Thursday, March 01, 2007

The Ape Will Lie Down With The Tiger

NO MORE PALM OIL!

Both these species are endangered thanks to Palm Oil plantations. And as cute as they are together they are endangered by man and imprisoned by man, to protect them from man.

See my Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright













































  • Feb. 28: Dema, a Sumatran tiger licks Nia a baby orangutan in a nursery room at the Taman Safari Zoo in Bogor, Indonesia.

  • Global warming hits world's largest tiger reserve

    See:

    Cargill


    Borneo

    Orangutan

    Apes


    Primates

    Monkeys

    Great Apes



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    Liberals Scab


    Liberals are not the party of workers in Canada.

    When in power provincially Liberals oppose a living wage.

    Now the Federal Liberals under Dion have flip flopped on anti-scab legislation Bill C-257.

    A private members bill from the BQ supported by the NDP and until today, supported by the Liberals.

    And like the flip flop on the Anti-Terrorism Act, Mr. Dion does it again. But will he whip the vote? Probably not. Without the Liberals support the bill will die on third reading. When they were the government the Liberal majority voted against previous private member anti-scab bills.

    My what a friend business has in Mr. Dion. I guess two controversial votes in a week would be a bit much for Mr. Dion's fragile leadership. The infighting in caucus would be even more virulent than it was over the Anti-Terrorism Act. After all the Liberals are the party of Bay Street as much as the Conservatives are.

    By flip flopping on this bill, which has been placed before parliament five times now, the Liberals prove they are not just pro-business but pro-scab. Which means anti-union. I hope they don't plan on trying to solicit funds from their old friends in the General Workers Union in Toronto.

    Progressives? In name only.

    Green? Sure thats the colour of money.

    Friends of Buzz Hargrove? Only during elections.

    Labour has a political party and it is the NDP. All others are pretenders and fair weather friends.

    See

    Dion

    Buzz

    Gomperism

    Liberals

    Unions



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    China Burps Greenspan Farts Dow Hiccups


    File this under; loose lips sink ships.

    On Monday, Greenspan said a recession was possible, though it's difficult to predict the timing, a comment blamed in part for the global market decline this week.

    Greenspaned the works. He actually speculated that America may be facing a recession. But now noticing the stink in the room he is waving his hand behind his butt to clear the air.US slump possible, not probable-Greenspan quoted

    Then the Chinese government which is still unfamiliar with the operations of capitalism speculated on capital gains taxes, and the Chinese stock market listened, and crashed.

    One does not speculate out loud about such things when you have a stock market. The market responds as it did to Greenspan's comments. Sighs for the good old days were heard through out the Chinese hierarchy.


    But why the panicked selling in China? It certainly wasn't because of anything Greenspan said. Most news reports are declaring that it was the result of rumors about potential policy initiatives that the Chinese leadership might soon enact to cool off an economy that is growing too fast. Whether Premier Wen Jiabao is about to announce interest rate hikes or a capital gains tax is impossible to say, but what we do know is that the leadership is very concerned with attempting to rein in China's reckless growth. And that's probably a good thing for everyone.

    So when Shanghai sneezes, the world's markets catch the bird flu? True or not, the fact that this story is even being told is testament to how far and how fast China has come. It's instructive to think back 10 years, to the Asian financial crisis of 1997. China managed to keep itself relatively immune from the devastation that ransacked its neighbors, in part because of its iron grip on its own currency, and possibly because it was less well integrated into the global economy than the rest of the region. Ten years later, it's China that's shaking up the status quo, with a little help from the United States. From that vantage point, the fact that on Wednesday the Shanghai stock exchange, so far, is keeping its cool could well be the single most significant data point in all the market madness racing around the globe over the past 24 hours.

    The reality is that in 1997 China had NO international stock market and did not yet own the ultimate capitalist safe haven; Hong Kong. So the Yaun was protected by the Chinese and their stock market, being internal, did not suffer the meltdown the rest of the world did.

    In this case China came of age, and created a global meltdown on what was a local event.

    Pick a stock market, any market in our globalised, homogenised, sterilised, aneasthetised, dumbed down, interconnected ever shrinking globe... and it tanked.
    But the original epicentre was somewhere new...that emerging sleeping giant that even Napoleon worried fleetingly about...China. Shanghai’s A share index – ie for Chinese investors only - slumped 9%.

    Today it is a different world and China owns the majority of America's debt. And its stock market is now a world market place despite being a creature of the Chinese State.

    China’s stock market had three unique features that made its rapid
    development unique and interesting.


    First, the government used it largely as a fund raising vehicle for
    funding state-owned enterprises
    Second, China’s stock market developed under a repressed financial
    regime. Financial repression was created through a combination
    of capital controls on international capital flows and administrative
    measures imposed by the central government to dampen potential
    competition among different financial assets (e.g., bank deposits, enterprise
    stocks, enterprise bonds, and various kinds of government
    bonds) within the domestic financial sector.5 While the capital controls
    helped to prevent capital from flowing out of the country, the
    competition-mitigating administrative controls sought to avoid the
    driving up of returns on various financial assets and thus to allow the
    government to maintain a source of cheap capital for financing SOEs’
    investments.
    Third, China’s stock market was developed under a weak legal
    framework that offered shareholders little protection. On the widely
    used indicators for shareholder rights protection developed by La
    Porta et al. (1998), China scored 3, compared with the average score
    of 3.61 for all other transitional economies.
    The actual protection for shareholders in China, however, is lower
    than what the index suggests because of the weak legal enforcement
    in China. The development of China’s stock market therefore
    presents a puzzling case for economists and financial analysts who
    hold that legal shareholder protection is a prerequisite for the development
    of a functioning capital market

    So the result was a crash heard around the world. The reason is three fold, China burped, Greenspan farted and America had lower than expected trade income (from durable goods) thus they owed the Chinese even more money.

    What happened Tuesday was a confluence of events, something of a "perfect storm," each of which precipitated pent-up doubts. There was the decline overnight of 9.2 percent in the Chinese stock market, in which U.S. investors purchased $5.2 billion in equities in 2006. Then there was a decline in orders for durable goods and Mr. Greenspan's comments.

    Correction or Crash is the question on everyones lips this morning on day three of the crumbling of stock markets world wide. It's a crash. Just not a 1929 crash. Heck it isn't even a 1987 crash. Nor a 1997 meltdown. It's a hiccup the stock markets world wide are a thousand times higher than 1929, and in 1987 the stock market was only at 5000. Today it is over 12,000 in North America and around the world. But a crash none the less.

    That was the ultimate Perfect Storm, as the 1987 crash proved. In 1987 the crash was as severe as it was in '29 but the impact was the clearing out of junk bonds, as it had been in '29 a clearing out of Mutual Funds, and other get rich quick schemes, and companies that collapsed were quickly bought up by those cash rich, which did not occur in '29.

    The 1987 market crash, which greeted Greenspan just two months into his term and drained the stock markets of nearly one-quarter of their value in a single day, was widely thought at the time to be a precursor of recession. But the Fed chairman, beginning to establish his reputation for working miracles, avoided the inevitable by guaranteeing to pump enough money into the economy to keep anyone from going broke for lack of cash.


    What folks forget in bull markets and boom economies, such as we have seen for the past twenty years is that crashes become cycles, called corrections by optimists, but the business cycle of the early 20th century are no longer as damaging to capitalist society as they were in 1929. Thanks to Keynes. Notice that even an Ayn Randist like Greenspan is not adverse to priming the pump to protect the Stock Market.

    There was no priming the pump for the 1929 Wall Street Crash, as Keynes noted at the time. As Galbraith writes in his history of the Great Depression.

    Galbraith writes with great wit and erudition about the perilous actions of investors and the curious inaction of the government. He notes that the problem wasn't a scarcity of securities to buy and sell: "The ingenuity and zeal with which companies were devised in which securities might be sold was as remarkable as anything." Those words become strikingly relevant in light of revenue-negative start-up companies coming into the market each week in the 1990s, along with fragmented pieces of established companies, like real estate and bottling plants. Of course, the 1920s were different from the 1990s. There was no safety net below citizens, no unemployment insurance or Social Security. And today we don't have the creepy investment trusts--in which shares of companies that held some stocks and bonds were sold for several times the assets' market value.

    In 1929 Joe and Jane America were invested in the stock market for the first time through Mutual Funds, which were the junk bonds of their day. Workers , small businessmen, seniors, all could afford to invest in stocks. Gone were the days of the Robber Barons dominating the sanctuary of Wall Street.

    Like insurance companies of the time, Mutual Funds and other stock market options were being peddled to the working class. For the first time ever in the boom economy of the Post War 1920's workers were secure in their jobs and could afford homes, cars, and yest putting a little aside for retirement either through insurance, bank savings, saving and loans mortgages or through stocks and mutual funds.

    The perfect storm was the complete collapse of market capitalism, one that had no social safety net. Workers lost homes, business collapsed and the state called for chickens in every pot but provided no jobs. The chickens came home to roost for the free marketeers,their ideology was laughed at as irrelevant in light of historical facts of the crash and empirical fact's behind it. The U.S. market never recovered until the space age.

    Over the long run, a European investing on Wall Street might do fairly well. But what if he had invested in the late ’20s, when America’s promise and success seemed most inevitable? Just ask the Ghost of ‘29. If he had invested his money just before the crash, he would have had to wait until ‘56 to break even! That is, he would have had to hold on through a Great Depression…another major world war…and practically until the end of the Eisenhower administration - a period of 27 years! After that, he would have enjoyed a good 10 years of capital growth - and then another setback.

    Like today many folks are invested in the Stock Market, but mainly through their retirement savings, thus the impact on real cash, real value is softened. State capitalism saves the day, meaning crashes are reduced to corrections, the business cycle levels off instead of being a desperate spiral to Depression, and all is well with the world. Thus this weeks downward spiral is a hiccup instead of a stroke.

    And while Rothbard would deny Keynes or Galbraiths solutions were valid, which history proved they were, his work on the Great Depression also shows that the much vaunted Free Market failed because it was dominated by criminal capitalists trying to make a fast buck. Something the right wing liberaltarians never consider in their free market mythology. But which is the reason for all such meltdowns in the marketplace as Enron showed.

    The ability to now regain from a crash is part of the checks and balances of the stock markets, whether through state regulations, investor funding or computerization. And thus the need to continually keep armed, to have little wars world wide, are now part of the business cycle as well. Gone are the days when rearmament could save the market, today it is key to the well being of the market place.

    The bull market effectively came to an end on September 3, 1929, immediately the shrewder operators returned from vacation and looked hard at the underlying figures. Later rises were merely hiccups in a steady downward trend. On Monday October 9, for the first time, the ticker tape could not keep pace with the news of falls and never caught up. Margin calls had begun to go out by telegram the Saturday before, and by the beginning of the week speculators began to realize they might lose their savings and even their homes. On Thursday, October 12, shares dropped vertically with no one buying, and speculators were sold out as they failed to respond to margin calls. Then came Black Tuesday, October 19, and the first selling of sound stocks to raise desperately needed liquidity.

    So far all was explicable and might easily have been predicted. This particular stock market corrective was bound to be severe because of the unprecedented amount of speculation which Wall Street rules then permitted. In 1929 1,548,707 customers had accounts with America's 29 stock exchanges. In a population of 120 million, nearly 30 million families had an active association with the market, and a million investors could be called speculators. Moreover, of these nearly two-thirds, or 600,000, were trading on margin; that is, on funds they either did not possess or could not easily produce.

    The danger of this growth in margin trading was compounded by the mushrooming of investment trusts which marked the last phase of the bull market. Traditionally, stocks were valued at about ten times earnings. With high margin trading, earnings on shares, only one or two percent, were far less than the eight to ten percent interest on loans used to buy them. This meant that any profits were in capital gains alone. Thus, Radio Corporation of America, which had never paid a dividend at all, went from 85 to 410 points in 1928. By 1929, some stocks were selling at 50 times earnings. A market boom based entirely on capital gains is merely a form of pyramid selling. By the end of 1928 the new investment trusts were coming onto the market at the rate of one a day, and virtually all were archetype inverted pyramids. They had "high leverage"—a new term in 1929—through their own supposedly shrewd investments, and secured phenomenal stock exchange growth on the basis of a very small plinth of real growth. United Founders Corporation, for instance, had been created by a bankruptcy with an investment of $500, and by 1929 its nominal resources, which determined its share price, were listed as $686,165,000. Another investment trust had a market value of over a billion dollars, but its chief asset was an electric company which in 1921 had been worth only $6 million. These crazy trusts, whose assets were almost entirely dubious paper, gave the boom an additional superstructure of pure speculation, and once the market broke, the "high leverage" worked in reverse.

    Hence, awakening from the pipe dream was bound to be painful, and it is not surprising that by the end of the day on October 24, eleven men well-known on Wall Street had committed suicide. The immediate panic subsided on November 13, at which point the index had fallen from 452 to 224. That was indeed a severe correction but it has to be remembered that in December 1928 the index had been 245, only 21 points higher. Business and stock exchange downturns serve essential economic purposes. They have to be sharp, but they need not be long because they are self-adjusting. All they require on the part of the government, the business community, and the public is patience. The 1920 recession had adjusted itself within a year. There was no reason why the 1929 recession should have taken longer, for the American economy was fundamentally sound. If the recession had been allowed to adjust itself, as it would have done by the end of 1930 on any earlier analogy, confidence would have returned and the world slump need never have occurred.

    Instead, the stock market became an engine of doom, carrying to destruction the entire nation and, in its wake, the world. By July 8, 1932, New York Times industrials had fallen from 224 at the end of the initial panic to 58. U.S. Steel, the world's biggest and most efficient steel-maker, which had been 262 points before the market broke in 1929, was now only 22. General Motors, already one of the best-run and most successful manufacturing groups in the world, had fallen from 73 to 8. These calamitous falls were gradually reflected in the real economy. Industrial production, which had been 114 in August 1929, was 54 by March 1933, a fall of more than half, while manufactured durables fell by 77 percent, nearly four-fifths. Business construction fell from $8.7 billion in 1929 to only $1.4 billion in 1933.

    Unemployment rose over the same period from a mere 3.2 percent to 24.9 percent in 1933, and 26.7 percent the following year. At one point, 34 million men, women, and children were without any income at all, and this figure excluded farm families who were also desperately hit. City revenues collapsed, schools and universities shut or went bankrupt, and malnutrition leapt to 20 percent, something that had never happened before in United States history—even in the harsh early days of settlement.

    This pattern was repeated all over the industrial world. It was the worst slump in history, and the most protracted. Indeed there was no natural recovery. France, for instance, did not get back to its 1929 level of industrial production until the mid-1950s. The world economy, insofar as it was saved at all, was saved by war, or its preparations. The first major economy to revitalize itself was Germany's, which with the advent of Hitler's Nazi regime in January, 1933, embarked on an immediate rearmament program. Within a year, Germany had full employment. None of the others fared so well. Britain began to rearm in 1937, and thereafter unemployment fell gradually, though it was still at historically high levels when war broke out on September 3, 1939. That was the date on which Wall Street, anticipating lucrative arms sales and eventually U.S. participation in the war, at last returned to 1929 prices.






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    Labour Shortage = Union Busting

    The only labour shortage in Alberta is finding unskilled folks to work at Timmies, and even there they are now paying $14 an hour plus benefits. But as for skilled labour, well they are working there too because they can't find jobs through the Merit Contractors and their business pals like CNRL and the Padrone's of CLAC.

    These guys being anti-union would rather hire temporary workers for $14 dollars an hour no benefits. To do union jobs that pay over $22 an hour with benefits.

    Worker shortage a 'myth' - union
    'Lots of skilled people in province'
    Alberta's labour shortage is a myth, says the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

    Tim Brower, IBEW Local 424 business manager, says non-union contractors are using the "myth" of a labour shortage to bring in temporary foreign workers who are taking away jobs from Albertans. "There is a shortage of unskilled people in this province. I won't deny that," he told reporters at the legislature yesterday. "Tim Hortons is looking for people. 7-Eleven is looking for people ... but when it comes to skilled people in this province, there is no shortage. I am the expert. I have them available."Brower said 1,000 electricians in his union are unemployed or working other jobs because they can't find work in their trade. "I have run into my members working at Home Depot handing out electrical components," he said. "Some of them are driving trucks.



    And since our new Minister of Human Resources; Monte Solberg loves his Timmies it's no wonder he is joining his pals in the non-union construction sector in Alberta calling for more Temporary Workers. Thats so more unionized workers can get jobs at Timmies. There are lots of unemployed skilled workers in Alberta, but of course they belong to the building trades unions.

    Companies like CNRL and others that are using Merit Shops to build oilsands projects are taking advantage of this to undercut the unions. Heck even right wing Edmonton Sun Columnist Neil Waugh noted this 'fact' last summer. And he notes it again today in a scathing attack on lack of planning by the new Stelmach regime.

    That's because the Merit Shops are not independent contractors at all but spin offs of unionized companies! Merit Shops are about as independent as CLAC is an independent union. Neither of them are and both are spin offs of Alberta's Big Construction Companies trying to bust the Building Trades Unions.

    Kushner is the president of the Merit Contractors Association and the person most responsible for getting a review of the Code rolling. Call them merit contractors, or open shops, it all means non-union (or at the very most, an "alternative" labour group such as the Christian Labour Association of Canada).

    Alberta's non-union construction industry began 20 years ago, as the oil price slump of the early 1980s shut down jobs and pushed companies into bankruptcy. Driven by the earlier, decades-long boom and labour shortage, construction labour relations had become a perpetual upward spiral of wage increases. Faced with the crunch, companies had to cut costs or go under.

    The end result was the famous "spin-off" company, a term industry people are reluctant to use to this day. After locking out their employees for 25 hours, the firm would hire them back in a subsidiary company, or through a labour broker, at lower wages. After the dust settled, the complexion of Alberta�s construction industry had changed forever.

    Today, there are few union contractors working in the commercial/institutional sector, while the large industrial projects are built almost exclusively by organized labour. The Merit Contractors Association represents 670 companies in Alberta, employing over 20,000 persons who complete 32 million hours of construction work annually. The Association has been growing at a rate of 36% a year, for the past four years. During those four years, it�s been lobbying ceaselessly, in its own right and through its members, for changes to workplace legislation, making annual presentations at Standing Policy Committee and appearances at Conservative Party functions.



    See

    Labour Shortage

    History of the WRF

    Alberta's Free Market In Labour

    The Labour Shortage Myth

    AFL Agrees With Me

    Lack of Planning Created Skills Shortage in Alberta


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    Dion Sucked

    Celine Dion not Stephane Dion.

    At the Academy Awards.

    Doing a pathetic souless song dedicated to the great composer Ennio Morricone.

    10:52: I'm not the biggest fan of movie scores, but I have to say, Ennio Morricone elevates the genre. Take notes, please, John Williams. Celine Dion opens her mouth, my cue to get up and stretch my legs.

    In fact it was so bad that while she looked like she was lip-syncing the words were actually coming out of her mouth. With lip-syncing there is at least some power, some force, some emotion because it is pre recorded. This was live.

    You had to lean forward to hear her sing, and as the camera focused on her mouth I was given to think of a Kissing Gourami as she painfully formed each word with her lips as she sang. High notes ferget it. Deep contralto ferget it. It was white toast, nah make that Melba toast.

    Luckily it was the Academy Awards and not American Idol, or she would never have made the cut. But then again Best Supporting Actress awards are given to those who don't make it on Idol.


    Dion's performance was a flat as the other Dion's has been in Question period.

    That's what happens when unilingual Francophone's try to express themselves in English by reading from a script or a teleprompter.





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    Tough Guys Cry

    So I went out for smokes in the wee hours of this morning and what should greet me from the covers of the Edmonton Journal and Edmonton Sun? Why nothing less than front pages showing Oiler Captain Ryan Smith crying cause he got traded.

    Not because he lost his teeth on the ice, or his team sucks, or because he was touched by some cancer kids in the hospital, or because he was outraged after visiting a womens shelter. Nope he is crying because he got traded.

    Shades of Oilers past it is being played like the Gretzky trade. Which was the end of the Oilers reign as NHL Champs. They became chumps until last years great play-off season.

    One look at the face of the former face of the franchise and you knew.

    He's the broken-hearted former heart and soul of the Edmonton Oilers.

    A dozen cameramen walking backward led a sobbing Ryan Smyth through the airport yesterday, his contorted face framed by the famed mullet. It said so much before a word was spoken.


    Yesterdays papers were filled with Mark the Moose Messier crying because the Oilers hung his number up. Boy these tough guys show they really are sensitive new age guys. Nice to see. But in the cheering and partying over Mess the news coverage in the local papers seem to be a day behind on the Smith trade news.

    Of course it was after two days of partying remembering the Oilers Championship which coincided with Alberta's last Oil boom. Talk about flashbacks here we are 25 years later and another boom and the Moose is retiring. There goes the last of the cocaine cowboys that were the Oilers past. At least they won the Stanley Cup, the Oilers are now officially out of it.

    Today the crying is over Smyth and his trade, a trade made over a measly $100,000 difference.

    Unless Smytty re-signs with the Oilers in the summer (he can join any NHL club), the Oilers are relegated to second-tier status in the NHL, at least in the coming "rebuilding" years.

    Impeccable sources suggest the dispute wasn't so much about money, but conditions - such as Ryan's insistence on a no-cut/no-trade clause.

    And, in the end, trading Smyth was a "hockey" decision. The money was there, but GM Kevin Lowe and his boss Cal Nichols felt $5.5 to $5.8 million a year could be better used on up-and-coming talent than a five-year commitment to a player who'll get slower and less productive as he ages.


    Clearly these two guys quoted above from the Edmonton Sun don't talk to each other. Whats going on here is another brilliant Ken Lowe play. He has upped the value of Ryan Smith by trading him to the Islanders, helping them make the playoffs. He waited till the absolute eleventh hour to trade him. He traded Edmonton's best player, heck their only real player this season, sans Rollie the Goalie, to a team with a chance at the Stanley Cup or at least a play off contender.

    He has all but admitted the Oilers are toast this season. So in what capitalism calls value added, he has made Smith more valuable for when he becomes a free agent in less than five months.

    And yep the Oilers have the money to buy out Smyth this summer. In fact Smyth has not even packed up his family or home here. He doesn't have to, his trade to the Islanders is temporary. And the Oilers got a good deal, cash and two young players to help build up the team.

    Why it's a win win as business likes to call it. And pro-sports is a business after all, and the players are commodities, the league is the market.

    Its a smart move for a team that has nothing else good to say about it this season. Except that we won't be seeing the City pay for play off riots fueled by the greed of Whyte Avenue bars.

    And all the tears, well these too shall pass. Besides they are only crocodile tears of very big egos either hurt or humbled, but big egos none the less. Hey it's not like these guys are Albert Schweitzer. They are after all just big dumb jocks.


    See:

    Hockey

    Oilers


    Pro-Sports


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    Shaft


    This is too funny I just heard it on CKUA Overnight...

    John Shaft
    Listen

    I thought it was Billy Crystal imitating Sammy Davis Jr. doing Issac Hayes; Shaft Theme.

    Nope I was wrong.

    It was the real Sammy Davis Jr. doing the Shaft Theme. Talk about high camp.

    He isn't even singing he is reading the words, sort of like William Shatner does.

    And it is on not just one album, nor two, but three!

    The only way it could have been campier is if he had a Klezmer band in the background. Nope sorry then it would sound like Sammy imitating Billy.




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    Wednesday, February 28, 2007

    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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    Anarchist History of Edmonton


    Over at the Carnival of Anarchy our latest carnival subject has been Anarchism in your area, so I have posted a history of Anarchism in Edmonton; Black and Redmonton





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    Batteries Not Included

    I haven't posted as often these past few days because my keyboard was slooooow. After slowing down as I wrote over the weekend it bit the bullet. After a couple of days of defraging, cleaning up my files, doing everything I could to get my computer to work, I realized maybe I should check the batteries in the wireless keyboard. And viola I discovered once again the righteousness of Occam's Razor; "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one." So I have replaced dem batteries and things will now get back to normal...I hope.