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NEWS & LETTERS, April 2004

Readers' Views

Never in history have the coffers of this nation been so blatantly thrown open for corporate pillaging as they are now under the Bush administration. The rapacious hunger of capital is being served as never before and is increasingly transparent in every sphere of life in America--in the jobless economy, the health care industry, the burgeoning monopolistic developments in the media, airline industry, finance, auto industry, electronics, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, energy and the military-industrial complex. And the horrors of this greed are nowhere more clearly revealed than in the U.S. imperialistic involvement in Iraq and the human and financial toll that it is extracting.

What we are experiencing today is the ruthless new stage of what Karl Marx analyzed 150 years ago as he traced the laws of capital. What is demanded is the total uprooting of this deadly system if humanity is to survive.

--Andy Phillips, Detroit

We hear every day that they are freeing everyone over there in Iraq but we're losing our freedom here to things like the Patriot Act. We have to look at what it's costing us to supposedly "give" them their freedom, when there's not enough money for education or even rat control here.

--Retired Black worker, Memphis

During his presidency, Ronald Reagan tried to call ketchup a "vegetable" for school lunch programs which he was trying to eliminate. Bush is doing him one better by trying to eliminate the kinds of school programs that would give our youth the education and training needed for all those supposed "higher end" hi-tech jobs to replace the "low-end" jobs going to India and China. Taking a cue from the Reagan era, he is trying to call flipping burgers at fast-food chains a "manufacturing job." Manufacturing fries and burgers? I can hear the new welcome to McDonalds: "Would you like some right-wing vegetable to go with your order, sir?"

--Fed up, California

Last month's "Workshop Talks" reminded me that every job that moves "offshore" goes to another worker--a human being with hopes, needs and dreams similar to any of us working in the U.S. The Pakistani worker who threatened to release confidential medical records to obtain her back pay represents workers everywhere rebelling against capitalism's exploitation. When Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto "Workers of the world unite," he foresaw capitalism's ability to pit worker against worker in different industries and different countries. He saw the problem has to be solved globally so one group of workers would not gain at the expense of others. We have to continue to support international organizing by workers. One small way might be to avoid terms like "cheap labor" when the real problem is "cheap capitalism."

--Susan Van Gelder, Detroit

I've been a nurse at Kaiser before the AFL-CIO labor-management partnership came in, and even before the landmark "Quality-Care" contract was won by the California Nurses Association. That was a great victory, but then the unions imploded. The more things change, the more they stay the same. They said "change is coming" but where's the real change? I'm still skipping my lunches and my breaks like I did a decade ago, just so my patients won't get worse. Where's the partnership? Where's the change?

--Registered nurse, California

Here in Britain we're told we have never had it so good in 200 years. The "we" must be the ruling class and its servants in Parliament. So greedy are our political masters that they now have the best pension fund in the country. Tony Blair is thought to have over 1.4 million pounds ($2.8 million) in his. This kind of affluence is also true of the trade union leadership and the secondary layer throughout Parliament and local government.

Meanwhile the poor, the weak, and the needy are to be punished even further. For those who are employed, increasing productivity and longer working days are the norm. The relentless drive for profit and the methods to extract it are not new. But the difference is that in the past some kind of network and safety net existed. Britain today may be the fourth richest country in the world but it occupies a 10th rating in health and longevity.

--Pat Duffy, England

One of the things I remember best from reading Frederick Douglass' autobiography was his observation that when he moved North, he didn't see the workers singing as they worked, the way he remembered the chattel slaves doing when he lived in the South. He said it seemed to be a characteristic of enslaved workers and that once they were freed of their chains they didn't seem to require singing to get through the day. 

It reminded me of all the postal workers I worked with who are equipped with Walkman headphones and I wondered if it marked a new form of slavery?

--Ex-Postal worker, Battle Creek, Michigan

WHO SUPPORTS BUSH'S WAR?

Perhaps a thousand took part in the anti-war demonstration in Spokane. It included a march to a local recruiting station where a brief "die-in" was staged. For every motorist on a busy arterial who flipped us the bird, perhaps as many as four out of five honked in support or flipped us the peace sign. The second America does not support this war. We are not alone. In the U.S. and all around the world, majorities have come forward to say no to Bush's war. We belong to a global majority.

--Protester, Spokane

In comparison to the demonstrations a year ago, two things struck me this year. One, there are a great many more families of soldiers participating in the protests and being very vocal about their opposition to the war. Two, the pro-war demonstrators--despite the way the press insists on giving them "equal time" even when their numbers are tiny--were not present this weekend at all.

--March 20 protester, San Francisco

When my neighbor heard that Bush would be speaking on March 6 on campus to a select group, he quickly gathered a number of friends who met with around 400 other demonstrators in front of Shrine Auditorium. Most were students demonstrating against the war for the first time. One explained that it is now impossible to ignore Bush's dangerous attitude.

--Observer, Los Angeles

ELECTIONS 2004

The Republicans are launching a voter registration drive. Nothing unusual about that, but their mechanism is a truck called the "Reggie the Voter Registration RIG." Yes, I know the Democrats have been doing this sort of thing for decades, but the fact that the Republican National Committee is openly calling theirs a RIG strikes me as being especially appropriate. Are they telling us they intend to rig the next election, too?

--Registered voter, Illinois

It was important the way the March lead article took up Kerry's half-hearted opposition to Bush. Kerry was an anti-Vietnam war activist but buried the real meaning of his past for the cause of electability. We can't be under any illusions that Kerry will solve our problems. We become short-sighted if we get so desperate that we forget he's at best the lesser of two evils.

--Longtime anti-war activist, Memphis

Did you know that there's an Impeach Bush website that a month ago had 12,000 people signed up and by March had 40,000? It's an opportunity to keep exposing his lies and convince people to vote him out, but I'd say we should impeach him because what he's done is so bad, it's not enough to just vote him out of office.

--Environmental activist, Tennessee

Yes, there were monumental intelligence failures with respect to the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction. The most monumental of all was the lack of intelligence in the White House.

--Disgusted, California

I’m very glad too see Martha Stewart was found guilty. If you can’t get the sharks, at least catch the minnows.

--Revolutionary, Chicago

It was a sad day for America when Martha Stewart was found guilty. I'm far, far from being a Stewart fan, but where is the justice in this? She lied about $50,000 worth of stocks and she might get 20 years in the slammer. Bush lied about millions of dollars and a lot more things that have cost us many human lives. And he might get four more years? In the White House!

--Justice seeker, California

TERRORISM IN SPAIN

We have seen another horrible terrorist attack on humanity, this time in Spain. Although the Spanish administration quickly said it was an act of the ETA, it soon turned out to be the work of Islamic fundamentalists. That is what most people in Spain and elsewhere thought of directly. The Spanish government was attempting to cover up their policy of support for Bush in Iraq, despite the opposition of 90% of the Spanish people, by accusing the ETA of the bombings. Although the ETA is a nationalist and sectarian organization, which has used terrorist actions, this attack was not in their line. What it shows is that, once again, people like Bush, Blair and Aznar do not make the world safer but even more insecure. They have only one goal: the profitability of capital. As a result of their policy they strengthen the terror of the fundamentalists. The Marxist-Humanist perspective is proved correct once again--the need is to develop resistance against U.S. imperialism AND Islamic fundamentalism.

--K.L., Netherlands

If the mass murder in Madrid was the work of ETA, then we are living in a world in which a section of the "Left" has adopted not only the tactics of Al Qaeda but also a strategic mindset which makes more sense to fans of Nostradamus than students of Clausewitz. It has nothing to do with the thinking of left nationalism in the sense that has been understood since 1848.

The question of who did this atrocity was of great importance. The perpetrators have successfully made a mockery of the Spanish election campaign. The Popular Party expected the people to vote not on policy but on alternative candidates for the atrocities: the ETA theory vs. the Al Qaeda theory.

--D.B., Britain

PRO- AND ANTI-MARXISTS

I enjoyed the article "Marx's Concept of Intrinsic Value" in the March 2004 N&L. I would like to see more pro-Marxist articles like that. This brings me to a line in the article that reads, "Those Marxists who think they have refuted Marx by intoning..." Shouldn't they be called "anti-Marxists" instead of "Marxists"? If they are working to disprove and cloud his meanings aren't they anti-Marxists? If they are all Marxists, how can you tell the pro-capitalist Marxists from the anti-capitalist Marxists? There are "Marxologists" who flout his work. I think they should also be called anti-Marxist.

--Sid Rasmussen, Iowa

REAL TIME DIALECTIC

In his fine commentary on Raya Dunayevskaya's letter of March 25, 1979 on the Iranian revolution (see March 2004 N&L), Ron Brokmeyer writes, "Dunayevskaya's account also takes the measure of bourgeois democratic intellectuals like Bani-Sadr who ended by being eaten by the revolution because he didn't challenge Islam with the self-determining forms that come from the masses." While Dunayevskaya had criticisms of Bani-Sadr in March 1979, the fact is that nowhere in her March 25 1979 piece does she so much as mention Bani-Sadr, much less "take the measure" of him.

Moreover, in a later writing of June 25, 1981, Dunayevskaya explicitly called for the defense of Bani-Sadr against Khomeini's drive to remove him from power. She wrote, "It is no small matter that 17 months after Bani-Sadr was elected as the first president ever of Iran by no less than 75% of the population, he has been driven from office by Khomeini. Bani-Sadr isn't any 'second Shah': Khomeini is. From the very day that Bani-Sadr had been democratically, overwhelmingly elected, the IRP began plotting to make the post of President powerless." At the time, Dunayevskaya's call for critical support for Bani-Sadr involved her in numerous debates with Iranian revolutionaries, including some who considered themselves close to Marxist-Humanism, who opposed her position on ultra-leftist grounds.

The projection of the dialectic "in real time" is surely important, but that involves drawing out the dialectic immanent in the movement of actual events instead of imposing upon them (to borrow a phrase from Marx) some "master-key of a general historico-philosophical theory, whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical."

--Peter Wermuth, Chicago

WHAT COMES AFTER?

I fully agree with Ron Brokmeyer's critique in “Readers' Views,” March 2004, that hearing the voices from below and explaining our present world-historical situation are important dimensions of our work but "not good enough." He is right that the movement to second negation requires us to ask the question now, "What comes after?" Truncating the dialectic in the moment of first negation gives rise to counter-revolution within the movement of revolution itself, rather than continuing to revolution in permanence.

As Marxist-Humanists we cannot afford to underestimate the significance of the question "What comes after?" On the other hand, however, the critique of vanguardism also entails a criticism of the mechanistic, deterministic idea of an a priori "blueprint" for the future, as if we already possess an answer to the question. Once we recognize that the answer to the question "what comes after?" is not a royal road to science that can substitute for the patience, the suffering, and the labor of the negative, we are required to clarify the sense of the question itself.

Dunayevskaya insisted on it precisely because, within the compass of post-Marx Marxism, an answer was either uncritically assumed, as though we already knew what "socialism" was, or else the question was never asked. The fulcrum of the "philosophic moment" of Marxist-Humanism is the breakthrough to the absolute: the absolute idea of freedom and the absolute as a new beginning.

--Tom More, Washington

HAITI

When the illegitimate president in the White House, who was not democratically elected, tells the legitimately elected president of Haiti to leave his own country to the onslaught of armed thugs who want to take over under the "protection" of American armed forces, we have to ask: Who is really protecting whom?

--Anti-war marcher, San Francisco

THE MANY VOICES OF WOMEN'S LIBERATION

The U.S. is isolated not only when it comes to the war in Iraq. Bush's reactionary policy on women also isolated the U.S. at the annual meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women in Santiago, Chile last month. Policy makers on health from 41 Latin American and Caribbean countries met to discuss how to further decisions made at the Cairo Conference in 1994. The U.S. voted against the rights of adolescents to get truthful sex education and to support the family "in all its forms." The vote was 40 to 1 against the U.S.

--Women's Liberationist, Memphis

So much negativity has been put forward against politicized fundamentalist Islam, that it was great to read about what happened in the Philippines. In Muslim Mindanao, a fatwah was issued recently that encouraged Muslims to practice family planning, including the use of contraceptives.

--Feminist, Tennessee

I wanted to call attention to the fact that March was Women's History Month, so I addressed some comments to the only African-American woman that has some power over the Chicago Police Department. I called to her attention that there is a tradition many tribes and villages perform on the continent of Africa in which the elder women form a circle and then invite a young woman to enter the circle. I asked Lori Lightfoot, OPS chief administrator, to consider that she had allowed 1,083 days to go by, up to then, without grabbing the three white male Chicago police officers who beat young Timia Williams. I told her that the elder sisters--Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Barbara Jordan and Shirley Chisolm--could not open the circle for her because she proved not worthy to be among them. To be worthy would demand going to Mayor Daley with a letter of resignation.

--George Wilfrid Smith Jr., Chicago

WOMEN THROUGH HISTORY

In Chicago you're not safe from police harassment even 60-plus years after death. The Park District proposal to name a city park after Lucy Parsons honoring her work "promoting women's, labor and civil rights in Chicago" is part of a citywide effort to recognize more women, when currently only 27 of 557 city parks are named for women. However  Lucy Ella Gonzalez Parsons Park is being opposed by Mark Donahue, head of the Fraternal Order of Police, because she defended her husband, Albert Parsons, one of the Haymarket martyrs convicted and executed in 1887. Lucy Parsons remained a lifelong revolutionary who spent all of her years working to better the lives of those oppressed by all forms of capitalism, including the police, whom she had been known to call "organized bandits." Looking at the state of police brutality here today, I'd say, unfortunately, her words still ring true.

--Lucy Parsons Park supporter, Chicago

I was glad to hear that there had been a large gathering in Amsterdam this year to commemorate Rosa Luxemburg's life. Raya Dunayevskaya's book on Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution showed how relevant her thinking was for today. She had been imprisoned many times for her opposition to war which is well known. Her ideas on women's liberation were not as well known, but are more important than ever for us to reflect upon as we mark the one-year anniversary of Bush's war on Iraq. What rings out more strongly than ever for me is her insistence that "Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party is no freedom at all. Freedom is always exclusively for the one who thinks differently."

--Women's Liberationist, Michigan

GAY MARRIAGE

Did anybody not feel excited when news came out of all the people pouring out to line up to get married in San Francisco without restriction of same-sex couples? It's not that legalization of gay marriage will result in equality and respect for gays, but it's clear that it represented a demand to be recognized as human beings and one could feel a dam burst. This country will never be the same. That doesn't mean we should underestimate the forces trying to install a theocracy.

--Supporter, San Diego

Only with increasing mass opposition to ruling class laws and restrictions will there ever be changes. Of course, much of the uproar about same-sex marriages today is driven by the born-again end-of-timers. If mainstream Christian churches want to maintain any credibility at all today they will have to renounce all that backwardness. There isn't much credibility left in religion on the basis of what scientific research has revealed since the 1800s.

--Longtime Socialist, Wisconsin

DEMOCRACY IN AARP?

Most of the AARP members I speak with agree that the AARP is not a democratic organization and that it has sold us down the river to the drug and insurance companies and undermined the basic principles of Social Security as a government-financed-and-administered social welfare program. I understand that over 10,000 members have quit, but I do not plan to quit. I plan to be part of a national campaign to make AARP a transparent and democratic organization.

The innocence of its "non-partisan stance" belies its sellout to the Republican Party. The drug bill can only be understood in the context of the anti-government philosophy of President Bush and his party. The good name of the AARP has been besmirched.

--Stan Rosen, New Mexico

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