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Post by Admin on Feb 19, 2022 14:14:12 GMT
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Post by Admin on Feb 22, 2022 8:57:45 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 21, 2022 12:52:56 GMT
Rosa Luxemburg and the International of Letters By Owen Hatherley A new book inspired by Rosa Luxemburg's famous letters shows how dialogue can happen across a diverse and often divided international Left. tribunemag.co.uk/2022/04/post-rosa-luxemburg-letters-east-westRosa Luxemburg is often treated today as a symbol and an icon more than a thinker. Yet she is a good person to think with, especially at a moment in which the Left is again riven with tensions between different and apparently irreconcilable positions. Luxemburg, like many of us, was a lot of things at once. She was a Pole, a Jew, a woman, a person with a disability, an ‘eastern’ Marxist, a militant of the tiny Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania and a leader of the ‘western’ Left in the world’s biggest socialist organisation, the German SPD, and an extreme opponent of nationalism to the level of abstraction. Politically, she was a revolutionary socialist who alternated from moment to moment in the same texts from being fiercely critical of the Bolshevik Revolution to even more brutal put-downs of those who opposed it. She was also, of course, a great writer of letters. Many letters from one part of the Left to another are being written right now. Ukrainian leftist Volodymyr Artiukh’s recent and very powerful letter to western leftists ‘on your and our mistakes’ is withering on the question of how much a focus on the USA above all else has led to poor analysis and a lack of solidarity. But what it also points out is how much the ‘eastern’ Left after the fall of Soviet state socialism has learned from the West. This isn’t a minor issue. For instance, in the 1990s reformed Eastern European socialists such as the Polish Solidarity leader Jacek Kuron shelved their critiques of capitalism. Let the free market rip, and ignore those old comrades in London or Paris warning that not all was rosy in the West. This was something that Kuron later publicly regretted, as the new capitalism opened up enormous social divides in his home country. So sometimes the allegedly pampered, self-important western Left is right about things. But sometimes, it screws up. Yet as much as there’s an east/west question within the Left, there’s an at the very least equally important north/south one. Rather than seeing similar struggles of oppressed countries as linked, geopolitics focuses us on either attacking or supporting ‘our’ imperialism. So, leftists who would never accept ‘spheres of influence’ arguments about Cuba or Mexico happily make them about Ukraine; liberal and conservative supporters of Ukraine more commonly compare that country’s predicament today to the aggressor state of Israel rather than to that of Palestine. Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichorn’s project Post Rosa: Letters Against Barbarism doesn’t explicitly set out to create dialogues between leftists east and west, north and south, but that’s what emerges from it. Coming from the editor of the delightfully strange and similarly internationalist Lenin150 (Samizdat), it uses the name of one of the Left’s great figures from the past—here, a rather less controversial one—as a way of situating the Left in the present, at a time which, as he points out in his introduction, feels to many to be a depressive and defeated one, after all the near-misses of the 2010s. So each contributor, most of whom are activists and/or intellectuals of the global Left, has a dialogue in three or four letters; these are, as in Lenin150 (Samizdat), supplemented with quirky visual material, here consisting of stamps and first-day-covers featuring the Polish revolutionary, alongside quotes from Luxemburg’s letters in the various languages of the book’s contributors, from English to Spanish Vietnamese to Polish to Swahili, and encouraging images of trees, leaves, and flowers, often shared by the letter-writers with each other. The real subject of the book, as Joffre-Eichorn puts it in his own letter to Peter Hudis, is as follows: ‘How does the importance of RL differ and change when viewed from once again military ruled Burma, from Gaza under fire or from Columbia suffering ongoing state-sponsored terrorism?’, and how does how we read her work change whether ‘we are overworked and underpaid health workers in Kenya, increasingly despondent peace activists in Eastern Ukraine or literally drowning climate justice warriors in the sinking Maldives?’ This idea is then connected with the way Luxemburg (letter-writer Helen C. Scott cautions against the rather diminishing familiar ‘Rosa’, something that would never be used with ‘Vladimir’ Lenin) was unrestrained and personal in her letter writing, which showed, to the surprise of the first editors of those letters, how deeply interested she was in, well, everything—poetry, animal life, the natural world, and much else, the sort of (to use a naff political journalism term) ‘hinterland’ that Luxemburg’s great frenemy Lenin notoriously didn’t just lack but actively disdained. If all this sounds a little twee, sometimes it is—there really is a moment in Post Rosa when Swedish leftist Rebecca Selberg recommends the music of Manu Chao to her Kenyan counterpart Maureen Kasuku—but it is also warm, charming, and imaginative. The content of the letters ranges from accounts of local struggles, sharing of poetry and favourite Brecht quotes, family histories, and the venting of beefs. Paul Mason, the only British letter-writer, is in his letters to the Turkish Marxist philosopher Sevgi Doğan, extremely concerned with expressing his eccentric takes on Corbynism, Stalinism, and ‘Anti-Humanism’, and generally separating the sheep from the goats. But rather than drawing lines, what comes across in the book is ‘Luxemburgians’ from around the world attempting to understand each other from what can be quite irreconcilable positions. Everyone in the book has some connection with Luxemburg, having written on her, translated her or engaged in some other way, but that’s often where the similarity ends. Post Rosa includes edgy left-communists, committed Marxist-Humanist ‘Luxemburgians’, and scholars of her work such as Paul Le Blanc, Helen C. Scott, and Peter Hudis, and also letter-writers who grew up in Polish state socialism, and two members of governing Communist Parties, Xiong Min in China and Nguyen Hong Duc in Vietnam. The Kenyan and Swedish militants politely talk around the obvious fact that their experiences of ‘capitalism’ are quite different from each other’s. These perspectives are often so different that you can read between the lines a tension between the letter-writers, but most of all, they are patient to learn from each other and listen. So as Joffre-Eichorn says in his introduction, ‘let’s start chatting’—or, to quote one of the figures in our own pantheon, ‘this is my truth, tell me yours’. Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichorn’s Post Rosa: Letters Against Barbarism is available to order from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s New York City office. About the Author
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Post by Admin on Apr 21, 2022 15:57:12 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 22, 2022 16:57:32 GMT
"The societies of consumers are those who are fundamentally responsible for the atrocious destruction of the environment." - Fidel Castro This Earth Day, it is imperative to focus on the endless ruin that capitalism offers our only home-- from extreme weather conditions caused by climate change, to worldwide environmental degradation as a result of ruthless extraction and war. A planned economy would offer a rational and sustainable way of using Earth's resources, placing human and environmental needs ahead of profit. We must realize that the survival of our species and planet is more important than the riches of a tiny minority of people. Once we realize this, we must act. We can't rely on individual action to save our planet-- a task of this magnitude requires a fundamental reorganizing of society. We need to demand a system that provides real solutions to climate change – a system with a planned economy that can provide responsibly for farmers and urban centers alike. We need a system that is based on people’s needs and the needs of the environment. Climate change is the symptom, capitalism is the disease, and socialism is the cure!
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Post by Admin on Apr 27, 2022 18:08:49 GMT
Remembering V I Lenin On His Birth Anniversary! "Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting against all oppression of nations." ~ Lenin #VILenin #Lenin
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Post by Admin on Apr 30, 2022 16:19:58 GMT
Arise: Power, Strategy and Union Resurgence - book review www.counterfire.org/articles/book-reviews/23170-arise-power-strategy-and-union-resurgence-book-reviewJane Holgate’s book, Arise: Power, Strategy and Union Resurgence, is part of a series of books which aim to examine workers’ movements in contemporary capitalism. It is interesting reading and this review is very much from the perspective of a rank-and-file trade unionist. There may well be a different review to be written from the perspective of those working within the full-time structures of the trade-union movement. Organising Holgate writes a lot about organising which is her specialist field of research. She describes a leadership structure from the rep or shop steward at the bottom of the pyramid up to the general secretary at the top (p.160). I remember when I first became active in a union it was in MSF at the insurance company, Norwich Union, back in the late 1980s. This was a union branch which had been built from scratch in the 1970s by a group of activists. The first time I went to our annual conference in Bishops Stortford, one of the long-standing branch activists drew the same pyramid structure on the board that Holgate describes, with the members at the bottom of the pyramid. He then turned it upside down to illustrate how it should be. This has stuck with me ever since; any union which describes itself as member-led, or aspiring to be so, needs to have this structure rather than the top-down structure described by Holgate. There is no doubt that an organising strategy as Holgate outlines is a step forward from the service-union model adopted by many unions in the late 1980s following the miners’ strike. A turn was then made in the late 1990s towards a more aggressive organising agenda rather than this service-model trade unionism which had become dominant. However, as Holgate points out, despite claiming to be adopting tactics borrowed from the US labour movement, nothing like the financial resources were put into it, nor the political approach adopted as in the US. There are dangers in relying on the general secretary and the full-time union apparatus to build the rank and file. There is no substitute for building from the base of the union upwards. Political issues are often part of the driving force of building the union. The full-time part of the union is comfortable sitting between employees and management. Unless driven by a progressive political ideology, which some full-time officials are, they see their role exclusively as encouraging negotiation rather than confrontation. While negotiation is a necessary part of any union branch, confrontation is also unavoidable, and an ‘avoid at all costs’ attitude to conflict can be damaging in the long run. A ‘rank-and-file’ movement built by the bureaucracy is likely to be nothing more than a pseudo rank-and-file movement, under the control of the full-time apparatus of the union. To understand the role of the full-time official, a good place to start is the totemic statement put out by the rank-and-file Clyde Workers’ Committee formed in 1915 among workers on the huge shipyards west of Glasgow: ‘We will support the officials just as long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them. Being composed of Delegates from every shop and untrammelled by obsolete rule or law, we claim to represent the true feeling of the workers. We can act immediately according to the merits of the case and the desire of the rank and file.’ The big struggles Holgate identifies and analyses some of the major strikes and struggles that have taken place over the past fifty years, including the great miners’ strike of 1984-5. What is surprising in her analysis is the absence of any mention of the Labour leaders at the time, in particular Neil Kinnock, then leader when Labour was in opposition. While Labour MPs such as Tony Benn were touring the country drumming up support for the miners’ cause, Kinnock spent his time in parliament delivering pathetic speeches, equating miners ‘violence’ with that of the police, miners in t-shirts against police in riot gear with horses, hardly a fair fight. I feel this is a serious gap in Holgate’s analysis. Simply analysing major confrontations from the perspective of self-activity misses out on the crucial political context in such disputes. Kinnock played a key role in undermining support for the miners. The miners needed the rest of the labour movement behind them, but the leaders of that movement failed them. Although thousands rallied around the country to ensure they and their families wouldn’t starve or be driven back to work, it was not enough to take on the might of the British state. Although workers’ self-activity is essential, without which there would be no strikes and nothing to put pressure on the employers, even in a small-scale dispute solidarity from other workers and those across the wider social movements is essential. And when the dispute is on a grander scale such as the miners’ strike of 1984-5, where the entire machinery of the state was pitched against the National Union of Mineworkers, with the police used as a military attack force to break pickets, it becomes increasingly difficult if not impossible for a single group of workers to win on their own. A more recent example is that of the junior doctors in England 2015-16, who went into dispute over new contracts being imposed by then health secretary, Jeremy Hunt. When they went on strike on 12 January 2016, it was the first such industrial action in forty years. However, not a peep was heard from the TUC. Widespread support across the trade-union movement was not mobilised as it could have been; even a one-day strike or a TUC-led march in support could have helped shift the balance, but the TUC sat on their hands. There was some support this time from the Labour leadership, but not enough from the movement overall. There were fantastic rallies up and down the country, but ultimately the strike was defeated. Role of trade-union legislation Holgate is right to highlight the processes that took place to undermine trade-union support among the wider British public. The view that unions were too powerful in the 1970s is one that you hear still today, sometimes from trade unionists themselves. It was in fact, as Holgate points out, the Labour government of 1964-70 which started the process of attempting to undermine union power with legislation. However, it wasn’t until the Thatcher government from 1979 onwards that this process really took hold. By the time the miners went on strike in 1984, anti-union legislation was already in place. The anti-union legislation process (p.158), which started in 1968, has now reached a high level of sophistication. It is clearly aimed at preventing strikes taking place, most notably thorough the arbitrary threshold of 50% needing to vote for a ballot to be actionable. However, more subtly, it acts as a restraining device on the union leadership and bureaucracy, who often willingly at times, it seems, use its restrictive features to stifle any action. There is a great need for discussion of organising strategies in the trade-union movement, to which this book makes a useful contribution. Strategy, however, needs to be considered through a wider lens than that of trade-union leaderships. Historically, the most powerful surges of unionism have come through rank-and-file militancy, and a political context which favoured widespread working-class solidarity. Trade unionism needs to focus on encouraging these conditions to build the fightback. Before you go... Counterfire is expanding fast as a website and an organisation. We are trying to organise a dynamic extra-parliamentary left in every part of the country to help build resistance to the government and their billionaire backers. If you like what you have read and you want to help, please join us or just get in touch by emailing info@counterfire.org. Now is the time!
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Post by Admin on May 1, 2022 2:06:41 GMT
"If the goal is to generate an anti-capitalist, cooperative economy, the combination of cooperative agorism and agorist-syndicalism can be considered forms of venture communism." - Eric Fleischmann Toward a Cooperative Agorism c4ss.org/content/56170I have a saying that goes something like: ‘I don’t trust anybody who thinks taxation is theft but profit isn’t.’ The former is a common sentiment among libertarians left and right, who argue, like Michael Huemer, that “[w]hen the government ‘taxes’ citizens, what this means is that the government demands money from each citizen, under a threat of force: if you do not pay, armed agents hired by the government will take you away and lock you in a cage” [1]. The affirmative of the latter is a less well known sentiment but is rooted in Marxist exploitation theory. Richard Wolff explains in Democracy at Work: A Cure For Capitalism how profit… is the excess of the value added by workers’ labor—and taken by the employer—over the value paid in wages to them. To pay a worker $10 per hour, an employer must receive more than $10 worth of extra output per hour to sell. Surplus is capitalists’ revenue net of direct input and labor costs to produce output. This argument is based in the labor theory of value, which is rejected by most right-libertarians. Kevin Carson, in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, rehabilitates it as the tendency of prices fall to the cost of production in the absence of artificial restrictions like state-sanctioned monopolies, but even if one rejects this, the logic of the LTV actually comes very close to the Lockean principle of ownership acquisition via mixing one’s labor. Cory Massimino explains: For 19th century anarchists, the labor theory of value, or “cost limit of price,” was the natural extension of the individual’s absolute sovereignty over themselves. Labor was seen as the source for all wealth, and the laborer naturally owns the fruits of their labor as an extension of their self-ownership. Tucker’s theory of value was intimately related to his ethical views based on each individual having sole dominion over their body and their justly acquired property, which required labor mixing. By this logic, profit could be considered theft from the same libertarian principles that outline taxation as such. And this has already more-or-less been done by proto-libertarians like Dyer Lum, who decries “taxation, profits, and rent” as “superimposed burdens” on “Labor.” Most right-libertarians would argue, however, that profit is earned from the voluntary exchange between employer and employee based on the former’s ownership of the means of production. But one can take a libertarian position to as extreme a point as Karl Hess did and suggest that much of what people call private property is actually… stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations. One can also look at the primitive accumulation, subsidies, regulatory capture, and monopoly privileges that have favored capitalists over the entire course of U.S. and global history. As such, Carson proposes that, from the dialectical libertarian perspective outlined by Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “the corporate economy is so closely bound up with the power of the state, that it makes more sense to think of the corporate ruling class as a component of the state.” This would ultimately mean that, like Logan Glitterbomb explains, because all large-scale private ownership of the means of production is “the result of theft, coercion, enclosure, corporate subsidies, state licensing regimes, zoning laws, government bailouts, tax breaks, intellectual property laws, and other political favors,” it is therefore “illegitimate,” and capitalists have less of a claim to its ownership than the worker. Glitterbomb allows “while, yes, if the original owner can be found, the property should revert back to their control and the decisions about what to do with it should rest with the original legitimate owner, as [Murray] Rothbard and many others have pointed out, finding the original or ‘legitimate’ owner can sometimes prove to be difficult or even impossible. It was in such a case that Rothbard claimed that the next best option was to turn such property over to those who have put the most labor into it recently, the workers.” By this analysis, workers generally have a greater claim over the means of production than capitalists, thereby making the extraction of surplus value a form of theft.
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Post by Admin on May 7, 2022 15:36:05 GMT
Socialist Equality Party Sixth Congress Resolution The Global Pandemic, the Class Struggle and the Tasks of the Socialist Equality Party $3.00 The sixth national congress of the Socialist Equality Party adopted this resolution that recognized that the coronavirus pandemic will go down in history as a “trigger event,” not unlike the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, which sparked World War I. mehring.com/product/sep-sixth-congress-resolution/Socialist Equality Party The Breakdown of Capitalism and the Fight for Socialism in the United States: Program of the Socialist Equality Party $1.99 – $3.00 A fighting revolutionary program for the American working class, adopted by the First National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party in August 2010, this document lays out an analysis of the global economic crisis, its political implications and the tasks of the working class. The SEP program outlines a series of basic social rights for jobs, education and culture, health care and democratic rights—all of which are under attack within the current capitalist system—and can only be won by the mobilization of the working class. mehring.com/product/the-breakdown-of-capitalism-and-the-fight-for-socialism-in-the-united-states-program-of-the-socialist-equality-party/David North The Fight for Trotskyism and the Political Foundations of the World Socialist Web Site $3.00 The World Socialist Web Site is the most widely-read socialist publication. Initiating a year-long discussion, David North’s opening report in February 1997, motivating the launch of an internet publication, and his summary remarks at the conclusion of the discussion, retain their importance today not only as the historical record of the political foundations of the World Socialist Web Site. They are also a demonstration of the relationship between Marxist theory and genuinely revolutionary practice. mehring.com/product/political-foundations-of-the-world-socialist-web-site/David North The Workers League and the Founding of the Socialist Equality Party $3.00 This pamphlet contains a report delivered by Workers League National Secretary David North to a meeting of the Workers League membership on June, 25 1995. It elaborates the political and theoretical foundations upon which the Workers League based its decision to found a new party. mehring.com/product/the-workers-league-and-the-founding-of-the-socialist-equality-party/David North The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique $9.99 – $39.95 The polemical essays in this volume examine the complex interaction between history, philosophy and politics. The author defends historical materialism against contemporary anti-Marxist philosophical tendencies related to the Frankfurt School and postmodernism. mehring.com/product/the-frankfurt-school-postmodernism-and-the-politics-of-the-pseudo-left-a-marxist-critique/David North A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990 – 2016 $9.99 – $44.95 Beginning with the first Persian Gulf conflict of 1990–91, the United States has been at war continuously for over thirty years. While using propaganda catchphrases, such as “defense of human rights” and “War on Terror,” to conceal the real aims of its interventions in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, as well as its confrontation with Russia and China, the United States has been engaged in a struggle for global hegemony. As the US seeks to counteract its economic weakness and worsening domestic social tensions, its relentless escalation of military operations threatens to erupt into a full-scale world war, between nuclear-armed states. mehring.com/product/a-quarter-century-of-war-the-us-drive-for-global-hegemony-1990-2016/David North In Defense of Leon Trotsky (second edition) $9.99 – $34.95 Leon Trotsky, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution and of the struggle against Stalin, was the last great representative of classical Marxism. No political event in the 20th Century can be understood without reference to his extensive writings. David North defends Trotsky’s legacy against the campaign of historical falsification begun by Stalin and continuing to this day. Stalin assassinated Trotsky in 1940, but he was unable to silence the Fourth International, founded to embody the revolutionary heritage of 1917. mehring.com/product/in-defense-of-leon-trotsky-second-edition/David North The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century $9.99 – $39.95 One hundred years after the outbreak of World War I and the Russian Revolution, none of the problems of the twentieth century—devastating wars, economic crises, social inequality, and the threat of dictatorship—have been solved. In fact, they are posed even more sharply today. Disputing postmodernism’s view that all history is merely subjective “narrative,” North insists that a thorough materialist knowledge of history is vital for humanity’s survival in the twenty-first century. mehring.com/product/the-russian-revolution-and-the-unfinished-twentieth-century/International Committee of the Fourth International The Fourth International and the Perspective of World Socialist Revolution $9.99 – $24.95 The 1985-86 split with the British Workers Revolutionary Party initiated a rich period in the history of Trotskyism. The period examined in the lectures in this volume facilitated the launch of the World Socialist Web Site and the preparation for the intense political struggles shaking the world today. mehring.com/product/the-fourth-international-and-the-perspective-of-world-revolution/David North The Heritage We Defend (30th Anniv. Edition): A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International $9.99 – $49.95 The work reviews the political and theoretical disputes inside the Fourth International, the international Marxist movement founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. It is a devastating reply to former WRP General Secretary Michael Banda’s document “27 Reasons why the International Committee Should be Buried Forthwith and the Fourth International Built.” Contains a detailed and objective assessment of the political contribution and evolution of James P. Cannon, Trotsky’s most important co-thinker in the US, as well as the evolution of the US Socialist Workers Party. The 2018 edition of the foundational 1988 work by David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, contains a new preface, photo section, and an extensive glossary. mehring.com/product/the-heritage-we-defend-30th-anniv-edition-a-contribution-to-the-history-of-the-fourth-international/Socialist Equality Party The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (US) $4.99 – $9.95 Tracing essential historical events and political experiences spanning more than a century, the work establishes the theoretical and political basis of the struggle for socialism. This document was adopted at the founding congress of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) held in Ann Arbor, Michigan on August 3-9, 2008. mehring.com/product/the-historical-and-international-foundations-of-the-socialist-equality-party-us/Socialist Equality Party Socialist Equality Party (US) Statement of Principles $1.50 – $2.00 This statement was unanimously adopted by the founding Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US) held August 3-9, 2008. mehring.com/product/socialist-equality-party-us-statement-of-principles/
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Post by Admin on May 7, 2022 15:38:04 GMT
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Post by Admin on May 12, 2022 20:32:38 GMT
Leon Trotsky Leon Trotsky on France $25.00 This series of articles was written by Trotsky from 1934 to 1939, between the installation of the right wing Doumergue government in 1934 and the election of the Popular Front government of Leon Blum in 1936 and the ensuing massive general strike. Trotsky subjects the program of the social democrats and Stalinists, who were bent on tying the working class to an alliance with the left bourgeois parties through Stalin’s “Popular Front” policy, to a withering critique. mehring.com/product/leon-trotsky-on-france/Leon Trotsky Leon Trotsky on China $32.00 This volume contains a collection of Trotsky’s writings on the Chinese revolution of 1925-27 and its aftermath. This failed revolution ended with the deaths of tens of thousands of communist workers and the total destruction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as an organised mass movement of the working class. One cannot understand the fundamental problems in modern Chinese history, in particular the nature of the Maoist regime that was established in 1949, without understanding the lessons of 1925-27. mehring.com/product/leon-trotsky-on-china/Leon Trotsky The Spanish Revolution (1931-39) $29.95 These writings by Trotsky examine the lessons of the great revolutionary movement of the Spanish working class in the 1930s, tragically aborted and betrayed by the Stalinist Communist Party and the centrist POUM into the hands of Franco’s fascists. His writings deal with the Popular Front, the centrist POUM, anarchism, Stalinism and basic questions of revolutionary strategy and tactics. mehring.com/product/the-spanish-revolution-1931-39/Leon Trotsky Terrorism and Communism $16.95 Writing in 1920 aboard his military train in the midst of the Civil War, Trotsky defended the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary measures against Karl Kautsky, the German renegade from Marxism and opponent of Soviet power. mehring.com/product/terrorism-and-communism/Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed $14.95 In the annals of political literature, few works have withstood the test of time so well as Leon Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed. More than 70 years after its initial publication, its analysis of the structure and dynamics of Soviet society and of the Soviet Union remains unsurpassed. As far back as 1936, writing as an isolated political exile in Norway, Leon Trotsky warned that the policies of the Stalinist regime, far from having assured the triumph of socialism in the USSR, were actually preparing the ground for the restoration of capitalism. David North’s introduction explains the historical importance of Trotsky’s masterpiece and demonstrates its contemporary significance. mehring.com/product/the-revolution-betrayed/David North Leon Trotsky and the Development of Marxism $3.00 Four articles by David North, originally published in 1982 on the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Tom Henehan, provide a remarkably concise introduction to Trotskyism, the Marxism of today. mehring.com/product/leon-trotsky-and-the-development-of-marxism/
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Post by Admin on May 22, 2022 19:01:50 GMT
Remembering Jeffrey Escoffier, Queer Socialist Pioneer BY WHITNEY STRUB With Jeffrey Escoffier’s passing this week, the world has lost a great thinker who took sex as seriously as politics and never lost sight of their intimate connections. Farewell to a titan of the queer socialist left. jacobinmag.com/2022/05/jeffrey-escoffier-queer-socialist-left/Reading and cruising, Jeffrey Escoffier once wrote, “are not such dissimilar techniques.” Both require sustained and dialectical interpretive practices, and he enjoyed them both greatly. He forged this connection while doing both in the mid-1960s: devouring the entire corpus of sexual sociology while pursuing the pleasures of the flesh in New York City’s Washington Square Park. With Escoffier’s passing this week, the world has lost a major thinker of the queer socialist left and a pioneering scholar of sexuality, one who took sex as seriously as politics and never lost sight of their intimate connections. Modeling an engaged, community-based scholarship from the dawn of gay liberation to the development of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), Escoffier was a brilliant public intellectual at the center of radical queer politics and thought. Gay (Marxist) Liberation Born in 1942 and raised on Staten Island, Escoffier’s dyslexia prevented him from reading until the age of ten, but books and sex marked his teen years. He was just in time to ride the waves of the ’60s, and he did so with gusto. High on Kerouac, Burroughs, and amphetamines, he hitchhiked to Mexico in the summer of 1963 and then enlisted, bodily and intellectually, in the cause of the sexual revolution after discovering the work of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown. Coming out was a process. He began graduate school at Columbia and, by 1967, recalled “roam[ing] the East Village holding hands with a man,” but only after the June 1969 Stonewall rebellion did he publicly adopt the word gay (“I had long known that I was queer — that is, a homosexual,” he wrote). Moving to Philadelphia in 1970 to study economic history, he brought with him a great deal of theoretical knowledge but little practical activist experience, which didn’t stop him from stumbling into the presidency of the local Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) chapter. These were the heady early years of gay liberation, inspired by the militance of the Black Panther Party, the anti-imperialism of the antiwar movement, and the anti-capitalist analysis of modern social relations. But Philly was different from New York or San Francisco, smaller and less anonymous. The GAA led the city’s first gay pride march in 1972, near Rittenhouse Square, and Jeffrey later recalled claiming the public sphere as “one of the most exhilarating things I’ve ever done.” In the spirit of the times, they also held “zaps” against homophobes, pushed for a municipal antidiscrimination ordinance, and held dances and other social events. Jeffrey helped found the Gay Alternative in 1972, and in the paper’s opening editorial, he declared coming out “an essential political act.” Its rich coverage included everything from politics to sports to a 1974 cover featuring John Waters’s film star Divine, but his most sustained theme was always socialism and sexual liberation. A long 1975 article on Oscar Wilde’s politics — “The Homosexual as Artist as Socialist” — passionately argued for the need to include Wilde in the history of the gay left, even as it criticized his reductive vision of politics as a matter of aesthetics. As the feverish burst of post-Stonewall radicalism subsided in the face of a more reformist gay and lesbian politics, being a gay Marxist could be lonely. Escoffier cobbled together one issue of Gay People in the Labor Force in 1974, and it might have been a landmark periodical, had anyone read it. By 1976, when he put up a poster for a gay Marxist study group, only one person attended. Toward a Materialist History of Sexuality In the late 1970s, Jeffrey moved to San Francisco, where he joined the founding cohort of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project, which also included Allan Bérubé, Amber Hollibaugh, Gayle Rubin, and other important thinkers of the queer left. The project was marked by a commitment to public and community-based history rather than work walled off in an ivory tower, and it eventually formed one of the bases of the still active GLBT Historical Society. He also became executive editor of Socialist Review for most of the 1980s, publishing numerous pieces about queer politics and the AIDS crisis, alongside familiar names such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Noam Chomsky, and Winona LaDuke, and cutting-edge leftist work such as an early iteration of Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s theory of racial formation. One of Escoffier’s own signature pieces appeared there in 1985. “Sexual Revolution and the Politics of Gay Identity” offers a still useful synthesis of the genealogy of thought on the emergence of gay identity, locating the sharpest analysis firmly within the gay left. Generous in his citations — to sociologist Mary McIntosh, the British Gay Left collective, historian John D’Emilio’s landmark “Capitalism and Gay Identity” (1979), and more — Escoffier also brought his training in economic history to bear on the history. Noting that sexologist Alfred Kinsey’s infamous 1948 and 1953 reports on human sexual behavior carried enormous effects on gay and lesbian visibility, he also argued for “the sexual contradictions of Keynesianism” as a key structural factor in the development of queer communities. Basically, the US welfare state was intended to shore up the traditional patriarchal family of breadwinner capitalism, but the “affluence and consumption ethic” that accompanied it simultaneously undermined the stability of the nuclear family by affording unprecedented individual sexual freedom. These are classical Marxist dialectics in action, but it was an important intervention to insist on such structural causes alongside the cultural. Another of what I consider Jeffrey’s most crucial works builds on this theme. “The Political Economy of the Closet: Toward an Economic History of Gay and Lesbian Life Before Stonewall,” written about a decade later, ambitiously confronts what was then an almost complete absence of archives. Paraphrasing Gwen Verdon from Damn Yankees and building an analytic framework from “a little thisa, a little data,” Escoffier charts “the high cost of a double life” in what he calls the “closet economy” of the Cold War era — costs that were not only psychic (though certainly that too) but also profoundly material. It’s impossible to precisely quantify the career costs, for instance, of the workplace rapport lost by not discussing partners, vacations, etc., around the office watercooler, but they were clearly significant. Likewise, the need for protection — either mafia, police payola, or both — for gay bars, bathhouses, and bookstores during that period of intense criminalization also redirected the majority of community spending away from the community itself, keeping it shackled to extortion. The urban “gay ghettos” (as they were then conceptualized) of the 1970s had deeper roots, but could only fully emerge when the post-Stonewall liberation economy replaced the closet, Escoffier contended. After leaving Socialist Review, Escoffier helped found OUT/LOOK, a national gay and lesbian quarterly that ran from 1988 to 1992. This period witnessed the coalescence of queer as a radical oppositional identity emanating out of AIDS activism, and also queer theory as an intellectual project dedicated to dismantling heteronormativity, and OUT/LOOK, perhaps better than any other venue, captured these shifts. Jeffrey had always maintained an inside-outside relationship with academia, teaching everywhere from Berkeley and Barnard to Rutgers-Newark at various points, but always as contingent faculty; he primarily supported himself as an editor, literary agent, and, after moving East in 1993, director of health media and marketing at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, from which he retired in 2015. So he saw OUT/LOOK as a public sphere connecting the academy and the community, and it was careful to include diverse multiracial voices from across the queer spectrum. Its first issue bore a cover image of Gladys Bentley, the black Harlem Renaissance–era “bulldagger who sang the blues,” and the opening editorial statement declared, “OUT/LOOK is committed to building a bridge between worlds which have often been quite separate.” (A valuable digital archive allows us to experience the vibrant text and layout of the magazine). Jeffrey recognized and respected the intellectual rigor of queer theory and understood the ways its hyperintellectual prose served as necessary social capital to legitimize LGBTQ Studies in still hostile university settings. But in a controversial 1990 OUT/LOOK article, “Inside the Ivory Tower,” he rued the ways an overly sophisticated (and perhaps sometimes sophistic) harnessing of Lacanian psychoanalytic tropes, Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, and other staples of the early works of Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and others shut down connections to the organic intellectual and political work of LGBTQ communities, which had driven landmark works by Cherríe Moraga, Barbara Smith, and others. He lamented a generational divide between Stonewall-era queer thinkers and the more professionalized, theoretical, and arguably more bourgeois drivers of queer theory. Escoffier’s call for a more democratic intellectual culture was “gossiped and grouched about,” making him persona non grata in some circles. Even the usually gracious Sedgwick belittled him as “anti-intellectual.” But his critique was in good faith and still reverberates. By focusing “too exclusively on the discursive aspects of knowledge or power and not enough on political and economic domination,” as Jeffrey wrote, queer theory risks profoundly misapprehending the actual historical operations of power — and indeed, at its most glib, when it examines cultural representations without attention to the labor behind them, inadvertently sets the stage for today’s noxious neoliberal intersectionality-minus-class. This remains a productive site of debate, and the gauntlet that Jeffrey threw down in 1990 was taken up thirty years later by, among others, Matt Brim in his valuable book Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the Academy. Porn Work as Work Perhaps in part due to the social fallout of his critique, Jeffrey became something of an academic nomad in the 1990s, but continued publishing prolifically. A 1998 sociological article reflected the high stakes of these debates over power and knowledge by meticulously theorizing the invention of “safer sex” in the 1980s as the product not just of epidemiological research but also the vernacular community knowledge of gay men’s sexual wisdom, forged as much in bathhouses as conference panels. Indeed, ever the public intellectual, Escoffier put these arguments into practice in his public-health work. Much of Jeffrey’s later work focused on gay male pornography, and here, too, he brought a Marxist lens to a field then dominated by film theory. He was always a bit frustrated by his 2009 book Bigger Than Life, which was rushed to production by a trade press more interested in salacious anecdotes than ideological analysis, though it still remains the go-to citation on post-Stonewall gay male erotic cinema. More expressive of his ambitions were the series of scholarly articles collected in Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography: The Pornographic Object of Knowledge (2021), which revolve around questions of labor: straight men shooting “gay-for-pay,” gendered wage discrepancies, and the increasing need for twenty-first-century porn performers to diversify income streams with stripping, escorting, etc. I am not doing anything near justice to the nuance and complexity of these pieces — my favorite of which tracks 1970s gay hardcore “homo-realist” films as effectively accidental documentaries of style, affect, and sexual imagination — but long before most academics in porn studies or elsewhere were taking sex work seriously, Jeffrey was laying the foundation for important later work such as Mireille Miller-Young’s A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography or Heather Berg’s Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism. It was through our shared work in porn studies that I came to befriend Jeffrey, and for several years before the pandemic began, he hosted a monthly salon at his Brooklyn apartment that he loved to call the “Tupperware party for perverts,” bringing together a comradely group of scholars and occasional porn workers. One memorable meeting happened at the home of Jerry Douglas, director of the gay-liberation hardcore hit The Back Row (1972), and another time I hosted in my hometown of Newark, taking the group on an excursion to the Little Theatre, one of the last (now closed) adult theaters in the New York City metro area. I was able to witness Jeffrey’s generous and loving mentorship to a host of graduate students, who will carry on his intellectual legacy. Christopher Mitchell, whose dissertation on gay markets and late capitalism built on Escoffier’s frameworks, calls him a “surrogate parent,” and spent May Day sitting with Jeffrey in hospice care. He was taken there from the ICU, where he spent several weeks after taking a hard fall at home that left him comatose. He never awoke, but he had a steady string of visitors that taxed the hospital’s two-daily quota. On my visit, I read aloud to him from some of his classic essays quoted here, marveling at what a rich body of work he leaves behind. Indeed, I am certain that Jeffrey would agree that the best way to honor him is to dig into his writing and find something to debate, or something that moves you to action. His final years were a flurry of productivity, spurred on by the sustenance he took from what he called “the company, the intelligence, and the beauty” that his companion Hector Lionel brought to his life. A fruitful collaboration with Jeffrey Patrick Colgan generated a number of works (I was fortunate enough to work with them on a chapter for the collection Intimate States); for the gay communist magazine Pinko, he wrote on COVID-19 and capitalism; and several works remain forthcoming, including a scholarly collection about PrEP. The vision animating all of this, from the early 1970s through works not yet published, was his belief in the necessity of a “radical democratic coalition” that is “open, pluralistic, and practical,” where identity politics coexist with mass movements and intellectual work with community practices. It’s the only way we will ever achieve a just society, and Jeffrey Escoffier’s life and work ensured that socialism would be just a little more queer, and queerness more materialist. Farewell to a titan of the queer socialist left.
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Post by Admin on Jun 19, 2022 10:13:02 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 11, 2022 15:54:55 GMT
THE CIA & THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL’S ANTI-COMMUNISM thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/Foundations of the Global Theory Industry Frankfurt School critical theory has been—along with French theory—one of the hottest commodities of the global theory industry. Together, they serve as the common source for so many of the trend-setting forms of theoretical critique that currently dominate the academic market in the capitalist world, from postcolonial and decolonial theory to queer theory, Afro-pessimism and beyond. The Frankfurt School’s political orientation has therefore had a foundational effect on the globalized Western intelligentsia. The luminaries of the first generation of the Institute for Social Research—particularly Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who will be the focus of this essay—are towering figures in what is referred to as Western or cultural Marxism. For those familiar with Jürgen Habermas’s reorientation away from historical materialism in the second and then third generations of the Frankfurt School, this early work often represents a veritable golden age of critical theory, when it was still—though perhaps passive or pessimistic—dedicated in some capacity to radical politics. If there is a grain of truth in this assumption, it is only insofar as the early Frankfurt School is compared to later generations that refashioned critical theory as radical liberal—or even just blatantly liberal—ideology.[1] However, this point of comparison is setting the bar much too low, as is the case whenever one reduces politics to academic politics. After all, the first generation of the Frankfurt School lived through some of the most cataclysmic clashes in global class struggle of the 20th century, when a veritable intellectual world war was being fought over the meaning and significance of communism. In order to avoid being the dupes of history, or of the parochialism of the Western academy, it is therefore important to re-contextualize the Institute for Social Research’s work in relationship to international class struggle. One of the most significant features of this context was the desperate attempt, on the part of the capitalist ruling class, its state managers and ideologues, to redefine the Left—in the words of cold warrior CIA agent Thomas Braden—as the “compatible,” meaning non-communist, Left.[2] As Braden and others involved have explained in detail, one important facet of this struggle consisted in the use of foundation money and Agency front groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) to promote anti-communism and lure Leftists into taking positions against actually existing socialism. Horkheimer participated in at least one junket organized by the CCF in Hamburg.[3] Adorno published in the CIA-funded journal Der Monat, the largest review of its kind in Europe and the model for many of the Agency’s other publications. His articles appeared, as well, in two other CIA magazines: Encounter and Tempo presente. He also hosted in his home, corresponded and collaborated with the CIA operative who was arguably the leading figure in the German anticommunist Kulturkampf: Melvin Lasky.[4] Founder and chief editor of Der Monat, as well as a member of the original steering committee for the CIA’s CCF, Lasky told Adorno that he was open to every form of collaboration with the Institute for Social Research, including publishing their articles and any other declaration as quickly as possible in his pages.[5] Adorno took him up on the offer and sent him four unpublished manuscripts, including Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, in 1949.[6] Horkheimer’s lifelong collaborator was thus closely connected to the CCF networks in West Germany, and his name appears on a document, likely from 1958/59, that outlined plans for an all-German committee of the CCF.[7] What is more, even after it was revealed in 1966 that this international propaganda organization was a CIA front, Adorno continued to be “included in the expansion plans of the Paris headquarters [of the CCF],” as it was “business as usual” in the part of Germany overseen by the U.S.[8] This is only the tip of the iceberg, as we shall see, and it is nowise surprising since Adorno and Horkheimer rose to global prominence within the elite networks of the anti-communist Left. A Dialectical Analysis of Theoretical Production The analysis that follows is based on a dialectical account of the social totality that situates the subjective theoretical practices of these two founding fathers of critical theory within the objective world of international class struggle. It does not accept the arbitrary dividing line that many petty-bourgeois academics desperately try to erect between intellectual production and the broader socioeconomic world, as if someone’s “thought” could—and should—be separated from their “life,” as well as from the material system of theoretical production, circulation and reception that I will here refer to as the intellectual apparatus. Such a non-dialectical assumption, after all, is little more than a symptom of an idealist approach to theoretical work, which presumes that there is a spiritual and conceptual realm that functions completely independently of material reality and the political economy of knowledge. This presupposition perpetuates intellectual commodity fetishism, meaning the idolization of the sacred products of the theory industry that prohibits us from situating them within the overall social relations of production and class struggle. It also serves the interests of those who have or aspire to part of a particular franchise within the global theory industry, if it be “Frankfurt School critical theory” or any other, because it protects the brand image of the franchise itself (which remains unsullied by the actual social relations of production). Whereas intellectual commodity fetishism is a principal feature of consumption within the theory industry, brand image management is the hallmark of production. For such a dialectical analysis, it is important to acknowledge that Adorno and Horkheimer did indeed mobilize their subjective agency in formulating significant critiques of capitalism, consumer society and the culture industry. Far from denying this, I would merely like to situate these criticisms within the objective social world, which entails asking a very simple and practical question that is rarely raised within academic circles: if capitalism is recognized as having negative effects, what is to be done about it? The deeper one mines down into their life and work, sifting through the deliberate obscurantism of their discourse, the more obvious their response becomes, and the easier it is to understand the primary social function of their shared intellectual project. For as critical as they sometimes are of capitalism, they regularly affirm that there is no alternative, and nothing can or should ultimately be done about it. What is more, as we shall see, their criticisms of capitalism pale in comparison to their uncompromising condemnation of socialism. Their brand of critical theory ultimately leads to an acceptance of the capitalist order since socialism is judged to be far worse. Not unlike most of the other fashionable discourses in the capitalist academy, they proffer a critical theory that we might call ABS Theory: Anything But Socialism. It is not the least bit surprising, in this regard, that Adorno and Horkheimer have been so widely supported and promoted within the capitalist world. In order to shore up the compatible, non-communist Left over and against the threat of actually existing socialism, what better tactic than to champion scholars like these as some of the most important, and even most radical, Marxist thinkers of the 20th century? “Marxism” can thereby be redefined as a kind of anti-communist critical theory that is not directly connected to class struggle from below but rather freely criticizes all forms of “domination,” and which ultimately sides with capitalist control societies over and against the purported “fascist” horrors of powerful socialist states. Since benighted anti-communism has been so widely promoted within capitalist culture, this attempted redefinition of Marxism might not be immediately recognizable to some readers as reactionary and social chauvinist (in the sense that it ultimately elevates bourgeois society over any alternative). Unfortunately, major swaths of the population in the capitalist world have been inculcated into the knee-jerk response of uninformed calumny, rather than rigorous analysis, when it comes to actually existing socialism. Since the material history of these projects, with all of their ups and downs—rather than mythological horror stories propagandistically constructed around a communist bogeyman—will be essential to understanding the argument that follows, I take the liberty of referring the reader to the deep and rich work of rigorous historians like Annie Lacroix-Riz, Domenico Losurdo, Carlos Martinez, Michael Parenti, Albert Szymanski, Jacques Pauwels, and Walter Rodney, amongst others. I also encourage the reader to examine the important quantitative comparisons between capitalism and socialism undertaken by exacting analysts like Minqi Li, Vicente Navarro and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.[9] Such work is anathema to the dominant ideology, and for good reason: it scientifically examines the evidence, rather than relying on hoary tropes and uninformed ideological reflexes. It is the type of historical and materialist work, moreover, that has largely been overshadowed by the speculative forms of critical theory promoted by the global theory industry. Intellectuals in the Age of Revolution and Global Class War Although their early lives were marked by the world-historical events of the Russian Revolution and the attempted revolution in Germany, Adorno and Horkheimer were esthetes wary of the supposed morass of mass politics. While their interest in Marxism was piqued by these incidents, it was primarily of an intellectual nature. Horkheimer did become marginally involved in activities around the Munich council republic after WWI, particularly by providing support for some of those involved after the council had been brutally suppressed. However, he—the same is true a fortiori of Adorno—“continued to maintain his distance from the explosive political events of the time and to devote himself primarily to his own personal concerns.”[10] Their class standing was far from insignificant in this regard, for it positions them and their political outlook within the larger, objective world of the social relations of production. Both Frankfurt School theorists were from affluent families. Adorno’s father was a “wealthy wine merchant” and Horkheimer’s was a “millionaire” who “owned several textile factories.”[11] Adorno “had no personal ties at all to socialist political life” and maintained throughout his life “a deep aversion to formal membership of any party organization.”[12] Similarly, Horkheimer was never “an overt member of any working-class party.”[13] The same is generally true of the other figures involved in the early years of the Frankfurt School: “none of those belonging to the Horkheimer circle was politically active; none of them had his origins either in the labor movement or in Marxism.”[14] In the words of John Abromeit, Horkheimer sought to preserve the supposed independence of theory and “rejected the position of Lenin, Lukács, and the Bolsheviks that critical theory must be ‘rooted’” in the working class, or more specifically working-class parties.[15] He encouraged critical theorists to operate as intellectual free agents rather than grounding their research in the proletariat, which was a type of work that he disparaged as “totalitarian propaganda.”[16] Adorno’s overall position, like Herbert Marcuse’s, was summarized by Marie-Josée Levallée in the following terms: “the Bolshevik party, which Lenin made the vanguard of the October Revolution, was a centralizing and repressive institution which would shape the Soviet State in its image and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into its own dictatorship.”[17] When Horkheimer took over the directorship of the Institute for Social Research in 1930, his stewardship was characterized by speculative concerns with culture and authority rather than rigorous historical materialist analyses of capitalism, class struggle and imperialism. In the words of Gillian Rose, “instead of politicizing academia,” the Institute under Horkheimer “academized politics.”[18] This was perhaps seen nowhere more clearly than in “the constant policy of the Institute under Horkheimer’s direction,” which “continued to be abstinence, not only from every activity which was even remotely political, but also from any collective or organized effort to publicize the situation in Germany or to support émigrés.”[19] With the rise of Nazism, Adorno attempted to go into hibernation, assuming that the regime would only target “the orthodox pro-Soviet Bolshevists and communists who had drawn attention to themselves politically” (they would indeed be the first to be put in the concentration camps).[20] He “refrained from public criticism of any kind of the Nazis and their ‘great power’ policies.”[21] Critical Theory American Style This refusal to overtly participate in progressive politics was intensified when the leaders of the Institute moved it to the United States in the early 1930s. The Frankfurt School adapted itself “to the local bourgeois order, censoring its own past and present work to suit local academic or corporate susceptibilities.”[22] Horkheimer had words like Marxism, revolution and communism expunged from its publications in order to avoid offending its U.S. sponsors.[23] Furthermore, any type of political activity was strictly forbidden, as Herbert Marcuse later explained.[24] Horkheimer put his energy into securing corporate and state funding for the Institute, and he even hired a public relations firm to promote its work in the U.S. Another émigré from Germany, Bertolt Brecht, was thus not fully unjustified when he critically described the Frankfurt scholars as—in the words of Stuart Jeffries—“prostitutes in their quest for foundation support during their American exile, selling their skills and opinions as commodities in order to support the dominant ideology of oppressive U.S. society.”[25] They were indeed intellectual free agents unrestrained by any working-class organizations in their pursuit of corporate and state sponsorship for their brand of market-savvy critical theory. Brecht’s close friend, Walter Benjamin, was one of the Frankfurt scholars’ most important Marxist interlocutors at the time. He was not able to join them in the United States because he tragically committed suicide in 1940 at the border between France and Spain, the night before he faced near certain apprehension by the Nazis. According to Adorno, he “killed himself after he had already been saved” because he had “been made a permanent member of the Institute and knew it.”[26] He was “flush with funds” for his trip, in the words of the famous philosopher, and knew “that he could rely completely on us materially.”[27] This version of history, which presents Benjamin’s suicide as an incomprehensible personal decision given the circumstances, was an exercise in mendacity for the sake of personal and institutional exoneration, according to a detailed analysis recently published by Ulrich Fries. Not only were the leading figures of the Frankfurt School unwilling to assist Benjamin financially for his flight from the Nazis, Fries argues, but they also ran an extensive cover-up campaign to disingenuously present themselves as his benevolent benefactors. Prior to his suicide, Benjamin was financially dependent on the Institute for a monthly stipend. However, the Frankfurt scholars despised the influence of Brecht and revolutionary Marxism on his work. Adorno had no compunction about describing Brecht with the anticommunist epithet “savage” when explaining to Horkheimer that Benjamin needed to be “definitively” liberated from his influence.[28] It is not surprising, then, that Benjamin feared losing his stipend due, in part, to Adorno’s critiques of his work and refusal to publish a section of his Baudelaire study in 1938.[29] Horkheimer explicitly told Benjamin around the same time, as fascist forces were closing in around him, that he should prepare for the discontinuation of his sole source of income since 1934. He claimed, moreover, that his hands were “unfortunately tied” when he refused to fund Benjamin’s journey to safety by paying for a steamship ticket to the U.S. that would have cost under $200.[30] This was literally “a month after transferring an extra $50,000 to an account at his exclusive disposal,” which was the “second time in eight months” that he had secured an additional $50,000 (the equivalent of just over 1 million dollars in 2022).[31] In July 1939, Friedrich Pollock also obtained an additional $130,000 for the Institute from Felix Weil, the wealthy son of a capitalist millionaire whose profits from a grain enterprise in Argentina, property speculation and meat trading funded the Frankfurt School. It was political will, not money, that was lacking. Indeed, Fries concurs with Rolf Wiggershaus that Horkheimer’s cruel decision to abandon Benjamin was part of a broader pattern according to which the directors “systematically placed the realization of their private life goals above the interests of everyone else,” while propagating the false appearance of “outstanding commitment to those persecuted by the Nazi regime.”[32] As if to put the last nail in Benjamin’s coffin, his literary estate was later purged of its more explicit Marxist elements according to Helmut Heißenbüttel: “In everything Adorno did for Benjamin’s work, the Marxist-materialist side remains erased. […] The work appears in a reinterpretation in which the surviving controversial correspondent imposes his view.”[33] Todd Cronan has argued that there was a palpable shift in the Frankfurt School’s overall political orientation around 1940—the year Pollock wrote “State Capitalism”—as it increasingly turned its back on class analysis in favor of privileging race, culture and identity. “It often seems to me,” Adorno wrote to Horkheimer that year, “that everything that we used to see from the point of view of the proletariat has been concentrated today with frightful force upon the Jews.”[34] According to Cronan, Adorno and Horkheimer “opened up the possibility from within Marxism of seeing class as a matter of power, of domination, rather than economics (the Jews were not a category defined by economic exploitation). And once that possibility was raised, it became the dominant mode of analysis on the left at large.”[35] In other words, the Frankfurt theorists helped set the stage for a more general shift away from historical materialist analysis grounded in political economy toward culturalism and identity politics, which would become consolidated in the neoliberal era. It is highly revealing in this regard that the Institute undertook a massive study of “Anti-Semitism in American Labor” in 1944-45, under Pollock’s stewardship. Fascism had risen to power with extensive financial backing by the capitalist ruling class, and it was still on the war path around the world. Yet, the Frankfurt scholars were hired to focus on the purported anti-Semitism of U.S. workers rather than on the capitalist funders of fascism or the actual Nazis who were fighting a war against the Soviets. They reached the remarkable conclusion that the “communist-run” unions were the worst of all, and that they thus had “fascist” tendencies: “The members of these unions are less communist than fascist-minded.”[36] The study in question was commissioned by the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC). One of the JLC’s leaders, David Dubinsky, had numerous ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and was involved, along with the likes of CIA operatives Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, in the Company’s expansive campaign to take over organized labor and purge it of communists.[37] By identifying the communist unions as the most anti-Semitic, and even “fascist,” the Frankfurt School appears to have provided some of the ideological justification for destroying the communist labor movement. rest in link.
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Post by Admin on Aug 4, 2022 12:19:22 GMT
Socialists on the Knife-Edge Hari Kunzru From early utopian communities to the leftist resurgence today, the history of American socialism is deeper than its meager successes. August 18, 2022 issue www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/08/18/american-democratic-socialism-dorrien-kunzru/“A specter is haunting America,” intones the right-wing propagandist Dinesh D’Souza. “The specter of socialism.” As he speaks, in the opening sequence of his 2020 documentary Trump Card, we are shown a dramatic montage, including a CGI fly-through of Manhattan. The Statue of Liberty has been replaced by Lenin. There’s a hammer and sickle on the front of the New York Stock Exchange. “The death toll of socialism is unimaginable,” D’Souza explains. “Over 100 million casualties.” In an odd dramatized sequence, a uniformed interrogator threatens a man shackled to a table, his head hooked up to some kind of steampunk electrical contraption. The message is clear: socialism is totalitarian. It is—or inevitably leads to—Soviet-style state communism. It operates by coercion and mind control. In his 2019 State of the Union speech, D’Souza’s hero, President Trump, reassured his base that “America will never be a socialist country.” Americans have long been encouraged to see socialism, however they understand it, as fundamentally alien, a collectivist threat to a national polity founded on the sanctity of the individual as economic actor and bearer of rights. As early as 1896 the famous editorial writer William Allen White attacked the Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan by warning that the election would “sustain Americanism or…plant socialism,” a racialized choice between “American, Democratic, Saxon” and “European, Socialistic, Latin.” A recent Pew Research poll found that 55 percent of those surveyed had a negative perception of socialism, while 42 percent felt positively. The most commonly cited reason for a negative view was that it “undermines work ethic [and] increases reliance on government.” But other recent surveys found that a majority of Americans support policies identified with socialism, such as a fifteen-dollar minimum wage and higher taxation of the rich. America’s most prominent socialist organization is currently the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), founded in the early 1980s through a merger of two existing groups, one that had split with the conservative “old left” of the labor movement over its support of the Vietnam War, the other with a background in “New Left” student radicalism. The DSA aims to be what its official history calls an “ecumenical, multitendency socialist organization,” a project that had never attracted more than a few thousand dues-paying members until the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, which introduced this brand of popular-front socialism to a wider audience. Since the start of the Covid pandemic, membership has exploded, standing at around 95,000 at the time of the group’s 2021 National Convention. In 2018 two DSA members, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, were elected to the House of Representatives. In 2020 they were joined by Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush.
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