Did you see that our labor secretary is adding a statue of Reagan to the
statues of labor leaders in Washington? Irony of ironies.
Coincidental to our discussion of George McGovern, there's an article in The
Nation on a new book about him, which describes something about his life and
politics. Although he certainly wasn't about to overturn Capitalism, he sounds
like someone I would still support today. And yes, because he lost, the party
decided that it had to move to the right.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2017 10:35 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Socialist Horizon: Building a New Party
Miriam and Brave Souls Everywhere,
Right. I knew that it's not something the American Communist Party does today,
and I suspect that such programs were later than when my folks were active in
the late 30's and early 40's. At least such expansive thinking never infected
the single mindedness of the stern faced men and sharp no nonsense eyes of the
women who gathered each week in the old store front on Queen Anne Avenue. They
had a nation to take over. I do remember my dad and some of his buddies
sitting around deciding what jobs they would take, when the "Revolution" came.
My mother was a bit more practical. "Who do they think is going to start this
revolution while they sit on their backsides blowing hot air?" She could not
tell the difference between Dad and his Buddies, and the guys already in power.
What she saw were men sitting about ordering their flunkies out to do the
work. In Dad's case, it was the women and children who did the leg work. I
can't begin to count the number of envelopes I stuffed, sitting at the back
table in that hall, or the hundreds of flyers I tucked in doors around the
North end of Seattle. But of course while these young men were dreaming of the
day they took charge, those already in the top dog slot were not idle.
Harry Truman and Joe McCarthy with his legal counsel Richard Nixon, along with
the FBI and their many stoolies, came crashing in the front door and hauled
many of those dreamers in front of the UnAmerican Activities Committee and
painted them as Commie Infiltrators Trained in Moscow by the KGB. The American
Communist Party never had a large following, and those young men sitting around
dreaming young men's dreams, were not ever going to mount an army of
protesters. But the Ruling Class took no chances. J. Edgar Hoover turned most
of his forces loose on hunting down those Commies and Fellow Travelers and the
Pinkos.
Later it was obvious, like Monday morning quarterbacks, it was obvious that
this was all part of a push against the "socialism" brought down on honest
Capitalists by that turncoat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It wasn't until
Ronald Reagan ascended to the Oval Office that some of the Working Class began
to awaken to the fact that they were under attack. Until that time Unions were
doing okay, wages were drifting upward, almost keeping up with rising cost of
living, credit was becoming easier, so many families now were moving into the
suburbs and taking on 30 year bank loans. Since Ronald Reagan's 8 years, the
unraveling of our social services teeters on the brink of annihilation. And
the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover expands into a monster, no longer content to
ferret out the Pinkos, but now hunting down the "Illegals", the Muslim
Terrorists, and all who fail to kiss the hem of our new leader's royal garment.
The Ruling Class full well knows that it is Fear that is their greatest weapon.
They use it to turn one group against another, and to keep each individual
worker fearful that his job will be the next one sent off to...wherever. We,
the working class, are held in the grip of many Fears. Some are real, but
many, many of them have been manufactured to keep us trembling in our heavily
mortgaged homes.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/28/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don't think the article says that the Communist Party does all those
activities now. I think it says they once did it. Apparently, it
depended on where you lived and which faction of the party you were
involved with. I'd love to see an objective comparison of the current Green
Party and the SDA.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2017 12:46 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Socialist Horizon: Building a New
Party
I can live with the DSA. But can Corporate Capitalism? I am prepared
to change my vote from the Green Party to the DSA. And for the
moment, I might consider joining as a member. If the old American
Communist Party in Seattle had organized family and Party activities,
like this article says they do now, and had they put my mother in
charge of organizing concerts, lectures, child and elder care support
groups, I most likely would be a Marxist today. But these stern, no
nonsense Party leaders of the 1940's, ordered mother to put Party
before Family. All they saw was her backside as she herded her three
children out of the Hall.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/27/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Socialist Horizon: Building a New Party Saturday, August 26,
2017 By Benjamin Balthaser, Truthout | Op-Ed
mix of centralization and decentralization, its democratic ethos
within a larger structure, its flexibility and yet its consistency
speak to both the needs as well as the disaggregated shape and
culture of today's millennial working class.
The Democratic Socialists of America is a mix of centralization and
decentralization, its democratic ethos within a larger structure, its
flexibility and yet its consistency speak to both the needs as well
as the disaggregated shape and culture of today's millennial working class.
(Photo:
Northside Chicago DSA)
As the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention wound to its
close at the beginning of August, I was struck with the historical
strangeness of what I witnessed. Decades after proclamations of the
"end of history" and critiques of institutional hierarchies and
vertical structures of power, here were nearly 1,000 mostly young
activists gathered in a giant lecture hall doing the work of building
a radical political party: taking votes, making motions, electing a
national leadership, making speeches for and against, observing the
strange Anglo-Saxon strictures of Robert's Rules of Order.
The convention in Chicago has rightly garnered an enormous amount of
attention, both for the unprecedented size of the organization, as
well as for its increasingly red hue. The surge in membership makes
DSA the largest socialist organization in the US since World War II,
and its growth in strength and popularity is equally marked by its
radical turn to the left:
delegates voted to endorse the boycott, sanction and divest (BDS)
movement against Israeli violations of human rights; they voted to
embrace the creation of an Afro-Socialism Caucus that includes a
platform for abolishing prisons and police; and they reaffirmed their
distance from the Democratic Party and their role in creating an
independent socialist movement. They did all this while strengthening
the centralization and structure of the DSA by introducing monthly
dues payments for members.
As Chilean activist and writer Marta Harnecker notes, the rise of
globalization, neoliberalism and the end of the Cold War has also led
to what she refers to as the "social disorientation" of both the
working class and the left. The organization of workers into giant
Fordist factories in urban centers, the growth of social and cultural
institutions, such as massive schools and state colleges, also did
the work of organizing the people into shared sites of social
production and reproduction.
While on the one hand this modernist reorganization of life produced
greater social alienation, it also produced the physical
infrastructure for mass-based, centralized social movements. One can
think of the rise of early-mid 20th century radical parties such as
the Socialist and later Communist Party USA, which exercised wide
influence through six-figure membership bases, affiliated labor and
civil rights groups, and high-profile political campaigns as a kind
of structural analogy to the mass production/mass consumption
modernist society Fordism produced. Perhaps the largest mass-based
working-class organization, the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO), was a direct outgrowth of the giant factories that comprised
the major sites of its organization.
An increasingly shared mass culture also helped produce new political
movements at mid-century. Small ethnic enclaves and segregated
neighborhoods could join in a dominant, increasingly plebeian mass
culture industry that featured, for the first time, ethnic accents
and working-class, urban heroes, such as James Cagney, Duke Ellington
and Barbara Stanwyck. During CIO drives, one organizer recounted
white and Black members listening to a Joe Louis fight on the radio
before going to recruit members for its integrated locals, and
Richard Wright famously wrote of the Louis-Baer match as leading to a
jubilant, spontaneous uprising among working class African Americans
on Chicago's South Side.
Within the mid-century cultural and material matrix of Fordism, the
Communist Party, unlike the Democrats or Republicans, built an entire
way of life, vertically and horizontally integrated, with softball
leagues, newspapers, dances and activity groups like the Friends of
the Earth
(camping) and the John Reed Clubs (writing) that provided not only
for the political needs of its members, but also for their social and
even romantic needs. "You could live an entire life within that world,"
one former Communist related in Vivian Gornick's oral history of the
movement. The Communist Party, like the centralized and Taylorized
mass culture of the period, was constituted by a sense of totality
and organization that marked both work and leisure. As capitalism's
"other," Communism organized much like Fordist corporations it opposed.
Flash forward a half decade, and the landscape of both capitalism and
left radically changed. Globalization and neoliberalism have not only
widened the gap between the rich and the poor within and between
nations, they have dramatically reorganized the economy away from
large-scale urban manufacturing to decentralized and increasingly
mobile just-in-time production. While this shattered what was left of
the large AFL-CIO unions, it also disrupted the material basis for
social, even socialist organizing.
White flight, suburban sprawl, strip malls, the spread of automobile
culture and online micro-communities have not only changed the way
social life is organized, they have also disrupted the forms of
organization on which the "old left" was built. If the culture of
modernism was based on the chance encounter on the city street and
collective anonymity of the factory and rail car, suburban sprawl and
the post-modern cubicle entered a new form of fragmented alienation,
one that is isolated as it is as often subcultural.
Theorists of left-wing social organization, such as Michael Hardt and
Toni Negri, as well as journalists, such as Naomi Klein, celebrated
these forms of disaggregation heterogeneity. Hardt and Negri
described the "multitude"
as the shape of the new working class. Decentralized and unorganized,
this new class of knowledge and service workers would meet together
in loose networks and horizontal associations, giving up neither
their autonomy as subjects nor their heterotopian forms of
difference. Klein described in The New Left Review the revival of
"the commons," both a public and social space held by all, as well as
a vision of radical democracy without ideological or political
center. Narrating the first uprising against neoliberalism after the
end of the Cold War, Klein remarked that the affinity groups and
spokescouncils of the "Battle of Seattle" resembled nothing more than
the internet, as well as the new forms of capitalist organization in
Silicon Valley. Flexible and just-in-time production had met its
match with flexible and just-in-time organizing.
We are a class society, riven by fault lines of race, colonial status
and gender. Capitalism is no longer hidden from view, and neither is
its opposition.
Yet Klein made another comment after the exuberant fin-de-siecle
explosion against the World Trade Organization and an increasingly
bleak millennium.
Speaking in 2001 in front of a roomful of activists at UCLA, she
asked if the uprising in Seattle was a "movement" or a "collective
hallucination."
This question is perhaps more telling than its answer. In the years
following Seattle, the left witnessed uprising after uprising, the
massive shutdown of the International Monetary Fund in 2001, the
half-million protesters in New York City against the invasion of
Iraq, the many millions that hit the streets in the immigrant rights
movement, the protest camps of the Occupy movement, and most
recently, the rebellions against racist state violence in Ferguson
and Baltimore. These movements, much like contingent, unstable, rapid
flows of financial capital around the globe, surge and then diminish,
explode into the streets and then go quiet. Our movements are our
collective hallucinations, in a global system that seems to be
spinning from crisis to crisis.
So, what does it mean that young people, the children of
neoliberalism, seem to be abandoning the horizontalism, disavowal and
decentralization of my own generation X? As Jodi Dean suggests in her
manifesto, The Communist Horizon, radicals have never taken the
claims of horizontal democracy as seriously as they proclaim. All
movements, she argues, are vanguard acts; they make claims of
representation: "We are the 99%." "The Movement for Black Lives."
They claim to represent "the people," however they are defined,
against an elite or a class or an institution. Yet the question Dean
poses is not so much whether we will commit acts of representation,
but rather whether we will build organizations that can contain
difference and the multiple gaps, omissions and divisions within
capitalism. Shall we have the vanguardism of the subculture, or the
organization of the Party?
Young radicals are voting with their feet. After a generation of
uprisings that have left us hanging in the air, it is safe to say
activists are tired of phantasmagorical movements, of collective
hallucinations. The crises of capitalism, from racialized state
violence, to the "gig economy," to environmental catastrophe, to rape
culture, to privatization of our public schools and our privatized
imaginaries cannot be solved within the same affective structures
that produce them. Richard Wright wrote after witnessing that
spontaneous uprising on Chicago's South Side, "say comrade here's the
wild river that's got to be harnessed and directed." When I read that
20 years ago, I winced at what I thought was Wright's incipient
Stalinism. Two decades later, it now reads like common sense.
Or perhaps rather, we are returning merely to certain 19th-century
verities
-- that we are a class society, riven by fault lines of race,
colonial status and gender. Capitalism is no longer hidden from view,
and neither is its opposition. Which is not to say DSA is a Stalinist
or even Communist "cadre" organization. Its mix of centralization and
decentralization, its democratic ethos within a larger structure, its
flexibility and yet its consistency speak to both the needs as well
as the disaggregated shape and culture of today's millennial working class.
A party is more than just a collection of individuals; it is a claim
on the future, a vision of another horizon.
As the convention wound down last week, one of the older comrades,
someone I know from an earlier socialist formation, slowly led the
delegates through the tune and phrases of "The Internationale,"
before and after the crowd spontaneously erupted into the
White-Stripes-turned-political-football-chant, "Oh Jeremy Corbyn" and
then "Viva el Day-Ess-Eh" ("DSA, DSA, DSA" it was decided, sounded
too much like "USA, USA, USA"). This mixing of political cultures --
of spontaneity and tradition, of a polyglot US with a long tradition
of democratic organizing
-- marks an epochal shift, away from spokescouncils and affinity
groups, and toward the political party. We should not be shy about
what a change this is. A party is more than just a collection of
individuals; it is a claim on the future, a vision of another horizon.
And it is one that we cannot wait another generation to witness.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Benjamin Balthaser
Benjamin Balthaser is associate professor of multi-ethnic US
literature at Indiana University, South Bend, and the author of
Anti-Imperialist Modernism. His writings have also appeared in
Jacobin, In These Times, Boston Review, American Quarterly, Truthout,
Criticism, Cultural Logic, Tablet and elsewhere. Benjamin is a member
of the South Side Chicago Democratic Socialists of America Steering
Committee.
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