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  • A Robust Voice for Such a Diminutive Person

    The image of Phyllis that remains most salient, and the one I most miss, would begin with a phone call. I would answer with a lugubrious “hello.” And from the other end, I would hear a buoyant “HIYA, STEVE, this is PHYLLIS.” A robust voice for such a diminutive person. And a twang that seemed more Texan than Bronx.

         The purpose of her call was always the same: to hustle up some copy for an upcoming issue. Has anyone here ever said “no” to Phyllis? Not that I’m complaining: Phyllis provided the nudge and New Politics the venue that kept me writing. But I’m trying to convey how she ran the journal through the force of her personality.

         Phyllis was also a formidable intellectual and a fierce critic, especially when it came to fighting old battles. In her last piece in the Summer 1997 issue of New Politics—she wrote a review of Joan Mellen’s book, Hellman and Hammet. She began by noting that Mellon portrayed Hellmann and Hammet as “a pair of mismatched lovers; he, a compulsive womanizer, she a compulsive liar.” And Phyllis was just warming up! She brushed aside Mellen’s preoccupation with their marriage and sex lives, and zoomed in on their politics. She skewered Hellman for denying that she was ever a member of the Communist Party, when she and Hammet were signatories to the 1938 Moscow Trials, and stuck to the party line right through the war years. For our demure Phyllis, Hellman “was not only a liar but, despite her disclaimers, an unregenerate Stalinist.” And she ended with this knock-out blow:

    Hellman said that ‘radicals’ like herself had done no harm. She was mistaken. By promoting a totalitarian movement in the name of socialism she and they had done enormous harm. They had impeded the development of an authentic socialist movement by distorting the basic concepts of socialism, promulgating the idea that a society based on the destruction of working class independence, on terror and the liquidation of millions was socialist. They not only distorted history but made a mockery of the American radical tradition.

    Vintage Phyllis and our credo at New Politics.

         It is impossible to talk about Phyllis without talking about Julie. Their love for each other seemed to fulfill all of the bourgeois nostrums concerning marital fidelity and devotion. Except that this was the real thing. Their love sprung from deep friendship and genuine devotion and was born and lived through their shared politics. Nor was it a politics defined by any political orthodoxy. Their politics were developed in their youthful struggles as workers and as self-made intellectuals, and much later as the founding editors of New Politics, where they labored side by side, single-handedly attending to the myriad details, from reviewing and editing manuscripts to the production and distribution of the journal. Did you ever see such a labor of love?

         And what a formula they had for fusing politics and life: they would pour themselves into the next issue, send it off to the printer, and then take off—traveling to remote corners of France, Italy, or Spain, visiting chapels that housed some obscure fresco, laying over at historic hostels in the countryside, and of course, eating well wherever they went. What a couple they were: Phyllis and Julie.

         After Phyllis was struck down, did you ever see such a display of total devotion, as Julie moved the journal to her room in the nursing home? I remember that he would tell Phyllis about what was going on with the journal, sharing their private jokes, certain that she took in everything that he said. He simply would not go on without her collaboration and consent.

         Their legacy to us was New Politics, and the best thing we can do in remembrance and in love for Phyllis and Julie is to keep New Politics afloat. And to take their example to heart, and in-between issues, relish life and family and good food and wine. The last meal I had with them, just before they left on that fateful trip, was at their home with Herbert Hill. Or “Herbie,” as they insisted on calling him (after all, Herbie had been a playmate of Phyllis’s as toddlers in the Bronx). Truth be told, they both seemed frail and Herbert and I urged them to cancel their trip. But just as Phyllis and Julie remained steadfast in their politics, they stubbornly clung to their youth and their spirit of adventure and joy of living, and were not cut out to make concessions to age (any more than Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky and other political stalwarts of that generation).

         Well, Phyllis and Julie are gone now, as is Herbert Hill. But we can take a measure of solace in knowing that Volume XIII, No. 1, of the second series, is now in press.

  • In Tribute to Phyllis Jacobson

    Julie and Phyllis Jacobson launched New Politics in the early 1960s, when they saw the absence of a voice for authentic left-socialist thought following the demise of the Independent Socialist current of the previous period. Ironically, although it was a time of reborn activism for civil rights, peace and what we now call “global justice,” the movement for a socialist politics fiercely independent of Washington, Moscow and Beijing had not organizationally survived to see it.

         New Politics, along with those activists who a few years later initiated the Independent Socialist Clubs, were instrumental in giving the movement a new beginning. New Politics brought to the international left’s attention the Polish Marxists Kuron and Modzelewski’s “Open Letter to the Party,” among other seminal texts including Hal Draper’s “The Two Souls of Socialism” and “Origins of the Middle East Crisis.”

         Julie and Phyllis were a remarkable team, but by all accounts Phyllis in particular was the guts and glue of the magazine’s production, circulation and financial management. And so it was again when they relaunched the journal after an eight-year lapse in the 1980s to address the new movements of that day, and through the tumultuous decade and more following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the monstrous bureaucratic tyranny that went under that grotesque label, “actually existing socialism.”

         It’s an interesting concidence that the years of Phyllis’s life, 1922-2010, match those of Howard Zinn. Zinn of course is justifiably famous, but fewer people really understand the contributions of Phyllis and those like her who are the stalwarts and geniuses of organization. There can be no socialist movement without people like Phyllis Jacobson, and there is no better testament to her life than the work of the team that keeps New Politics alive and kicking.

    David Finkel
    Against the Current magazine
    Detroit, Michigan

  • Phyllis Jacobson: An Appreciation

    Phyllis Jacobson, who died after a protracted illness on March 2 — just shy of her 88th birthday — was the dynamic force behind a remarkable political and intellectual partnership of shared passion that left an indelible imprint on three generations of twentieth century American radicalism.

         Phyllis, much like her future husband Julie, came to revolutionary socialism in her early teens. They met through the Trotskyist faction within the Socialist Party, later the Young People’s Socialist League, 4th International of the late 1930s after the split with the SP. There they, like so many of their radical comrades, many of whom — as they defected from their earlier commitments — became know as the New York Intellectuals, obtained a grueling political education in struggle not only with the much more influential Stalinists who dominated the left landscape, but with the mainstream Trotskyist faction who offered critical support to the Soviet Union long after the revolution was interred.

         Phyllis would later recall, with mixed pride and irony, that it was she who recruited her childhood friend, and future neo-conservative historian, Gertrude Himmelfarb, to the movement. Phyllis, like Julie, clearly shared with the New York intellectuals an ability to express herself eloquently and accessibly — without a hint of leftist cant — through a broad sweep of domestic and international political affairs, but differed from them in one crucial detail. They utterly lacked the requisite yearning for peer respectability. They accommodated their views to fit no political fashion; to curry favor neither with academia nor with any left mainstream. They fought against the war in Vietnam, without succumbing to illusions about Ho Chi Minh and the NLF; they struggled against American intervention in Nicaragua, without closing their eyes to the Sandinistas’s infringements on democracy; they fought against CIA- inspired overthrow attempts of Castro, while exposing the Castro regime’s repressive anti-democratic nature. They engaged the struggle for democratic unions, while condemning racism both in the ranks and in leadership policies of the labor movement. And they saw no contradiction in fighting for both at once. For that, they did more than most to save the good name of anti-Stalinism from the clutches of intellectual conciliators, apologists and outright propagandists of capitalism and reaction who were to emerge ever more dominant both on the liberal left as well as the neo-con right.

         If later radicalizing generations were to sentimentally embrace the memory of naively idealistic Communists fighting the good fight as premature anti-fascists, Phyllis was an early and persistent defector from that consensus. She retained bitter memories of these “sweet Stalinist grandmothers” who ripped Trotskyist leaflets from her and her comrades, shoved her to the ground and denounced them all as ‘Trotskyite’ whores and fascist agents. She remembered too how Julie’s Stalinist relatives once demanded of them an accounting as to how the ‘Trotskyites’ could justify their poisoning of Maxim Gorky.

         The rot of counterrevolution ran deep as she relentlessly reminded later generations, innocently inclined to forgive, what they never knew to forget. Writing about Lillian Hellman, Phyllis remonstrated, that Hellman and her Stalinist compatriots may not have actually engaged in much more than verbal violence, though their catalog of concrete crimes even on that level were certainly voluminous. But, if they were free of the actual physical crimes of Stalinism, and that more an accident of opportunity than of scruple, they nevertheless colluded in the larger political and intellectual cover-up.

    By promoting a totalitarian movement in the name of socialism, she and they had done enormous harm. They had impeded the development of an authentic socialist movement by distorting the basic concepts of socialism, promulgating the idea that a society based on the destruction of working class independence, on terror and the liquidation of millions was socialist. They not only distorted history but made a mockery of the American radical tradition.

    Theirs was a different type of violence, a lasting assault on the very soul of the modern emancipatory impulse that she and Julie dedicated their lives to repair.

         It was in the Workers Party — the third camp tendency, sometimes simplistically and misleadingly known as the Shachtmanites — that Phyllis and Julie first came to know one another. One from the far reaches of the Northern Bronx, the other from the hinterlands of Brooklyn, the sheer geography posed a difficult challenge in sustaining a relationship. Two hours each way on the subway, Herb Hill once recalled, was the death of more than one movement romance.

         The Workers Party, later the Independent Socialist League, was a dissident milieu that the two were quite rightly exceedingly proud of having experienced. It shaped their talents, honed their political perspectives and provided a richness of revolutionary activity that “stood in stark contrast to the crippling and suffocating airlessness of the Stalinist movement.”

         When the Independent Socialist League dissolved itself in the late 1950s and merged with the Socialist Party, Phyllis briefly became the SP’s Manhattan organizer. Julie joined so briefly, that many years later, he actually had no memory whatsoever of having ever belonged. Phyllis’s membership ended rather early as she grasped that the vaunted regroupment strategy that Shachtman sold as the basis for unification—to prepare a neutral ground to pick up the remnants of the disintegrating Communist Party after the Khrushchev revelations and the invasion of Hungary—was fast becoming a cover for abandoning socialist politics. When, a few years later, she returned to the SP office, now little more than a George Meany patronage machine, to reclaim bound volumes of the New International (the WP/ISL theoretical journal), she was met with unexpected resistance by the few “old, young men” — as she put it — who ran the office. Brooking no argument, she proceeded to spirit away the entire stock, stating firmly that it was the intellectual and financial contributions of her movement — not theirs — that gave her the moral right to do so.

         When asked why she and Julie never joined any subsequent grouping, Phyllis responded simply that they had participated in the most stimulating sect that they could ever imagine, but that they had no further interest in entrapping themselves into another sectarian shell. These, in her opinion, bred a self-destructive “lack of civility among comrades and friends” and a self-isolating sense of misplaced moral superiority. New Politics was envisioned as a way to break out of that shell, to create an arena for cross pollinating the wealth of political experience and insight that the WP/ISL had fostered with broader activist movements for change among other healthy radical traditions, among labor movement insurgents, the militant wing of the civil rights movement of the early 1960s and the emerging new left. The journal continues its long tradition of encouraging wide-ranging debate, with writers having extensive freedom to express views the editors disagree with.

         Of the two Jacobsons, Phyllis was clearly the more outgoing. Intellectually, they were joined at the hip. They struggled together over every phrase, every nuance and tone of each other’s writings. Julie freely admitted — and without a hint of patronization— that Phyllis was a very real coauthor with him, his indispensable editor, and his critical eye. And one can easily see this in their writing styles, as close as two different individuals might conceivably be. It was Phyllis who handled the day-to-day work of the journal. She cajoled authors and financial contributors to meet deadlines. She had the unique tact to convince often thin-skinned writers to accept editorial suggestions, and, when rarely necessary — editorial fiats. She maintained and meticulously updated the vast rolodex of contacts, donors, and subscribers. She coordinated the layout, printing and distribution. And she, unlike Julie, was the real schmoozer, with a rollicking laugh so infectious that rare indeed were those who could resist joining her. Phyllis enjoyed relating, as few political obsessives can, to a range of cultural and epicurean topics that permitted her to engage simply and naturally both to the radical and to the political bystander alike. Phyllis truly was — in that much abused phrase — the life of the party.

         This did not mean that she lacked a temper, nor an unyielding sense of political propriety. She, unlike Julie, never forgave Irving Howe and Lewis Coser from colluding with the publisher in demoting Julie to “an assistant” in the publication of The American Communist Party. Julie had done remarkable research for this volume. But they had academic ladders to climb — Julie was only a machinist– and the publisher in any case would only list two authors. So Julie was listed as a “co-author in all but name.” Forty years later, Phyllis still declared this episode a “disgrace.” And “disgrace” remained the ultimate denunciation. Phyllis memorably upbraided a prominent left scholar from the audience, who qualified his defense of affirmative action in a circumstantial cloud, by declaring quite audibly that his utterances were “simply disgraceful.” An act of political chiropratics was instantaneously performed, a spine was straightened, and the equivocation forthrightly and apologetically retracted. That was symptomatic of the authority Phyllis could wield.

         Remarkably, however, this diminutive powerhouse did not formally join the editorial board — and then not as the co-editor — until the summer 1968 issue. Her inclusion was made without prior announcement and with no fanfare; her name simply posted in alphabetical order on the list of board members. In fact, up until that point, there were no women either on the editorial board or on its sponsors’ list! Phyllis had argued passionately and skillfully in defense of the ERA, when that was still a debatable topic, particularly among labor movement activists; and in defense of the feminist movement against former comrades such as Irving Howe, whose “schmaltzy” defense of immigrant Jewish patriarchy — a microcosm of his larger evasion — left her particularly disgusted. She was quite conscious of coming out of a milieu, the neo-Trotskyist movement, which was, as she said, “far from generous to its women.” Yet, in a very real sense, it was the rising tide of the women’s movement that liberated Phyllis within the New Politics milieu. Even then, Phyllis only became a co-editor with the second series of the journal. It is a sad footnote that when the first series of New Politics ended in 1976, there were still no other women on the editorial board and only two women listed as sponsors, one of whom — Joanne Landy — had closely participated in New Politics since its inception. Still, the ongoing division of labor within the Jacobson family deprived the journal of the volume of literary output she should have otherwise produced. What we have of Phyllis’s writings constitute only a handful of articles, but memorable contributions all, and amongst the highest literary and political quality that the journal ever produced. Her writings on Stalinism, the American Communist Party and the Popular Front alone remain a unique source of political education for those who seek a concrete understanding of the nature of totalitarianism and the relationship of socialism to democracy.

         Phyllis — with Julie’s active participation to be sure — worked hard to see that the lack of women’s voices was not duplicated when the journal was resurrected a decade later. She campaigned for a properly consistent policy of gender, racial and generational diversity in the solicitation of contributors and in the choice of subject matter. And she never ceased to register her disappointment when these standards were not met.

         The last years of Phyllis’s life were heartbreaking to witness, a debilitating series of strokes that left her a shell of her former self — an ever cheerful and radiant political provocateur silenced, dependent and immobilized. Phyllis was visibly uncomfortable with sentimentality and it would be difficult to end on a note that violated her spirit. Her passing leaves a void of consistent polemical grace and unbounded political energies in the small, hard-pressed socialist movement of today that cannot easily be duplicated. She is missed.

  • A Personal and Political Tribute to Phyllis

    IT’S A STAPLE of American comedians to make fun of in-laws in general and mothers-in-law in particular. But, in my case and with no offense to Michael, I could have married my husband simply for his parents.

         In fact, I knew of Julie and Phyllis long before I met Michael. When I was at Princeton as a young woman, doing research on the U.S. left, I came across the book The Negro and the American Labor Movement edited by Julius Jacobson and written before the term African-American came into common and preferred usage. Because of this, I was already impressed when I met Michael Jacobson, the son of an American leftist – the quite-cool-and-interesting-to-me-sounding radical, “Third Camp Socialist” figure Julius Jacobson.

         But, as I know well as a feminist, much as I loved and respected my father-in-law, there could and would have been no Julie qua respected left democratic socialist theorist and debater without Phyllis. They were a team: Phyllis-and-Julie, Julie-and-Phyllis, inseparable and linked at the hip even though they grew up in (and tried to transcend) a traditionally gendered, raced and classed world. In some ways, their lives were conventional in terms of gender roles: Phyllis did more of the cooking, taking care of the house, more of the raising of Michael (it was, after all, the 50s), more of the administrative work for their long-standing publication New Politics — and more of the typing, transcribing and editing of all Julie’s articles. In other ways, though, their love – for I will always think of Phyllis and Julie’s story as, at one level, a love story – transcended gender hierarchies and conventions. I saw this very clearly after Phyllis’ tragic stroke when Julie, as so many men of his generation would never have done, refused to leave her bedside, setting up a telephone and bringing his books so that he could be by her side. He wouldn’t even leave to go to the Socialist Scholars Conference one year, saying to me that “being with Phyllis was much more important, and what gave his life meaning.”

         But why did Phyllis mean so much to me over the years I knew her, from the time we met when she was just about my age – i.e. in her 50s? The reasons are as much personal as political, emotional as much as if not more than intellectual. For, very soon after she came to know me, Phyllis accepted and loved me virtually as a daughter. She showered me with the unique combination of kindness and intelligence, dignity, and determination that I later learned marked her relationships with many other people as well. What I admired so much in her was the grace she created, her utter commitment with Julie to enjoying pleasures from eating to listening to music and appreciating the beauty of art and antiques to traveling. At the same time, Phyllis shared with Julie a passionate commitment to justice and overcoming inequalities: their anti-Stalinist socialism involved a vision in which everyone, not just class, racial and gendered elites, could partake of the beauties of day-to-day life.

         To capture both the personal and the political, the emotional and intellectual, aspects of my relationship with Phyllis, I’d like to share with you some vignettes and images, through the many years I knew my lovely, kind, and intelligent mother-in-law Phyllis Jacobson:

    • One image goes back to when Michael and I were first together, and he was busy in the late 80s working in the City’s budget office. I would call Phyllis some afternoons when I was upset about the pressures of the Columbia tenure process I was going through, or lonely because Michael had to work long hours, and I can hear Phyllis saying immediately, "Come right over" and my knowing I would have a cheery evening of dinner and conversation.

    • And I can see Phyllis in my mind’s eye bounding down the stairs cheerfully when I would come, saying "Hi child." If I complained about Michael to her (as I remember doing sometimes during that particularly stressful period), she would say, "Oh, I don’t know what you do with someone like that."

    • Then so many dinners, wonderful evenings, come back to mind with Michael and Julie and Phyllis and I – dinners when the conversation was truly at least 50 percent about food and 50 percent about politics. We’d debate whether Empire chickens were the best or Murray’s, and whether Staubitz the butcher was too over-priced (as Phyllis would complain) and how to best cook some delicious dish Phyllis was making. Then the conversation would move as though seamlessly into politics and I can almost hear Phyllis’ voice as she decried one “miserable” politician or another (from Clinton to Cheney and back again). And then we would move from debating food to debating a political question – like capital punishment. For some odd reason, Julie didn’t share Phyllis, Michael and my opposition to capital punishment – and, at least on this issue, I would find Phyllis to be the better, more articulate and even fiercer debater than Julie.

    • And then, after we’d talked about food and eaten and talked about politics, there were so many evenings when I can see the maps coming out as we’d plan summer trips that Phyllis and Julie took so many times, and which before our son Alexander’s birth, for many years, we managed to take with them. Many people would think Phyllis and Julie had lots of money, but they might not know that both of them would economize all year (eating in pretty much all the time), saving all year for precious European voyages they loved). And then, many times, the four of us did meet up in the 14TH arrondissement in Paris on the Rue Boulard or sometimes outside Paris and even once (as I recall) in Venice, comparing notes and Phyllis saying enthusiastically "Let’s do it" about going to particular monuments or art exhibits or restaurants or just to a local market or store we’d heard about.

    • Then I remember when Alexander (whom Phyllis and Julie called "Sasha") was born, and a picture comes to mind of being in the Jacobsons’ house where Michael and I used to change Alex’s diaper on top of the washing machine. I can remember Phyllis shouting Julie’s nickname, "Yudi! Yudi! Come down here!" when we were about to change Alex because she wanted him to share with her the joys and sensuousness of her finally having become a grandmother.

    • This is where some of these "personal" beautiful memories start to become sad, though, as I remember the tragic years after Phyllis became sick and was confined – this wonderful lively, smart, energetic woman – to the nursing home. Yet somehow, someway – even from this horrific position when Phyllis’ stroke left her unable to speak and to move – there was something, in all those years, of the same dignity that characterized Phyllis in the years when she was well. Anyone who came to visit Phyllis in the nursing home might know what I mean about a certain recognizable dignified smile that came onto her face even under these conditions – when she was no longer living in her beautiful home surrounded by lovely antiques, and when there was nothing to offer any of us by way of food or drink or greetings. And yet somehow, someway, she would greet strangers and nurses with some of that same dignified poise and grace that characterized her in her better days – and she would still raise her fingers as though to make an older point of debate or argumentation. Michael and I could still make her laugh by telling her funny stories.

    WHAT DIGNITY, what an amazing testament to the human spirit, to strength of will, does Phyllis offer to us not only in her younger and happier days but even through and up to the end.

         But I want to leave you today not just with these images of Phyllis the beautiful and strong woman and person, but of Phyllis the intellectual. See, for example, her article "Black Outrage in Los Angeles" that she wrote for New Politics in summer, 1992, or the NP review she wrote in summer, 1997.

         Thank you, Phyllis, for everything – for the love and role model you presented me, and for the belief in a better personal-and-political world that I still share, and for providing me inspiration for the rest of my life, as a mother, as a teacher, as a friend. I’ll never ever forget you and what you meant to me: how could I?

  • A Rejoinder to the Monthly Review-Keynesian Debate

    Monthly Review magazine, which long continues to have cache on the left—especially with regard to economic analysis—is currently hosting a debate on the so-called “Minksy moment.” MR, of course, long defends the view advanced in the 1960s by Paul Sweezy’s and Paul Baran’s book Monopoly Capital. In brief, that book advanced the thesis that the method of accumulation in modern capitalism differs significantly from its more competitive past due to significant changes in the level of concentration and centralization, that is because of the monopolization process itself.

    The reason for this is that monopoly capital is able, through its market power, to alter the rate of exploitation, the rate at which value is divided and redistributed to capital, by operating below full capacity. This creates market shortages, artificially raising prices above the limits that might otherwise competitively prevail in the absence of monopoly restrictions on potential competition. These barriers to entry are due not to collusion as such, but rather to the prohibitively high cost of entry at the necessary scale of production needed to force prices down.

    The consequence, according to Baran and Sweezy, is the generation of a mass of surplus-value that cannot be readily recycled. There is no reason to build additional productive capacity when the key to monopoly profits resides in withholding production. The system therefore suffers from stagnation, a permanent difficulty in recycling its “surplus” (the preferred term in Monopoly Capital) by means of additional capital formation. In this unique sense, monopoly capitalism is said to suffer from chronic overaccumulation, which it attempts to counteract through a multiplicity of waste generating activities that absorb the surplus without arresting the central dynamic of overaccumulation. Whereas “competitive” capitalism lapsed into periodic crisis due to an insufficiency of surplus-value, the modern stage of capitalism is said to suffer from its inverse. Business cycles are replaced with an overarching tendency to stagnation, which is itself only periodically transformed into prosperity to the degree in which surplus absorption can be made successful.  This takes the form primarily of advertising, war production, and imperialist adventures, the latter two financed by taxes and by the issuance of government debt. But not only by those means.

    The “Minsky” analysis, named after the late left Keynesian economist, who most famously questioned whether “it”—a second Great Depression—could occur, dealt primarily with the issue of financial instability. The creation of new financial products as a result of a combination of innovation, deregulation or regulatory avoidance, Minsky argued, increased the appetite for financial risk. This engenders a speculative boom that can be maintained as long as a sufficient revenue stream is available. Financial booms pass through three stages: a hedge phase, in which revenues are sufficient to cover interest and principle on debt; a speculative phase in which revenues are sufficient only to cover interest; and a Ponzi phase, the most dangerous, in which revenues are altogether insufficient and reliance is now placed on unsustainable asset inflation to meet ongoing debt obligations.  The duration of the speculative boom requires therefore a particular architecture of profits to fend off onset of the Ponzi phase.

    This is what fits so neatly into the Baran and Sweezy analysis. For a capitalism systemically awash in a surplus that needs to be recycled, while retaining a relatively low level of capital formation, habitually seeks out other—speculative—avenues for investment that offer greater rates of return than, say, that on government debt.

    The problem, however, is this. There is nothing in the marriage of these two approaches that permits us to see why the Ponzi phase is ever attained. And, more significantly, there is nothing that helps us understand how the financial crisis is transformed from a self-contained bubble into a general capitalist crisis; how a crisis in the banking system broadly defined comes to profoundly disrupt the production of commodities—be they goods or services. For that to occur, we would have to see, as we have, a rise in the debt to revenue stream of nonfinancial capital. That is, we would have to see the Ponzi like dynamic transferred into the commodity producing sectors of the economy. But this is largely inexplicable in the MR framework.

    For, if we were to follow Baran and Sweezy, the disproportional growth of the financial sector should be no more destabilizing than the growth of advertising. The service they perform for capitalism, according to MR—absorbing the surplus, while not adding to capital formation—is after all in principle quite similar. Equally, there is no reason why the debt to revenue ratio should attain Ponzi like dimensions in a monopoly system of commodity production that is choking on its excesses of surplus-value. Why, in other words, would borrowing displace internal financing in the nonfinancial sector when profits are plentiful and the need for additional capital accumulation relatively modest? Conversely, if the traditional avenues for mopping up the excess surplus have overreached and actually created a capital shortage, what is the continuous source of excess capital that so over-fuels the growth of the financial sector without triggering a self-correction in the form of prohibitive interest rates?

    The MR framework is ill equipped to answer these questions. The reason, in part, is the insistence that “monopoly” capitalism has created new laws, new dynamics, that upend the previously understood laws of capital accumulation. But those previously understood laws were derived independent of the particular degree of market competition. They are concerned with the general characteristics of capital and are based on how the system regulates the relations between surplus-value and invested capital. The form of competition can alter the distribution of surplus-value and create disturbances in the reproduction process that flow uniquely from this redistribution. But that is a question of the concrete application of these laws operating within a monopolistic context.

    This is precisely what the MR theory fails to answer. The nonaccumlating capitalism awash in surplus that Baran and Sweezy postulate as a “fundamental structural change” is a theoretical fantasy. Monopolistic limitations on production, largely overstated in any case, do not create surpluses for the system as a whole, they merely redistribute surplus-value by suppressing the rate of profit in less competitive sectors. It may be argued that monopolies also convert paid labor or wages into unpaid labor or profits through price gouging. But, at the same time, the idling of productive capacity needed for price gouging means a sacrifice of the surplus-value that would otherwise be available to a system operating under competitive conditions where additional workers would be exploited to the point of full capacity utilization. In any case, monopolies that fail to innovate through the accumulation of capital will find themselves unable to maintain their monopolistic advantages. Moreover, the larger the already existing base of accumulation, the larger the investment required for replacing the existing stock with more effective means of production needed to secure an expansion of the scale of production beyond the reach of potential competitors.

    Large concentrations of capital therefore are continuously faced with the need to expand profits and are no less threatened by a shortfall of profits than their less advantaged counterparts. Waste production redistributes surplus-value, while withholding value from additional capital formation. For the system as a whole, nonreproductive investment converts profits into revenue. “Waste production” may indeed provide needed services for the social reproduction of capital—not only through advertising that creates brand loyalty, in empire building that extends the availability of markets or secures vital resources and in generating public works and social services that fosters social stability. But waste production also can impede capital accumulation if the rate of exploitation cannot be increased sufficiently to meet the needs of all the expanding claims on surplus-value.

    Exploitation has been pushed ever higher in the American economy over the past 40 years. To some extent this can be attributed to the all out assault on labor unions that commenced in the Reagan years, but also to the neo-liberal free trade policies of both Democratic and Republican administrations that threatened the export of jobs if wage restraint was not strictly adhered to. As a result, almost all the productivity gains of the last generation were captured by the ruling class. If working-class living standards were nevertheless roughly maintained this can largely be attributed to the massive accumulation of consumer debt. This is the consumer aspect of Ponzi-ism, insofar as workers were able to sustain previously unheard of debt levels, not through anticipated pay increases, but by refinancing home mortgages under the assumption of an ever appreciating housing market.

    Yet even this massive redivision of the collective working day in favor of capital was insufficient for the needs of additional capital formation. The nonfinancial sector found itself ever more reliant on borrowing, yet this external financing would have otherwise presented no fundamental problem if profit margins had kept pace with the requirements of capital accumulation. Instead, however, the ratio of debt to revenue blossomed out of control. The fragility of this business borrowing became evident insofar as equity asset prices increasingly bore only the most fictional relationship to the underlying profitability of the system as a whole.

    This entire process was underwritten not by a continuous flow of “monopoly profits” but by the undervaluation of the Chinese yuan with respect to the dollar. This kept the Chinese export accounts in perpetual surplus, allowing an ocean of recycled dollars flowing back into American banks and into the bloodstream of the economy in the form of cheap credit. It also allowed a relative measure of relief for capital, insofar as imported input prices were artificially suppressed slowing down the erosion of profits. The entire credit bubble therefore collapsed in on itself at its most overburdened point. As the consumer market began to default in housing it initiated concentric ripples from there to the stock market, the financial sector and to the remainder of the economy.

    Keynesians and MR radicals believe that countercyclical measures can theoretically restore full employment and prosperity. They differ however on the political feasibility under capitalism for the type of radical income redistribution and investment socialization, beyond deficit spending, that this would require. An examination of the contradictory nature of state intervention would take us beyond the limits of this essay. Suffice it to say here, that production of surplus value in the private sector is the determining factor in the development of the overall system. If state activities improve the conditions of accumulation to the benefit of private capital in the sphere of production, while also accommodating rising living standards and the annexation and reconversion of surplus value into improved social entitlements, a capitalist prosperity meaningful to working people can be restored. This is particularly unlikely insofar as capitalist prosperity generally first requires a thoroughgoing purge of capital values and cuts in working class living standards of sufficient magnitude to reestablish the conditions of capital accumulation on a profitable basis. Measures that restore full employment through the expansion of state activities at the expense of the private sector can only create a pseudo- prosperity that leaves the immediate causes of economic instability latent. But even if the state could temporarily contribute to the creation of a meaningful capitalist prosperity, it cannot arrest and eradicate the recurrent causes of economic crises, causes which are embedded in the fundamental class divisions of society.

    As socialists we are in no position to place society on a different footing. Our class loyalties demand that we make every effort to mobilize for remediation of working-class living standards, to demand government act, if necessary, as employer of the last resort. But it is also imperative that we lose no opportunity in explaining that every measure short of socialism is a stopgap to real working class security and prosperity. Neither the Keynesian nor the MR approach lend themselves to that.

  • The New Corporatism in American Politics and the Grassroots

    From the Tea Party to the Coffee Party, How Political Parties Grow the Grass and Mow the Lawn

    There are moments in history when driven by economic and social conditions, by war, or by political problems, grassroots groups spring up from below, among rank-and-file workers or people in local urban or rural communities. Usually the Democratic Party has succeeded in gathering up such movements, domesticating them, and gathering them into its fold and making them part of its electoral machine, to the benefit of corporate America. Overtime, however, the labor unions and the national African American and Latino civil rights groups became so tame and tired, that they ceased to provide the social base required by the party if it was to be successful in elections.

    So today, the major political parties, both Republicans and Democrats, are creating new foundations and non-governmental organizations to expand the base of the parties and attract new voters. Those party think-tanks and NGOs in turn create what could be called pseudo-social movements, often describing themselves as "grassroots," though, in fact, they are created and controlled from above by inside-the-beltway D.C. organizations. These new corporate organizations, now propelled by the internet and social networking, are changing the landscape of social and political life.

    The Republican Party and conservative think tanks and foundations summoned up the Tea Party to give the Republicans new life after its defeat in the national election. The Democratic Party has similarly over the last several years inspired or created a number of such group — MoveOn.org, Repower America, Reform Immigration for America, and the Coffee Party — organizations that both work to shape the politics of social movements and win a new base of support for the Democrats. The organizers of these groups, using electronic media, social networking, and creating coalitions that absorb other smaller groups, create organizations that often meet in the local coffee shop, churches, American Legion or union hall, but have an agenda set in Washington by foundations and NGOs which in turn are controlled by the two major parties.

    The new corporate movements inspired and controlled by the Republicans and Democrats have the same relationship to a grassroots movement that genetically modified grass imbued with the Roundup pesticide does to a country meadow. The new grassroots is not so much a pasture as it is a modern suburban lawn, seeded, fertilized, watered and mowed by the foundations — ultimately to be enjoyed by the Republican or Democratic Party as the site of campaign barbecues.

    A New Corporatism

    What we're witnessing is the development of a new corporatism in American politics. Some use "corporatism" to refer to control of our economy and culture, society and politics by the corporations — and certainly we have that problem. I use "corporatism' here, however, as political scientists use it, to refer to government and party control over other organizations and movements. Most important among these are those started by the Democratic Party, its leaders or simply those who share the party's goal of creating a new activist base, while also setting limits of activism and ideological dissent.

    The goals of the neo-corporatism are two: First, to be able to mobilize people concerned with social problems and turn them out to vote for the major parties. Second, to create a series of organizations that can prevent the development of politically independent movements with agenda of their own. The trajectory of these groups is that in the name of political realism and expediency, they become bureaucratically centralized — usually in Washington — and pursue opportunistic and pragmatic goals within the framework set by the Democratic Party and its legislative agenda. The ultimate goal of the Republican and Democratic Party neo-corporatism is to prevent the development of independent political parties which might disrupt the regular rotation to power of the two capitalist parties.

    Those who join these new groups are folk looking for a way to influence politics in a progressive direction, well-meaning people, often new to politics, though some of them longtime activists and genuine grassroots groups. They join and participate in these organizations because they seem to have the potential to influence national policy in a good direction, though in the long run the goal of the politicos who conjured up these organizations is precisely to circumscribe the limits of activism and to contain their followers within the ideological boundaries and political programs of their respective parties and of corporate capitalism.

    Neo-Corporatism: A New Version of an Old System

    Political parties, of course, have always given political expression to other organizations and movements and have always worked to create or to control others groups and developments for the parties themselves. The Republican Party was during the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries became the expression of groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the U.S. Chambers of Commerce, and other such employer organizations, or of wealthy capitalist farmers and later of corporate agribusiness. And the party acted in government as arbiter of those various capitalist interests within the capitalist system.

    At the same time the Republicans and those employer organizations worked to keep in tow and in check small business associations which were otherwise often at odds with the big corporations. The Republicans fundamentally fought for the interests of finance and heavy industry, while keeping small town merchants and manufacturers and farmers from breaking with big capital and heavy industry. Similarly they fought for the wealthiest farmer groups, while working to keep medium and small farmers from breaking ranks. The Tea Parties of those days were Citizens Alliances, Midwest Grange groups, and nativist associations which rallied and railed against socialists, labor unions and immigrants.

    More recently, the Republican Party's economic conservatives, still representing the interests of finance, industry, and oil, also both helped to create the evangelical religious right which acted to draw lower middle class and working class white voters into the party's fold. Perhaps that the starting point of the neo-corporatist organization of politics was with Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, established in 1979. Falwell's group provided the prototype for other such rightwing religious organizations which simultaneously drew people into the Republican Party and headed off the development of political alternatives on the right.

    The Old Democratic Party

    The Democratic Party before 1965 was based primarily on the Solid South — the racist white politicians who enforced segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans below the Mason-Dixon Line — and also the corrupt big city machines in place like New York and Chicago which turned out the immigrant and working class vote. At the same time it also always represented finance, industry, and service corporations — though often consumer goods rather than heavy industry. The Democrats, however, found their most important political support through mass organizations of labor, African Americans, Latinos, and women. Beginning in the early 20th century, the Democratic Party had succeeded in politically subordinating the American Federation of Labor and its craft unions to its corporate political agenda, while also coming under pressure from those organizations to adopt elements of their agenda.

    During the 1930s, a powerful, militant, and politically radical labor movement arose that in some states created independent labor parties. The experiment, however, as short lived. After the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s, the Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats also succeeded capturing the CIO. With the AFL-CIO merger in the 1950s, the Democrats and the labor unions formed a partnership that lasted, with much better results for the Democrats than for the unions, until today.

    Similarly, with the rise and then the victory of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Democratic Party, after long resisting African American demands for equal rights, succeeded in drawing in and subordinating the NAACP and other African American organizations, while also becoming the primary vehicle, however inadequate, of the black political agenda. Likewise with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the National Council for La Raza whose leaders and members been drawn into the Democratic Party's sphere of influence. The organized women's movement too succumbed. The women's movement of the 1970s found its organizational expressing in the National Organization for Women (NOW), which also became politically subordinate to the Democratic Party, as did most other women's organizations.

    The Movements Ossify

    The workers movement of the 1930s, the civil rights organizations in the 1960s, and the women's groups in the 1970s had all been tumultuous movements, but once gathered into the Democratic fold they ossified. The bureaucratization of labor organizations and the growth of a privileged caste of labor officials, together with the routine character of collective bargaining from the 1940s to the 1970s, led the unions to become pragmatic, moderate, and weak. They also grew out of touch with the changing character of the workforce, far more "male, pale and stale" than the membership.

    Similarly, the civil rights organizations moved from the period of radicalism to respectability, from militant leadership to liberal leadership, and from real confrontations with power to symbolic reenactments of the past. The women's movement, linked to the labor movement and the democrats, largely shared the same fate of succumbing to the system, ceasing to be a movement in the streets and largely becoming a legislative lobby. Unions, African American and Latino organizations, and NOW and other women's groups became, at the political level, extensions of the Democratic Party and of a liberal establishment which supported the corporations and capitalism — and the actual economic, social and political interests of those groups were largely forgotten.

    All of these groups — labor, African Americans, Latinos and women — sought to use the Democratic Party as the vehicle for their political demands, though in that vehicle they were definitely not in the driver's seat, and sometimes they felt as if once the election was over, they were locked in the trunk. The Democrats — and the corporations they represented — succeeded because they held the steering wheel. The labor and social movements, locked up in the party of another social class, could not change the direction of the party, or government, or of the economy. And a crash was coming.

    When these groups pressed hard enough, the Democrats would take up their cause, and often even a token effort often proved to be enough to continue winning the votes of workers, African Americans, Latinos and women. Year after year, for example, the Democrats failed to pass labor law reform, including most recently the Employee Free Choice Act, yet labor continued to support the Democrats — because the alternative would mean a social struggle that the labor movement was not prepared to carry out. While disappointed with the Democrats' jobs of representing them, most of those groups felt that creating an independent party would be too difficult, though they had also learned that taking over the Democratic Party also proved impossible.

    A Shrinking Social Base

    The Democratic Party, however, was also disappointed with unions and the civil rights groups which by the 1980s were failing to keep voters loyal to the party. The unions shrunk from about 35% of all workers in the 1950s to just about 12 percent by the 1990s, losing power and influence. The Republican Party made gains among Hispanic voters. The historic African American civil rights organizations, such as the NAACP, passed through a series of organizational crises which made them less useful, though most black voters continued to vote for the Democratic Party seeing no alternative in the Republicans. While some new social movement had appeared — particularly the environmental movement and the gay and lesbian rights movement, and while the Democratic Party had gained most from them — they had not proven large and strong enough to rebuild the party's base. So by the 1990s the Democrats stumbled upon another strategy, the creation from above of new organizations that could both conjure up and control a mass following for the Democratic Party. The Democrats went into landscaping; time to plant the grass.

    MoveOn.org

    The Democrats' new corporatism might be dated from the establishment of MoveOn.org in 1998, originally as a group calling upon Congress to censure rather than impeach President Bill Clinton and then "move on." MoveOn.org opposed President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq and became for one of the country's most important anti-war groups. MoveOn.org created Action Forums as local discussion and action groups and worked with MeetUp.com to organize street demonstrations and other events.

    MoveOn's fundamental strategy and method was to act both on the Democratic Party and within the Democratic Party. MoveOn became involved in the 2004 election and issued its Call for Change in the 2006 election, always with an eye to moving the Democratic Party to the left, but without moving to the left of the Democratic Party. The desire to serve the party gradually supplanted the responsibility to serve the movement. By the end of middle of the century's first decade it had become clear to many anti-war activists that MoveOn's fundamental commitment to the Democratic Party had become an obstacle to effective anti-war activism.

    MoveOn.org, though it had not exactly been created in Washington, provided the prototype of the a group created and commanded by Democratic party loyalists who wished to use the organization to both create and contain a social movement, a movement which might otherwise have found its way into other more independent channels, in the case of the anti-war movement into United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ ). MoveOn also provided the first model of organization for the new corporatism: an organization led by Democrats organizing from above, through an electronic apparatus which they controlled and reaching down into the social soil of America.

    MoveOn used the new electronic media and social networking as no other group had used them before, reaching out to millions with its ideas and its actions. MoveOn did provide many people with their first experience of activism, and set them in motion around issues such as the war in Iraq, and for many this was a politically important and personally meaningful experience. But the goal was always both to create that movement and to contain it within the political parameters of the Democrats.

    Eventually MoveOn, moved on to deal with all sorts of economic and social issues, becoming a broad liberal lobby that claimed five million members, more than twice as large as the country's largest labor union. MoveOn urged its members to vote, and to vote for Democrats and to support the Democratic Party agenda. MoveOn would provide the model for other groups — Repower America, Reform Immigration for America, and the Tea Party — which were more directly created and controlled respectively by the Democratic or Republican Party.

    Reform Immigration for America

    A similar process took place around the issue of immigration reform. Back in 2003 immigration national advocacy organizations, mostly based in Washington, D.C., and labor unions came together to create the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CCIR) also known as the New American Opportunity Campaign (NOAC). The founders of CCIR were four immigration advocacy groups — The Center for Community Change, the National Council of La Raza, National Immigration Forum, New York Immigration Coalition — and two labor unions, SEIU and UNITE. The groups organized the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, modeled after the civil rights freedom rides of the 1960s, and then went on to create an umbrella organization for all immigrant rights and immigrant organizations.

    When in 2005 Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) introduced the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act (or "McCain-Kennedy Bill") — involving legalization of a majority of the undocumented immigrants in the U.S., stricter border enforcement, a large guest worker program, and plans for the orderly control of future flows of immigrants — the CCIR became its principle organizing vehicle. CCIR worked on building support for the bill in immigrant communities throughout the United States. Well-funded and professionally organized, CCIR staff worked to convince local immigrant groups and regional coalitions, though local immigrant groups often objected that both the organization and the bill had been foisted on them.

    Many independent immigrant groups wanted all immigrants living and working in the U.S. to be legalized, objected to the heavy costs and penalties in the proposed bill, opposed guest workers, and rejected the idea of building more walls on the borders. Every major city or immigrant community saw tense arguments not only over the bill's content but also over the CCIR's top-down organization for it.

    Then, under the pressure of genuine grassroots groups — hometown clubs, soccer teams, local radio disc jockeys, church congregations — a tremendous movement developed in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and many other cities and towns. In the spring and summer of 2006 that movement took to the streets, not controlled by CCIR and not in support of any particular bill, but rather a social explosion of immigrants demanding the right to live and work in America. Those massive demonstrations, some as large as one million people — the largest social movement demonstrations in American history — threatened in some places to become a kind of general strike of Latino workers.

    Still, the movement could not overcome the backlash — fanned by conservative Republicans and some Democrats — that had developed among many whites. The Kennedy-McCain Bill failed to pass the U.S. Congress, and the CCIR went on to support other versions of "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" proposed to the Congress over the next few years. The Washington-based immigration advocacy groups held together around roughly the same program for immigration over the next several years.

    From CCIR to RIFA

    After the election of Barack Obama, the same core group that had created CCIR founded a new group, Reform Immigration for America (RIFA), to support another "comprehensive immigration reform" bill. Under the pressure of immigrant communities, RIFA created a program somewhat more progressive the former CCIR's, calling for more visas, rather than for guest workers programs. While RIFA's program puts forward more humane values, it is not without its problems. It would not legalize all immigrants now working in the country and would deny undocumented immigrants an opportunity to work legally, driving them into the underground market. More important, RIFA and the advocacy groups at its core are prepared to accept a far more conservative compromise bill in order to pass immigration reform in one version or another.

    Genuine grassroots immigrant groups and their allies will have little if any voice in the political process of passing some sort of immigration reform, which will remain in the hand of the Democratic Party. The Democrats will subordinate RIFA to their aims, and RIFA will keep local immigrant groups in line. Ultimately the Democrats will further weaken an immigration bill to please the Republicans. Neither RIFA nor the Democrats are prepared to organize the power of immigrant workers, which would in turn revitalize the labor movement.

    Repower America

    In 2008 multi-millionaire and former Democratic Party presidential candidate Al Gore created Repower America, an extension of his organizations the Climate Protection Action Fund and the Alliance for Climate Protection, which claim five million members worldwide. The group's home page says, "Founded by Al Gore, Repower America is dedicated to revitalizing our economy, strengthening our national security and solving the climate crisis through clean energy."

    Well funded and staffed, Repower America has put organizers in the fields in states throughout the country, and they in turn have hired young people to distribute literature and circulate petitions on environmental issues. The website invites "grassroots supporters" to engage in "grassroots" lobbying for the environmental agenda. Recently the group also created Inconvenient Youth to involve teenagers from 13 to 18. That site has a social networking to allow members to connect with others near them, cultivating the young shoots of the neo-corporatist grassroots.

    Founded by Al Gore, one of the Democratic Party's most important and, since his failed election campaign, most successful leaders — winner of both the Nobel Peace Prize and an Academy Award for his film "An Inconvenient Truth" — Repower America is clearly a Democratic Party project. Clearly Gore's goal is to build a top-down movement that will support the Gore's environmental policy within the Democratic Party.

    Interestingly, when the Obama administration recently decided to permit the oil companies to engage in drilling along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, Repower America created a petition where its members and others could appeal to President Barack Obama to reconsider and change that policy. One should not take that as a mark of political independence from Obama and the Democrats. While Repower America may be willing to criticize some particular administration policy, no one should expect it to fundamentally criticize Democratic Party policy or come to an independent position.

    Operation Free

    Gore's isn't the only neo-corporatist environmental game in town. The U.S. Department of Defense has created Operation Free, a "coalition of leading Veterans and national security organizations," to promote green environmental policies. The DOD sends veterans traveling around the country to speak on the need to "Secure America with Clean Energy." Locally sponsored by groups such as the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Foundation and Environmental Defense Fund, Operation Free tours the country in a big blue bus emblazoned with a military-style service patch displaying wind turbines and solar panels.

    Operation Free's veteran spokesmen and -women, talk about their service time in wars overseas, their commitment to the country, and to environmental policies. Sounding like liberal sheep in conservative wolves' uniforms, they tell environmentalist audiences that they oppose the oil companies and that they can better reach conservative voters and win them to support green policies. "We've won health care reform, and now we can win green environmental policies," one veteran told an audience in Cincinnati, Ohio. The carefully orchestrated meetings are dominated by the veterans' prepared statements and they permit only written questions, and most audiences hesitate to raise the issue of war and its environmental consequences.

    The Obama Campaign

    Barack Obama's brilliant 2008 campaign for the U.S. presidency drew upon the experience of groups such as MoveOn.org and Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, creating an attractive website and logo, using electronic social networking that eventually involved millions, and then turned that electronic network into a campaign organization that mobilized tens of thousands to do precinct work. Many young people in particular, who had never been involved either in politics or a genuine social movement, experienced the Obama campaign as what was for them a social movement.

    The sense of excitement, the meetings and rallies, the door-to-door canvassing, though orchestrated from Washington, D.C. were experienced regionally and locally as the nearest thing to a movement that many of the participants had ever known. When the campaign was over and Obama was elected, he then turned his campaign organization into Organizing for America. OFA invites those who visit its website to join "grassroots OFA campaigns to support the President's agenda."

    OFA represents perhaps the largest and broadest of the neo-corporatist organizations, a "grassroots" group controlled by the Democratic Party President who is the head of the U.S. government and commander-in-chief. After Obama's election, however, interest in OFA declined, revived only briefly, sporadically and spottily by the campaign around health care reform. OFA called upon Obama supporters to engage in lobbying for his health care reform — without single-payer (Medicare for all) or a public option. Disappointment with the President on the left and the right, had left the door open for the Republican's neo-corporatist Tea Party.

    The Tea Party

    The stunning victory of Barack Obama in the 2008 election devastated the Republican Party. Not only did Obama win, but the Democrats also won a majority of both houses of Congress. At the same time, however, during his first year in office Obama failed to provide strong, clear leadership to the Democratic Party majority, to his supporters in the Democratic Party and to his followers in Organize for America. Enthusiasm waned, support dwindled, and the grass dried up. Then the crab grass came.

    Rightwing Republicans with strong support from conservative foundations such as Freedom Works and from FOX News and other conservative media, stepped into the vacuum created both by the lack of leadership from Obama and by the disorientation of mainstream Republicans. Beginning in 2008, rightwing Republicans and some Libertarians began to call for a Tea Party to protest against Obama's administration and its policies. By January 2009 the Tea Party had been born — with many claiming to be the fathers, mothers or midwives of the movement. Tea Party activists took a lead in opposing Obama's call for health reform, arguing that it was the first step toward socialism and the end of America as we have known it.

    While the proliferation of Tea Party websites, organizations, political programs, and ideological orientations gave the impression of a genuine grassroots movement, in fact the Republican Party and its most conservative think-tanks backed by the corporations had quickly taken command of the group. True, the Tea Party has its racists and fascists, its cranks and screwballs, but it's the Republicans who have paid the bills and provided the direction. Dick Armey, former leader of the House Republicans, lobbyist, and chair of Freedom Works, emerged as the principal party leader of the Tea Party, while Sarah Palin, Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008, became one of the group's favorite spokespersons. The Tea Party organizers increasingly promoted an anti-government and free market position, claiming that Obama was leading the nation toward socialism and the brink.

    By the spring of 2010 Tea Party organizations were active principally in Republican Party primary races supporting more conservative candidates than those wanted by the Republican Washington establishment. In a few place the Tea Party and its rightwing activists wrecked local Republican Party election plans. Such a development could threaten the Republican Party leadership and even the future of the party, still the Tea Party remains for now part of the party, not a genuinely independent political movement. Whether or not the Tea Party will be able to sustain momentum after the November 2010 elections remains to be seen, but we can be sure that the Republican Party will remain in place.

    The Coffee Party

    With the Tea Party garnering much of the media's attention, two Barack Obama supporters, movie makers Annabel Park and Eric Byler, decided to create the Coffee Party, with the motto "Wake up and Stand up!" in January of 2010. Using the kind of electronic media techniques developed by MoveOn and by the Obama campaign, they created a website, and then quickly called meetings in some 370 coffee shops throughout the country and a few overseas. The group claimed 150,000 members within six weeks. The initial meetings were followed a second round of meetings, often with a different group of participants.

    The Coffee Party, while clearly intended to be the Democrats' answer to the Tea Party, presents itself as non-partisan. The group's website explained itself this way:

     

    "The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them."

     

    The group's organizers failed to inform participants that the movement had been formed by Democratic Party loyalists, though that was obvious from the discussions that revolved around the Democrat's key issues, such as health care reform, with a clear intent to minimize calls for single-payer. Discussions of the wars abroad were generally off the table.

    Some of the Coffee Party's initial announcements asked people to turn from the extremes and to "meet in the middle." Local leaders explain that the group rejects the political extremes of left and right. Cincinnati's principal Coffee Party organizer speaking to a class at the University of Cincinnati said, "We won't want to be like those people out in the streets carrying signs with hand-written slogans." Sounding like an American Progressive of the 1910s, he said, "We want our discussion to be based on facts. When we have a question we go to the experts and read academic papers that have been peer-reviewed."

    Rather than taking to the streets, in Cincinnati at least the Tea Party has organized a meeting to thank a local Congressman for voting for Obama's health care reform. So, while the Tea Party has been in the streets winning a following by challenging the government, the Coffee Party has so far remained cloistered in mostly middle class coffee shops, eschewing the streets and rejecting confrontation.

    Grassroots Redefined

    All of these organizations talk about building "grassroots movements," but in a way that gives a new definition to old expression. Grassroots originally meant a movement with roots in local concerns and suggested the notion of a local group democratically controlled by some local community and the people involved in it. Grassroots suggested a kind of authenticity, a genuinely homespun movement of local people, even if concerned with regional and national issues. It also suggested a movement from below, in local communities or one sort or another that then reached up to try to influence the centers of power. These neo-corporatist movements, however, mostly have their origins in Washington, D.C., though, even if conceived outside of the beltway, they have been created by people loyal to the Republicans or the Democrats as the case may be.

    While mostly created from on high by the parties, party leaders, NGOs or foundations, there is no doubt that in many cases they have successfully reached down into the grassroots. Whether we talk about MoveOn, the Obama campaign, The Tea Party or the Coffee Party, almost all have found constituencies in communities across the country. None of them, however, really originated there, with the possible exception of some of the first manifestations of the Tea Party. Controlled by the parties, foundations, and NGOs, well-funded and usually with professional staffs, they have reached outward and downward — principally through electronic media and social networking — to attempt to build a local base. They are planting the grass they want, and view other things that pop up as weeds.

    Most of these groups do not have a democratic membership structure with an elected leadership, nor do they usually have local chapters with any degree of autonomy. Organizational directives and political positions move from the top to the bottom, from the center to the periphery, though some of these groups create some semblance of local autonomy. The Tea Party may be if not the most democratic, at least the most chaotic. While Dick Armey, the Republicans, Freedom Works, and FOX provide much of the real direction for the Tea Party, local chapters do their own thing from holding meetings, and demonstrations, to issues proclamations and manifestoes.

    The Democratic Party organizations create the regional and local structures and establish quite clear if not always publicly stated political parameters. And they may also offer a lot of space for local discussion and debate of the sorts that is either about high minded and abstract ideals — "How do we promote real democracy in the United States" — and therefore does not affect political policy, or is about organizational matters — where to hold the meeting — and therefore does not touch on any matters of substance. Generally, members have no way in a local chapter to make decisions that might affect the national organization, while the national organization makes all the substantive decisions for the local chapters.

    Still, both the Tea Party and the Coffee Party, and the other organizations, find followers looking for like minded folk with whom to socialize, commiserate, and chat (both actually and virtually). The success of these models has a lot to do with creating partisan substitutes for what were once more diverse and democratic town hall meeting, or with building new forms of party precinct and ward organizations which went out of business with the growth of radio and television.

    The Independent Left and the New Corporatism

    How should the independent left, that is people to the left of the Democratic Party, anti-capitalists and socialists, relate to these neo-corporatist organizations and pseudo-movements? Our goal in approaching this question should be to understand that we want to join people in action and while working with them, win them to our point of view. With that in mind, each of these organizations presents a different set of problems or questions.

    With regard to the Tea Party, while most of its members may simply be exceptionally conservative Republicans, there are within it various sorts of ultra-conservatives, some of them racist and some potentially violent. The more radical right-wingers often dominate protest demonstrations and put forward slogans and demands, and sometimes carry racist posters, which would make it impossible for us to participate in good conscience. We will probably not be able to even converse with much less influence people in the centers of these movements, though we might draw away people in their penumbra.

    Organizations like MoveOn.org, now that it has become a kind of generic liberal lobby, and groups like the Coffee Party call meetings in which we would want to be present, both to understand liberal arguments, and to meet some of the many fine people who participate in these meetings. We may through conversations with them be able to identify some who share our more independent views. When they call demonstrations, we may want to participate, though perhaps with our own slogans, signs and chants which raise a more independent political position.

    Similarly with Repower America which has put so much money into creating an apparatus to organize young people, one might want to participate in the movements without adopting the politics, while offering critical perspectives. Where Repower does draw young people into the environmental movement, we would want to argue, for example, for the need to socialize energy resources and to create socialized green production. We should look for opportunities within Repower to challenge the capitalist, liberal, and ultimately Democratic Party parameters set by the group.

    With Operation Free, on the other hand, we should take a different position. This is after all an organization of the Department of Defense — better called by its historic name the War Department — and we should try to rip off the green mask which covers the bloody red of imperial wars, occupations, mass murder, environmental disasters in victim nations, and the dislocation of millions, together with the drone missiles and the horrifying civilian deaths they cause. If we are members, we should insist that the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Foundation and Environmental Defense Fund cease to work with the War Department.

    Reform Immigration for America (RIFA) has to be approached much as we would approach some of the labor unions which founded and support it, that is, as a bureaucratic organization with reformist politics which has some degree of organizational and ideological influence over millions of workers. When RIFA calls meetings and demonstrations such as it has which involved thousands of workers, we must be present, but we should not accept the RIFA program which does not speak to immigrants' real needs. Where possible, and this depends on local conditions, we should introduce a critique of RIFA's immigration program, such as denying undocumented workers in the U.S. the right to a job and increasing border policing. Just as we do in the labor unions, we should work in the movement, but without accepting its politics, working to represent the interests of all the immigrants and of the broader labor movement.

    With regard to the anti-war movement, while keeping informed about MoveOn.org activities and participating when possible with independent signs and literature, one would perhaps rather work to build United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), though at this point most independent anti-war activists are working to build a new independent anti-war coalition of some sort. Certainly the continuing war in Iraq, the expansion of the war in Afghanistan, and the shameful and horrifying drone attacks on Pakistan which have killed civilians demand that we build a new anti-war movement, and MoveOn.org, with its commitment to the President and the Democrats cannot and will not provide leadership.

    Ultimately, for those of us work in the grassroots, the point is this: We need no condescending gardeners. We will rather work to cultivate movements at the real grassroots, the diverse garden of self-managed organizations independent of both the Democrats and Republicans.

     

    Note: In writing this article, I have found it helpful to refer to the Wikipedia articles on the various organizations discussed, from which I have taken some of the accounts and descriptions of them.

     

    Dan La Botz is a Cincinnati based teacher, writer and activist and the Ohio Socialist Party candidate for the U.S. Senate.

  • Sounding the alarm on "Race to the Top"

    How can we make neoliberalism’s project to destroy public education, captured in the Obama/Duncan “Race to the Top” proposal,  more understandable? The subject is complex, but bloggers in the US are taking up the challenge, as we see in Susan Ohanian’s excellent report on my work. (Thanks to all who have picked up the debate with Ravitch.)

    Still, we cannot can beat back this juggernaut alone. We in the US are conditioned to think that we have the answers. However, the rest of the world has been battling the neoliberal project far longer than we have, and we can learn from them.

    One valuable resource is the website hosted by Mary Compton, co-editor of our book describing the neoliberal project and resistance to it. If we had the teacher union movement we need, Mary’s website would be run by the conservative and bureaucratic Education International, the global federation of teacher unions.

    Another is the Anti-Academies Alliance in the UK. “Academies” are UK charter schools, and the Alliance, supported by the National Union of Teachers, is doing grassroots organizing from which we can and should learn. The Alliance has developed questions to put to candidates in the general election. Just change the names of the operators of the schools and you have wonderful talking points.

    1. Do you agree that state schools should be accountable to democratically elected representatives of the communities they serve and not to unaccountable private sponsors or providers?

    2. Given their patchy performance and the high cost of establishing academies, do you agree with the independent think tank Civitas that there should be a freeze of the Academies programme while an evaluation is carried out of its successes and failures?

    3. Do you agree that public funding of our schools should all be spent on educating our children rather than contributing to the profits of private educational providers like GEMS, Edison and Lilac Skies, paid to provide “outsourced” services to state schools?

    4. If elected as an MP, do you promise that you will vote against any proposal to allow so-called “free” [translate: “alternative”] schools to be run for a profit?

    We need to build an international movement. That means taking off the national blinders.

  • "Drunk, crazy, and manipulated by their betters" – Sailors and Democracy

     My research on Jack Tar, the American colonial seaman, began in rebellion against the highly politicized historiography of the 50s and early 60s, which reflected Cold War values, stressing the classlessness of American society, the lack of conflict, and the irrationality of those who dissented. A conservative historiography saw crowd actions in early America as drunk/crqzy, or manipulated by their betters. I undertook research on seamen, who were disproportionately present in the Revolutionary crowds, which I rescued from the contempt of the dominant historiography, finding rational motives and grievances (such as impressment by the Royal Navy. I published various pieces on the American Revolution as seen from the bottom up.
    Now, some 40+ years later, younger historians are continuing and refining this work. Thus at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Washington DC on April 9, I chaired a session on “From the Bottom Up: Sailors and Democracy.” Below is my introduction in text and in video excerpt, plus a video excerpt from the paper presented in the session by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. 

  • Kate Millett and Her Critics

    [This article appeared in the old series of New Politics, Fall 1970.]

     

    Sexual Politics by Kate Millet
    Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, N.Y. 1970, 393 pp. $7.95

    Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics has elicited awe, praise and sober criticism, but proof of its effectiveness is the appearance of a variety of articles and reviews marked by utterly unselfconscious vulgarity, philistinism and venomous hostility.

          “These are not normal women. I think they are freaks. Besides, they are dead wrong in their assumption that most women detest men, marriage and housework so much they can’t wait to e liberated from them so they can rush out to work all day in factory, shop or office. … Most women have a strong nesting instinct and they like taking care of their homes.” So writes Helen Lawrenson in the January 1971 issue of Esquire, a publication which has been trying manfully to change its “girlie” image since its editors realized years ago that it could not compete successfully with Playboy. The Lawrenson article, “The Feminine Mistake,” characterized by breezy ignorance and the social sage: “So you see, no matter how you slice it, it’s the same old sex game. Liberate me, daddy, eight to the bar.” Even the idiom is dated.

          Midge Dector’s response to women’s liberation is a “fable” called “The Liberated Women” which appeared in te October 1970 issue of Commentary, written in e form of a prolonged whine. Its whimsy cannot conceal its essential vulgarity:

    To judge from what she sys and does, however – finding only others at fault for her predicaments, speaking always of herself as a means of stating the general case, shedding tears as a means of negotiation – the freedom she truly seeks is of a rather different kind. It is a freedom demanded by children and enjoyed by no one: the freedom from all difficulty. If in the end her society is at fault for anything [my emphasis, P.J.], it is for allowing her to grow up with the impression that this is something possible to ask. Even the good fairies who attended her birth would never have dared so far.

          Miss Decter’s claim to fame is that, in addition to being the executive editor of Harper’s magazine, she is in the words of the biographical squib accompanying the article, “married and is the mother of four children.” It failed to add that she is married to the editor of Commentary which is surely the only explanation for an article of no merit whatsoever appearing in that journal’s pages.

          Harper’s, the magazine of which Miss Decter is the executive editor, selected for its reviewer of Sexual Politics a man whose polemical writing is marked by the royal put-down, invariably spiced with words and phrases from language he does not speak: none other than Irving Howe. Despite its pretentiousness (there are almost three full pages on Freud, an area in which Mr. Howe’s credentials are highly dubious), the review is marked by much more than his usual nastiness. Miss Millet, we learn is “a figment of the Zeitgeist, bearing the rough and careless marks of what is called higher education and exhibiting a talent for the delivery of gross simplicities in tones of leaden complexity. Brilliant in an unserious way. … She has a mind of great energy but small feeling for nuance. … She is the ideal highbrow popularizer for the politics and culture of the New Left. …” What is more “About the experience of working-class women she knows next to nothing. …” And then, for a coup de grace. Carried away by his own learned exposition of Freud, Howe steps into the role of diagnostician, “…there are times when one feels the book was written by a female impersonator.”

          The hostility of the review (How threatened can Irving Howe get?) is matched only by its philistinism. “And is the poor bastard writing soap jingles in an ad agency performing a ‘human’ task morally of psychologically superior to what his wife does at home, where she can at least reach toward an uncontaminated relationship with her own child?” And capped with truly unselfconscious vulgarity masquerading as “yiddishkeit,” “I think back, then, to the one other world I have known well, the world of immigrant Jewish workers. … Was my mother a drudge in subordination to the ‘master group?’ No more drudge than my father who used to come home with hands and feet blistered from his job as a presser. Was she a ‘sexual object?’ I would never have thought to ask, but now, in the shadow of decades, I should like to think that at least sometimes she was.” Fadeout to the soft strains of a yiddish folk song. Pure schmaltz!

          In any case, the point that escapes Howe is that Momma certainly was more of a drudge than Poppa. They both worked in garment factories, where she earned less than he did, both came home exhausted but Momma cooked, washed dishes, scrubbed floors and tended to Poppa’s other needs. Or does the reality intrude on the sentimental drivel Howe concocts for public consumption?

          Irving Howe has kind words for Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex now that Sexual Politics has arrived on the scene in the context of a women’s movement. Howe’s attempt is to use de Beauvoir to put down Millett. In his characteristically charitable style he says: “…anyone comparing the two books would immediately recognize the extent to which Miss Millett has drawn upon de Beauvoir’s famous work. The central ideas and sentiments of Sexual Politics are simply appropriated, in vulgarized form, from The Second Sex, and reviewers with some intellectual conscience might consequently have sown some restraint in praising Miss Millett’s originality of thought.” Generous to a fault!

          While Howe is careful to say about The Second Sex only that it is “famous,” by implication he also says that it is a better piece of work. The political conclusion should not be lost on the unsuspecting. When Martine Luther King emerged as the leader of an active, militant, civilly disobedient civil rights movement even downright reactionaries, not to mention the entire political Establishment, suddenly became the champions of Roy Wilkins and the NAACP. Faced with movement and inevitable change, they opted for a moderate. This is not to say at all that Simone de Beauvoir is a moderate on women’s liberation. It is only that her book (with an entirely different emphasis than Kate Millett’s) appeared in the United States during the fifties, a period of political apathy. While it received wide attention and, no doubt, succeeded in shocking its more backward readers, it could not possibly have had the impact and effect that Sexual Politics has today in the context of political movement among women. Fearful of any radical change, Irving Howe suddenly embraces Simone de Beauvoir.

     

    What is there about Sexual Politics that provokes this unseemly response?

          The threat is clear. Kate Millett has formulated a forceful indicetment of patriarchal society, illustrating her theory of sexual politics with examples from history, psychology and literature. One need not agree with every example, every argument presented to come to the realization that “there remains one ancient and universal scheme for the domination of one birth group by another – the scheme that prevails in the area of sex.”

          The evidence is overwhelming and whether she is discussing women in the economy, in literature, in totalitarian societies or their estimates of themselves, Miss Millett handles her material with great skill and, even more important, with insight, humor and compassion.

     

          Discussing women’s role in the economy where they constitute a large and underpaid factory population, Miss Millett draws a sharp difference between men and women in production. While neither owns nor controls the process in which they participate, women do not even comprehend it. Her example is illuminating:

     

    …the refrigerator is a machine all women use, some assemble it in factories, and a very few with scientific education understand its principles of operation. Yet the heavy industries which roll its steel and produce the dies for its parts are in male hands. The same is true of the typewriter, the auto, etc. Now, while knowledge is fragmented even among the male population, collectively they could reconstruct any technological device. But in the absence of males, women’s distance from technology today is sufficiently great that it is doubtful that they could replace or repair such machines on any significant scale.

    The conclusion is inescapable. “If knowledge is power, power is also knowledge, and a large factor in their subordinate position is the fairly systematic ignorance patriarchy imposes upon women.”

          And despite the growing numbers of women involved in “higher education,” the society, through its insistence on retaining long outmoded cultural differences, enforces systematic ignorance in a way not too different from the manner suggested by John Ruskin in 1865. Female education for Ruskin was “not for self-development, but for self-renunciation.”

     

    Miss Millett’s discussion of anti-feminist attitudes in totalitarian societies – attitudes which are basically irrational and even harmful to the economies of those societies – bears out her contention that “…sexual politics, while connected to economics and other tangibles of social organization, is, like racism, or certain aspects of caste, primarily an ideology, a way of life, with influence over every other psychological and emotional facet of existence.” To be sure, while both Germany and Russia systematically excluded women from the labor force prior to World War II, there was a material consideration of overwhelming importance – increasing the population for waging war. In both countries there were bonuses for mothers and, in Germany, additional taxes for bachelors and spinsters and marriage loans with tax and interest rebates for each child born.

     

          In Russia, the anti-feminist attitudes and edicts were a product of the Stalinist counterrevolution. Immediately after the October revolution, a conscious effort had been made to free women and restructure the family. There was free marriage, divorce, contraception and abortion on demand. And while Kate Millett is correct when she writes that “Marxist theory has failed to supply a sufficient ideological base for a sexual revolution,” buttressing that judgment with a quote from Trotsky: “You cannot ‘abolish’ the family, you have to replace it,” such an ideology might have been developed in a revolutionary atmosphere. Instead, the Stalinist reaction was complete and in rapid order free marriage, divorce, contraception and abortion were all outlawed; replaced by strict edicts on bearing many children and strengthening the family. (There are those, otherwise enchanted by Sexual Politics, who are very critical of Miss Millett for her discussion of the Russian counterrevolution. Without adducing any evidence to the contrary, Irwin Silber took exception to the material on Russia in an essentially laudatory review which appeared in The Guardian. Since he presented no augment whatsoever to account for his criticism, one is led to believe he has none but simply feels that recounting the effect of the counterrevolution is a breach of faith. Miss Millett is fortunate that her book appeared in 1970. Had it come out as late as twenty years ago she would have been referred to as a “fascist mad dog.”)

     

    There are areas in which Miss Millet may overstate her case. She has been criticized for her unrelieved attack on Freud and for an imbalance in her treatment of biological differences between the sexes. Yet, she was not writing an appreciation of Freud. What she has done, effectively in my opinion, is to underscore Freud’s masculine bias, a bias so pronounced that it raises strong doubts, at the very least, about the value of his psychoanalytic theories of feminity. The quoted material from Freud’s books, papers and letters certainly give credence to Miss Millett’s view that “It is especially curious to imagine that half the race should attribute their clear and obvious social-status inferiority to the crudest biological reasons when so many more promising social factors are involved.” If she has overstated her case, it is unnecessary. The evidence of women’s inferior status and oppression that exists in all areas of life and literature is abundantly clear.

     

          The literary examples of sexual politics – Lawrence, Miller, Mailer and Genet – are illuminating and entertaining and if Miss Millett opts for Genet it is because “his notions of sex role and rank are the most flat-footed ones available in his culture, quite without Lawrence’s subtlety, archaic in their direct presentation of power and subordination: a vicious and omnipotent superservility contrasted to a fluttering helplessness and abjection.”

     

          Sexual Politics is a harsh indictment of the actual status of male and female in patriarchy. More than that, it is a call to rebellion: a call to rebellion at a time when there is a growing consciousness among women of their inferior status and growing women’s movement to heed the call. It is the very existence of the Women’s Liberation movement that is responsible for the hostile and reactionary response to Miss Millett’s book.

     

     

    In a postscript to the book, Kate Millett deals very briefly with the timing of the emergence of this new feminist movement. She believes that it was inspired by the example of black protest and was given additional impetus by “the sexist character of the New Left.” Black protest undoubtedly played an important role in the development of women’s movement but the New Left, given the contradiction between its idealistic motives and its elitist nature, was the catalyst.

     

          Filled with idealism and radicalized by a succession of struggles waged for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam war during the sixties, the women found themselves part of a movement which discriminated against them in the most direct and often gross manner. Women in the movement were consigned to the role of clerk-typist and, with the development of the new sexual freedom, to the role of sex objects conveniently available to minister to the sexual needs of the male “theoreticians.” Why should this have been the pattern? Was this kind of gross discrimination against women part of the so-called Old Left and therefore a carry-over of previous practice?

     

          Not really. In the movement of old (true, at least of the Trotskyist and neo-Trotskyist movement of which I was part), women were discriminated against in more traditional ways. To obtain positions of leadership, women had to be twice as talented, twice as capable as the men. They were generally made to feel that they could never quite comprehend the intricacies of the more complex political theories. All of which is to say that the movement was far from generous to its women. However, women did play a role and because many were twice as talented and capable they did rise to prominence. It was another age and, much more important, the movement was not characterized by the kind of political and personal elitism which characterizes the New Left.

     

          The movement of the sixties was marked early by its enchantment with the more recent forms of totalitarianism. While it forswore the computerized Russian leadership as “conservative” (Kosygin and Brezhnev while malevolent are also faceless), it took up the cudgels for Mao, Ho, Kim and, better still for its romantic elitist vision, Fidel and Che. The fact that the societies ruled by these “heroes” are totally undemocratic, that freedom is non-existent, that women are particularly oppressed, did not give them pause. Quite the contrary, the virtues of China, North Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba were written about extensively, much in the manner of articles extolling Stalin as “Sun God” that appeared in Soviet Russia Today during the thirties, with just as much basis in fact.

          Added to the political elitism was the devotion to machismo. What Hemingway is for Norman Mailer, Che is for the men of the New Left. (The number of young men who walk around looking like mirror images of Che is startling, if ludicrous.) Che is the man with the gun, fighting alone against heavy odds, the ultimate guerilla. Alone, or perhaps with a small band of guerrilla fighters, he will free us all. He is endowed with all the virtues of a Hemingway hero: strong, armed, compassionate, and infinitely wise. Even the fact that he blew it (not so infinitely wise after all) did not destroy the myth.

          Filled with notions of guerrillaism and machismo, the men of the New Left made the movement a distinctly unpleasant experience for their women comrades. “Throw her off the stage and fuck her,” some of them yelled during an anti-war demonstration in Washington when one of the women was speaking. The message of male superiority was nowhere delivered as stridently as it was in the New Left. And having developed some political awareness, women in the movement became convinced of the necessity for a women’s movement to struggle for sex equality.

     

    The Women’s Liberation movement is a new one with growing influence. Its very existence is largely responsible for the liberalization of abortion laws in many states. Despite the fact that it is marred by absurdities (the media adore the very notion of bra burning) and by an unfortunate kind of righteous puritanism (one of the purposes of the movement is to free women to enjoy their sexuality not to suppress it), the movement has enormous possibilities. Kate Millett’s conclusion expresses it well:

    It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination – and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity. It may be that we shall even be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics, but not until we have created a world we can bear out of desert we inhabit.

    Humanity is the vision that should inform the Women’s Liberation movement.

     

     

    PHYLLIS JACOBSON is co-Editor of New Politics.

  • Phil Ochs – The Struggle Continues

    Phil Ochs was, until his untimely death in 1976, one of the great American folksingers and songwriters, whose powerful lyrics — political and poetic — helped to inspire a generation. His sister Sonny Ochs has worked to keep Phil’s memory and his message alive by organizing concerts bringing together current-day folk singers, offering a mix of their own material and Phil’s. The Hurdy Gurdy Folk Music Club of New Jersey presented one of these concerts on April 10 and it was a real treat, both musically and politically.

    The participating artists were Jen Cass, John Flynn, Greg Greenway, Kim and Reggie Harris, and Magpie (Greg Artzner and Terry Leonino).

    John Flynn, introducing a powerful song he wrote about the Dover Air Force Base, where the bodies of US soldiers killed in action are brought, pointed out that we have to hold Obama to the same standard as we held George W. Bush.

    Greg Greenway performed his “Standing on the Side of Love”; the title, he explained, comes from a line he heard at a concert in Virginia supporting same-sex marriage: when it comes right down to it, someone commented, I want to be standing on the side of love.

    Jen Cass sang a moving tribute to Phil, “Standing in Your Memory,” incorporating some of his own lyrics:

    Too many martyrs and far too many dead,
    Isn’t that what you said? Somehow you let it be again
    You became…another tragedy, a casualty of war
    What were we fighting for if you Ain’t Marching Anymore?

    The Harrises — who’ve written and perform an opera on the Underground Railroad, among many other musical creations — treated us to Reggie’s virtuoso guitar-playing and Kim’s vibrant and melodic voice.

    And Magpie updated Phil’s wonderful “Love Me, I’m A Liberal” (there are many shades of political opinion in the United States, Phil explained; and one of the shadiest of these is the liberal: 10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center when it affects them personally):

    Love Me, I’m a Liberal
    By Phil Ochs
    updates by Greg Artzner & Terry Leonino

    I cried when they shot Medgar Evers
    The tears ran down my spine
    And I cried when they shot Mr. Kennedy
    As though I’d lost a father of mine
    But Malcolm X got what was coming
    He got what he asked for that time
    So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

    I went to civil rights rallies
    And I put down the old D.A.R.
    I love Oprah and Michael and Tiger
    I hope every black kid becomes a star
    But don’t talk about revolution
    That’s going a little bit too far
    So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

    I cheered when Obama was chosen
    My faith in the system restored
    And I’m glad that they caught Bernie Madoff
    He certainly got his reward
    And I love Pakistanis and Arabs
    As long as they don’t move next door
    So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

    Those crazies who joined the tea parties
    Should all hang their heads in shame
    Now I can’t understand how their minds work
    Way too much Glenn Beck on the brain
    But if you want socialized health care
    You must be terminally insane
    So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

    I read MoveOn.org and Progressive
    I’ve learned to take every view
    I watch Bill Maher and Jon Stewart
    And I laugh all the way to the loo
    But when it comes to the war on terror
    There’s no one more red, white and blue
    So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

    I vote for the Democratic Party
    Though I’m sure that Kucinich is wrong
    I attend all the Pete Seeger concerts
    He still gets me singing those songs
    And I’ll send all my money to Haiti
    But don’t ask me to come on along
    So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

    Once I was young and impulsive
    I wore every conceivable pin
    Now it’s causes on Facebook and Twitter
    Virtual marches and sit-ins
    Ah, but I’ve grown older and wiser
    And that’s why I’m turning you in (to the department of homeland security)
    So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

    If you have a chance to catch any of these performers, don’t miss them. And be on the look-out for the next Phil Ochs Song Night!

  • What's right – and wrong – in Diane Ravitch's new take on school reform

    Five friends, none of them teachers, have called to tell me they heard about Diane Ravitch’s new book and her change of heart about the school reforms she advocated for a decade. “Lo! She’s saying what you’ve been telling us!”
    The publicity for Ravitch’s book has certainly put her incisive critique of the reforms (privatizing education; using standardized tests to measure everything; looking to “choice” and charter schools drive improvement) in the news.

    But it is revealing that Ravitch’s book uses none of the scholarship that radical critics of NCLB published about the reforms she supported. Instead, she goes back and reinvents the wheel. (Susan Ohanian has traced the foundations that contributed $125,000 to the writing of the book.)

    I noted in the panel at New York University in which Ravitch, Edward Fergus, and I appeared, Ravitch should be commended for her courage in criticizing the extremely powerful think tanks and figures (the “Billionaire Boys Club”) with whom she previously hobnobbed. Her drive to set the record straight on how the reforms are destroying public education should be welcomed.

    Still, it’s important to note what she gets wrong and why. In the book she explains being “caught up” in the widespread “enthusiasm” for market reforms. She will not, however, name this as the neoliberal project. By the political yardstick she uses in the book, the American Enterprise Institute is a “well-respected conservative think tank.” Someone whose first job in New York was at the New Leader, where she learned all about left sectarian politics and met  Max Shachtman, (as she noted in our exchange before the panel), knows enough to name capitalism’s latest iteration.

    Ravitch won’t name neoliberalism as the problem because it would force her to confront facts she’d rather ignore. Like the fact that 70% of the new jobs being created only require a minimal education. Or the fact that her idea of a great education is the Houston schools of her youth, a school system that was racially segregated. 

    Ravitch’s very unpersuasive agenda to beat back the neoliberal assault is a return to the post WW2 welfare state, pre-Brown versus education and those messy social movements that created the culture wars. She wants a kinder, gentler neoconservative restoration, one shorn of neoliberalism’s savagery. Her solutions include having parents (meaning minority parents) teach their kids how to behave right and read to them at home.
    As I said in the panel, this solution won’t do. I share Ravitch’s critique but to halt this juggernaut we have to see the international dimension of the project and its roots in capitalism’s appetite for greater profits from a workforce that competes in a race to the bottom.

     Neoliberalism’s project to privatize education and destroy the teacher unions (though perhaps they’ll be permitted to exist in name only, in the West) can’t be defeated with Ravitch’s solutions. Diane will have to come on board with her radical critics if she’s serious about reversing the destruction she describes so well in her book.

  • Hic Jacet Humptus – with a bow to the late William Buckley

    Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
    Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
    All the king’s horses
    And all the king’s men
    Couldn’t put Humpty together again

    How much can a citizen expect of his state?

    Before we rush into the breach with solutions that only create more problems, solutions like more welfare, more job-retraining programs, more touchy-feely therapy, in short, more middle class boondoggling in a mind-boggling bureaucracy, let us try to find out what caused the problem.

    “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall” presupposes one of three possible conditions:

    (1) He sat on the wall of his own volition. The market was open without interference, and he chose to sit on the wall.

    (2) An act of God or nature placed him on the wall.

    (3) He was set on the wall by one of his friends — liberal do-gooders, perhaps, or maybe radicals who want to create such bad conditions that mirabile dictu things will improve.

    If #1, Humpty must look to his own resources for respite. If the government did not misrepresent the wall or weaken its pinnings, he cannot look to the government.

    If #2, he must look to God for relief. One prays before a wall, not on a wall. (Even Parsees put only their dead on the wall.)

    If #3, we may be dealing with violations of conspiracy laws. For the sake of argument, let us assume that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could indeed rehabilitate Humpty. As Burke said, “And having looked to government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.” Humpty may well be a beginning, not an end, a recrudescence of something basic in man’s nether nature. After Humpty what? I need not remind you that there are billions of eggs and many, many walls. Do we continue increasing the number of horses and men? Can we?

    However, let us not fall (!) into the post hoc, propter hoc notion that Humpty’s sitting on the wall caused his fall. It just might be part of la condition humaine, human destiny. Death may be squatting inside Humpty’s shell, even as he was in the armor of Rilke’s knight. Joyce warned us, in Finnegans Wake, that this might be our cycle. The liberals are not going to repeal the law of gravity, try though they may.

    A problem arises: what if Humpty falls on us? That must, at all costs, be prevented. Citizens have the right to expect their government to protect them from this kind of interference. ALL THE KING’S HORSES AND ALL THE KING’S MEN WILL KEEP HUMPTY OFF THE WALL. In the next issue of National Review I shall take up the threat of those righteous barbarians of the Left who began with littering and — all too predictably — ended with murder: Hansel and Gretel.

  • Why Should the Left Trust the Government?

    In 1960, as a graduate student in history, I decided to pick up some work as a census-taker on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. At the training session (at the Henry George School), the instructor said, "you're paid by the head, and [smirk], nobody's going to make any trouble if you find a couple of two-headed people." (At that time I was still a Good Boy, and didn't find any such.)
    But this trained me in some skepticism about the census, which stayed with me when, as historian, I used old census records. And the continuing collapse of civil liberties under Obama further reinforces other doubts, about confidentiality. Why should we trust a government that spies on our emails, etc.?
    Nonetheless, still a little bit of a Good Boy and recognizing the positive value of the census, I filled out and returned the form. But all this made me recall that there is a tradition of census resistance in this country, going back to the first census (1790), opposed and refused by Baptists who based their resistance on a biblical passage which they read as opposing counting the people. (At that time, there remained established religions in some states, in effect taxing Baptists for their support.)
    As I write this, I think about a larger issue: expressions of anti-government sentiment in 2010 seem to be the monopoly of the right. What in the world has become of such expressions, which have been part of important Left traditions?

  • Obama’s War/Obama’s Atrocities

    Since George Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001 — the unjust, illegal, and unnecessary attack on Afghanistan — there have been constant US and NATO strikes on Afghan civilians, along with constant denials that such strikes have taken place. (These deaths were in addition to the deaths that resulted from disrupting the food distribution system, and are but a fraction of the number of people put at risk of starvation as a result of the US bombing.) Time and again, however, reporters have exposed Pentagon cover-ups and lies. Richard Lloyd Parry, who exposed one such US government lie (“A Village Is Destroyed. And America Says Nothing Happened,” Independent, Dec. 4, 2001) later commented: “The mullahs might have exaggerated the effects of the bombing, but they were never caught out in lies as big as those of the Pentagon.” (“War in Afghanistan: Has This Murky and Confusing War Solved Anything?” Independent, Dec. 28, 2001, p. 7)

    Afghan wedding-goers are particularly vulnerable. Tom Engelhardt undertook the grisly task of keeping track of these attacks on wedding parties — he’s counted five so far — which the Pentagon touts as military targets.

    It is almost certainly not the case that the US killed these civilians intentionally, in the sense of trying to kill civilians. But there is no doubt that Washington’s madly aggressive policies — the determination to kill as many of the enemy as possible and provide maximum protection to US forces — has led to a criminally reckless disregard for the lives of Afghan civilians. US officials indirectly acknowledged their criminal behavior when they announced in June 2009 new rules of engagement that prohibited attacks on militants when civilians were around and US troops were not in imminent danger and could safely withdraw — meaning that before this point, in such situations, the civilians could be routinely killed.

    Frequent killings of civilians since June 2009 have shown that the new rules of engagement have not ended the reckless disregard. Nor have they ended the Pentagon practice of cover-up and lies. As Jerome Starkey has recently written for Nieman Watchdog (thanks to Stephen Soldz for this lead.), “U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan are committing atrocities, lying, and getting away with it.” Starkey reported in The Times of London that NATO claimed it killed two militants and then found the dead bodies of three bound and gagged women, two of them pregnant. But in fact, the dead militants were “loyal” Afghan civilian government workers and the women had been killed by NATO. NATO followed up its fabrication by impugning Starkey’s credibility. But this time the UN and other journalists were willing to corroborate Starkey’s story.

    We are likely to be getting just the tip of the iceberg with these atrocity reports because, as Starkey notes, international forces “are rarely called to account because most reporters are too dependent on access, security and the ’embed culture’ to venture out and see what’s happening for themselves.”

    Obama may not be as crass as Bush, but the imperatives of counter-insurgency warfare, where you are defending a corrupt and illegitimate government, will inevitably lead to this sort of disregard for civilians.

  • Invoking "sedition" against Teabaggers: short-sighted, ahistorical, and suicidal

    The Nation joins a great tradition (Alien and Sedition Acts, Palmer Raids, Smith Act) by invoking "sedition" against Teabaggers.
    It seems utterly suicidal for the Left to invoke "sedition," as Melissa Harris-Lacewell does in condemning Teabaggers in The Nation . What a proud tradition we would join by doing this: Alien and Sedition Acts, Palmer Raids, Smith Act. And what's up with Harris-Lacewell's adoration of The State, with its "monopoly on the legitimate [sic] use of violence, force and coercion"? Huh? Are we really happy with this utterly unqualified approval of such government action, and, as a result utterly unqualified prohibition of such things when used by non-governmental people? There goes the picket line, and anything else that they might deem to be "coercive."
    All in all, this seems at best short-sighted, unbelievably ahistorical, and at worst suicidal. Nasty, even vile expression is a two-way street, and we should certainly retain the broadest right to express hostility to those who Harris-Lacewell enshrines as "agents of the state." (By the way, a recent court decision, which I certainly favor, said that we cannot be punished for giving the finger to a cop). Coming up next in The Nation: the uses of conspiracy law? No, wait a minute, it's already here: Harris-Lacewell writes of certain congressional representatives that "They joined as co-conspirators with the Tea Party protesters by arguing that this government has no monopoly on legitimacy."

    Shall we re-try the Chicago Seven?

  • The Right's Conspiracy Theory Attack on Frances Fox Piven

     If you believe Glenn Beck, the Tea Party lunatics, Rush Limbaugh, and their ilk, Frances Fox Piven is the Marxist Machiavelli whose 1966 article in The Nation (written with Richard Cloward) still serves as the blueprint for a radical takeover of American society, including Barack Obama's "socialist" administration.

    This growing attack on Piven, an eminent and prolific scholar (political scientists and sociologist) and a political activist, was a centerpiece of Joseph Farah's keynote speech at the recent Tea Party convention in Nashville. And it has been escalated by yet another right-wing "gotcha" journalist, Kyle Olson, who interviewed Piven in February under false pretenses (he claimed he was a college student) and posted bits of that interview on the right-wing BigGovernment website.

    My expose' of Olson's "gotcha" interview with Piven, and my analysis of the Right's paranoid conspiracy theory about the "Cloward-Piven strategy, " can be found in an article posted Tuesday on the Huffington Post.

  • Black Outrage in Los Angeles

    [This article appeared in New Politics no. 13, Summer 1992.]

    The fire burning in South-Central Los Angeles illuminated the rage, anguish and despair of African-Americans consigned to bleak lives of poverty and hopelessness by the most "advanced" country in the world. But as history attests, once the rage subsides, the images, which should be unforgettable, are all too soon forgotten. The ghetto and those trapped inside it are once more invisible.

          The Rodney King beating, captured on videotape and shown around the world, was a rare exposure of the reality of summary police "justice" visited on African-Americans on the streets of this nation. Perhaps in the belief that such a graphic glimpse would shock the national conscience, blacks patiently allowed "the system" to run its course. For months preceding and during the trial, despite almost daily provocations and despite constant television rebroadcasts of the vicious beating, not a match was struck, not a store window broken nor a business looted. The black community of Los Angeles, and not only of L.A., kept its cool.

          But once the jury acquitted the policeman after only one day of deliberation, the ghetto exploded. Fires were set, motorists pulled from their cars and beaten, stores looted. No doubt gang members were involved in the looting but to try to reduce the riots – as some have done – to gangs and depraved elements seeking to enrich themselves is to reveal a cynical indifference to the despair. Neglected, unorganized, unrepresented, lacking a coherent, progressive national leadership, looting and violence appear to many blacks to be the only way to let whites know how biter they are. "I know it’s my neighborhood that’s burning," said a 55-year old black worker, "but if I’ve got to do this to make you listen, I’ve got to do it. A lot of people are crying out, reaching out."

     

    In an attempt to use the riot as a racist centerpiece for his re-election campaign Bush assigned the blame to the social programs enacted in the 60s and 70s. Welfare, which encourages sloth, dependency and lassitude, is the culprit. Let them go hungry – out of sight, of course.

          When that didn’t sit as well as he had hope, he unearthed anti-poverty "expert," Jack Kemp, to unveil his pitiful laissez faire program for economic uplift of the poor, cloaked with the populist mantle of "empowerment." "Enterprise zones," allowing the poverty-stricken to buy their own apartments in public housing projects, and education vouchers. What Bush calls, in the vulgar vernacular of the capitalist hustle, "a piece of the action." A tiny piece, to be sure.

          And the Democratic contender? What has Bill Clinton proposed. More of the same platitudinous generalities – hope, faith and charity. (Not too much of the last.) His one concrete suggestion is to increase the minimum wage automatically each year to keep pace with inflation. That would net the lucky recipients a solid increase of about 18 cents an hour in 1993.

          The riot’s toll was terrible – 58 lost their lives, 9,500 were incarcerated and there was $1 billion worth of damage. That black rage turned indiscriminately on whites, that it turned inward on its own community, wreaking such havoc and destruction was tragic. But white America got the message. That 81-second videotape of the police beating, broadcast over and over again, forced whites to confront the terrible injustices inflicted on blacks. Unlike Watts and other riots that centered on the miserable conditions of life for blacks, this time the explosion was sparked by mistreatment so gross and so visible, it could not be overlooked.

          Perhaps out of fear over the fire next time spreading to their suburban enclaves, whites have indicated a change of heart. For the first time, a clear majority believes that the country is spending too little on improving conditions for black Americans and that investing in jobs and job training programs is a better way of preventing future turmoil than police repression. A more benign explanation may well be that working- and middle-class whites, suffering the effects of a failed economy – losing their jobs, their homes, many forced into personal bankruptcy – can relate to black deprivation with greater understanding and sympathy.

     

    Institutional racism has condemned blacks to poverty and joblessness. Far from being an old story, a thing of the past, racial discrimination in every area of American life – jobs, schools, housing, the professions – persists. Nowhere are its effects more visible than in the black ghettos of this country where longterm unemployment and cuts in social welfare programs have led to further deterioration and produced a climate hospitable to drug dealing, violence and crime. All talk about "level playing fields," "meritocracy" and "reverse discrimination" serves to rationalize the continuation of racial injustice. There is no level playing field, never has been. As for meritocracy, try describing it to blacks denied entrance into the craft unions, for example, or denied admission into colleges, because in the building trades unions priority is given to relatives of the en-trenched and, most often, corrupt officials, and in the colleges, to the sons of alumni. (Having had nearly four years to gauge our President’s intellectual stature, does anyone seriously believe that George Bush gained entrance to Yale on the basis of merit?)

          The explosion in South Central Los Angeles underscores the urgency of affirmative action, including quotas and racial preferences for African-Americans. It is an economic and social imperative.

          That both political parties have failed black America comes as no surprise. So have the unions. Liberals and what there is of a left, for the most part, have deserted their commitment to racial injustice and affirmative action in their headlong rush to support Democratic Party candidates, no matter who. To that end they are ready to sacrifice black demands for racial equality.

          For years they have devoted themselves to reforming the Democratic party. To what end? The Democratic Party, committed to the politics of austerity, is less responsive today to the needs of the poor, minorities, women, the beleaguered trade unions than it was 30 years ago. Its role in the S & L bailout (speaking of looting!) is practically indistinguishable from the Republican Party’s. Not only has it failed to press for the "peace dividend," the Democrats vote billions for military spending and to restore funds for military hardware that even the Pentagon is prepared to cut. The liberal-left’s efforts to reform the Democratic Party, far from resulting in the party’s transformation has, sadly, succeeded in conservatizing the reformers.

          The absence of an electoral alternative today, when it might well have reaped the rewards of Bush’s vulnerability, was insured by the left’s failure to pursue the path of independent political action yesterday. Popular disenchantment with both Republicans and Democrats, coupled with demands for more comprehensive social programs, open the possibility of a positive response to a left appeal and the creation of a viable independent alternative tomorrow.

     

    PHYLLIS JACOBSON is co-Editor of New Politics.

  • Diane Ravitch

    You can hear Diane Ravitch’s revised version of what’s needed for school reform, as well as a very different perspective (my own), in a panel this Friday, March 26, 6:00 PM, at NYU, Silver Room 207. The panel is open to the public. Ravitch is the architect of the US version of a school reform project that has been imposed by the World Bank on developing nations. As I explain in an article for NP that project came home in the form of NCLB, and in an NP blog, reverberates  now in the Obama/Duncan reforms.  

    Joining us in the panel is  Edward Fergus, Deputy Director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education at New York University.

    The panel has been organized by the Radical Film and Lecture Series.

  • Addicted to war

    Kathryn Bigelow, the director of The Hurt Locker, claims that many men in Iraq and Afghanistan are addicted to war. If this is true, could it have something to do with the fact that GIs today do not face the endless bombardment from airplanes, field artillery, and tanks that World War II soldiers did?

    I served in the 88th Infantry Division in Italy and I never met anyone so addicted. Had we met someone like that we would have considered him “Section 8,” that is, seriously disturbed.

    Does that mean that many gung-ho GIs now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are Section 8?

  • Two Invented Lives

    [This article was published in New Politics No. 23, Summer 1997]

    Review of HELLMAN AND HAMMETT, by Joan Mellen (HarperCollins, New York, 1996. 572pp. $30.00 HB, $13.00 PB)

    Not for one instant the charming, deliciously insouciant Myrna Loy and William Powell of legendary Thin Man movie fame, Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman were, according to Joan Mellen's scrupulously researched biography, a pair of mismatched lovers; he, a compulsive womanizer, she, a compulsive liar. While most of the book is devoted to an in-depth analysis of their personal/sexual relationship, Mellen is very much concerned with their politics, as well. "A foremost literary fabulator of her generation," Mellen writes, "Lillian Hellman invented her life, so that by the end even she was uncertain about what had been true." The first biographer to have access to the Hellman papers which include those of Hammett's deposited in her archives, Mellen was in an excellent position to disprove many of the lies Hellman told about herself during her lifetime.

    Hellman said she was never a member of the Communist Party. But she was. Not that that was a crucial bit of information. If she was not a member, she was a dues cheat and my suspicion is that even as a member, given her mythic avarice — she even appropriated the royalties Hammett left to his daughter — she probably didn't contribute that much. But, for years, she and Hammett gave something even more valuable than money to the Communist Party: they lent their celebrated names and prestige to every piece of CP skullduggery requiring a public whitewash.

    Both supported the verdict of the 1938 Moscow purge trial as signatories to the petition "Leading Artists, Educators Support Soviet Trial Verdict," that appeared in the New Masses (May 3, 1938) which said about the Old Bolshevik defendants:

    …they resorted to duplicity and conspiracy and allied themselves with long-standing enemies of the Soviet Union — nationalists who had ties with capitalist, fascist and White Guard Allies, and even with former czarist agents provocateurs.Degeneration may therefore be charged to the defendants, and not the Soviet Union, which gains strength internally and externally by the prevention of treason and the eradication of spies and wreckers.

    Both signed an "Open Letter to American Liberals" warning them not to aid John Dewey's investigation of the charges against Leon Trotsky because it gave "support to fascist forces" and opposed asylum for Trotsky in the U.S. The statement denounced the "fantastic falsehood that the USSR and totalitarian states are basically alike." A week later the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed.

    The use of the Smith Act, making illegal "teaching and advocating the overthrow of the United States government by force and violence," to indict and jail the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party in 1941, met with CP approval and Hammett/Hellman silence.

    In 1949 Hellman was one of the sponsors of the notorious Waldorf Conference, The Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, a joint Soviet-American venture whose official sponsor was the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (a CP front which, under a different name had tried to mobilize intellectuals for the 1948 Henry Wallace campaign.) When Norman Cousins attacked the narrow group running the Conference for its refusal to include American intellectuals opposed to Soviet totalitarianism, Hellman replied irrelevantly but in the outraged tones of a grande dame: "I would recommend, Mr. Cousins, that when you are invited out to dinner you wait until you get home before you talk about your hosts."

    She was still at it in 1969 when, according to Mellen, she told Dorothea Strauss that her husband was a "malefactor" because he published Solzhenitsyn. Mellen quotes her as saying "If you knew what I know about American prisons, you would be a Stalinist, too." Mellen continues, "American justice allowed her now to maintain good faith with the tyrant who had, despite his methods, industrialized the 'first socialist state.'" But her grande dame manner vanished when, as late as the late 70s, she said about George Orwell's magnificent Spanish Civil War memoir, Homage to Catalonia, that it was "a load of crap."

    Lillian Hellman's performance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 scripted by her notable social democratic, anti-Stalinist attorney, Joseph Rauh, accorded her iconic status. Rauh prepared a statement for her in which she declared herself ready to answer questions about herself, "But to hurt innocent people whom I knew years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions…" A ringing statement. But she was well aware that the need to answer questions about herself would never arise. To remain silent about others required the use of the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination which, of course, she used. "She named no names," Mellen writes, "Otherwise her position was hardly worthy of the mantle of Joan of Arc she assumed after her ordeal was over."

    After that, Hellman spent her time courting mainstream intellectuals, indulging her obsession with money. Systematically, Mellen says, she severed her old left-wing connections. "Now she did cut her conscience to suit the year's fashions," as she cut loose from the innumerable CP-front organizations using her name on their letterheads.

    Her memoirs, particularly Scoundrel Time, published in 1976, Mellen writes,

     

    rained upon Lillian Hellman torrents of incredulity. In this account of her travail under McCarthyism she seemed unregenerate in her Stalinism. Nor would she even now admit that she and Hammett were Communists. Fighting back, she accused liberal anti-Communists of attacking "radicals" rather than capitalists and imperialists. But she was at last being held accountable and it stung.

     

    Hellman's publisher, Little Brown, backed out of its contract with Diana Trilling to publish a collection of her essays in which Trilling replied to Hellman's charges against her and her husband, Lionel. Hellman, the ultimate civil libertarian, demanded that Trilling agree to have her remarks about her edited. When Trilling refused, Hellman persuaded Little Brown not to publish her book. It was later published by Harcourt.

    But worse was yet to come in the person of Mary McCarthy who had said publicly, "I think every word she writes is false, including 'and' and 'but'," a statement she repeated on the Dick Cavett show. In a rage, Hellman contacted her lawyer, noted civil libertarian Ephraim London, and demanded that he institute a suit against the Educational Broadcasting Company and Mary McCarthy. Despite warning her that she would lose, Hellman insisted that he proceed. She, after all, was a millionaire and could easily stand the cost of a lawsuit while McCarthy had no money to speak of.

    McCarthy started producing evidence of some of Hellman's lies, including her statements indicating that she knew nothing about the Moscow Trials. Hellman had, she pointed out, signed statements applauding the guilty verdict. But then she produced the most damaging of all Hellman's lies, the chapter in Pentimento, the second volume of her memoirs (later made into the film, Julia with Jane Fonda playing Hellman (Julia) to Vanessa Redgrave's anti-fascist activist), in which Hellman portrays herself heroically carrying money into Nazi Germany for her socialist activist friend. A complete fabrication. Hellman had appropriated the life of Muriel Gardiner who later told her own story in Code Name Mary, a story Hellman had learned from their mutual friend, lawyer Wolf Schwabacher. Told by London that she would have to produce evidence of the real Julia to proceed with her case against McCarthy, Hellman was frantic and became tangled in a web of additional lies. She actually had the chutzpah to plan to visit Muriel Gardiner to ask Gardiner to say that she was not Julia, a meeting that never came off. Hellman still hadn't thought her way out of her dilemma when McCarthy's attorneys' motion to have the case dismissed on the basis that Hellman was a public figure was denied. The case was scheduled to proceed. But it never did. Hellman died before that could happen.

    Lillian hellman was not only a liar but, despite her disclaimers, an unregenerate Stalinist. In Scoundrel Time she wrote,

    Communist-haters, particularly among intellectuals, wrote and talked a good deal about the violence they could suffer at the hands of American Communists … but I think that was a very doubtful charge. About foreign gunmen I know only what I have read, but the American radicals I met were not violent men.

    It is hard to believe, for example, that anybody could have thought of V. J. Jerome, the theoretician of the Party, as a man with a bomb or a gun.

    To be sure, when Hellman wrote of "radicals" she didn't mean radicals at all. She meant the likes of V. J. Jerome, among others. Why should she have found it "hard to believe" that he could be thought of "as a man with a bomb or a gun"? Hellman admired his European counterparts, after all, and they not only used bombs and guns but were responsible for mass murder in those countries — the Soviet Union, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland — where they had power. They were totalitarian ideologues dependent on violence for the retention of power. Why should we believe that the difference between them and V. J. Jerome was anything more than an accident of geography?

    Hellman said that "radicals" like herself had done no harm. She was mistaken. By promoting a totalitarian movement in the name of socialism, she and they had done enormous harm. They had impeded the development of an authentic socialist movement by distorting the basic concepts of socialism, promulgating the idea that a society based on the destruction of working class independence, on terror and the liquidation of millions was socialist. They not only distorted history but made a mockery of the American radical tradition.

    Joan Mellen's exceptional biography, Hellman and Hammett, written from a left viewpoint, chronicles not only the tempestuous relationship of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett but their love affair with Stalinism, as well.

     

    Phyllis Jacobson is the co-editor of New Politics.

  • Democrats for Education Reform?

     Anyone who doubts that the Democratic Party has morphed from “liberal” to “neoliberal” in regard to education policy should check out the Democrats for Education Reform (DER). Their program is straight from the neoliberal thinktanks, and they make no effort to disguise the origins of their ideas or politics. In Denver they are hosting a talk with “Rick” Hess, who heads the education policy unit at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Ten years ago AEI would have been called “far-right wing.” But since high-profile Democrats, like Cory Booker, the African American mayor of Newark, NJ, (who is on the Board of Directors of Democrats for Education Reform) now march to AEI’s tune about schools, maybe we have to refer to AEI as “centrist”?

    The guiding principle of DER is that schools have “become captive to powerful, entrenched interests that too often put the demands of adults before the educational needs of children.” By “entrenched interests” they do NOT mean the for-profit companies that run schools and take care of “outsourced” school services, like school lunch, teacher hiring and professional development. Nor does DER want to toss out corporations that produce and grade standardized tests – and in doing so control what is taught to our kids. They think what what Stephen Ball refers to as “education for sale” and the “commodification of everything.” is just dandy.  Nope, the only “entrenched interests” they want to control are…. teacher unions.

     Their attack on unions  is straight out of the neoliberal blueprint for education, articulated in its most unvarnished form in a draft report of the World Bank “Making Services Work for Poor People.”  As this  playbook for crushing the unions puts it , teachers and their unions are a threat to global prosperity. Why? Because “With their political power, teachers and doctors are able to protect their incomes when there is pressure for budget cuts.. Many governments have responded by creating a second class of teachers who are outside the civil service, and are correspondingly paid less with fewer benefits. The experience in several West African countries shows that there are many people willing to take these jobs (a recent announcement in Senegal generated 30,000 applicants for 1,000 positions); even if they are less qualified, the evidence on student performance is mixed; and, over time, these contractual workers have come to dominate the public service, as in Benin.” (p.6)

    With the wholesale firing of teachers in the “failing” school in Rhode Island, an act lauded by Obama and Arne Duncan, we see the World Bank’s program in Benin and Senegal come to  the US.