Subject: ON "REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM" IN AMERICA AND THE
VIRTUAL "BUSINESS AS USUAL" FACADE.
20 November 2006
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
When I was a young man and full of myself I used to shock the people I
met by announcing that I was a revolutionary socialist, by which I
meant not that I was a violent man --in fact, I think that violent acts
have served to prevent or limit revolutions more often than they have
served to fulfill revolutionary promises. No, I called myself a
revolutionary socialist simply because I thought that I understood the
system better than anyone who was not a revolutionary socialist. I
remember thinking that I had the intelligence to understand (if not the
power to command) the deep structural changes in the American political
economy which would be required if the quality of our lives was to be
improved. It was long over-due, I thought, to replace the worn-out
Standard
of Living Index with a new
Quality of Life Index, and no
one could make me forget this fact, I told myself, not even by blowing
smoke in my face.
I thought I understood how all corporate interests --and not just
military corporate interests-- waged war on the rest of us and
sometimes asked us to die for their higher order of profits.
As I grow older, it seems like the number of victims of disinformation
has increased. Like some kind of intellectual vacuum cleaner, it has
gone to work on our environment, and as a result of this "nettoyage" a
new, arrogant and aggressive style of management has taken hold of the
institutions, which no longer bothers even to justify itself. It would
seem that a gangster-like
rapport de force is enough to solicit
loyalty in this sleazy opportunistic atmosphere : "You don't want to
get hurt, do you?" is the language of r
apport de force, and it
was a memorable phrase from one of those favorite Saturday afternoon
gangster movies in the 1960s. We heard it echo around our school for
while when I was a kid. Another memorable threat was, "This is a small
town, and we have a long memory!" This was a cliché out of the
mouth of a small town Southern sheriff depicted in another TV series on
the civil rights movement when bigots sought to intimidate local
citizens.
Society has since become suffused with the ideology of retribution --an
ideology of "might makes right." Respectable "gangsters" have
prepared the mind for the unjust act. They ignore the common basis of
social organization, like "natural justice" in English common law and
"due process" in the more advanced capitalist democracies. The result
of this unconscious learning in today's institutions is disastrous to
civil society. As Anthony Wilden has observed, the traditional recourse
to justice through "due process," the protection stemming from the
process of being assumed innocent until proven guilty has been
displaced by an intense moral outrage and a self-righteousness which
escalates counter-revolutionary violence to a new pitch.
- The result of this unconscious
learning is disastrous to civil society. As if by the inherent
godliness of priests, or the
- awful majesty of law, or the divine
right of kings, the ideology of retribution --the self-righteous
punishment of real
- and imaginary wrongs-- turns into
what every colonizer recognizes as the strategy of colonialism: The
absolute right
- of "absolute good" (the colonizers)
to do absolutely anything to absolutely anyone they have defined as
criminal, immoral,
- animal, or evil.(Wilden,
1987, p.324)
If modern societies are derived from class struggle and, in fact, exist
as the material crystallization of this conflict, then these residues
today contain a degree of alienation as has rarely been seen before in
western democracies. The emotionally numbing effect of war activities
on both sides of the conflict can no longer be ignored. A more
congenial society will happen only when the causes of class warfare are
removed, which, of course, will involve removing the causes of poverty
and
not simply eliminating the poor, which is the
tactics now adopted from New Orleans to Gaza. The private profit motive
must be replaced by something more constructive, and as Gills Deleuze
wrote many years ago in his two-volume work,
Capitalisme
et Schizophrénie,
the "désire désiré par le corps plein sans organ"
(also known as corporate strategy) must be replaced by human bodies,
containing a multitude of human desires which govern a great diversity
of human behaviors. This is not an ideal; it is a condition of survival.
Reaching back to what sometimes seems to have been our "pre-history,"
when the nature of intellectual work was to seek an understanding of
"causes and effects," the psychology of empire-building was usually
acknowledged with the same pathos as the work of sand castle architects
before the rising tide.
Lenni Brenner, in his Preface to the 1988 edition of his book,
The
Lesser Evil, critiqued the composition of the Democratic
Party in the U.S. with the following account :
Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, the ex-Speaker of the House, once said that in
any other country the Democrats
would be five parties. So, perhaps in
some conservative milieus, there are those who believe in America's
oldest
party. But not among liberals or peace activists. And not among
academics and other intellectuals. Not in my experience.
Let's give
the cynics their due. They're at least half right. A preliminary peek
at the record shows the party to be
steeped in evil. I was born during
the Roosevelt administration. He put all the Japanese-Americans on the
West
Coast in concentration camps. Today no one defends that. Harry
Truman dropped the atom bomb twice on civilians.
Later he slaughtered
tens of thousands in defense of the Korean despot Syngman Rhee. Jack
Kennedy invaded Cuba.
Lyndon Johnson covered himself with the blood of
the Vietnam War. Jimmy Carter backed the sleazy Marcos, armed
the
Saudis, the world's last absolute monarchy, conspired with the Shah's
torture regime, and continued to recognize
the genocidal Pol Pot of
Cambodia, even in exile and disgrace.
- "OK," it
will be said, "but liberals weren't for these crimes. Often they
weren't
'for' these Democrats. They were
- voting against their Republican
opponents. And weren't they indeed lesser evils to the likes of
Goldwater or Nixon or
- Reagan? So there, brother Brenner. A
little
charity toward thy neighbor. Realistically, in this world an honest to
God
- lesser evil is about as close to a
saint as politics produces."
-
- But should
Japanese-Americans have
voter for their jailer because the Republicans were to the right of
Roosevelt?
- And are the Democrats always the
lesser evil? ... Isn't it
the liberals who howl loudest for increased aid to Israel, despite
- the
fact that it finally admitted that it arms South Africa and intends to
continue to do so?(pp.v-vi)
He went on to illustrate the inadequacies of U.S. electoral democracy
from the earliest years :
In 1784,
while a member of Congress, Thomas Jefferson proposed that slavery be
prohibited in the western territories
after 1800. These included what
is now Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as the
land north of the
Ohio River. However, under the rules of the then
Articles of Confederation, seven state delegations had to vote for it.
Because one of its delegates was ill, New Jersey couldn't vote, and the
bill failed by one state. Jefferson's disappointment
was naturally
profound:
-
- The voice of a single
individual . . . would have prevented this abominable crime
- from
spreading . . . .
- Thus we see the fate of
millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and
- Heaven is silent in that
awful moment! (p.7)
In his 1976 preface to Werner Sombart's classic book,
Why is
there no Socialism in the United States? (1906),
Michael Harrington wrote:
- I would argue
... that there is a social-democratic movement in the United States
today. That is, Sombart's belief that
- eventually America would produce
such a movement has been confirmed, albeit in a hidden and disguised
fashion. There
- is a growing recognition in Europe ...
that social
democracy and Socialism are not synonymous. Let the former term stand
- for a movement that mobilizes workers on
behalf of State intervention,
planning and social priorities within capitalism, and
- the latter be a
description of a political movement which seeks to transform capitalism
fundamentally.
- Given that
definition, a labor party --a social democracy-- appeared in the United
States during the Great Depression.
- Its peculiarity was that it
organized within the Democratic Party. Yet it is a distinct entity,
with class criteria ... and a social-democratic programme not that
different from the immediate programme of the German or British social
democracy.
- ... [A] basic question concerns whether
or not this invisible
social democracy will become Socialist --or whether, as not a few
American conservatives hope, it will turn sharply to the Right in the
name of the 'social issue' (race, abortion, feminism,
- sexual politics,
and the like).
- Obviously
Werner Sombart did not anticipate the problems and possibilities of
contemporary America. But he did ask the
- right questions.(pp.xi-xii)
For an informative analysis of "political capitalism" and a critical
discussion of methods for studying it, we recommend Professor Gabriel
Kolko's essay on
"The
Lost Democracy".
And for a examination and commentary on the limits of contemporary
electoral politics in the U.S. please see the items below :
In item
A. Robert Fisk critiques
the
intellectual limitations of press coverage in the Middle East.
Item
B. is an essay by University
of Massachusetts Professor of Economics, Richard Wolf, on U.S. election
fraud, all over again.
Items
C. and
D.
are two short articles sent to us by the President of
The
International Endowment for Democracy, NYU Professor of Politics
Bertell Ollman, on the 2006 elections as a harbinger of things to
come.....
And, finally, in this Bulletin we recommend the following Internet site
for
access to the
Index to Traprock Peace Center’s Audio Files
:
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies
Director of Research
Université Stendhal-Grenoble 3
http://www.ceimsa.org/
______________
A.
from Robert Fisk :
12 November 2006
New
America Media
Journalists' Coverage of Middle
East Shallow and Distorted
by Robert Fisk
DEARBORN, MI –
J
ournalists in the "West" should feel a burden of guilt for much that
has happened in the Middle East because they have, with their
gullibility, sold a fictitious version of events.
Their constant references to a "fence" instead of a wall, to
"settlements" or "neighborhoods" instead of colonies, their description
of the West Bank as "disputed" rather than occupied, has bred a kind of
slackness in reporting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Just as it did in Iraq when so many reporters from the great Western
newspapers and TV stations used U.S. ambassador Bremer's laughable
description of the ferocious insurgents as "dead-enders" or "remnants"
- the same phrase still being used by our colleagues in Kabul in
reference to a distinctly resurgent Taliban which is being helped,
despite General Musharraf's denials, by the Pakistani intelligence
service, the ISI.
Much worse, however, is the failure to enquire into the real policies
of governments. Why, for example, was there no front-page treatment of
this year's Herzliya conference, Israel's most important policy-making
jamboree? Most of the important figures in the Israeli government -
they had yet to be electe - were in attendance.
The conference was the place where Ehud Olmert first suggested handing
over slices of the West Bank: "The choice between allowing Jews to live
in all parts of the land of Israel" - the "land of Israel" in this
context included the West Bank - "and living in a state with a Jewish
majority mandate giving up part of the land of Israel. We cannot
continue to control parts of the territories where most of the
Palestinians live."
However, most speakers agreed that the Palestinians would be given a
state on whatever is left after the huge settlements had been included
behind the wall. Benjamin Netanyahu even suggested the wall should be
moved deeper into the West Bank. But the implications were obvious.
A Palestinian state will be allowed, but it will not have a capital in
East Jerusalem nor any connection between Gaza and the bits of the West
Bank that are handed over. So there will be no peace, and the words
"Palestinian" and "terrorist" will, again, be inextricably linked by
Israel and the U.S.
There were articles in the Israeli press about Herzliya, including one
by Sergio Della Pergola in which he warned of the "menace" to Israel of
Palestinian birth rates and advised that "if the demographic tie
doesn't come in 2010, it will come in 2020." Earlier conferences have
discussed the possible need for the revoking of the citizenship rights
of some Israeli Arabs.
Already this year, "Haaretz" has reported an opinion poll in which 68
per cent of Israeli Jews said they would refuse to live in the same
building as an Arab - 26 per cent would agree to do so - and 46 per
cent of Israeli Jews said they would refuse to allow an Arab to visit
their home.
The inclination toward segregation rose as the income level of the
respondents dropped - as might be expected - and there was no poll of
Palestinian opinion, though the Palestinians might be able to point out
that tens of thousands of Israelis already do live on their land in the
huge colonies across the West Bank, most of which will remain,
llegally, in Israeli hands.
All these details are available in the Arab press - and of course, the
Israeli press, but are largely absent from our own. Why? Even when
Norman Finkelstein wrote a damning academic report on the way Israel's
High Court of Justice "proved" the wall – deemed illegal by the Hague -
was legal, it was virtually ignored in the West. So, for that matter,
was the U.S. The academics' report on the power of the Israeli lobby,
until the usual taunts of "anti-Semitism" forced the American
mainstream to write about it, albeit in a shifty, frightened way. There
are so many other examples of our fear of Middle Eastern truth.
Is this really the best that we journalists can do? Save for the
indefatigable Seymour Hersh, there are still no truly investigative
correspondents in the U.S. press. But challenging authority should not
be that difficult. No one is being asked to end the straightforward
reporting of Arab tyrannies. We ae still invited to ask - and should
ask - why the Muslim world has produced so many dictatorships, most of
them supported by "us." But there are too many dark corners into which
we will not look. Where, for example, are the CIA's secret torture
prisons? I know two reporters who are aware of the locations. But they
are silent, no doubt in the interests of "national security."
And so on we go with the Middle East tragedy, telling the world that
things are getting better when they are getting worse, that democracy
is flourishing when it is swamped in blood, that freedom is not without
"birth pangs" when the midwife is killing the baby.
It's always been my view that the people of this part of the earth
would like some of our democracy. They would like a few packets of
human rights off our supermarket shelves. They want freedom. But they
want another kind of freedom - freedom from us. And this we do not
intend to give them. Which is why our Middle East presence is heading
into further darkness. Which is why I sit on my balcony and wonder
where the next explosion is going to be. For, be sure, it will happen.
Bin Laden doesn't matter any more, alive or dead. Because, like nuclear
scientists, he has invented the bomb. You can arrest all of the world's
nuclear scientists but the bomb has been made. BinLaden created
al-Qaeda amid the matchwood of the Middle East. It exists. His presence
is no longer necessary.
And all around these lands are a legion of young men preparing to
strike again, at us, at our symbols, at our history. And yes, maybe I
should end all my reports with the words: Watch out!
_____________________
Robert Fisk’s new book is "The Conquest of the
Middle East."
_________________
B.
From Richard Wolf :
From: "Rick Wolff" <rdwolff@worldnet.att.net>
Subject: US election analysis from GlobalMacroscope.com
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2006
Exit
Poll Revelations
by Rick Wolff
E xit polls conducted at last
week’s elections reveal the contradictions and limits of the Democrats’
victories. As reported in The New York Times (November 9, 2006, page
P7), the four fifths of US voters who are white preferred Republicans
(52 to 48 percent), while Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians chose Democrats
(by 89 to 11, 70 to 30, and 62 to 38 respectively). Looking at voters’
income levels showed that the lower the family income, the larger the
Democratic margin. Families earning below $15,000 preferred Democrats
over Republicans by 69 to 31 percent. As incomes rose, the Democratic
advantage fell: families with incomes over $100,000 – 23 per cent of
voters - preferred Republicans over Democrats by 52 to 48
percent. Democrats owe their victories in no small measure to the
poorer and the less white among us.
Yet, consider these contradictory numbers for families with very high
annual incomes ($ 150,000 – 200,000). Those living in the East
preferred Democrats by 63 to 37 percent, a remarkable shift from 2004
when they preferred Republicans by 50 to 48 percent. For Eastern
families earning over $200,000, the 2006 results showed a preference
for Democrats of 50 to 48 percent compared to 2004 when those families
preferred Republicans by 56 to 40. Exit polls in the South, West, and
Mid-west, while less extreme, showed similar shifts. Many of the
richest Americans changed their party preferences over the last two
years.
The richest Americans provide most of the contributions funding
Congressional campaigns, The Democrats got more votes in no small part
because they got more money from those richer households: money used to
offset both heavy Republican spending on TV advertising and media
“reportage” that favored Republicans.
The exit polls therefore pose an obvious question: why did so many of
the richest families switch their contributions and their votes to
Democrats? Slate magazine’s Daniel Gross refers to “angry,
well-off, well-educated yuppies, generally clustered on the coasts, who
were funneling windfalls from Bush tax cuts into the campaigns of
Democrats and preparing to vote for those who would raise taxes on
their capital gains, their incomes, and their estates.”
[http://www.slate.com/id/2153272/] Gross thinks that hatred of Bush
trumped their economic self-interest. If so, the question is why. Here
is one possible answer.
What Bush accomplished was rarely a problem for his richest
constituents. It was rather the manner, speed, and costs of his
accomplishments that provoked their growing criticism, distaste, and
derision. In Iraq, he had dared to go further and faster to transform
US foreign policy from multilateral diplomacy to aggressive unilateral
militarism. Likewise, he went further and faster in widening the
domestic gap between rich and poor, a daring demolition of what
remained of the New Deal welfare state. These goals were popular with
most rich Americans from 2000 through 2004. Moreover, 9/11/2001 gave
Bush the political cover and capital to pursue these goals further and
faster. But as 9/11/2001 receded into history, Bush’s pursuit produced
a predictable backlash.
The war and occupation provoked violent resistance inside Iraq that the
US could not contain. More importantly, it increased political,
diplomatic, and ideological opposition to the US nearly everywhere. As
the war dragged on and its costs rose, so too did criticism. Beyond
harsh denunciations of that criticism, Bush moved to prevent potential
domestic opposition by curtailing civil liberties and expanding federal
power to wage an endless war against terrorism. The transformation of
US foreign policy into a military unilateralism thus took on higher
costs (political, cultural, as well as economic; foreign and domestic)
than rich Americans (as well as others) were content to pay. They
wanted US foreign interests to be advanced, but henceforth more slowly,
multilaterally, and diplomatically than the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld
approach.
Much the same happened to the Bush economic policies (tax changes,
relaxed industrial regulations, cheap labor immigration, subsidies to
favored industries, encouragement of job outsourcing, and so on).
Together such policies accelerated the declining conditions of most
middle and lower income families. Increasingly stressed by longer and
harder work and mounting debts, those families had begun to complain
about, criticize, and oppose Bush policies. The richest Americans had
benefited from Bush economics far more than the rest of the population,
as widening wealth and income disparities showed. Rumblings of mass
discontent made many of the richest Americans determined somehow to
soften and slow the Bush economic program. Otherwise it might be ended
or, worse still, reversed.
The elections of 2006 may thus continue the basic Bush shifts in
foreign policy and domestic economic change but less quickly, less
sharply, less offensively. The elections weakened the Bush approach and
removed some of its most aggressive leaders (e.g. Rumsfeld). The
elections empowered Democrats to slow and soften Bush policies and
thereby hopefully to reduce opposition to them. The richest Americans’
votes and contributions to Democrats represented their demand that the
Bush program be drastically moderated. Bush, his cabinet, and their
neo-con gurus were not trusted to achieve the required moderation
quickly (even the James A. Baker III- Lee Hamilton commission
redesigning Iraq policy was too slow, too little, and too late). Many
of America’s richest concluded that financing and voting for Democrats
was necessary.
Bush and “his” Republicans had gone far to reconstitute a pre-1929 kind
of US capitalism and to reposition the US as the world’s dominant
unilateralist military power as well as economic center. However, en
route to these welcomed gains, they had overshot the mark in ways
deemed dangerous by many of the richest Americans. Thus, they turned to
the Democrats to mollify all those offended, frightened, or damaged by
Bush’s programs while consolidating and solidifying those same
programs’ achievements. The classical oscillation between the two
parties should once again serve well. Republicans can console
themselves with the knowledge that once the Democrats have done their
job, Republicans can reasonably expect America’s richest to switch back
and support their approach yet again.
____________
C.
from Bertell Ollman :
Subject: Clear Evidence 2006 Congressional Elections Hacked
18 November 2006
http://www.truthout.org
Francis -
Here is the best thing I've seen so far on the elections last week.
See below for the piece on "Clear Evidence 2006..." for the most
complete and serious overview of what really happened in the election.
If not understood and acted upon, this small "victory" in 2006 will
only lead to a massive defeat in 2008.
Bertell
- A
major undercount of Democratic votes and an overcount of Republican
votes in
- US
House and Senate races across the country is indicated by an analysis
of
- national
exit polling data. These findings have led the Election Defense
- Alliance
to issue an urgent call for further investigation into the 2006
- election
results - and a moratorium on deployment of all electronic election
- equipment.
_______________
D.
from Bertell Ollman :
Subject: A bombshell from Jimmy Carter
http://www.markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/
Francis -
This shocking admission from a former president deserves to be
part of whatever mailing you send out with the last piece I just sent
you. MCM's title below is a good one for this piece.
B.
Carter
Helps Monitor Nicaragua Presidential Election
By Debbie Elliot
. . . . DE: Mr. President, one final question,
if you will. Here in the U.S., we have a very hotly contested election
on Tuesday that could change the balance of power in the Congress.
Voters across the country are concerned here about the voting process.
Some have expressed concerns about voting machines and whether they
will be working, others have accused officials of trying to intimidate
certain groups of voters. Is there a need for a poll watching system of
outside observers at U.S. elections?
JC:
As you may know after the 2000 election which was a total debacle,
President Gerald Ford and I headed a major blue ribbon commission and
recommended changes in the voting procedures that largely were passed
by the Congress. And then, after the 2004 election, which still showed
some major problems, former secretary of state James Baker and I headed
a similar commission and made some recommendations, very few of which
have yet been implemented. But there's no doubt in my mind that the
United States electoral system is severely troubled and has many faults
in it. It would not qualify at all for instance for participation by
the Carter Center in observing. We require for instance that there be
uniform voting procedures throughout an entire nation. In the United
States you've got not only fragmented from one state to another but
also from one county to another. There is no central election
commission in the United States that can make final judgment. It's a
cacophony of voices that come in after the election is over with,
thousands or hundreds of lawyers contending with each other. There's no
uniformity in the nation at all. There's no doubt that that there's
severe discrimination against poor people because of the quality of
voting procedures presented to them.
Another thing in the United States that we wouldn't permit in a country
other than the United States is that we require that every candidate in
a country in which we monitor the elections have equal access to the
major news media, regardless of how much money they have. In the United
States, as you know, it's how much advertising you can by on television
and radio. And so the richest candidates prevail, and unless a
candidate can raise sometimes hundreds of thousands or millions of
dollars, they can't even hope to mount a campaign, so the United States
has a very inadequate election procedure.