HERE IS ANOTHER BLOG THAT PUBLISHED A CRITIQUE OF THE MYTH THAT PRUSSIAN STATE SOCIALISM IS SOCIALISM 

REAL SOCIALISM COMES FROM BELOW 

IT IS CALLED  STATELESS SOCIALISM AS I DISCUSS HERE 

I THOUGHT I WOULD SHAMELESSLY STEAL 

AND REPRINT THIS SINCE THE BLOG IS NO 

LONGER PUBLISHING UNFORTUNATELY

Socialism- the s-word…

Just a thought…

I really wish I could be either enthused or appalled by the fact that Ed Miliband is now leader of the Labour Party. I know the ultra-Blairites, with their fellow travellers in the BBC and on the Murdoch Death Star, who rallied around his brother David as the next best thing to The World’s Favourite Money Grabbing War Monger, are shocked that their cunning plan failed (‘if it hadn’t been for you meddlin’ trade unions…’) Best make the best of a bad job chaps… and go and join the Conservative Party- Education Secretary Michael Gove for one seems pretty keen on embracing the Blair Legacy.

Anyway, ‘Red Ed’? Do me a favour! You may have heard the comment that his father Ralph Miliband claimed that socialism could not come through Parliamentary means and his two sons have gone around proving it in practice. Only in a country where most mainstream politicians are in such awe of a handful of  mindlessly Thatcherite newspapers with declining circulations could someone like Ed Miliband be called a ‘Red’.  It is a bit like Business Secretary Vince ‘privatise the Post Office’ Cable being called a ‘Marxist’ for criticising the City of  London. If there is any sort of ‘Marxist’ class war in this country it is the City of London and its patsies in the mainstream media and the main political parties  against the rest of us…

Now if Vince had walked  around the Square Mile with this placard…

Anyway, socialism is a real political swear word isn’t it? Sometimes I try and think if anything has not been tagged with the ‘s-word’ at some point. I realise that for a lot of people, ‘socialism’ is any form of state intervention in the economy. Sometimes this is expanded to include any state intervention in wider social life or state interventions abroad. I then wonder how it got to this. After all, most of the original socialists were often extremely anti-state…

Every couple of years or so I seem to repost this blogpost written in 2006 by Larry Gambone, a Canadian evolutionary anarchist who now lives in Nanaimo (that’s right isn’t it, Larry?), largely as a quick refresher for those who automatically think socialism = the state:

The Myth Of Socialism As Statism [May 6th 2006]

What did the original socialists envision to be the owner and controller of the economy? Did they think it ought to be the state? Did they favor nationalization? Or did they want something else entirely? Let’s have a look, going right back to the late 18th Century, through the 19th and into the 20th, and see what important socialists and socialist organizations thought.

*Thomas Spence – farm land and industry owned by join stock companies, all farmers and workers as voting shareholders.
* St. Simon – a system of voluntary corporations
* Ricardian Socialists – worker coops
* Owen – industrial coops and cooperative intentional communities
* Fourier – the Phlanistery – an intentional community
* Cabet – industry owned by the municipality (‘commune’ in French, hence commune-ism)
* Flora Tristan – worker coops
* Proudhon – worker coops financed by Peoples Bank – a kind of credit union that issued money.
* Greene – mutualist banking system allowing farmers and workers to own means of production.
* Lasalle – worker coops financed by the state – for which he was excoriated by Marx as a ‘state socialist’
* Marx – a ‘national system of cooperative production’

Would that sound better on ‘The Apprentice’ or ‘The Dragon’s Den’, Karl?

* Tucker – mutualist banking system allowing farmers and workers to own means of production.
* Dietzgen – cooperative production
* Knights of Labor – worker coops
* Parsons – workers ownership and control of production
* Vanderveldt – socialist society as a ‘giant cooperative’
* Socialist Labor Party – industry owned and run democratically through the Socialist Industrial Unions
* Socialist Party USA – until late 1920’s emphasized workers control of production.
* CGT France, 1919 Program – mixed economy with large industry owned by stakeholder coops.
* IWW – democratically run through the industrial unions.
* Socialist Party of Canada, Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1904-05 program – common ownership, democratically run – both parties, to this very day, bitterly opposed to nationalization.
* SDP – Erfurt Program 1892 – Minimum program includes a mixed economy of state, cooperative and municipal industries. While often considered a state socialist document, in reality it does not give predominance to state ownership.

Well? Where’s the statism? All these socialisms have one thing in common, a desire to create an economy where everyone has a share and a say.

Why The Confusion

The state did play a role in the Marxist parties of the Second International. But its role was not to nationalize industry and create a vast bureaucratic state socialist economy. Put simply, the workers parties were to be elected to the national government, and backed by the trade unions, cooperative movement and other popular organizations, would expropriate the big capitalist enterprises. Three things would then happen:

1. The expropriated enterprises handed over to the workers organizations, coops and municipalities.

2.The army and police disbanded and replaced by worker and municipal militias.

3. Political power decentralized to the cantonal and municipal level and direct democracy and federalism introduced.

These three aspects are the famous ‘withering away of the state’ that Marx and Engels talked about.

The first problem with this scenario was that the workers parties never got a majority in parliament. So they began to water-down their program and adopt a lot of the statist reformism of the liberal reformers. Due to the Iron Law of Oligarchy the parties themselves became sclerotic and conservative. Then WW1 intervened, splitting the workers parties into hostile factions. Finally, under the baleful influence of the Fabians, the Bolsheviks and the ‘success’ of state capitalism in the belligerent nations, the definition of socialism began to change from one of democratic and worker ownership and control to nationalization and statism. The new post-war social democracy began to pretend that state ownership/control was economic democracy since the state was democratic. This, as we see from the list above, was not anything like the economic democracy envisaged by the previous generations of socialists and labor militants.

So there are ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ forms of socialism. I definitely identify with the latter type, while the former attracts the power hungry ‘socialist’, whatever his or her professed stripe (notice how many erstwhile ‘Bennites’ in the Labour Party thirty years ago became evangelicals for ‘Blairism’?). ‘Top-down’ socialists who identify with the Big State are a bit like ‘free marketeers’ who excuse Big Business rather than support independent trades people and the self-employed because, to use Kevin Carson’s mocking phrase, ‘Them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get.’ (Kevin A. Carson Studies in Mutualist Politcal Economyi, p.116)

Of course, to talk about a Non-Statist or Libertarian form of  Socialism throws a lot of people. Well, here another phrase to throw about: ‘market collectivism.’ That is:

‘a community of producer cooperatives. Each cooperative is owned and run by the workers themselves. Their products are sold on a market. They purchase the required raw materials themselves. There is little or no central planning….a market collectivist society is not capitalist because….workers are self-managed; they do not work under the direct or indirect control of a capitalist. In addition the workers (collectively) own the product of their labour, which they bring to the market for sale.’ Geoff Hodgson The Democratic Economy, p.177.

The nearest to a ‘market collectivist’ economy any of us have seen is Yugoslavia under Tito. Now that eventually collapsed in the wars of the 1990s but how much did market collectivism have to do with it? I suspect the lack of political freedom and the plunging of the whole country into deep debt during the 1970s and 1980s had a much more profound effect in bringing about the death of Yugoslavia.

The main theorist of market collectivism is Jaroslav Vanek. An interview with him from the early 1990s, in which he says why it has been hard for co-operatives to take off in the West, can be found here.

So what is a pore ole Market Collectivist to do? I cannot think of a British political party that is opposed to co-operatives per se. However, are any of them likely to say in the foreseeable future that co-operatives should be the dominant enterprise model for the economy? I doubt it. Even the Co-operative Party is hobbled by its links to the Labour Party. Perhaps one should just keep plugging away and things will change.  It is worth noting that the economic situation in recent years seems to have encouraged the growth of co-operatives in the US. This ‘bottom-up socialism’  is definitely better than the top-down ‘War Socialism’ which is encouraged by the Republican Party in the US:

The U.S. economy increasingly resembles the dual economy of the Soviet Union, with an overfunded military sector and a chronically weak, dysfunctional civilian sector. Like the Soviet Union in its decline, we are bogged down in an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan. The Soviet system was supported to the end, however, by Soviet military and intelligence personnel and defense factory workers and managers. Their equivalents exist in America. Conservatives are not being irrational, when they ignore the civilian economy while fostering the military economy that provides orders and jobs to many of their constituents. Theirs is the logic of Soviet-style conservatism.

‘Watch what we say, not what we do,’ Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell famously remarked. Out of power, the Republican Party preaches Ron Paul-style libertarianism. In power, the party practices Martin Feldstein-style military Keynesianism and military socialism — and Hank Paulson-style financial sector Keynesianism and socialism.

Anyway, I’ll leave it there. I do not expect to quickly change the minds of those who think socialism must always = the state, but I’ll give it a go!

Update: Suzanne Moore goes down memory lane with Da Brudders:

I have vague recollections of the Milibands thousands of years ago when I worked at Marxism Today. There were many young men around who made the tran­sition from Communist Party backgrounds to New Labour without much trouble. It ­simply required a degree of faith and opportunism.

There is still to be a good book written on how a load of erstwhile self-proclaimed ‘Marxists’ (whether from a Communist or Trotskyite background) and/or ‘Hard Left’ activists (Freud would have a field day) ended up supporting the largely pro-City of London/Big Business agenda of New Labour. They took on different ideals and goals but used the similar methods to achieve them. Discuss.

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TAGS: BENJAMIN TUCKER, DEMOCRATIC ECONOMY, GEOFF HODGSON, JAROSLAV VANEK, JUMP YOU FUCKERS, KARL MARX, KEVIN CARSON, LARRY GAMBONE, MARKET COLLECTIVISM, MUTUALISM, PETER WILBY, PROUDHON, ROBERT OWEN, RON PAUL, SOCIALISM, STUDIES IN MUTUALIST POLITICAL ECONOMY, SUZANNE MOORE, TITO, US WAR SOCIALISM, VINCE CABLE, WORK LESS PARTY, WORKERS' CO-OPERATIVES, WORKERS' SELF-MANAGEMENT

Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Christopher Hitchens, 4 June 1998

BACK WHEN CHRIS HITCHENS WAS A 'FORMER' TROTSKYIST NOT HIS LATER INEVITABLE DECLINE INTO NEOLIBERALISM, THAT BASTARD CHILD OF ANTI STALINIST TROTSKYISM 

Vol. 20 No. 11 · 4 June 1998

Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square

Christopher Hitchens

1968: Marching in the Streets 

by Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins.

Bloomsbury, 224 pp., £20, May 1998, 0 7475 3763 1

The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968 

by Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn.

Verso, 175 pp., £10, May 1998, 1 85984 290 9

The Love Germ 

by Jill Neville.

Verso, 149 pp., £9, May 1998, 1 85984 285 2

I was just beginning to write about 1968 when I learned of the death in New Orleans of Ron Ridenhour, the GI who exposed the massacre at My Lai. He was only 52, which means that he was in his early twenties when, as a helicopter gunner in area, he learned of the murder of nearly 660 Vietnamese civilians. This was not some panicky ‘collateral damage’ fire-fight: the men of Charlie Company took a long time to dishonour and dismember the women, round up and despatch the children and make the rest of the villagers lie down in ditches while they walked up and down shooting them. Not one of the allegedly ‘searing’ films about the war – not Apocalypse Now, not Full Metal Jacket or Platoon – has dared to show anything remotely like the truth of this and many other similar episodes, more evocative of Poland or the Ukraine in 1941. And the thing of it was, as Ron pointed out, that it was ‘an act of policy, not an individual aberration. Above My Lai that day were helicopters filled with the entire command staff of the brigade, division and task force.’

A few weeks ago, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, the state finally got round to recognising the only physical hero of the story, a decent guy named Hugh Thompson who saw what was going on, landed his helicopter between Lieutenant Calley’s killing-squads and the remnant of the inhabitants, called for back-up and drew his sidearm. His citation had taken thirty years to come through. It was intended as part of the famous ‘healing process’ which never seems quite to achieve ‘closure’.

Ron wasn’t interested in any stupid healing process. He wanted justice to be done, and it never was. A single especially befouled culprit, the above-mentioned Calley, was eventually court-martialled and served a brief period of house-arrest before being exonerated by Nixon. The superiors, both immediate and remote, got clean away. A canny young military lawyer near the scene, Colin Powell by name, founded a lifelong reputation for promise and initiative by arranging to have the papers mixed up at the office of the Judge-Advocate General.

I once asked Ron Ridenhour what had led him to risk everything by compiling his own report on the extermination at My Lai and sending it to Congress. He told me that, poor white boy as he was (he left school at 14 and was drafted without protest), he had been in basic training when, in the hut one night, a group of good ol’ boys had decided to have some fun with the only black soldier in the detail. The scheme was to castrate him. Nobody was more astonished than Ron to hear his own voice coming across the darkened bunks. ‘“If you want to get to him, you’ve got to come through me.” I’d’ve been dead if I hadn’t been white and poor like them, but they gave up.’ Later, when his troopship called in at Hawaii en route for Saigon, he went ashore and bought a book about Vietnam by the late Bernard Fall. ‘Shit, this is what I’m getting into.’

A revolutionary moment requires both extraordinary times and extraordinary people, and Ron Ridenhour, despite his laconic attitude, was one of the latter. He wouldn’t have denied, however, that there was ‘something in the air’ in those days. It was getting to the point where you couldn’t shove black people around so easily, or invade any country that took your fancy. There were people who wouldn’t take it, and even people in the press and in the academy who were prepared to make an issue of that. (Though this can be overestimated: it took more than a year for the My Lai story to get into print – in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.) Nonetheless, the climacteric that was 1968 had been building for some time. What fused it into critical mass, and provided its most indelible slogans and imagery, was undoubtedly the correspondence between the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, both of them American and both of them therefore, in a time when ‘global village’ was a new cliché, universal in scope and appeal and reach.

Something has to be done to rescue that time from the obfuscations that have descended over it and to fend off the sneers and jeers that now attach so easily. Some people, of course, take a kind of pleasure in repudiating their own past. Some, whether they wish to or not, live long enough to become negations or caricatures. Or indeed partial confirmations: I am thinking of Lionel Jospin, now chief minister of France and in those days a member of an unusually dogmatic trotskiant group; a groupuscule, indeed, and perhaps an excellent school for the inflexible later canons of neo-liberalism. Robert Lowell once said that he was glad not to have been a revolutionary when young, because it prevented him from becoming a reactionary bore in his old age. I see the point: the fact remains that in midlife and in 1968 he acted eloquently and well, as a citizen of the republic of Emerson and Whitman should when the state is intoxicated with injustice and war. ‘Retrospectives’ which emphasise flowers, beads, dope and simplistic anarchism tend to leave him out, as they also omit the Ron Ridenhours.

I didn’t really lift a finger to stop the colonial bloodbath in Vietnam which was, let it never be forgotten, prosecuted by liberal Democrats and robotically supported by an Old Labour Government. I did give some blood for the Vietcong, at a Blackfriars monastery which had been swept into enthusiasm by the mood of the time. (‘Brother, your blood group is a rare AB. Do you think you might possibly make it two pints?’ ‘No.’) I invited Eduardo Mondlane, the soon-to-be assassinated leader of the rebels in Mozambique, to my rooms, and helped organise a public meeting where he hailed the Vietnamese revolution for presaging the defeat of Salazarism in both Africa and Portugal, which indeed it did. I undertook a little work in helping American draft resisters in Oxford, thereby earning my first but not last file held by creepy people nobody had voted for. I went out with the brush and the poster-paint. And I took part in a good-sized punch-up outside the American Embassy in London, thus disproving (as a pamphlet of the time pointed out) Lady Bracknell’s piercing words in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.’

The My Lai massacre had taken place the day before: we weren’t to know that but it did seem very important to us that, half a world away, the Vietnamese might get to hear about this riot and somehow, I don’t know, take heart. Mike Rosen, who was arrested and roughed up along with one or two other people who might be embarrassed if I printed their names today, wrote a rather fine agitprop poem making this simple point. It was a beautiful spring day and as one looked up from the big, heaving, horse-battered, clod-throwing tussle around the Roosevelt memorial one could see the reflection of binoculars and spyglasses as various members of the ruling class, foregathered on the roofs of North Audley Street, strove to catch the mood of the nation’s supposedly insurgent youth. The editor of the Daily Telegraph the next morning published some sort of ‘I was there’ piece in which he got all the slogans wrong, perhaps from listening through an ear-trumpet. One of the fun things that year was to monitor the hopeless efforts of a rattled establishment to ‘keep up’. At Oxford the authorities had a solemn discussion about covering the medieval cobbles with tarmac, lest there be a nuit des barricades, and in the PPE examination papers an anxious and ‘with-it’ question asked for elucidation of the sage ‘Herbert Maracuse’. That was good for a chuckle. But it wasn’t all doddering and quavering: Home Secretary Callaghan, that red-faced beadle, knew his stern duty. All the Fleet Street rags, the day after Grosvenor Square, printed a leering pic of a girl demonstrator in the grip of several stout bobbies, her skirt round her waist while one especially beefy constable administered a spanking. (For all I know, this is one of the many triggers that may have set Paul Johnson off.)

Tariq Ali was the moving spirit of that rally and this book – which includes the spanking picture – brings it all back with exquisite vividness. It’s hard to recall what a hate-figure he was in those days. I had a friend, a moustachioed Parsee Marxist named Jairus Banaji, who was forever getting picked up and smacked around by the forces of law and order just for the sake of appearances, as you might say. But then, 1968 was also the year when, also to the gloat and awe and wonder of the Tory press, London dockers marched to Westminster in support of Enoch Powell. Seeing the Kenyan High Commissioner entering the precincts of Parliament, they bellowed ‘Go back to Jamaica’ and were much admired in the suburbs for their John Bull spirit. The Communist Party, which was strong on the docks in those times and had the famous Jack Dash as its hate-figure, took the day off and later tried to organise a conciliatory East End meeting addressed by the concerned priesthood. But this is to get ahead of the story somewhat.

Like most such ‘years’, 1968 began a few months early. Premonitory rumbles, in my memory, include the American-inspired military coup in Greece on 21 April 1967, which seemed to challenge the endlessly reiterated notion of reliable ideological ‘convergence’ between Western European political forces (and also allowed us a second look at the ‘defensive posture’ of Nato). One would have to add the hunting down, by CIA men and the agents of a brutal dictatorship, of Che Guevara in Bolivia in October 1967, in which the local Communist Party also played a complaisant part. And, in quite another key, I recall the death at about that time of Isaac Deutscher, who had done so much in the early years of the teach-in movement to remind the young that ‘the end of ideology’ was itself an ideological construct, and that there still existed factors such as class and power. (When he spoke at the main event in Berkeley, the Communists tried to keep his appearance until last and then cut off the microphone.)

There’s a kaleidoscopic feel to the pages of the Ali-Watkins volume. Turn the pages in a hurry and you go from the Tet offensive in Vietnam to the strikes in Poland to the murder of Dr King and the ghetto insurrection, getting no time to take breath for les évènements in France and the shooting of Robert Kennedy. Then comes the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the drama in the streets at the Chicago Democratic Convention, the butchery at the Mexico Olympics and the brave (now seemingly almost quixotic) We Shall Overcome moments of the first citizens’ movement in Ulster. Some of these produced imperishable vignettes: microcosmic glimpses that were better recollected in tranquillity. I remember Terry Barrett, a Tilbury docker, giving a brilliant rasping reply to the racists from a May Day platform, and the workers at the Berliet plant outside Paris rearranging the letters of their company logo to read Liberté, and Mayor Daley being lip-read by the cameras as he shouted across the Convention floor at the composed, dignified figure of Senator Abraham Ribicoff: ‘Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch. Fuck you. Go home.’ I also remember Dr Frantisek Kriegel, the only member of the Czechoslovak leadership who refused to sign the humiliating post-invasion document. He was a veteran of the International Brigades, the Chinese revolution and the wartime resistance, and is often left out of the record (including, though not for this reason, of the Ali-Watkins book) because he put the signers to shame and also because he was attempting to save the honour of socialism.

Not entirely with hindsight, one can now identify the significance of 1968 as being perhaps the critical year in that Death of Communism that is now such a commonplace. Some of my best friends in those days, as well as some of my worst enemies, were members of the Communist Party. It was very striking to be able to observe, in both cases, to what a huge extent a year of crisis and opportunity exposed them to awkwardness, put them on the defensive, found them stammering and unprepared. Their international fraternity of parties had become so contorted and congested by past lies and compromises and reversals that they yearned mainly for a quiet life. Thus: the spring developments in Prague could not be accepted in their entirety even by the reform supporters, because they contained a frontal challenge to ‘the leading role of the Party’. But the prospect of a Warsaw Pact fraternal intervention would compromise at one stroke the careful edifice of peace campaigns and ‘broad fronts’ through which the Party had ingratiatingly tried, with some success, to keep in with the Labour Left and the trade-union apparat. I used to read the Morning Star (which had changed its name from the Daily Worker to become, as one comrade put it, a version of the Daily Employee) attentively. The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign was denounced, because the Soviet Union ostensibly put its faith in the good offices of U Thant. Enoch Powell was to be challenged by a bureaucratic fiat: prosecution under the incitement clause of the Race Relations Act. The Jew-baiting of the Polish authorities in the ‘anti-Zionist’ purge in Warsaw in March 1968 was to be discussed only in a whisper. Most revealing of all, the stony and mediocre nomenklatura of the French Communist Party (those ‘crapules Staliniennes’, as Daniel Cohn-Bendit invigoratingly termed them) exerted their entire negative weight in order to abort the anti-Gaullist upheaval in France. We know now what we knew then: the Soviet Union had given the PCF a direct instruction to become ‘the party of order’. In a recent edition of the Paris magazine L’Événement du Jeudi, one can read the testimony of Yuri Dobrynin, former fixer at the Soviet Embassy in Paris, who recalls in round terms: ‘La ligne dictée par Moscou était précise: pas toucher à de Gaulle.’ Thus, when the General returned in mid-rebellion from a fraternal visit to Ceausescu’s Romania, and disappeared to Germany to consult with his military caste and agreed to release the Algerian war-criminals, Raoul Salan and Jacques Soustelle as part of the deal, he had a porte-parole from the Kremlin in his pocket. The Fifth Republic with its cynical and fluctuating anti-Americanism didn’t have long to run in fact, but George Marchais and Jacques Duclos and the others weren’t to know that, any more than they did when they became the ‘party of order’ once more and supported the ‘normalisation’ of Czechoslovakia a few months later. Somewhere between those two moments, the remaining breath fled the body of monolithic Communism, which continued to decompose steadily in ways that some soixante-huitards found relatively easy to follow. (I was to have arguments with truly believing Communists only once more, among certain American pro-Sandinistas in the late Eighties, but by then it was like dealing with the squeaks emitted long ago from a dead planet. The real laugh came when dealing with the neo-conservatives who needed the illusion of an unsleeping and keenly ideological foe.)

Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn’s book The Beginning of the End, which I read when it first came out, is more interesting now than it was then. It’s rather sporting of the current Nairn to allow it to be reprinted. At the time, it seemed to those of us in the old International Socialists – who dismissed it scornfully as ‘a long poem’ – to be the sentimentalisation of a romantic moment; an almost hedonistic celebration of youth culture and spontaneity. (At the expense, naturally, of the sterner and more demanding task of educating and equipping the working classes to see through the illusions of Stalinism and social democracy, which I must say I still jolly well wish they had done.) There is an interesting change in the text, however. I am certain, without checking, that the original paperback had on its title page one of those mini-feuilletons which Robert Escarpit used to contribute, box-sized, on the front page of Le Monde. On this exciting occasion, slightly borrowing from the imagery of the old spectre and the old mole, he had imagined the think-tank and dividend-drawing classes discussing the new and virulent infection; inquiring above all whether it might spread.

The book would obviously be more stale and depressing if this spirited but ephemeral contemporaneous thought had been left in. As it is, one winces to scan the Nairn-Quattrocchi ‘Afterword’, the last two paragraphs of which read:

Paradoxically, real inevitability has emerged only after the material century of its triumph, in the final product of its machines: the new society alive within it, invisible yesterday, visible everywhere today, the young negation of its nature.

The anarchism of 1871 looked backwards to a pre-capitalist past, doomed to defeat; the anarchism of 1968 looks forward to the future society almost within our grasp, certain of success.

Well no, actually, I don’t think so. Although it is true that a certain esprit de soixante-huit survived the year of its birth, and had its final – and not least honourable – moments during the May days in Lisbon after the fall of fascism in 1974, there is no red thread of Ariadne, to paraphrase Clara Zetkin on Rosa Luxemburg, to be followed between the Sorbonne commune and the digital and cybernetic age. We are left to contemplate mainly the ironies of history – Deutscher’s preferred trope – and the subtle, ironic, even surreptitious influences of language. Jill Neville’s rough little diamond of a novel is a case in point. (It’s as bitter to think of her early death as it is of Ron Ridenhour’s.) As the mistress of the above Angelo Quattrocchi in the Latin Quarter in 1968, this tough and beautiful and brave woman was well-placed to record the festival of the oppressed, with all its accompaniment of erotic and imaginative charge. She was also in a good/bad position to observe the way that male militants treated the girls’ auxiliary, and thus to prefigure the imminent revival of feminism, which essentially began that year for those reasons. By an amazing chance, she chose the metaphor of sexually-transmitted disease as the bonding element in a narrative of interpenetration. Her book reads more strongly now than that of her ex-lover, precisely because it subliminally knows that there may be a price to be paid for hedonism and narcissism. Jill did not for an instant echo those sadistic authorities of the restored moral order, who said (and say) that Aids was God’s verdict. But she knew that there was more to politics, and to love, than doing your own thing.

So, in a very different way, did W.H. Auden who, a few days after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, wrote a short poem entitled ‘August 1968’:

The Ogre does what ogres can

Deeds quite impossible for Man,

But one prize is beyond his reach,

The Ogre cannot master Speech:

About a subjugated plain,

Among its desperate and slain,

The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,

While drivel gushes from his lips.

The term ‘Velvet Revolution’, used to describe the humbling of secular power in Prague in 1989, may sound as vague and feel-good as the mantra of any ‘human be-in’ from the Bay Area rag-tags of the Summer of Love. But it conceals, within its irritating geniality and inclusiveness, the signal and salient fact that satirists and poets and subversive wordsmiths had simply, bloodlessly worn down the monster of what Ernst Fischer called Panzercommunismus. Auden was more audaciously prescient than he’d realised. The dank, gruesome regime of the langue de bois, of peace-loving forces and progressive elements and internal affairs, gave way before wit and music and understatement – just as if Allen Ginsberg had fulfilled his dream of levitating the Pentagon. To the extent that 68 metamorphosed into 89, then, it carried its point. But no date will ever mark history’s high tide.

In a work-camp of enthusiasts which I attended in Cuba that summer, where the ideological level was not as low as some of you may think, there was a sort of dress-rehearsal when the Warsaw Pact went grinding into Czechoslovakia. All the conventional arguments, about great-power tyranny and the ‘socialist camp’, or about self-determination v. ‘giving ammunition to the enemy’, were gone over as a matter of course. Somewhere in there, but waiting for an idiom in which to be unambivalently uttered, was an expression, or affirmation, of human and civil rights as a good thing in themselves. Easy enough, you say, and of course I’m with you all the way, but neither side in the Cold War had proved, or ever proved, capable of stating such a principle in practice. ‘Double standards’ can waste an awful lot of time. Anyway, I found the exact phrase for it when I met Adam Michnik, one of the Polish sixty-eighters, a few years later. ‘After all, like socialism, the words freedom and democracy have been discredited by governments and parties. But we do not abandon them for this reason. The real struggle, for us, is for citizens to cease being the property of the state.’

Good man, I thought at the time, having then no idea that Michnik would easily outlive Stalinism and go on to be the leading Polish critic of clerical fascism, brute nationalism and all the other mental rubbish of post-1989. Now let’s see if we can’t stop citizens being anybody’s property, or anyone’s disposable resource, or nuclear statistic. In order for that to occur, as William Morris put it in The Dream of John Ball, people will have to cogitate how it comes that they so often fight for something and lose, or think they have won, only to get another thing, and leave to others the task of fighting for the same thing under another name.

GOP MISOGYNISTS
Here are the 5 senators who voted against giving workers break time to pump breast milk

Madison Hall
Fri, December 23, 2022 

Mother pumped milk from both boobs into Automatic breast pump machine.Blandscape/Getty Images

Five senators voted against expanding protections for breastfeeding workers.

The senators are Sens. Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, Pat Toomey, Mike Lee, and John Cornyn.

The PUMP Act will now be included in the federal Omnibus bill, which the president is expected to sign.

In a display of bipartisanship, the Senate voted 92-5 in adding an amendment to the federal Omnibus bill that guarantees people breastfeeding the space and time to express milk at work. Five senators, however, each male and Republican, voted against the amendment on Thursday:

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky


Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin


Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania


Sen. Mike Lee of Utah


Sen. John Cornyn of Texas


The Providing Urgent Maternal Protections (PUMP) for Nursing Mothers Act was sponsored by Sens. Jeff Merkley and Lisa Murkowski, a Democrat and a Republican. The bill expands upon a 2010 law that was passed by Merkley and Rep. Carolyn Maloney which guarantees time and space for hourly workers to breastfeed.

In online statements on Thursday, Merkley and Murkowski celebrated the passage of the PUMP Act.

"I am encouraged to see the PUMP Act pass the Senate—good progress toward ensuring no mother ever has to choose between a job and nursing her child," Murkowski said.

"We must make it possible for every new mom returning to the workplace to have the option to continue breastfeeding. That option is also really good for business," Merkley added. "With this bill, parents will be empowered to make their own choices on breastfeeding, and businesses can improve retention of valuable employees. It's a win-win-win."

Merkley and Murkowski initially tried to get the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act voted on as a standalone bill on Tuesday, but the attempt was blocked by Paul. According to Jezebel, the senator blocked a vote on the bill for not including an amendment that he wanted.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Republican of Wyoming, also blocked the bill in August, noting that it could upset the supply chain as the transportation industry may not be able to provide reasonable accommodations for breastfeeding workers.

What A Rush

Rush Limbaugh the self appointed voice of the Conservative right is a drug addled failure. His attacks on McCain and their failure to influence Republican voters shows that this pill popping loser has no credibility. He and other conservative mouthpieces like Ann Coulter and Foxy Sean Hannity have bewailed against McCain and Huckabee and even Ron Paul. For them it is the brylcreme slick huckster and flip flopper Mitt Romney that reflects their values. Luckily for the Republican party the base is divorcing itself from its self appointed 'values' based leadership.

But nailing the nomination is starting to look like the easy part of the task facing McCain over the next 10 months.

The closer he gets to securing the Republican candidacy, the louder the protests from the right of the party denouncing him as a traitor to the true cause of Ronald Reagan conservatism.

Rush Limbaugh, the radio talk show host who has emerged as McCain-basher in chief, was back on the offensive within hours of the polls closing on Super Tuesday. Through his website and his radio broadcasts to 612 stations across the US, he lambasted the senator for Arizona for his allegedly anti-conservative positions on a raft of issues from immigration to tax cuts, and hinted that he might consider voting for the Democratic candidate in November.

"I'll just tell you, there's far more apathy or anger out there than the Republican establishment knows. One question I asked myself: if, if, if, if down the road you think that the election of Obama, Hillary, or McCain is going to result in very bad things happening to the country, who would you rather get the blame for it?"

The conservative talk-radio assault on John McCain and Mike Huckabee has backfired in a big way.

Supporters of Huckabee are so angry that they have launched a “Send it Back” campaign, asking people who have copies of books by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to send them back to their authors. They’re angry that Limbaugh and Hannity were trashing Huckabee on the air. Limbaugh and Hannity were joined by Laura Ingraham in trying to rally their listeners around Mitt Romney. The ploy failed. Romney won in seven contests on Super Tuesday but failed to win either California, where he expected to win, or any Southern state.

The “Send it Back” campaign also applies to Ann Coulter, who attacked Huckabee as the “Republican Jimmy Carter.” Coulter, who has achieved notoriety for making personal attacks and writing books blasting Democrats, also said that McCain was so unacceptable that she would vote and campaign for Hillary Clinton if the Arizona senator was the Republican presidential nominee.

Ironically Limbaugh is using traditional right wing rhetoric to attack McCain, the old Nazi stabbed in the back accusation.

Suggesting he has come under intense pressure to get on board and back McCain, radio personality Rush Limbaugh held his ground Monday, saying on his program: "John McCain has stabbed his own party in the back I can't tell you how many times. He stabbed his own president in the back on legislation a number of times. He doesn't support his party or his president when the chips are down."

The stab in the back first gained currency in Germany, as a means of explaining the nation's stunning defeat in World War I. It was Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg himself, the leading German hero of the war, who told the National Assembly, "As an English general has very truly said, the German army was 'stabbed in the back.'"

Truly a drug addled brain at work here. Not unlike Goering, whom Rush bears a striking resemblance to ideologically as well as physically.






Tags
presidential elections 2008,
Ann Coulter, right wing, republicans, Rush Limbaugh, Mike Huckabee, John McCain,
Fox News

Nightmare #3: A Disturbing Turn in Right-Wing Thought

“What if, instead of free healthcare and a guaranteed income, we just let the virus run rampant and kill a lot of people?”



It is strange to think about the disease from where I am sitting, because outside the window everything looks relatively normal. I am still in a quiet residential neighborhood, in an empty vacation house, quarantined for two weeks before going to stay with my parents. From time to time a person goes by the window on a bicycle, or walks by with their dog. But this neighborhood was sleepy before and is sleepy now.

The disease therefore has this strange kind of unreal quality. I know it’s out there, I know it is killing people in gruesome and excruciating ways, that there are hundreds of newly bereaved families dotted around the country. But I neither see nor hear them. Coronavirus seems to live solely in my laptop and phone. If I look at a news site, there is nothing but the disease. But it’s difficult to see the thing as fully real from within a cosy room. Of course, when I go out, the shops are closed. I do not go out, though.

This distance between my own immediate experience and the reality of the disease partly explains, I think, why we have recently seen a dangerous and horrifying turn in conservative opinion.

* * *

I had assumed that it was a consensus that we needed to keep people home from work until such time as public health officials and the medical community said we could lift the lockdowns, and that the discussion would then turn to the questions of: (1) how to drastically increase our ability to test for the disease, trace down who has it, isolate cases, and ramp up the production of critical medical supplies and the capacities of hospitals to absorb corona patients (2) how to mitigate the economic consequences for all the people who no longer have work. We would need to make sure they’re provided for, need to make sure the parts of the economy that are indispensable to our survival keep humming, and need to figure out how to achieve a dramatic reduction of work while keeping workers afloat and that the businesses that need to be put “on ice” would not go bankrupt in the interim, and would be ready to come back online. The theory of how to get past this disease is: an indefinite lockdown buys us time and hopefully keeps the virus from overwhelming the medical system too badly. We need that time so that we can make sure we’re ready for what happens when the lockdown is lifted.

But influential conservatives have taken things in a different direction: Instead of asking what the government needs to do to mitigate the economic fallout of the radical social distancing, they have begun to wonder whether we should just ignore the medical community and return to work after an arbitrary short length of time. As Politico reports, public health leaders have been “horrified” as President Trump floats the idea of restarting the economy within 14 days, and filling churches for Easter services. The line adopted by Trump, and many on the right, is that the “cure will be worse than the disease.” “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down,” he said, saying that if the doctors had their way, the country would be shut down for years. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, figures on FOX News, and crackpot economists like Larry Kudlow and Arthur Laffer are all urging Trump to “open the country up.” Adviser Stephen Moore says it is “not a viable option” to “keep the economy shut down for the next seven to 10 weeks.”

It is not clear exactly what Trump intends by “opening America for business again.” We have seen in Italy what happens when the disease gets out of control: Hospitals are quickly overwhelmed. Italy is not talking about ending its lockdown—in fact they are thinking of increasing penalties for violating it. Their priority is not “opening for business again,” but stopping a highly contagious disease from ravaging the population.

Of course, health experts say that the sooner we end the lockdowns, the greater the risk that the disease will end up killing millions of Americans. But some conservatives have gone so far as to suggest that if allowing the disease to spread kills the elderly in vast numbers, it is worth it, because it would preserve “the country.” (By which they seem to mean the stock market.)
“Even if we all get sick, I would rather die than kill the country” — Glenn Beck
“If given the choice between dying and plunging the country I love into a Great Depression, I’d happily die.” — Jesse Kelly, Federalist contributor
“No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that is the exchange, I’m all in.” — Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick

Note that these men are almost certainly not the ones who would die. Glenn Beck is not nobly sacrificing himself for the good of the Markets. He’s sacrificing my dad, and perhaps yours too. They are wishing death on other people. Glenn Beck will be safe in his giant house. The least-wealthy nursing homes, homeless populations, prisoners: These people will suffer horribly. And they will not all be old: The young and healthy can suffer too. (And it is worth remembering just how bad dying of coronavirus can be. In many cases we will not just be sentencing them to death, but sentencing them to be tortured to death. And their family will not even get to be near them in their dying moments.)

Now, I do want to be fair here, because when you point out how monstrous this position is, they have an argument. “Killing the economy” would also kill people, they say. If people suddenly lose their jobs and their health insurance, and cannot afford to pay their rent or their mortgage, they will suffer terribly, and their health will suffer too. First, let’s note that actual economists, rather than right-wing pundits, believe that since you cannot even really have a functional economy with a deadly pandemic raging through the population and destroying the health system, the shutdown is necessary. As economist Justin Wolfers says, social isolation will “save many many more people from COVID-related deaths than the ensuing economic dislocation will cause. We economists actually measure stuff like this, and it’s not even in the neighborhood of being close.” There is a consensus among both economists and public health experts that “lifting the restrictions would impose huge costs in additional lives lost to the virus — and deliver little lasting benefit to the economy.” Even Larry Summers was “appalled,” and if Larry Summers is appalled by the callousness of a cost-benefit argument you know it’s bad. It’s only far right crackpots and New York Times columnists (how thin the line between them so often is) who dispute the public health experts, which is probably why other countries battling COVID-19 have not been having the ludicrous argument we now find ourselves having.

But there is another premise in the Kill The People, Save The Economy theory that needs examining, namely the idea that all of the most extreme economic harms caused by a lockdown are unavoidable. Thomas Friedman, in his column on how to get America “back to work,” says that:

Lost wages and job layoffs are leaving many workers without health insurance and forcing many families to forego health care and medications to pay for food, housing, and other basic needs.

This, of course, is true. But note the false dichotomy here: between letting the disease take its course and depriving millions of workers of their livelihoods. (Friedman, naturally, concludes that we need a moderate approach somewhere in the middle, isolating the most vulnerable while easing up on restrictions on everyone else, perhaps in as little as two weeks.) But what if we stopped to ask why workers are left without health insurance and have to forgo care when they lose their jobs? Or why they can’t pay for food and housing?

Well, the reason is that we do not live in a social democracy, where the government provides the basics to people and makes sure they don’t suffer horribly from material deprivation. Instead of just offering free-at-point-of-use healthcare to all, we tie insurance to employment, so that losing work is scary and devastating because it means losing healthcare. We do not provide a basic income, or paid sick leave, or quality public housing, and are unwilling to consider measures (like pausing rent payments and mortgage payments, and halting evictions) that would hurt rich property-owners. The threat that conservatives are holding over people’s heads (“go back to work or misery will ensue”) is the product of a choice. If we choose not to soften the blow for people during the period they can’t work, then it will be a calamity for them.

The “economy” is an abstraction, and saying we need to “restart” or “open” it is highly imprecise and unhelpful. There are some activities that are clearly essential (such as making sure everyone can eat, and have healthcare, and that the lights and the internet are on), while others do not need to be done if doing them means increasing the risk of a pandemic spreading further and overwhelming the hospital system. For example, let us take a housekeeper for idle rich people. There is no reason for that housekeeper to have to expose herself needlessly to the virus before it is contained. Her work is hard but ultimately, the rich person can clean their own damn house if necessary. “Ah, but she will be thrown out of work!” Yes, but it’s physically possible that, during the pandemic, she could be paid to stay home rather than to go out and clean. It is not because her task itself must be done, but because even in a pandemic the idea of paying people not to work is unthinkable to conservatives, and therefore that the false choice is supposedly between firing her and having her go to work.

In fact, I think one reason conservatives are so determined to get back to “business as usual” is that the disease has threatened many of their most cherished dogmas. For example: It’s very clear that coronavirus testing and treatment needs to be free for patients. If patients are getting $9,000 bills for tests, they’re not going to want to get tested. But if coronavirus treatment should be free, it opens up more questions: What about treatment for other diseases that worsen because hospitals are overwhelmed with coronavirus patients? Are we okay with having those people bankrupted by medical expenses? Why shouldn’t we just make healthcare free? If you’re in the Army, you get government-funded and operated Tricare services. You get a lot of free-at-point-of-use services, because the government understands that its Army needs to be fit and healthy. But what about the general population?

I am not surprised that a libertarian like Richard Epstein insisted coronavirus was overblown and would only cause 500 deaths in this country (he wrote that on the 16th, and we’re already well past that; he’s upped it to 5,000 and says it’s what he meant all along). If the disease is not overblown, it requires massive centralized state action to solve. China has gotten coronavirus under control, but how did they do it? It is a problem the free market will not solve, and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal are reluctant to admit there are problems the market doesn’t have an answer for.

Economist Dani Rodrik is surprised at Trump’s reluctance to use the authority of the Defense Production Act, which allows the government to give orders to private industry in a national emergency. I am much less surprised, because if this worked, it would force conservatives to concede that there are certain circumstances in which the state directing industry produces good outcomes, which many will never admit.

The crisis is shattering dogmas left and right. It is showing that outsourcing U.S. manufacturing might have produced horrible consequences when we needed to ramp up domestic manufacturing of a crucial supply as quickly as possible. It is showing that our government could have given us a social safety net all along and chose not to. It is showing that making people pay their debts is not always a good thing. It is showing that we can house the homeless if we try, or lower our prison population. It is showing that there is such a thing as “society,” that there are collective problems requiring collective solutions. No wonder Ron Paul wanted so badly to think coronavirus was a hoax! (His son got coronavirus soon after.) No wonder Trump wants to think it’s just like the flu and we can all go back to business as usual soon! If the crisis can’t be solved with a miracle cure, it might require a dose of FDR-style social democracy. (The Democrats also have this generation’s FDR waiting to take charge (hint: it’s Bernie, not Cuomo), but unfortunately seem to be on the verge of nominating someone whose crisis leadership skills are dubious.)

* * *

I would like to come back, though, to where I started: the unrealness of the virus to me right now. This is not just the case for me as an individual. It’s the case for all of those who do not yet personally know someone who has gotten sick, and to whom the sickness exists as words and images on a screen. This includes Donald Trump. He and others on the right live in a world of image, where they think if they can change the narrative they can change the reality. It is almost like a belief in magic.

But how long can this illusion last? The virus is spreading, and it is spreading quickly. I do not think Trump wants to accept this. Neither does Richard Epstein or Ron Paul. I don’t want to believe it myself. Sooner or later, though, we will have little choice. Atlanta’s ICUs are apparently already at capacity. Medical supplies are running low in many places. And there is no reason to think that, at least until the effect of social distancing kicks in, the number of cases will not continue to explode.

Stay safe, everyone.

Nathan J. Robinson
filed 25 March 2020 in THE VIRUS
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/03/notes-on-a-nightmare-3-a-disturbing-turn-in-right-wing-thought

Sen. 'RUSSIAN' Ron Johnson Told Capitol Security Officials That “Fake” Trump Supporters Started The Capitol Riots

Johnson, who refused to condemn Trump’s lies about the election, suggested Trump supporters were not actually responsible for the Jan. 6 attack.

Paul McLeodBuzzFeed News Reporter

Reporting From

Washington, DC

Posted on February 23, 2021, 

Pool / Getty Images

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin

WASHINGTON — Sen. Ron Johnson claimed Tuesday that left-wing “provocateurs” and “fake” Trump supporters sparked the violence at the Capitol riots.

Johnson made the comments as Capitol Hill security chiefs testified before a Senate committee investigating how rioters were able to breach the Capitol on Jan.

Both Democrat and Republican senators spent their time grilling security heads on the logistics of what went wrong, before Johnson read a lengthy passage from a piece published in the right-wing website the Federalist titled “I Saw Provocateurs at the Capitol Riot on Jan. 6” by J. Michael Waller.

Waller claimed, without evidence, that people “whom I presumed to be Antifa or other leftist agitators” were the ones who attacked police officers and turned “unsuspecting marchers into an invading mob.” He described the Trump-supporting crowd as overwhelmingly peaceful and included a section about how they did not even litter.

BuzzFeed News was on the ground outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 and witnessed hundreds of Trump supporters attacking the Capitol, as well as media and police, carrying Trump signs and waving Trump flags. Many of the rioters who have been charged for the insurrection have explicitly said that they are Trump supporters who came to DC prepared for a fight and went into the Capitol because they believed Trump was directing them to. Joseph Padilla, who is charged among other things with joining a group that attacked police with a giant Trump sign with a metal frame, for example, posted on TheDonald after Jan. 6 that he wanted to be clear it was “Patriots” like himself who attacked the Capitol, not “Antifa,” according to charging documents unsealed on Tuesday.

Johnson spent most of his allotted time for questioning witnesses by reading passages from the Federalist piece that painted Trump supporters as overwhelmingly peaceful and made unsubstantiated suggestions that left-wing provocateurs were actually responsible for the attack.

“I’d really recommend everyone on the committee read this account,” Johnson said.

Johnson was one of 13 Republican senators who announced they would vote against certifying Joe Biden’s Electoral College win leading up to the Jan. 6 count. Several of them, including Johnson, reversed course after the Capitol siege and voted for certifying the results. The crowd had stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop the count after then-president Donald Trump told them to “fight like hell” to stop the election from being stolen.

For weeks after the election, Johnson refused to condemn Trump’s lies about the election. The Republican senator repeatedly called for investigations into purported irregularities, lending credence to Trump’s false claims.

The Senate Rules and Administration Committee hearing Tuesday was intended to analyze the security breakdowns of Jan. 6. The committee repeatedly heard that the National Guard, under the control of Trump, was slow to get involved. Acting DC Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee III described being “stunned” as the federal government dragged its heels on sending in troops.

But Johnson warned his colleagues against second-guessing decisions made that day. “2020 is hindsight, it’s pretty easy to Monday-morning quarterback and I want to make sure we guard against doing so,” he said.

Zoe Tillman contributed reporting to this story.