and saw political life as embodying all of those, which was very different from the politics he walked into in the middle of the 1930s, first in England and then in the United States.

The intellectual legacy of Cyril Lionel Robert James is complex and controversial. Best known as the author of The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, James also made significant contributions in the fields of sport criticism, Caribbean history, literary criticism, Pan African politics and Marxist theory. Though many academics and political activists have attempted to do so, it is impossible to isolate any one period of James' life as his true legacy. Many have lamented the lack of "a coherent sense of James' life as an integrated whole." James' political and literary activities extended over five decades and several countries - including Trinidad, Britain, the United States and Ghana. Such a long and extensive career easily lends itself to interpretative debate. Yet any accurate assessment of James' work must begin with his origins. Above all else, James was a quintessentially Caribbean writer. Like George Lamming, Jean Rhys and many others, James had to expatriate himself to reach an audience. His eclectic pursuits developed largely in response to his circumstances - to changing conditions in world politics and his personal situation

See:

Black History Month; P.B. Randolph

Black History Month; Paul Lafargue

Trotsky


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Carnival of Socialism 13

So, following from that drum roll, the topic for the 13th Carnival of Socialism is "Why is the left obsessed with the Middle East?". Deadline will be February 24th 2007. You therefore have a fortnight folks - contributions to Shiraz Socialist or by email to voltaire_reincarnate@lycos.com





See
Carnival of Socialism

Carnivals


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Valentines Day Challenge

Valentines Day is the most overt expression of heterosexuality in our culture. The assumption made is that your sweetie is a member of the opposite sex. All of the commercial cultural products are aimed with this assumption in mind.

So as I picked up my obligatory card and gifts for my sweetie, from me and the cats and dogs, hmm, I wondered; what about gay and lesbian couples?

I saw no cards for Mary and Alice or Adam and Steve. No his and his flowers or her and her chocolates. And then I came across this posting at Alternet;

We in the gay and lesbian community understand coming out, but I've found that coming out isn't easy for some heterosexual folks to understand. They still think, but WHY do you NEED to come out?

To answer that, I have a challenge for you: This Valentine's Day, don't indicate to anyone all day what the gender of your sweetie is. Evade. When people ask, "What are you doing this evening?" Say, "I'm having dinner with a someone special," or, "My partner and I are seeing a movie." Some people will assume that the person you reference is of the opposite sex. Some people may think you are in a same-sex relationship. How do you feel about that? How do you think gay and lesbian people feel?

Since I regularly use the term 'my partner' rather than wife, I understand the phenomena. Though in the labour movement and in other progressive circles this term is used more often than the term husband or wife so I am used to it being sexual orientation neutral, and being an acceptable practice.

I used partner long before it was socially acceptable, being an anarchist and coming as it does from the anarchist tradition of Free Love referring to ones lover as companiero, companion,comrade, or close friend, showing that we are partners not property of each other.

Mollie Steimer and Senya Fleshine
Anarchist activists who were in their 80’s at the time of these interviews (both are now deceased). Steimer, defendant in the celebrated “Abrams Case” (one of the most important civil liberties cases in US legal history, it was the first important prosecution under the 1918 Espionage Act. The Supreme Court upheld the convictions of Steimer and her comrades, Jacob Abrams, Samuel Lipman, Hyman Lachovsky, and Jacob Schwartz, for giving out leaflets protesting American intervention in Soviet Russia.). She was deported from the United States to the Soviet Union in 1921.

There, she met Senya Fleshine, then secretary to Emma Goldman (also an immigrant to the United States, he had not been deported to the Soviet Union, but had hurried back when the revolution broke out. He participated in the historic attack on the Winter Palace, and was acquainted with the Ukrainian anarchist general, Makhno.) . Steimer and Fleschine became “companieros”, and lived together for the next 60 years, although several times separated by war, revolution, and imprisonment. In 1923, they were both deported from the Soviet Union for their anarchist activities and protests against authoritarian rule. They lived in various places in Europe (mostly in Paris), until Nazism forced them to flee to Mexico in 1940, and where they stayed until the ends of their lives. Senya became a nationally-known photographer, assisted in his photographic studio by Mollie, under the name of “Semo” (orSenya-Mollie).





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Racist ADQ

The Reform Party of Quebec, aka the ADQ has revealed its racist roots. And with their encouragement the little town of Herouxville has met their challenge.

Mario Dumont is resorting to "demagoguery" when he says old-stock Quebecers are "on their knees" before minority groups, Premier Jean Charest said yesterday.

The premier was referring to an open letter by Dumont, leader of the right-of-centre Action democratique du Quebec. In it, he referred to Quebecers' "European stock" and "our values inspired firstly by our religious tradition."

The ADQ leader noted recent incidents involving minority groups, in which Quebecers "chose to put aside our common values" to satisfy minorities. He also criticized Charest for showing a lack of leadership and blaming "our old minority reflex, which persists despite the Quiet Revolution, Bill 101 and the success of Quebec Inc."

The premier said Dumont's view that Quebecers are always giving in to minorities is "a total, total fabrication."

Once again Quebec Nationalism, regardless of political ideology of its demagogues, reveals itself to be Pure Laine. Quebec does not need national sovereignty it needs working class sovereignty; socialism.

And the ADQ like its federal counterparts now running Ottawa appeals to the lowest common denominator, tax cuts, reduction in government services, privatization of the public sector, and anti-dual citizenship, aka anti-immigrant racism.

Ironically the ADQ's attitude is similar to the old Reform Party base out West which is not only anti-non-European-immigrant but also Anti-Francophone. Expressing the same beliefs that the ADQ does towards minorities, that is the Rest of Canada always gives in to Quebec.

See

Quebec

Not Your Usual Left Wing Rant

Reform Party


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Black History Month; Paul Lafargue

For Black History Month I will look at some of the historically obscure but influential black intellectuals of the 19th Century.

Today I feature Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son in law who was a Mulatto and faced racial discrimination as well as being subjected to antisemitism.

Paul Lafargue was born in Cuba in 1842. As he would later boast, he was an “international[ist] of blood before [he] was one of ideology.” By which he meant that of his four grandparents, only one was a Christian French citizen – one of his grandmothers was an Indian from Jamaica and one was a mulatto refugee from Haiti, and his maternal grandfather was a French Jew. He also liked to say that “the blood of three oppressed races runs in my veins” and when Daniel DeLeon asked him about his origins, he promptly replied, “I am proudest of my Negro extraction.”

Despite his family ties to Marx and his friendship and patronage by Engels we was no Marxist, he was a follower of Proudhon and an avowed anarchist/libertarian socialist.

He is known for his famous exhortation to the working class to struggle against work; The Right To Be Lazy (1883)

This would be the inspiration for the polemical proto-situationist text; The Right to Be Greedy and later Bob Blacks popular consumer version;The Abolition of Work

Lafargue's critique that workers under capitalism were no better off than slaves rings true even today. He applied the term wage-slave literally, and literarily. He exhorts workers to not to demand the right to work but to demand the right to leisure. Something capitalism of his time could not provide, though today it is all around us in modern consumer society of the G8 countries.

Capitalism, controlling the means of production and directing the social and political life of a century of science and industry, has become bankrupt. The capitalists have not even proved competent, like the owners of chattel slaves, to guarantee to their toilers the work to provide their miserable livelihood; capitalism massacred them when they dared demand the right to work -- a slave's right.

His tongue in cheek sarcasm and ridicule makes his writing humorous, accessible and pointed. In this case he points out that those who advocate for the morality of animal rights would do well to advocate for the ultimate pack horse of capitalism, the worker.

THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN

Capitalist Civilization has endowed the wage-worker with the metaphysical Rights of Man, but this is only to rivet him more closely and more firmly to his economic duty.

"I make you free," so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, "free to earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough strength left to gulp down pour soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the right to pay taxes.

Progress and Civilization may be hard on wage-working humanity but they have all a mother's tenderness for the animals which stupid bipeds call "lower."

Civilization has especially favored the equine race: it would be too great a task to go through the longs list of its benefactions; I will name but a few, of general notoriety, that I may awaken and inflame the passionate desires of the workers, now torpid in their misery.

Horses are divided into distinct classes. The equine aristocracy enjoys so many and so oppressive privileges, that if the human-faced brutes which serve them as jockeys, trainers, stable valets and grooms were not morally degraded to the point of not feeling their shame, they would have rebelled against their lords and masters, whom they rub down, groom, brush and comb, also making their beds, cleaning up their excrements and receiving bites and kicks by way of thanks.

Aristocratic horses, like capitalists, do not work; and when they exercise themselves in the fields they look disdainfully, with a contempt, upon the human animals which plow and seed the lands, mow and rake the meadows, to provide them with oats, clover, timothy and other succulent plants.

These four-footed favorites of Civilization command such social influence that they impose their wills upon the capitalists, their brothers in privilege; they force the loftiest of them to come with their beautiful ladies and take tea in the stables, inhaling the acrid perfumes of their solid and liquid evacuations. And when these lords consent to parade in public, they require from ten to twenty thousand men and women to stack themselves up on uncomfortable seats, under the broiling sun, to admire their exquisitely chiseled forms and their feats of running and leaping They respect none of the social dignities before which the votaries of the Rights of Man bow in reverence. At Chantilly not long ago one of the favorites for the grand prize launched a kick at the king of Belgium, because it did not like the looks of his head. His royal majesty, who adores horses, murmured an apology and withdrew.

It is fortunate that these horses, who can count more authentic ancestors than the houses of Orleans and Hohenzollern, have not been corrupted by their high social station; had they taken it into their heads to rival the capitalists in aesthetic pretentions, profligate luxury and depraved tastes, such as wearing- lace and diamonds, and drinking champagne and Chateau-Margaux, a blacker misery and more overwhelming drudgery would he impending over the class of wage-workers.

Thrice happy is it for proletarian humanity that these equine aristocrats have not taken the fancy of feeding upon human flesh, like the old Bengal tigers which rove around the villages of India to carry off women and children; if unhappily the horses had been man-eaters, the capitalists, who can refuse them nothing, would have built slaughter-houses for wage-workers, where they could carve out and dress boy sirloins, woman hams and girl roasts to satisfy their anthropophagic tastes.

The proletarian horses, not so well endowed, have to work for their peck of oats, but the capitalist class, through deference for the aristocrats of the equine race, concedes to the working horses rights that are far more solid and real than those inscribed in the "Rights of Man." The first of rights, the right to existence, which no civilized society will recognize for laborers, is possessed by horses.

The colt, even before his birth, while still in the fetus state, begins to enjoy the right to existence; his mother, when her pregnancy has scarcely begun, is discharged from all work and sent into the country to fashion the new being in peace and comfort; she remains near him to suckle him and teach him to choose the delicious grasses of the meadow, in which he gambols until he is grown.

The moralists and politicians of the "Rights of Man" think it would be monstrous to grant such rights to the laborers; I raised a tempest in the Chamber of Deputies when I asked that women, two months before and two months after confinement, should have the right and the means to absent themselves from the factory. My proposition upset the ethics of civilization and shook the capitalist order. What an abominable abomination -- to demand for babies the rights of colts.

As for the young proletarians, they can scarcely trot on their little toes before they are condemned to hard labor in the prisons of capitalism, while the colts develop freely under kindly Nature; care is taken that they be completely formed before they are set to work. and their tasks are proportioned to their strength with a tender care.

This care on the part of the capitalists follows them all through their lives. We may still recall the noble indignation of the bourgeois press when it learned that the omnibus company was using peat and tannery waste in its stalls as a substitute for straw: to think of the unhappy horses having such poor litters! The more delicate souls of the bourgeoisie have in every capitalist country organized societies for the protection of animals, in order to prove that they can not be excited by the fate of the small victims of industry. Schopenhauer, the bourgeois philosopher, in whom was incarnated so perfectly the gross egoism of the philistine, could not hear the cracking of a whip without his heart being torn by it.

This same omnibus company, which works its laborers from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, requires from its dear horses only five to seven hours. It has bought green meadows in which they may recuperate from fatigue or indisposition. Its policy is to expend more for the entertainment of a quadrupled than for paying the wages of a biped. It has never occurred to any legislator nor to any fanatical advocate of the "Rights of Man" to reduce the horse's daily pittance in order to assure him a retreat that would be of service to him only after his death.

The Rights of Horses have not been posted up; they are "unwritten rights," as Socrates called the laws implanted by Nature in the consciousness of all men.

The horse has shown his wisdom in contenting himself with these rights, with no thought of demanding those of the citizen; he has judged that he would have been as stupid as man if he had sacrificed his mess of lentils for the metaphysical banquet of Rights to Revolt, to Equality, to Liberty, and other trivialities which to the proletariat are about as useful as a cautery on a wooden leg.

Civilization, though partial to the equine race, has not shown herself indifferent to the fate of the other animals. Sheep, like canons, pass their days in pleasant and plentiful idleness; they are fed in the stable on barley, lucerne, rutabagas and other roots, raised by wage-workers; shepherds conduct them to feed in fat pastures, and when the sun parches the plain, they are carried to where they can browse on the tender grass of the mountains.

The Church, which has burned her heretics, and regrets that she can not again bring up her faithful sons in the love of "mutton," represents Jesus, under the form of a kind shepherd, bearing upon his shoulders a weary lamb.

True, the love for the ram and the ewe is in the last analysis only the love for the leg of mutton and the cutlet, just as the Liberty of the Rights of Man is nothing but the slavery of the wage-worker, since our jesuitical Civilization always disguises capitalist exploitation in eternal principles and bourgeois egoism in noble sentiments; yet at least the bourgeois tends and fattens the sheep up to the day of the sacrifice, while he seizes the laborer still warm from the workshop and lean from toil to send him to the shambels of Tonquin or Madagascar.

Laborers of all crafts, you who toil so hard to create your poverty in producing the wealth of the capitalists, arise, arise! Since the buffoons of parliament unfurl the Rights of Man, do you boldly demand for yourselves, your wives and your children the Rights of the Horse.

Also See:

Black Herstory Month: Lucy Parsons




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