Lest We Forget, Clinton Wanted to Privatize Social Security
by ANDREW STEWART


The collapse of the liberal media into a miasma of identity politics and guilt trips is fascinating to watch. After having been laid for a killer trip for how my support for Jill Stein is going to bring about the return of back-alley abortion, I think I have a bit of a right to just point out yet again that Hillary Clinton, if elected, wanted to put my parents in the poorhouse by privatizing their Social Security.

The first place to look for confirmation of this was the Podesta email cache. On October 10, Wikileaks released the infamous Wall Street speeches Clinton made behind closed doors, which said:

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, this may be borne more out of hope than experience in the last few years. But Simpson-Bowles — and I know you heard from Erskine earlier today — put forth the right framework. Namely, we have to restrain spending, we have to have adequate revenues, and we have to incentivize growth. It’s a three-part formula. The specifics can be negotiated depending upon whether we’re acting in good faith or not. And what Senator Simpson and Erskine did was to bring Republicans and Democrats alike to the table, and you had the full range of ideological views from I think Tom Coburn to Dick Durbin. And they reached an agreement. But what is very hard to do is to then take that agreement if you don’t believe that you’re going to be able to move the other side. And where we are now is in this gridlocked dysfunction. So you’ve got Democrats saying that, you know, you have to have more revenues; that’s the sine qua non of any kind of agreement. You have Republicans saying no, no, no on revenues; you have to cut much more deeply into spending. Well, looks what’s happened. We are slowly returning to growth. It’s not as much or as fast as many of us would like to see, but, you know, we’re certainly better off than our European friends, and we’re beginning to, I believe, kind of come out of the long aftermath of the ’08 crisis. [Clinton Speech For Morgan Stanley, 4/18/13]

Simpson-Bowles, for those of you who forgot, was part of a long line of Democratic moves over the past 8 years that would lead the way for privatizing the fund. I previously documented this issue for Counterpunch on September 30 and stand by my reporting despite claims from the pwogs that this is a conspiracy theory.

Second of course is Robin Blackburn’s classic essay How Monica Lewinsky Saved Social Security, which retrieved from the Clinton archive primary documents from the beginning of the effort dating back to 1998. Following his destruction of Welfare, Bubba had decided to set his sights on retirement “entitlements” with the aid of his Robert Rubin-Larry Summers fiscal brain trust. Of course, when the intern with that magic blue dress became a national punchline, he was forced to pivot to the left to shore up his anti-privatization base as the GOP hounds began to circle for the kill. Nevertheless, the effort has been simmering on the back burner for the past two decades and remains tenable. Obama has put in place as custodian of the Social Security trust fund Charles P. Blahous III, who supported privatizing under George W. Bush, and manipulated the chained Consumer Price Index, used to generate yearly coast of living adjustments, so to sow enough dissent and cause people to think the system no longer works. The blade of the guillotine only needs be released at this point, all that is needed has been prepared.

Right now the media pundits who created this whole mess in the first place are spewing metric tons of nonsense about the Democrats coming to save us all from the Donald. This has an air of credibility due to the quite obvious fact that his Rogues Gallery of staff and cabinet posts, neocons and neo-Confederates to quote Jeffrey St. Clair, is obviously awful. But this whole discourse is missing a crucial class analysis and so has all the merit of a spitball launched at the lunchroom bully. Only with a class analysis that articulates the truth about Democratic Social Security policy do we see the real discourse emerge.

To further cement this point, I would suggest a brief exercise that begins with two quotes.

The longest-lived effort to construct socialism was the USSR, but in this case we find the deployment of one or both biblical narratives – a ‘betrayal’ or a ‘Fall’ narrative – to account for its ‘failure’. For many, Stalin embodies the manifestation of that betrayal. Was he not, after all, a paranoid and omniscient dictator, ruling by a bloodthirsty and capricious will? Caricatures aside, once one opts for a narrative of the ‘Fall’, one is playing a theological game. By ‘Fall’ narrative I mean a narrative that is structured in terms of a fall from grace, analogous to the story in Genesis 2–3, in which Eve and then Adam eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree (of the knowledge of good and evil) and are thereby banished by God from paradise. -Roland Boer

One of the most devious traps which lurk for Marxist theorists is the search for the moment of the Fall, when things took the wrong turn in the history of Marxism: was it already the late Engels with his more positivist-evolutionary understanding of historical materialism? Was it the revisionism AND the orthodoxy of the Second International? Was it Lenin? Or was it Marx himself in his late work, after he abandoned his youthful humanism (as some “humanist Marxists” claimed decades ago)? This entire topic has to be rejected: there is no opposition here, the Fall is to be inscribed into the very origins. (To put it even more pointedly, such a search for the intruder who infected the original model and set in motion its degeneration cannot but reproduce the logic of anti-Semitism.) -Slavoj Zizek

I would argue the neoliberals are not, despite pwog pleas to the contrary, the aberration within the Democratic edifice, they are in fact the norm. I would like to try to hammer this home using a point that is the antithesis of the one made by Boer and Zizek by explaining what happened to American liberalism in the 1930s.

The myth that has gone on for nearly a century is that Franklin Roosevelt was the grandfatherly Keynesian who saved the economy and American capitalism by creating the welfare state. Dr. Vijay Prashad touched on a fact, however, that repudiated this earlier this year when he wrote

“Roosevelt’s main [1933 campaign] plank was to shrink the government and expand U.S. trade with the world. These were policy positions much favored by the elite. During the election, there was little sign that Roosevelt would expand the U.S. government and use state spending to enhance economic activity.”

Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.com also nears this point when he discusses his beloved Old Right, the collection of both isolationist Democrats and Republicans who hated the New Deal. While it is true that his Old Right did have a bit of a soft-gloves approach to European fascism, it is clear that he is not referring to the Klan, who were the actual right wingers in America, as much as anti-Keynesian moderates.

What I am trying to articulate here is that, if there is any tradition that deserves a Fall narrative, it is American liberalism. Until the election of FDR, the Democrats were a liberal party in accordance with the tenets of that philosophy. But, in the midst of a near-revolutionary moment that we call the Great Depression and Second World War, Roosevelt changed its very character to that of a European labor one, staving off Communists, Socialists, Trotskyists, and Musteites who were on the verge of expropriating the expropriators. Roosevelt told the financial elites at that point refusal to allow the creation of the welfare state was at their peril.

In this sense, the Fall narrative should be the four decades of economic development seen in America, spanning the election of Roosevelt to the fall of Nixon, who was ousted just as much by a right wing base enraged by his fiscal policies as by the Watergate break-in. The welfare state itself was the heresy of the capitalist parties that would otherwise have been happy to allow further suffering of the population just as long as they were ensconced in comfort. In this sense the Clintons are, true to their Southern roots, like an old-time revivalist tent show, inclined to all sorts of chicanery and smoke-and-mirror operations to hide from the congregation how they are robbing the people in the pews.

Mark Blyth, the Eastman Professor of Political Economy at Brown University, recently wrote in a column titled Global Trumpism for Foreign Affairs of how the welfare state was unsustainable:

…[O]nce you target and sustain full employment over time, it basically becomes costless for labor to move from job to job. Wages in such a world will have to continually rise to hold onto labor, and the only way business can accommodate that is to push up prices. This mechanism, cost-push inflation, where wages and prices chase each other up, emerged in the 1970s and coincided with the end of the Bretton Woods regime and the subsequent oil shocks to produce high inflation in the rich countries of the West in the 1970s. In short, the system undermined itself…

This is the nature of any heresy in the theological sense, they contain a certain element that makes them prone to self-destruction. In America, we have just witnessed the collapse of a multi-decade Protestant one, the Prosperity Gospel, which was embraced for decades by Evangelical Christians. These same Evangelicals just voted in droves for a Chief Executive who embodies every anathema within that theological matrix, a crass, crude, adulterous philandering scum bag landlord from the godless, Jew-infested Big Apple.

The reason for this collapse is related directly to the nature of liberalism as a philosophy of the capitalist revolution that smashed the feudal system. It is a philosophy that is premised on the notion of identity, saying that all are equal before the law, and it does not have within its logic the dimension of class that Marx later added through the use of the Hegelian dialectic. The half-hearted efforts of the presidents from 1933-1975 to solve this conundrum created a welfare state that infamously depended on both imperialism and the perpetuation of an apartheid order ostracizing people of color from the bounty. Clinton’s corporatist policies, including but not limited to privatizing Social Security, were classical liberal positions, just as Trump’s are. The Libertarian Party at least is honest about these sorts of things as the true believers in liberalism.

The rectification of this heresy within liberalism requires an embrace of a uniquely eco-communist vision of our future politics. The notion of eco-socialism is frankly lacking because of the nature of the crisis at hand. When Lenin renamed the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolshevik) the Communist Party, that was an act reflecting how radically he wished to push things to the left in the face of a global cataclysm that continues to impact our daily lives a century later. The European Socialist movement, gathered around the Second International, had collapsed in the face of this cataclysm, the First World War, and had in fact enabled a Trump-like brand of vicious racism by espousing a Clintonite style of imperialism. By repudiating Socialism in the name of Communism, he was directly opposing this latter brand, a polite colonialism composed of gentlemen technocrats and efficient gendarmes.

In the present circumstances, we must not only oppose the privatizing of Social Security but promote its expansion. Social Security itself was a first enacted by the state socialist program of Bismarck, who effectively coopted the German Socialist program to maintain a worker class base and stave off a revolt for a generation. In the face of the climate crisis, we cannot allow for similar coopting.

We should further begin to develop a critique of neoliberal imperialism that recognizes the “disaster capitalism” discussed by Naomi Klein in her The Shock Doctrine as a weapon of imperialism, that American government apathy in the face of climate change is in fact a barely-hidden glee at the prospect of profits for the imperial state. The anti-colonial struggle being waged at places like Standing Rock are therefore nothing more than auguries of a wider eco-communist struggle to come as the crisis accelerates. The question of whether one should embrace accelerationism in this sense is simply moot because it is actually a fact that the capitalist system is the party who selected this perspective.

Eco-communism is the only solution to what we face. Blyth gave a succinct and clear diagnosis of what is on the horizon when he closed his recent essay by writing “The era of neoliberalism is over. The era of neonationalism has just begun.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/22/lest-we-forget-clinton-wanted-to-privatize-social-security/

The "lesser" of two Evils.

Lest We Forget, Clinton Wanted to Privatize Social Security
by ANDREW STEWART


The collapse of the liberal media into a miasma of identity politics and guilt trips is fascinating to watch. After having been laid for a killer trip for how my support for Jill Stein is going to bring about the return of back-alley abortion, I think I have a bit of a right to just point out yet again that Hillary Clinton, if elected, wanted to put my parents in the poorhouse by privatizing their Social Security.

The first place to look for confirmation of this was the Podesta email cache. On October 10, Wikileaks released the infamous Wall Street speeches Clinton made behind closed doors, which said:

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, this may be borne more out of hope than experience in the last few years. But Simpson-Bowles — and I know you heard from Erskine earlier today — put forth the right framework. Namely, we have to restrain spending, we have to have adequate revenues, and we have to incentivize growth. It’s a three-part formula. The specifics can be negotiated depending upon whether we’re acting in good faith or not. And what Senator Simpson and Erskine did was to bring Republicans and Democrats alike to the table, and you had the full range of ideological views from I think Tom Coburn to Dick Durbin. And they reached an agreement. But what is very hard to do is to then take that agreement if you don’t believe that you’re going to be able to move the other side. And where we are now is in this gridlocked dysfunction. So you’ve got Democrats saying that, you know, you have to have more revenues; that’s the sine qua non of any kind of agreement. You have Republicans saying no, no, no on revenues; you have to cut much more deeply into spending. Well, looks what’s happened. We are slowly returning to growth. It’s not as much or as fast as many of us would like to see, but, you know, we’re certainly better off than our European friends, and we’re beginning to, I believe, kind of come out of the long aftermath of the ’08 crisis. [Clinton Speech For Morgan Stanley, 4/18/13]

Simpson-Bowles, for those of you who forgot, was part of a long line of Democratic moves over the past 8 years that would lead the way for privatizing the fund. I previously documented this issue for Counterpunch on September 30 and stand by my reporting despite claims from the pwogs that this is a conspiracy theory.

Second of course is Robin Blackburn’s classic essay How Monica Lewinsky Saved Social Security, which retrieved from the Clinton archive primary documents from the beginning of the effort dating back to 1998. Following his destruction of Welfare, Bubba had decided to set his sights on retirement “entitlements” with the aid of his Robert Rubin-Larry Summers fiscal brain trust. Of course, when the intern with that magic blue dress became a national punchline, he was forced to pivot to the left to shore up his anti-privatization base as the GOP hounds began to circle for the kill. Nevertheless, the effort has been simmering on the back burner for the past two decades and remains tenable. Obama has put in place as custodian of the Social Security trust fund Charles P. Blahous III, who supported privatizing under George W. Bush, and manipulated the chained Consumer Price Index, used to generate yearly coast of living adjustments, so to sow enough dissent and cause people to think the system no longer works. The blade of the guillotine only needs be released at this point, all that is needed has been prepared.

Right now the media pundits who created this whole mess in the first place are spewing metric tons of nonsense about the Democrats coming to save us all from the Donald. This has an air of credibility due to the quite obvious fact that his Rogues Gallery of staff and cabinet posts, neocons and neo-Confederates to quote Jeffrey St. Clair, is obviously awful. But this whole discourse is missing a crucial class analysis and so has all the merit of a spitball launched at the lunchroom bully. Only with a class analysis that articulates the truth about Democratic Social Security policy do we see the real discourse emerge.

To further cement this point, I would suggest a brief exercise that begins with two quotes.

The longest-lived effort to construct socialism was the USSR, but in this case we find the deployment of one or both biblical narratives – a ‘betrayal’ or a ‘Fall’ narrative – to account for its ‘failure’. For many, Stalin embodies the manifestation of that betrayal. Was he not, after all, a paranoid and omniscient dictator, ruling by a bloodthirsty and capricious will? Caricatures aside, once one opts for a narrative of the ‘Fall’, one is playing a theological game. By ‘Fall’ narrative I mean a narrative that is structured in terms of a fall from grace, analogous to the story in Genesis 2–3, in which Eve and then Adam eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree (of the knowledge of good and evil) and are thereby banished by God from paradise. -Roland Boer

One of the most devious traps which lurk for Marxist theorists is the search for the moment of the Fall, when things took the wrong turn in the history of Marxism: was it already the late Engels with his more positivist-evolutionary understanding of historical materialism? Was it the revisionism AND the orthodoxy of the Second International? Was it Lenin? Or was it Marx himself in his late work, after he abandoned his youthful humanism (as some “humanist Marxists” claimed decades ago)? This entire topic has to be rejected: there is no opposition here, the Fall is to be inscribed into the very origins. (To put it even more pointedly, such a search for the intruder who infected the original model and set in motion its degeneration cannot but reproduce the logic of anti-Semitism.) -Slavoj Zizek

I would argue the neoliberals are not, despite pwog pleas to the contrary, the aberration within the Democratic edifice, they are in fact the norm. I would like to try to hammer this home using a point that is the antithesis of the one made by Boer and Zizek by explaining what happened to American liberalism in the 1930s.

The myth that has gone on for nearly a century is that Franklin Roosevelt was the grandfatherly Keynesian who saved the economy and American capitalism by creating the welfare state. Dr. Vijay Prashad touched on a fact, however, that repudiated this earlier this year when he wrote

“Roosevelt’s main [1933 campaign] plank was to shrink the government and expand U.S. trade with the world. These were policy positions much favored by the elite. During the election, there was little sign that Roosevelt would expand the U.S. government and use state spending to enhance economic activity.”

Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.com also nears this point when he discusses his beloved Old Right, the collection of both isolationist Democrats and Republicans who hated the New Deal. While it is true that his Old Right did have a bit of a soft-gloves approach to European fascism, it is clear that he is not referring to the Klan, who were the actual right wingers in America, as much as anti-Keynesian moderates.

What I am trying to articulate here is that, if there is any tradition that deserves a Fall narrative, it is American liberalism. Until the election of FDR, the Democrats were a liberal party in accordance with the tenets of that philosophy. But, in the midst of a near-revolutionary moment that we call the Great Depression and Second World War, Roosevelt changed its very character to that of a European labor one, staving off Communists, Socialists, Trotskyists, and Musteites who were on the verge of expropriating the expropriators. Roosevelt told the financial elites at that point refusal to allow the creation of the welfare state was at their peril.

In this sense, the Fall narrative should be the four decades of economic development seen in America, spanning the election of Roosevelt to the fall of Nixon, who was ousted just as much by a right wing base enraged by his fiscal policies as by the Watergate break-in. The welfare state itself was the heresy of the capitalist parties that would otherwise have been happy to allow further suffering of the population just as long as they were ensconced in comfort. In this sense the Clintons are, true to their Southern roots, like an old-time revivalist tent show, inclined to all sorts of chicanery and smoke-and-mirror operations to hide from the congregation how they are robbing the people in the pews.

Mark Blyth, the Eastman Professor of Political Economy at Brown University, recently wrote in a column titled Global Trumpism for Foreign Affairs of how the welfare state was unsustainable:

…[O]nce you target and sustain full employment over time, it basically becomes costless for labor to move from job to job. Wages in such a world will have to continually rise to hold onto labor, and the only way business can accommodate that is to push up prices. This mechanism, cost-push inflation, where wages and prices chase each other up, emerged in the 1970s and coincided with the end of the Bretton Woods regime and the subsequent oil shocks to produce high inflation in the rich countries of the West in the 1970s. In short, the system undermined itself…

This is the nature of any heresy in the theological sense, they contain a certain element that makes them prone to self-destruction. In America, we have just witnessed the collapse of a multi-decade Protestant one, the Prosperity Gospel, which was embraced for decades by Evangelical Christians. These same Evangelicals just voted in droves for a Chief Executive who embodies every anathema within that theological matrix, a crass, crude, adulterous philandering scum bag landlord from the godless, Jew-infested Big Apple.

The reason for this collapse is related directly to the nature of liberalism as a philosophy of the capitalist revolution that smashed the feudal system. It is a philosophy that is premised on the notion of identity, saying that all are equal before the law, and it does not have within its logic the dimension of class that Marx later added through the use of the Hegelian dialectic. The half-hearted efforts of the presidents from 1933-1975 to solve this conundrum created a welfare state that infamously depended on both imperialism and the perpetuation of an apartheid order ostracizing people of color from the bounty. Clinton’s corporatist policies, including but not limited to privatizing Social Security, were classical liberal positions, just as Trump’s are. The Libertarian Party at least is honest about these sorts of things as the true believers in liberalism.

The rectification of this heresy within liberalism requires an embrace of a uniquely eco-communist vision of our future politics. The notion of eco-socialism is frankly lacking because of the nature of the crisis at hand. When Lenin renamed the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolshevik) the Communist Party, that was an act reflecting how radically he wished to push things to the left in the face of a global cataclysm that continues to impact our daily lives a century later. The European Socialist movement, gathered around the Second International, had collapsed in the face of this cataclysm, the First World War, and had in fact enabled a Trump-like brand of vicious racism by espousing a Clintonite style of imperialism. By repudiating Socialism in the name of Communism, he was directly opposing this latter brand, a polite colonialism composed of gentlemen technocrats and efficient gendarmes.

In the present circumstances, we must not only oppose the privatizing of Social Security but promote its expansion. Social Security itself was a first enacted by the state socialist program of Bismarck, who effectively coopted the German Socialist program to maintain a worker class base and stave off a revolt for a generation. In the face of the climate crisis, we cannot allow for similar coopting.

We should further begin to develop a critique of neoliberal imperialism that recognizes the “disaster capitalism” discussed by Naomi Klein in her The Shock Doctrine as a weapon of imperialism, that American government apathy in the face of climate change is in fact a barely-hidden glee at the prospect of profits for the imperial state. The anti-colonial struggle being waged at places like Standing Rock are therefore nothing more than auguries of a wider eco-communist struggle to come as the crisis accelerates. The question of whether one should embrace accelerationism in this sense is simply moot because it is actually a fact that the capitalist system is the party who selected this perspective.

Eco-communism is the only solution to what we face. Blyth gave a succinct and clear diagnosis of what is on the horizon when he closed his recent essay by writing “The era of neoliberalism is over. The era of neonationalism has just begun.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/22/lest-we-forget-clinton-wanted-to-privatize-social-security/


This is so "profound" Chlams that it's hard to know where to begin. It what way is this a revelation ? Who is he trying to reach and for what reason should be a starting point. You can probably start with "who is doing the talking matters" something I've been trying to drive into your thick skull recently. Who is doing the talking in this case ? This cat is a Green Party hack and nothing more. All of this shit you're posting in the swamps should come with a fucking disclaimer. Let me remind you again of the Green Party "radical" brand.

"I love capitalism and freedom but things have gotten out of hand so we must make Wall Street, big corporations, and the rich pay their fair share of taxes."

--Jill Stein

Beyond that... just simple research of this guy Stewart reveals the reactionary opportunism in full glory. I just wasted a half-hour using up some of the few brain cells that remain doing a little research on this cat. Here's one example. Do these Green "radicals" really believe this shit is a leftist program ? Do you ?

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/05/green-bernie-or-green-party-machine/

Green Bernie or Green Party Machine?

by Andrew Stewart

I respect and pretty much agree with the point that Dave Marsh made in his recent column, but also think he misunderstands a Green Party tactic for a Green Party policy. Let me explain briefly.

First, no one has any delusion in their mind that Bernie Sanders is actually going to become a Green (or at least I hope not). As Ralph Nader, who knows a few things about the Greens, told Abby Martin on an episode of Empire Files a few months ago, Sanders is fully cognizant of the fact he is coming up on seniority in his Senate seat and simply cannot afford to alienate the Democrats. But I do not know if all the Sanders crowd understands this also. In fact, some are still so high they think Bernie still has a shot at the convention. Besides wanting to meet their drug dealer as soon as possible, I’m simply amazed by this cult of personality and how far it is taking people.

As such, in tactical terms, the Greens are laying the path very early to lead a pack of Sanders supporters to the Stein campaign. This explains the reason the Party recently said there will be a “Green welcome mat” awaiting the Sanders crowd in July and why Stein recently publicly reached out to Bernie to continue the revolution. The Greens know that someone is in the buff but the Sanders gang has yet to catch on that their emperor has no clothes.

Second, and more importantly, Marsh has left out a key point in his analysis. The Greens just passed a major benchmark to gain federal funding. Every vote Jill Stein gets, even if she does not win, is a vote for further funding for the Greens. That is a brilliant type of long game. Even if the Greens lose in 2016, by 2018 they would have more resources for the midterm elections. It was correct to say that Sanders was a sheep-dog but the Greens rather ingeniously have figured out how to use that to their advantage. Instead of putting themselves in the line of fire, as Nader did in 1999-2000, they let Sanders do all the work for them. Now the Democrats have exposed themselves as a bunch of wretched, despicable people in beating up on one of their own. In other words, they shot the sheep-dog too early and now the herd is both exposed AND, more importantly, not just wandering but running away on their own!

Finally, let us be clear, Obama is doing everything he can to get the TPP passed and chaos is resulting. Clinton is so obviously phony and transparent only the criminally insane would deny it. Sanders is treading water but the ship is still sinking. The Democratic Party Gossip Sheet, which the rest of the world calls New York Times, is clumsily playing catch-up and trying to cover the behinds of both Wall Street and the Clintons.

The Greens now need to only do two things now to make their goal even more successful. First, Jill Stein and the Greens need to seriously consider branding themselves in a way that evokes Scandinavian democratic socialism, if not calling themselves Green Democratic Socialists outright. That is a perilous decision because it could alienate potential Green voters who are more moderate. I personally have seen and written in my own work about how the Greens are the actual democratic socialists of America as opposed to the Michael Harrington-Cornel West-Bayard Rustin Democratic Party kinda-sorta socialists. But there are an awful lot of Trump voters who call themselves “fiscal conservatives and social liberals” that have rejected neoclassical economic policies this election cycle that could be alienated.

My own thinking is this. First, wait until Sanders dies off in July and get his followers to jump into the Green Party. Then, begin to build Vote Pacts like Sam Husseini advocates with your Libertarian friends. Finally, consider seriously how these Vote Pacts, in the aftermath of the election, could be used to create an effective anti-war and anti-austerity united front from below. The first tactical action that such a united front could take on would be a boycott of Wal-Mart, small business owners hate them because they ruin their business and union activists hate them because they bust organizing drives. If a town were to refuse to shop at Wal-Mart until it allows a union vote, we could actually begin to retake economic democracy in a meaningful fashion.

Who is he trying to reach and for what reason should be a starting point.

Why? If we read his writing are we all going to be brainwashed into his agenda or something?


you can probably start with "who is doing the talking matters" something I've been trying to drive into your thick skull recently.

That matters far more when it comes to DEMANDS than when it is social criticism and exposes. Granted, this particular article is best if one merely reads the headline and is a real head scratcher overall (especially since Boer and Zizek are arguing precisely OPPOSITE of each other)


Who is doing the talking in this case ?

Some nut. Your point being..?

Some nut. Your point being..?

I don't think he "gets" chlams. I think he doesn't "get" a lot. The whole idea of making sure "who" is speaking is a very liberal/progressive/elite sort of fetish. The idea seems to be that if one posts something to read, it must be vetted before hand - so as to make sure that it doesn't sway the "lower types". The idea that you might post an article that carries some of the main oppositional memes and ideologies, for a round of discussion and criticism, is completely lost on our progressive anarchist. Granted we have all posted stuff that fizzled out right a way (you can't bat a thousand - well, I can't), but the idea that "OMG! YOU POSTED THAT!?" is and should be sort of alien. Lenin, after all responded in writting to some pretty lame shit - and we are all the better for it.

This is so "profound" Chlams that it's hard to know where to begin. It what way is this a revelation ? Who is he trying to reach and for what reason should be a starting point. You can probably start with "who is doing the talking matters" something I've been trying to drive into your thick skull recently. Who is doing the talking in this case ? This cat is a Green Party hack and nothing more. All of this shit you're posting in the swamps should come with a fucking disclaimer. Let me remind you again of the Green Party "radical" brand.
"I love capitalism and freedom but things have gotten out of hand so we must make Wall Street, big corporations, and the rich pay their fair share of taxes."

--Jill Stein

Beyond that... just simple research of this guy Stewart reveals the reactionary opportunism in full glory. I just wasted a half-hour using up some of the few brain cells that remain doing a little research on this cat. Here's one example. Do these Green "radicals" really believe this shit is a leftist program ? Do you ?


Hittin' that bottle again?

I always enjoy sophistry that opens with, "I don't even know where to begin."

You wasted a half hour lookin' up this cat? LOL. Speaks volumes for your problems. You might want to save as many brain cells as you have left. After a point they don't regenerate- you're well past that point.

You're expecting a revolutionary program from Counterpunch?

And the Green Party is pro-capitalist? Who knew- aside from every one here who has been pointing that for the last decade.

I also heard that this guy once bought a Chevy.

Why? If we read his writing are we all going to be brainwashed into his agenda or something?



That matters far more when it comes to DEMANDS than when it is social criticism and exposes. Granted, this particular article is best if one merely reads the headline and is a real head scratcher overall (especially since Boer and Zizek are arguing precisely OPPOSITE of each other)



Some nut. Your point being..?[/COLOR]


Point being this shit has no relevance to anything but elections as a "radical" offering. This is Chlams standard "Marxist/Leninist" offerings. Gotta love the hypocrisy though. Merry Christmas Kid :D

I don't think he "gets" chlams. I think he doesn't "get" a lot. The whole idea of making sure "who" is speaking is a very liberal/progressive/elite sort of fetish. The idea seems to be that if one posts something to read, it must be vetted before hand - so as to make sure that it doesn't sway the "lower types". The idea that you might post an article that carries some of the main oppositional memes and ideologies, for a round of discussion and criticism, is completely lost on our progressive anarchist. Granted we have all posted stuff that fizzled out right a way (you can't bat a thousand - well, I can't), but the idea that "OMG! YOU POSTED THAT!?" is and should be sort of alien. Lenin, after all responded in writting to some pretty lame shit - and we are all the better for it.

Geez I thought this article would prove I wasn't the "purist" I'm made out to be.

That SP would spend time looking into the author of the piece rather than the content is another example of how shallow and reactionary this character is.

An intelligent critique of the article would both recognize the merit in the factual material presented and criticize aspects such as the ambiguous "eco-communism" referred to in the article or the reference to Klein's "disaster capitalism" or the constant use of "neo-liberalism" as a replacement term for capitalism. There are other weak spots to this piece that are asking for analysis- but no our local sot can't amass the mental horsepower to do anything other than critique the author.

On the bright side our local drama program has been renewed with another bumbling appearance from our Buccaneer friend.

I don't think he "gets" chlams. I think he doesn't "get" a lot. The whole idea of making sure "who" is speaking is a very liberal/progressive/elite sort of fetish. The idea seems to be that if one posts something to read, it must be vetted before hand - so as to make sure that it doesn't sway the "lower types". The idea that you might post an article that carries some of the main oppositional memes and ideologies, for a round of discussion and criticism, is completely lost on our progressive anarchist. Granted we have all posted stuff that fizzled out right a way (you can't bat a thousand - well, I can't), but the idea that "OMG! YOU POSTED THAT!?" is and should be sort of alien. Lenin, after all responded in writting to some pretty lame shit - and we are all the better for it.

You're hypocrisy is glaring and laughable Professor Dhalgren. Here's an "article" that carries some main oppositional themes for the "lower types." It consists of one paragraph far more to the point than a thousand articles of the reactionary opportunist drivel of the Green Party radicals and their mutimiilionaire fraud of a mouthpiece Jill Stein.

"It is not the highness or lowness of wages which constitutes the economical degradation of the working class: this degradation is comprised in the fact that, instead of receiving for its labour the full produce of this labour, the working class has to be satisfied with a portion of its own produce called wages. The capitalist pockets the whole produce (paying the labourer out of it) because he is the owner of the means of labour. And, therefore, there is no real redemption for the working class until it becomes owner of all the means of work -- land, raw material, machinery, etc. -- and thereby also the owner of the whole of the produce of it's own labour."

-- Friedrich Engels

Hittin' that bottle again?

I always enjoy sophistry that opens with, "I don't even know where to begin."

You wasted a half hour lookin' up this cat? LOL. Speaks volumes for your problems. You might want to save as many brain cells as you have left. After a point they don't regenerate- you're well past that point.

You're expecting a revolutionary program from Counterpunch?

And the Green Party is pro-capitalist? Who knew- aside from every one here who has been pointing that for the last decade.

I also heard that this guy once bought a Chevy.

No answers Chlams eh ? You put this up at Truthdig yet ? You should get a hundred up votes from the "new populist alliance" of right-wing libertarians and new left "radicals." You sure got those Greens, disaffected liberals, and right-wing Austrian economics disciples lapping up your reactionary shit on a daily basis.

Geez I thought this article would prove I wasn't the "purist" I'm made out to be.

That SP would spend time looking into the author of the piece rather than the content is another example of how shallow and reactionary this character is.

An intelligent critique of the article would both recognize the merit in the factual material presented and criticize aspects such as the ambiguous "eco-communism" referred to in the article or the reference to Klein's "disaster capitalism" or the constant use of "neo-liberalism" as a replacement term for capitalism. There are other weak spots to this piece that are asking for analysis- but no our local sot can't amass the mental horsepower to do anything other than critique the author.

On the bright side our local drama program has been renewed with another bumbling appearance from our Buccaneer friend.

LOL.. I didn't bother. The hypocrisy was so glaring. Care to critique another one of your standard go to commentators Paul Street ? Will you publicly denounce Street as a pathological liar and a infiltrator too for this stance you lovable hypocrite ?

http://www.paulstreet.org/?p=1192

(Snip)

Soviet “Socialism”

The legend had little to do with reality. Whatever the claims of its ruling elite, the Soviet Union was not remotely socialist in the authentic sense of the word: workers’ control and popular democracy for the common good. Soviet Russia was an authoritarian state-capitalist and bureaucratic despotism that had little to do with Karl Marx and other 19th century leftists’ dream of capitalist class society being replaced by “an association, in which the free development of each is the conditions for the free development of all” – a “true realm of freedom” beyond endless toil and necessity and “worthy of [homo sapiens’] “human nature..”As US Marxist economist Richard Wolff notes, early Soviet non-capitalist experiments in which workers were “both the producers and the appropriators of surpluses” were quickly “abandoned under multiple pressures.” Further:

“Soviet socialism – and increasingly socialism in general – came to be redefined in terms of what actually existed inside Soviet industrial enterprises. There, hired workers produced surpluses that were appropriated and distributed by others: the council of ministers, state officials who functioned as employers. The Soviet Union was actually an example of state capitalism in its class structure….by describing itself as…socialist, it prompted the definition of socialism to mean state capitalism.”

Along the way, the Soviet Union quickly descended into a top-down political tyranny whose harsh dictatorial reality – replete with dungeons and mass political executions – was far removed from genuine socialism’s democratic, grassroots, and popular-participatory ideals.

Geez I thought this article would prove I wasn't the "purist" I'm made out to be.

That SP would spend time looking into the author of the piece rather than the content is another example of how shallow and reactionary this character is.

An intelligent critique of the article would both recognize the merit in the factual material presented and criticize aspects such as the ambiguous "eco-communism" referred to in the article or the reference to Klein's "disaster capitalism" or the constant use of "neo-liberalism" as a replacement term for capitalism. There are other weak spots to this piece that are asking for analysis- but no our local sot can't amass the mental horsepower to do anything other than critique the author.

On the bright side our local drama program has been renewed with another bumbling appearance from our Buccaneer friend.

So much of your go to "agitation" bullshit to sift through and so little time to expose it all Chalms. But still...

https://meldungen-aus-dem-exil.noblogs.org/post/2015/07/19/counterpunch-or-suckerpunch/

CounterPunch or Suckerpunch?

How America’s "Best Political Newsletter" Mainstreams the Far Right

CounterPunch, which bills itself as ‚America’s best political newsletter‘, offering ‚independent investigative journalism‘, tends to figure quite prominently in the reading lists of left-leaning activists, who doubtlessly appreciate its consistent antiwar stance, its critical analysis on US economic and foreign policy and US-sponsored Israeli apartheid, and the regular contributions from such leading Left writers as John Pilger, Noam Chomsky, Paul Street, Jeremy Scahill, and Tariq Ali. Indeed, CounterPunch generally tends to be thought of as a Left media outlet. However, in writing for, and sharing articles published on, CP, Leftists are unwittingly helping to promote the agenda of the far right.

In addition to the authors relied on by CP for its left cred, ‚America’s best political newsletter‘ also regularly publishes ‚independent investigative journalism‘ by a wide variety of white supremacists, including Paul Craig Roberts, editor of the white nationalist website VDare, Ron Paul (who poses for photo ops with neo-Nazis and warns of ‚race war‘), and Alison Weir, holocaust denier Israel Shamir, and that perennial saboteur of the Palestinian solidarity movement, Gilad Atzmon, author of the racist The Wandering Who.

Although there are some who have expressed concern on this problematic mix, when I have raised this issue in discussions with others in left activist circles, I have often found that it is dismissed as a triviality. In these discussions, the white supremacist contingent tends to be attributed to an unwillingness to bow to ‚political correctness‘ or a mere desire to ‚piss off liberals‘, and generally believed to be an insignificant deviation from an otherwise clear leftist editorial line, the sort of thing only an ‚ideological purist‘ could get excited about.

My own research into the editorial practices at CounterPunch shows otherwise. Not only have white supremacist authors long been a fixture at CP; their ideology is shared by members of the editorial collective. All in all, it is entirely reasonable to say that the formation of a Querfront (an alliance between the far right and the left) is a longstanding project of the newsletter, consistently endorsed by the decisions taken by CP editors and their own stated positions. In the following, I will examine the relationship between the CP editors and the racist Right via individual case studies and several statistical investigations:



Publication figures for white supremacist versus prominent leftist authors;
Ron Paul: Supportive vs. critical articles
Gilad Atzmon: Supportive vs. critical articles
Origins of US support for Israeli apartheid: ‚Zionist occupied government‘ or imperialist interests?
Querfront: Supportive vs. critical

Following an introduction to the notion of Querfront/Third-Position politics, we shall see below that a quantitative and qualitative examination of each of the above questions reveals that right-wing populism is heavily favoured by the CounterPunch board, to the extent that on some issues, e.g., the role of Zionist lobby groups like AIPAC in US support for Zionism, left perspectives are so underrepresented as to be negligible.

Querfront: The Right’s Perennial Leftward Overtures

The idea of a red-brown alliance, or Querfront (German for ‚transversal front‘), has been a recurrent motif in far-right thought over the past century. Craving the legitimacy that an alliance with progressive forces can provide, reactionaries seize on ostensibly shared positions, chief amongst them opposition to corrupt élites, to create the impression that progressives could benefit from making common cause with them.

Querfront (also known as ‚third position‘) propaganda can be highly seductive. Today’s (crypto)-fascist and other hard-right suitors, for example, focus on the commonplace left themes of opposition to war and corporate globalisation, the depredations of the ‚banksters‘, civil liberties, and Palestinian solidarity. Because the problems described by Querfront propaganda overlap so well with left-progressive causes, it may even superficially appear to be standard left-progressive discourse. The enemies it describes may even be given the same names – élites, military-industrial complex, corporate power, the US government – that progressives might use. If – as is the case with many of today’s (especially US) left-progressives – one lacks the historical knowledge and analytical tools to recognise this propaganda for what it is, it is quite easy to be sucked in.

Third-position propaganda may have the same ’surface structure‘, to borrow a term from linguistics, as left analysis – working-class people fighting against oppression by entrenched élites – but the ‚deep structure‘ is quite different. Where a left analysis looks to the structure of individual institutions, and to that of the political and economic system itself, the Querfront propagandist attributes the assorted sociopolitical evils to cabals of evil individuals, to unwholesome foreign influences, to secret societies (both real and fabricated) – in a word, to scapegoats. Where a left analysis sees structures that must be attacked and changed in order to end systemic injustice, the third-positionist offers conspiracies. Often, in the modern Querfront worldview, a ‚good‘ élite of ‚enlightened‘ people who know about What They Don’t Want You To Know need only reveal the conspiracy and awaken the masses (often dehumanised as ’sheeple‘) in order for Good to prevail. However, the minions of the third-positionist’s chosen Evil Cabals are lurking everywhere, and must be rooted out. This worldview was usefully termed ‚conspiracism‘ in Chip Berlet’s 1994 work Right Woos Left (RWL). Although Berlet himself is not immune to the sort of wooing from the right (and has been a vocal and dishonest defender, inter alia, of Engage propagandist David Hirsh), steadfastly refusing to apply his analysis to Zionist ideology and propaganda, his work remains worth citing as one of the best analyses of the Querfront phenomenon and its consequences, particularly in the US.

As Berlet notes in RWL:

In paranoid political philosophies, the world is divided into us and them. Evil conspirators control world events. A special few have been given the knowledge of this massive conspiracy and it is their solemn duty to spread the alarm across the land.

Conspiracism and scapegoating go hand-in-hand, and both are key ingredients of the fascist phenomenon. Fascism is difficult to define succinctly. As Roger Scruton observes in „A Dictionary of Political Tought,“ fascism is „An amalgam of disparate conceptions.“

[Fascism is] more notable as a political phenomenon on which diverse intellectual influences converge than as a distinct idea; as political phenomenon, one of its most remarkable features has been the ability to win massive popular support for ideas that are expressly anti-egalitarian.

Fascism is characterised by the following features (not all of which need be present in any of its recognized instances): nationalism; hostility to democracy, to egalitarianism, and to the values of the enlightenment; the cult of the leader, and admiration for his special qualities; a respect for collective organization, and a love of the symbols associated with it, such as uniforms, parades and army discipline.

The ultimate doctrine contains little that is specific, beyond an appeal to energy, and action.

‚Another way to look at fascism‘, Berlet continues,

is as a movement of extreme racial or cultural nationalism, combined with economic corporatism and authoritarian autocracy; masked during its rise to state power by pseudo-radical populist appeals to overthrow a conspiratorial elitist regime; spurred by a strong charismatic leader whose reactionary ideas are said to organically express the will of the masses who are urged to engage in a heroic collective effort to attain a metaphysical goal against the machinations of a scapegoated demonized adversary.

A great deal of the appeal of Querfront propaganda is likely due to its simplicity. A serious left analysis, say, of US support for Israeli apartheid will start by looking at the documented record of US foreign policy as a whole and the history of US policy in the Middle East in particular, examining the institutional structures that consistently produce some version of the same outcome – in this case, massive US military and diplomatic support for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its racist internal regime – all of which requires considerable research and intellectual effort to develop, verify, and understand. The third-positionist version, on the other hand, shines in its elegance: A foreign lobby has taken over the US government and media, and is forcing the US to act against ‚American interests‘ and ‚American values‘, and anyone who says otherwise is a Zionist infiltrator. A moment’s informed scrutiny will raise doubts about this account, but it is not designed to appeal to those who are inclined to dedicate a moment to scrutinising convenient narratives.

The Querfront approach to social injustice also allows those on the more comfortable end of certain systems of oppression (e.g., sexism, ableism, racism, cissexism, homophobia) to avoid the hard work and introspection involved in recognising that, despite their own oppression, they benefit in some ways from the oppression of others. A serious left analysis will consider a politician’s appeals to racism, sexism, and/or homophobia a red flag that counsels against aligning oneself with him. The third-positionist sees such concerns as nothing but ‚political correctness‘ and ‚liberal thought policing‘, and even worse, as ‚divisive‘ (and indeed it is divisive: it divides those who oppose systemic oppression from those who support it).



These days, of course, the hard right has an image problem: Open bigotry tends to be frowned on, and outright fascist imagery will often put off people who otherwise do not object to reactionary ideology. As such, an organisation or publication exclusively dedicated to publishing reactionary voices is not likely to have a broad appeal. However, when interspersed with genuinely left-progressive content, it may achieve a certain progressive respectability, at least as a legitimate position for debate amongst social justice activists. If you want to sell excrement, you’ll get better results if you surround it with chocolates.



This is a lesson the CounterPunch editorial collective, from Alex Cockburn on down, have clearly internalised.



The CounterPunch Assortment:



From the sort of material shared from CounterPunch in left-leaning circles on Facebook, one could easily get the impression that it is a left media outlet that only occasionally publishes voices from the right. In reality, however, CounterPunch offers a very steady diet of white supremacist and other reactionary authors.



To ascertain the number of white supremacist vs. leftist authors published on CP, I did Google searches using the search term site:counterpunch.org „by [AUTHOR NAME]“, with no time restriction, disregarding the inevitable repetitions and uses of the phrase other than in by-lines.

For the white supremacists, a list of prominent white supremacist authors was used, including Gilad Atzmon, Mary Rizzo, Israel Shamir, and Jeff Blankfort, known for their racist conspiracism and holocaust denial, white nationalist and Reagan-era US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts, Alison Weir of If Americans Knew, Bill and Kathleen Christison, and Franklin Lamb.

For the left contingent, I cast the net broader to include an assortment of radical left and left-liberal commentators, including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Jeremy Scahill, Norman Finkelstein, Tariq Ali, and John Pilger. The results are shown in Table I:


RIGHT/WHITE SUPREMACISTS NO. OF PUBLICATIONS ON COUNTERPUNCH
Paul Craig Roberts 264
Franklin Lamb 170
Bill & Kathleen Christison (includes individually and jointly written articles) 78
Gilad Atzmon 46
Israel Shamir 45
Alison Weir 42
Ron Paul 19
Jeff Blankfort 3
Paul Larudee 3
Paul Findley 2
Mary Rizzo 1
Daniel McGowan 1
William Lind 1
TOTAL RIGHT/WHITE SUPREMACISTS 674

LEFT/PROGRESSIVE
Louis Proyect 59
Tariq Ali 43
John Pilger 38
Jeremy Scahill 34
Noam Chomsky 32
Norman Finkelstein 19
Paul Street 14
Amy Goodman 6
Edward Herman 6
Howard Zinn 0
Naomi Klein 0
TOTAL LEFT/PROGRESSIVE 245



The total number of publications by representatives of the racist Right numbers 674, or more than double the total number of publications on CP by the various left/progressive authors. Indeed, with his 264 publications, Paul Craig Roberts, editor of the white nationalist website VDare, has been published more times by CounterPunch than all of the left/progressive authors studied combined.

Paul Craig Roberts, for example, has been given a platform on CP to inform us that:

For the left-wing, Ronald Reagan [in whose administration Roberts served] is the great bogyman. Those on the left don’t understand supply-side economics as a macroeconomic innovation that cured stagflation by utilizing the impact of fiscal policy on aggregate supply. Instead, they see “trickle-down economics” and tax cuts for the rich. Leftists don’t understand that the Reagan administration intervened in Grenada and Nicaragua in order to signal to the Soviets that there would be no more Soviet expansion or client states and that it was time to negotiate the end of the cold war. Instead, leftists see in Reagan the origin of rule by the one percent and the neoconservatives’ wars for US hegemony.

The defence of the disastrous Reagan-era economic policies in which he was complicit is a recurring theme for Roberts. Elsewhere, he tells us that ‚In their hatred of „the rich,“ the left-wing overlooks that in the 20th century the rich were the class most persecuted by government. The class genocide of the 20th century is the greatest genocide in history‘, an insight that will surely bring comfort to those left to mourn the dead of genocidal US wars and proxy wars in Indochina and Latin America, and repeats the oft-debunked lie that immigration is responsible for unemployment.

‚If Americans have any honor‘, Roberts asks in yet another article that makes it clear why he’s so popular with a supposedly left-leaning publication, ‚how can they betray their Founding Fathers, who gave them liberty (…)?‘. However, for someone like Roberts, who can claim with a straight face that the US proxy war against the civilian population of Nicaragua was about ‚Soviet expansion‘ or that ‚the rich were the class most persecuted by government‘ in the 20th century, clearly there’s no reason little things like slavery and denying political rights to all but well-to-do white men should get in the way of the idea that the ‚Founding Fathers…gave [Americans] liberty‘.

Alison Weir of If Americans Knew (a think tank promoting the ‚foreign lobby‘ version of US Middle East policy, to which we will return), on the other hand, has received space on the pages of CounterPunch to tell us – as an aside, no less! – that the blood libel – the European myth of ritual murders by Jews – was true:

In February 2007 the Israeli and Italian media were abuzz (though most of the U.S. media somehow missed it) with news that Professor Toaff had written a book entitled „Pasque di Sangue“ (“Blood Passovers”) (24) containing evidence that there “was a factual basis for some of the medieval blood libels against the Jews.”

Based on 35 years of research, Toaff had concluded that there were at least a few, possibly many, real incidents.

Gilad Atzmon, for his part, has been invited to CP to spread conspiracy theories that scapegoat Jews in the Palestinian solidarity movement, claiming that ‚Palestinian Solidarity is an occupied zone‘ because of its rejection of Zionist narratives that he holds dear. The Palestinian solidarity movement he has dedicated much effort to sabotaging, he charges, is ‚almost indifferent towards the fate of millions of Palestinians living in refugee camps and their Right of Return to their homeland‘, which is a bit much coming from someone whose Twitter account is pure self-promotion, scarcely even mentioning such banalities as the hunger strikes of Palestinian political prisoners. Rather than focussing on ‚a dull, banal dynamic‘ such as the colonial and racist nature of the Zionist regime and ‚[d]utifully unit[ing] against racism‘, the Palestinian solidarity movement should ‚look at the Zionist crime in the light of Jewish culture and identity politics.‘

In From Esther to AIPAC, Atzmon, who once dodged a phone-in radio listener’s question about whether the Nazi holocaust happened by saying that he was ’not a historian‘, bemoans the fact that:

Though some may dispute the numbers (Shraga Elam), and others question the validity of memory (Ellis, Finkelstein), no one goes as far as revisionism, not a single Holocaust religion scholar dares engage in a dialogue with the so-called ‘deniers’ to discuss their vision of the events or any other revisionist scholarship [sic].

Mary Rizzo’s sole publication thus far in CounterPunch was dedicated to smearing Tony Greenstein, a British leftist who has been prominent in anti-Zionist activism for decades. Greenstein had dared to picket a talk by Gilad Atzmon at the Bookmarks bookshop owned by the not-yet-utterly-disgraced British Socialist Workers‘ Party (SWP). Or, as Rizzo would have it,

He has put forth an edict that Atzmon is an anti-semite (as well as anyone who supports him), that he is associated with anti-semites (because he, like thousands of others, reads material which Tony does not approve of), and that he is a Holocaust Denier or at the very least, an apologist for them.

The reading material in question was The Holocaust Wars by holocaust denier Paul Eisen, which Atzmon had distributed. Although it may seem rather unobjectionable for a member of an anti-racist movement to expect an ostensibly anti-racist party to distance itself from someone who regularly disseminates racist propaganda, to Rizzo this showed nothing other than Greenstein’s ‚desire to weed out the movement, and divide it into Tony-friendly or not‘. Rizzo goes on at some length misrepresenting Greenstein and others‘ opposition to white supremacist hijacking of the Palestinian solidarity movement as some ‚Stalinist‘ quest for personal power (any similarities to conventional racist stereotypes about Jews are doubtless coincidental).

Greenstein contacted CounterPunch seeking to respond to these smears, which, as he has noted, are likely the only thing most of CP’s readers will have heard of him. The response? ‚CounterPunch’s editor, Alex Cockburn, whose father Claude must be spinning in his grave, refused even to acknowledge my correspondence.‘

At CounterPunch, it seems, publishing racist smears against committed social justice activists is entirely acceptable, but allowing them to reply when attacked in CP’s pages is simply not on. Indeed, statistically, it seems a leftist is more likely to get libelled than published by CounterPunch.

Ron Paul: Querfront Standard Bearer

On of the most significant examples of pernicious right-left ‚alliance‘ building in the past decade has been the support of many on the left-progressive spectrum for Ron Paul, white supremacist and occasional Republican presidential hopeful. Thus, if Querfront politics is part of the CounterPunch editorial line, we would expect to see a preponderance of articles praising Ron Paul, and ignoring, denying, or trivialising his racist, sexist, and homophobic views and hard-right economic policies, on the pages of CounterPunch.

Once again, the CP editors do not disappoint. In addition to the 19 occasions on which Paul himself has been published on CounterPunch, Ron Paul’s presidential aspirations have been the subject of 45 opinion pieces, nearly all of them supportive of a left-right ‚alliance‘ with Paul as its electoral figurehead.

To assess this, I performed a search for all CP articles mentioning Ron Paul by name. In addition to repetitions, I excluded here all mere mentions of Paul (e.g., factual statements mentioning his sponsorship of a certain bill in articles on other subjects). Only those articles were counted as ’supportive‘ that took a clear position in favour of Paul, either by explicit expressions of support or praise for some aspect of his politics. The results are shown in Table II.

Table II: Articles on CP Taking a Position on Ron Paul
SUPPORT FOR RON PAUL OPPOSITION TO RON PAUL TOTAL
33 12 45

As can be seen above, articles supporting Ron Paul on CP outnumber those opposing him by a ratio of more than 2:1.

If it is mentioned at all, Paul’s racism is largely mentioned only to dismiss it as an unfounded accusation (‚No one can attribute a single racist word to Dr. Paul‘) or to trivialise it as being insufficient grounds to oppose Paul’s presidential ambitions (‚Whether or not Ron Paul is, was or ever will be a „racist“ seems a moot point…‘). Tellingly, several of the supportive articles are written by members of the CP editorial collective, including Alex Cockburn and Joshua Frank.

Just as I have defined ’supportive‘ narrowly, to exclude mere factual mentions, even when these might be construed as laudatory, I have defined ‚opposition‘ broadly, to include factual mentions that might reasonably be construed as critical (because they mention some unappealing aspect of Paul’s politics). I have done this in order to address the potential objection that the overwhelming editorial support for Ron Paul is the result of my definition of the terms.

As such, the articles opposed to Paul include one that mentions Paul’s support for stripping the Supreme Court of jurisdiction ‚ to protect first amendment, privacy, and marriage equality rights‘, one article in support of Vermont’s secession from the US that criticises Paul incidentally for being one of those who ‚persist in the belief that the U.S. government is still fixable‘, and one that discusses Paul’s racist and reactionary politics in detail, but concludes ‚In fact, a vote for Ron Paul is certainly a better use of the franchise than a vote for almost any of the other candidates currently running. For better or worse‘ in the context of arguing that ’nothing-especially nothing as important as ending the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan-can be solved simply by voting another face into the White House‘. The last of these differs from those articles that mention Paul’s reactionary politics, but dismiss them as reasons not to support him, in that

(a) it points out that Paul was not the only presidential hopeful at the time to oppose the war, and that the others did not share his reactionary politics and

(b) the endorsement only comes in the context of discussing the pointlessness of electoral politics (‚On the other hand, do I think it’s the end of the world if Ron Paul gets your vote (or gets elected)? Of course not.‘).

The supportive articles, which constitute the vast majority, often compete to see who can heap the most superlatives on the reactionary US Representative from Texas. One informs us that ‚Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate who stands up for the Constitution, but the majority of Americans are too unconcerned with the Constitution to appreciate him.‘ Another opines that ‚America has one last chance, and it is a very slim one. Americans can elect Ron Paul President, or they can descend into tyranny.‚

In Why the Establishment is Terrified of Ron Paul, Dave Lindorff hails Paul as ‚an uncompromising defender of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution‘ (except for the bit about birthright citizenship, of course). Lindorff goes on to dismiss criticisms of Paul’s racism as ‚guilt-by-association‘, by association with Paul’s own public statements, that is, and concludes with the following words:

We’d have a hell of a fight on our hands in a Ron Paul presidency, defending Social Security and Medicare, promoting economic equality, fighting climate change and pollution, defending abortion rights and maybe fighting a resurgence of Jim Crow in some parts of the country, but at least we wouldn’t have to worry about being spied upon, beaten and arrested and then perhaps shipped off to Guantanamo for doing it.

‚We‘ of course means people like Lindorff, who will have little to fear from Paul’s scapegoating of immigrants and people of colour.

Editor Alex Cockburn describes Paul as ‚endearing‘ based on his alleged anti-war stance and his support for re-privatising the monetary system. CounterPunch editor Joshua Frank ignores Paul’s vote in support of the murderous, illegal invasion of Afghanistan to declare him ‚the most visible and enthusiastic antiwar candidate in the country‘, a candidate ‚we consistently ignore‘. It’s hard to tell who this ‚we‘ is who ‚consistently ignores‘ Ron Paul; certainly it isn’t CounterPunch, which has positioned itself firmly in Paul’s cheering section. Of Paul’s base, which consists to a significant degree of a wide segment of neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and Birchers, Frank tells us ‚[Paul is] exciting many newcomers to the movement and that must be welcomed‘.

In the same piece, Frank openly calls for a red-brown alliance: ‚As a movement that allegedly grew out of WTO protests in Seattle‘, i.e., a movement against corporate globalisation that saw numerous attempts at co-option by white supremacist and fascist groups, Frank remarks, ‚one would think the left would be at the forefront in calling for such an alliance again today.‘

Ron Paul is such an instructive case not only because he is a prominent recent example of Querfront building, but because of all that must be ignored or dismissed in order to make a progressive case for supporting him. A left-progressive justification for supporting Ron Paul must not only ignore his call to end Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and to re-privatise the monetary system (‚End the Fed‘); as if all that weren’t enough, a progressive case for Paul must ignore or dismiss his ties to far-right groups like the John Birch Society (at whose anniversary gala a few years ago he gave the keynote address), Stormfront (with whose leaders he posed for a photo-op), the neo-fascist American Third Position Party. Furthermore, it must ignore his misogynist stance on women’s reproductive freedom, the racist newsletters he acknowledged writing back in 1996, and his more recent racist statements on immigration. In short, it takes a mountain of denial to construct a ‚progressive‘ case in support of Ron Paul based on his supposed antiwar views (which do not extend to opposing the war on Afghanistan).

It’s no easy task, but CounterPunch does it as well as anyone can.

Gilad Atzmon

Table III: Articles defending Gilad Atzmon vs. articles criticising Gilad Atzmon


DEFENDING ATZMON CRITICISING ATZMON TOTAL
17 1 18

Few people personify the white-supremacist hijacking of Palestinian solidarity activism as thoroughly as the ‚ex-Jewish‘ saxophonist Gilad Atzmon. His entire oeuvre is dedicated to suffusing Palestinian solidarity activism with racist tropes according to which Jewish anti-Zionists are a fifth column in the movement and are to blame for what he takes to be the ineffectiveness of pro-Palestinian activism. Atzmon consistently rejects any analysis of the U.S.-Israeli occupation of Palestine that is based on imperialism, racism, and colonialism (explicitly denying the colonial nature of the Zionist project) because this analysis tends to portray Jews as ‚ordinary people‘. Rather, he blames the ‚third-category racial brotherhood‘ of Jews. He has attempted to portray even the Palestinian-led BDS (boycott, divestiture, sanctions) campaign as a Jewish conspiracy led by George Soros by falsely alleging that the demands of the campaign have been changed.

As such, he has been roundly rejected as a liability by a wide array of Palestinian and solidarity activists. If the Querfront hypothesis holds true, however, we would not expect this rejection to be shared by the CP editorial team.

And, indeed, it is not.

Of seventeen articles published by CP about Atzmon (not counting those actually written by him), exactly one is critical of Atzmon’s racism. The rest are explicit apologias for Atzmon that regularly misrepresent criticisms or defame his critics. It is this latter category that includes Gilad Atzmon’s [sic] A Guide for the Perplexed, by CP editor Jeffrey St. Clair.

In The Case of Gilad Atzmon (February 2013), Blake Alcott purports to examine ‚ The Wandering Who? and some of Atzmon’s blogs and videos with an eye out for the racism, „antisemitism“ and Holocaust denial of which Granting accuses him‘, and gives away the game by singling out antisemitism to put in scare quotes (which Alcott does repeatedly throughout the article), as if the existence of antisemitism were somehow in doubt. He then introduces a familiar trope in Atzmon apologetics with his announcement that ‚I’m restricting my analysis almost entirely to Wandering on the assumption that evidence for the accusations would be there, if anywhere‘, despite the fact that Atzmon’s critics have repeatedly made clear that their criticisms are in no way based exclusively on Atzmon’s signature work on the ‚racial brotherhood‘ of Jews.

As if this sleight of hand were not enough, Alcott proceeds to assert that ‚[Granting No Quarter, the Palestinian call for the solidarity movement to dissociate from Atzmon] claims that “Zionism, to Atzmon, is not a settler-colonial project…” The text of Wandering does not support this claim,‘ only to admit in the same paragraph that Atzmon echoes Zionist denials about the colonial nature of Zionism throughout that book. This is not, Alcott tells us, because Atzmon means what he says. Rather, despite Atzmon’s explicit words, what Alcott knows he really means is that ‚ the settler-colonialist paradigm is not sufficient to explain Zionism.‘

Also typical of the Atzmon-related fare on CounterPunch is Who’s Afraid of Gilad Atzmon (June 2005) by Mary Rizzo (also discussed above), in which Jewish activists issue ‚edicts‘, and Tony Greenstein in particular is singled out as a latter-day Beria, who

decides who he likes or not, who has the right to speak or not, and when they do speak, he dictates what it is they talk about. He wants to be master of discourse; the most vocal, most pure, and official voice of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement. Those who disagree with him and his agenda are in his mind on the „other side of the camp“ and gone full circle, having fallen into anti-semitism.

Rizzo, who has elsewhere claimed that there was no organised Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews, also takes ‚Greenstein and his close allies‘ (i.e., everyone except Rizzo and her close allies) to task for criticising Deir Yassin Remembered, an organisation of holocaust denialists including Paul Eisen and Daniel McGowan, who have long since been deserted by the few Palestinian solidarity activists who had previously been on the DYR board (not that that stops DYR claiming them as board members).

The only exception to the consistent diet of dishonest Atzmon apologetics served up by CounterPunch (apologetics engaged in also by CP board member Jeffrey St. Clair) is a single sentence in a March 2011 article about Jeff Halper of the Israeli Campaign Against House Demolitions:

You can be critical of Israel and not be anti-Semitic. You can be critical of Israel and anti-Semitic – like Pat Buchanan, you can be NOT critical of Israel and be anti-Semitic, you can be Jewish and anti-Semitic.“ Halper cites a former friend of his – Paul Eisen. To which list I quickly suggest Gilad Atzmon and Israel Shamir. We also discuss another category becoming increasingly recognisable in Europe at least, the pro-Israel Christian philo-semites, right-wing white nationalists, formerly harsh critics of Israel who, fearful of the „Muslim threat“ to Europe, have shifted to backing Israel.

This single sentence, offered as an aside and without analysis in an article on another subject entirely, is the closest thing to a critical discussion of the racism of Gilad Atzmon that CounterPunch will allow in their pages.

Lobby Fetishism

Table IV: Articles promoting vs. rejecting the ‚foreign lobby‘ explanation for the US-Israel ’special relationship‘


PROMOTING LOBBY HYPOTHESIS REJECTING LOBBY HYPOTHESIS NEUTRAL TOTAL
87 5 16 108

Of the individual issues examined for this piece, explanations for US support for Zionism afforded one of the richest collections of material for analysis, with 108 articles found on the subject. To recall the onus of proof, if the Querfront hypothesis is valid, at least a substantial percentage of CP’s output should be supportive of the notion that the US backs Zionist crimes because of the nefarious activities of a ‚foreign lobby‘.

In the event, of 108 articles found, fully 87 promote the Lobby version of history. Articles that take no clear position are in second place (16 of 108), whilst only five approach the question from a perspective that acknowledges the strategic value of Is to US imperialism. In other words, well over 95% of relevant articles on CP advance the notion that the implicitly just foreign policy of the United States is being subverted by foreign (Jewish) influence, or at least do not dismiss the idea. A clearer indication of the CounterPunch editors‘ own views on the matter is scarcely imaginable.

For example, in the June 2010 piece Helen Thomas: an Appreciation, written by white nationalist Paul Craig Roberts, we learn that ‚Allegedly, the US is a superpower, but in fact it is a puppet state of the Israeli government.‘ Likewise, in How Powerful Is the Israel Lobby?, Paul Findley (October 2007) claims:

There is an open secret in Washington. I learned it well during my 22-year tenure as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. All members swear to serve the interests of the United States, but there is an unwritten and overwhelming exception: The interests of one small foreign country almost always trump U.S. interests. That nation of course is Israel.

It is practically an article of faith on CounterPunch that decades of US support for murderous regimes in the Middle East, Israel included, cannot possibly be anything to do with maintaining control over economic rivals‘ access to a strategic resource. Other elements of the CounterPunch catechism include the belief that US officials are sincere when they utter mild criticisms of Israeli atrocities that they back to the hilt. Whilst the CP articles promoting the Lobby Hypothesis are largely couched in sober-sounding terms, the editors are clearly not averse to publishing ‚analyses‘ like:

The United States government and a majority of the subjects, especially those members of evangelical churches, grovel at the feet of the Israeli Prime Minister? How is a country a superpower when it lacks the power to determine its own foreign policy in the Middle East? Such a country is not a superpower. It is a puppet state.

(The American Puppet State, Paul Craig Roberts, November 2012)

In short, to say that right-wing populism is the default lens through which CounterPunch presents the relationship between the US and its Israeli attack dog is to understate the case. Articles presenting another view are virtually nonexistent.

Querfront: Supportive vs. Critical Articles

Table V: Right-left alliance – supportive vs. critical


SUPPORTIVE OF RIGHT-LEFT ALLIANCE CRITICAL OF RIGHT-LEFT ALLIANCE TOTAL
10 2 12

Thus far, we have examined specific issues with a view to assessing the openness of the CounterPunch editorial collective to left-leaning and right-wing voices and perspectives. In every case study examined, it has been shown that CP are much more open to right-wing and white supremacist perspectives than to anything that could be seriously described as left of centre. However, if we are to determine whether CounterPunch can fairly be characterised as a Querfront publication, a publication that promotes the ’suckerpunch‘ (C. Berlet) of left-right alliance, one obvious question remains: What perspectives are published on Counterpunch that bear directly on the desirability of an alliance between the far-right and the left? As we shall see, CounterPunch publications overwhelmingly favour such an alliance.

Twelve articles were found that deal directly with the question of whether a red-brown alliance is a prospect to be welcomed or a disaster to be avoided (though this number would be larger if we take into account that just about every one of the significant body of pro-Ron Paul articles already noted stops just short of being an outright appeal to form a united left-right front). Of these, only two were critical of the idea, whilst two of the supportive articles were written by CP editors.

The overall tone is set by an April 2000 article (25 Years after Vietnam: Beyond Left and Right) by no less a CP figure than founding editor Alexander Cockburn himself. In it, Cockburn reports with amusement how he responded to criticisms in ‚angry e-mails from lefties who seem to feel that any contiguity with Buchanan is a crime, even if the subject was gardening and Dutch tulipomania in the seventeenth century‘ for sharing a platform organised by ‚Libertarian‘ Justin Raimondo with white supremacist Pat Buchanan:

(…) thanks for yr [sic] note. So far as Buchanan is concerned, I assume he was invited because he opposed the war in Kossovo [sic], and calls for the lifting of sanctions against Iraq. There is a lot that’s funky abt [sic] American isolationism, but frankly, I don’t mind sharing a conference schedule with someone who opposes war on Serbs and on Iraqi kids. Nor do I think B is any more of a fascist — in practical terms — than Albright and Clinton and Gore and Bradley, with the first three literally with the blood of millions on their hands. Go find Mailer’s interview with Buchanan in Esquire a few years ago. See you on the picket lines.

This glib dismissal is all Cockburn has to say about Pat Buchanan, a figure notorious for his promotion of white supremacist and misogynist views: that Buchanan’s ‚isolationism‘ is ‚funky‘. Of note is also that Cockburn distinguishes Pat Buchanan, who helped craft the propaganda that justified the genocidal US occupation of Indochina, from Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore because the latter ‚literally‘ have ‚the blood of millions on their hands. This is the attitude of one of the founding editors towards alliances with white supremacists.

Likewise, John V. Walsh, in June 2013, invites readers to Join Libertarians [sic] and Leftists for a Panel at Left Forum ,noting:

The discussion will take account of the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the Ron Paul libertarian movement, which has been steely in opposing Empire and war. It will take into account the enthusiasm of youth for the Ron Paul endeavor. And it will be a step to prevent Right and Left from being divided on questions of war, Empire and civil liberties, then conquered, by the imperial elite in Washington and on Wall Street.

Like Cockburn, Walsh does not see any need to mention Ron Paul’s white supremacism and his ties to outfits such as the fascist American Third-Position Party, the John Birch Society, and the neo-Nazi website Stormfront, even to dismiss the notion that these might be legitimate concerns for anyone who opposes war from a left anti-imperialist, antiracist perspective.

In his August 2013 Defense of Alexander Cockburn’s Libertarianism [sic] , Walsh opines that the Libertarian (by which he means right-wing ‚anarcho‘-capitalists in the Rothbard-Hayek mould) view of the state ‚is pretty much the same as the Marxist one, an instrument of force and a monopoly on violence which the rich and powerful use to keep their subjects in place.‘ This will doubtless come as a surprise to many ‚Libertarians‘.

In Defense, Walsh uses an article by Vijay Prashad as his foil. After noting that Prashad criticises ‚The deep seam of racism and sexism that runs beneath the dominant strand of right-wing populism‘ and ‚Ron Paul’s racist rants in his newsletter ‚. Prashad’s reference to the racist newsletters that Ron Paul openly acknowledged writing in 1996, Walsh dismisses as ’slander‘, relying on the fact that Paul eventually thought the better of claiming authorship of newsletters that called for ‚race war‘ and described African-Americans as criminal animals 12 years after his initial admission:

More important, his charge against Ron Paul is simply not true. Let us be clear on Prashad’s slander of Paul. No one can attribute a single racist word to Dr. Paul. It is true that a generation ago someone, not Dr. Paul, authored some racist innuendo in a newsletter that bore Paul’s name. But Paul has said multiple times that he did not write them nor read them at the time nor was he aware of them at the time. He goes on to say he repudiates them.

Perhaps by way of full disclosure, Walsh acknowledges that ‚This writer spent as much effort and money on the Ron Paul campaign in 2012 as I did with the Nader campaign in 2008 and earlier years. I found not a single hint of racism or homophobia in the Paul campaign,‘ and closes with the thought that:

The libertarians at least are leading the antiwar, anti-Empire and civil libertarian movement in a principled way, sparing neither the Bushes or Clinton or Obama, which may get us somewhere.

Tellingly, for someone who routinely offers these helpful bits of advice for the left, Walsh has also supported the right-populist account of the US-Israel ’special relationship‘, in his April 2007 Why is The Peace Movement Silent about AIPAC?, a ‚driving force‘ (though Walsh makes an understated nod to reality when he acknowledges that it is not the only one) that ’sinks its teeth into the foreign policy establishment of both parties, perhaps the Dems more so than the Republicans.‘

Similarly, in his April 2014 Left-Right Aliances, Ralph Nader concludes:

It is a neglected responsibility of the mainstream media to expand reporting on left/right concurrences, especially where they move into action around the country. It is our responsibility as citizens to more visibly surface these agreements into a new wave of political reform. Guess what? It starts with left/right conversations where we live and work. Not even corporatists can stop you from getting that train moving.

If there are any potential drawbacks to this strategy – perhaps evident from the various historical precedents for Querfront – Nader does not see fit to mention them.

Another indicator of the pro-Querfront attitudes that prevail in the CounterPunch editorial collective (albeit one not published in the pages of CP itself thus far) are the attacks (by Amith Gupta) on Jewish Voice for Peace, and subsequently on the US Campaign to End the Occupation, for their decision not to work with Alison Weir because of her long history of white supremacism, published by CP editor Louis Proyect on his ‚Unrepentant Marxist‘ blog (see http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/louis-proyect-remains-unrepentant.html, http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/knowing-difference-between-antisemitism.html). When various long-time anti-Zionist activists responded with evidence that the accusations against Weir are true and extensively documented, Proyect responded with rebuttals such as: ‚You are a fucking joke. I get 5 hate mails a week calling me a ZioNazi or a CIA agent. Do you honestly think I give a shit what you say?‘

Even more germanely for the Querfront question, Proyect remarks in another comment:

You people are ridiculous. I am on the editorial board of CounterPunch magazine and write a weekly article, usually on film, for the website. This is a publication that features the work of Israel Shamir and Gilad Atzmon. It doesn’t matter to me that they are far worse than Weir.

This, it bears remembering, is the sort of ‚Unrepentant Marxist‘ that is welcome on the CounterPunch board.

The two exceptions to the overwhelming support for the Querfront approach are articles by Anthony DiMaggio, who, along with Paul Street, debunked the media-driven image of the Republican ‚Tea Party‘ as an actual mass movement, (December 2011) and a December 2007 piece by Sherry Wolf (Why the Left Should Reject Ron Paul), which states in refreshingly clear terms that ‚A cursory look at Paul’s positions, beyond his opposition to the war and the Patriot Act, would make any leftist cringe‘, and goes on to discuss the virulent racism of Paul’s newsletters, his position on immigration, his support for ‚free-market capitalism‘, and his opposition to women’s reproductive freedom.

However, a true takedown of the Querfront approach, one that actually looks at the disastrous consequences of such red-brown alliances in the recent and not-so-recent past and the sort of bedfellows one accepts when one decides to work together with the likes of (CounterPunch contributors) Ron Paul and Paul Craig Roberts, will not be found on the pages of CP, where the value of red-brown alliances is received wisdom and the few critics the editors deign to publish at all can expect derisive and dishonest responses such as those of Cockburn and Walsh.

Conclusion

When I first decided to carry out a quantitative analysis of the content published by CounterPunch, my working hypothesis was that the study would reveal a preponderance of left-leaning content interspersed with a significant minority of white-supremacist contributions, indicating a desire on the part of the CounterPunch editorial collective to mainstream far-right perspectives in a predominantly left audience. In other words, the working hypothesis was that CP is run by generally left-leaning editors who have been suckered into believing that alliances with fascist and white-supremacist elements is a worthwhile strategy.

The available data support this view only in part. It is clear that the Querfront approach is endorsed by the editorial collective, both in terms of their publication decisions and of their explicit views. However, the idea that CounterPunch is a generally left-leaning publication with a regular dose of white supremacism turns out to be completely backwards.

Instead, the quantitative analysis of CounterPunch’s editorial decisions indicates that CP is primarily a right-wing publication that attracts left-leaning readers with content from a small number of left authors. On all of the ‚acid test‘ issues studied, right-wing populist views are clearly in the majority, in some cases (e.g. Lobby Fetishism) so much so as to render left views negligible.

It should he stressed that this is by no means a comprehensive study of the political orientation of the CounterPunch editorial team, and much remains to be said in this regard. One might mention, for example, the climate change denialism of CP co-founder Alex Cockburn, or the various articles published in support of Deep Green Resistance’s decision to exclude trans women. CounterPunch provides a wealth of reactionary material to analyse and critique.

All this raises an urgent question: Why are leftists giving oxygen to a publication that is so thoroughly aligned with racist populism and conspiracism, both by sharing CP articles and by publishing there when there are so many worthy left publications that would benefit from the content? By using the CP platform, these authors, whatever their intentions may be, are helping to mainstream a veritable cesspit of white-supremacist ideology. Surely, it would be better to publish elsewhere and expose CounterPunch for the suckerpunch it is.

It seems more than likely that the left authors who publish on CP do not realise what sort of ’newsletter‘ they are promoting. After all, they are probably misled by a biased sample: Leftists on social media are more likely to see Paul Street or Noam Chomsky articles shared from CounterPunch than they are to see the wit and wisdom of Gilad Atzmon or Paul Craig Roberts, and thus may well not realise that CP offers a platform to such bigots at all, let alone sees them as the meat and potatoes of their magazine. However, the true orientation of CounterPunch is undeniable, and it is to be hoped that the leftists who publish there will act accordingly.

LOL.. I didn't bother. The hypocrisy was so glaring. Care to critique another one of your standard go to commentators Paul Street ? Will you publicly denounce Street as a pathological liar and a infiltrator too for this stance you lovable hypocrite ?

http://www.paulstreet.org/?p=1192

(Snip)

Soviet “Socialism”

The legend had little to do with reality. Whatever the claims of its ruling elite, the Soviet Union was not remotely socialist in the authentic sense of the word: workers’ control and popular democracy for the common good. Soviet Russia was an authoritarian state-capitalist and bureaucratic despotism that had little to do with Karl Marx and other 19th century leftists’ dream of capitalist class society being replaced by “an association, in which the free development of each is the conditions for the free development of all” – a “true realm of freedom” beyond endless toil and necessity and “worthy of [homo sapiens’] “human nature..”As US Marxist economist Richard Wolff notes, early Soviet non-capitalist experiments in which workers were “both the producers and the appropriators of surpluses” were quickly “abandoned under multiple pressures.” Further:

“Soviet socialism – and increasingly socialism in general – came to be redefined in terms of what actually existed inside Soviet industrial enterprises. There, hired workers produced surpluses that were appropriated and distributed by others: the council of ministers, state officials who functioned as employers. The Soviet Union was actually an example of state capitalism in its class structure….by describing itself as…socialist, it prompted the definition of socialism to mean state capitalism.”

Along the way, the Soviet Union quickly descended into a top-down political tyranny whose harsh dictatorial reality – replete with dungeons and mass political executions – was far removed from genuine socialism’s democratic, grassroots, and popular-participatory ideals.

We all like the work Paul Street has done but this is dead ass wrong. This makes it obvious that he ain't no Marxist and has not a clue about the function of the dictatorship of the proletariat, like a dumb ass anarchist or Trot. But then he's been big on the Greens and that's idealists city.

SP, you are entirely all over the place, you have changed your critique several times, seemingly hunting the next outrage. It also seems to me that your primary interest is pursuing vendetta. Stop it, just stop it.

Hey everyone another revealing newsflash offered by the butthurt Buccaneer- Counterpunch publishes a bunch of crappy authors. This is startling news. It will take weeks to recover from this revelation.

Street also waffled a bit on Hillary this cycle therefore everything he has ever written and will write is useless. Which means...

So much of your go to "agitation" bullshit to sift through and so little time to expose it all Chalms. But still...



You forgot to add "so little time spent sober."

Now let's get another one-liner with a forty page link from the village idiot who complains about folks using links.

BTW Hendrick's self-indulgent attempts at poetry are remarkably flaccid. Why would anyone use such a self-important source. Does she sing bad opera as well- no doubt to herself.

We all like the work Paul Street has done but this is dead ass wrong. This makes it obvious that he ain't no Marxist and has not a clue about the function of the dictatorship of the proletariat, like a dumb ass anarchist or Trot. But then he's been big on the Greens and that's idealists city.

SP, you are entirely all over the place, you have changed your critique several times, seemingly hunting the next outrage. It also seems to me that your primary interest is pursuing vendetta. Stop it, just stop it.

When I used the founder of that council communism site as an example, it was because she was lauded on the site as the bringer of enlightenment and true socialism - she was an uber Trot. The critique of the site was based on the content of the articles. It was plain to see the Bolshevik bashing, the Castro bashing, etc. We use Trot articles from WSWS all the time - sometimes they are good, sometimes they are bad or very bad, but the idea that because we vehemently disagree with the Trots we can never use any of their materials is laughable. The council communist site had almost nothing that wasn't anti-revolutionary; if some useful material can be found on that site, then I would be willing to look at it.
But what SP is doing is saying that everything you post MUST be something you adhere to or support; you cannot post anything that you, yourself, might disagree with. This strikes me as a very progressive/liberal attitude, as is many of his other displays. He appears to be trying to pass himself off as a "materialist" and "leftist". Well, if you are measuring "leftism" by US, liberal politics, then I guess maybe he is one; but he ain't no kind of materialist - doesn't show it, at all. SP is steeped in idealism, he wears bourgeois-colored lenses all the time, I guess it isn't his fault, it is hard to break out of it.

But what SP is doing is saying that everything you post MUST be something you adhere to or support; you cannot post anything that you, yourself, might disagree with. This strikes me as a very progressive/liberal attitude, as is many of his other displays. He appears to be trying to pass himself off as a "materialist" and "leftist". Well, if you are measuring "leftism" by US, liberal politics, then I guess maybe he is one; but he ain't no kind of materialist - doesn't show it, at all. SP is steeped in idealism, he wears bourgeois-colored lenses all the time, I guess it isn't his fault, it is hard to break out of it.

His complaints, liberal anti-communism, that is the common theme. Ain't nothin there that hasn't been seen on DU ad nauseam. Trotism & anarchism in 21st century is just progressives putting on airs, wittingly or not working for the man. Push come to shove they'll side with the ruling class over communists.

You forgot to add "so little time spent sober."

Now let's get another one-liner with a forty page link from the village idiot who complains about folks using links.

BTW Hendrick's self-indulgent attempts at poetry are remarkably flaccid. Why would anyone use such a self-important source. Does she sing bad opera as well- no doubt to herself.

Careful. Remember that none of this is personal -- even if SP thinks it is and goes out of his way to try and make it so. When he says that you are wading into some very repugnant and dangerous cesspools he is not wrong -- regardless of whether you extract biting social commentary/criticism from said cesspool. There is not necessarily anything wrong with doing that but SP is asking to see some discernment on your part (ostensibly because you almost always post articles without comment, but this could be opportunism on his part).

Its hard for me to tell (on the surface) whether the dispute is one of approach or not. SP sees almost everything through the lens of compromising principle which can't help but lead to zealot-level stridency. But there IS a time and place for that..although that time and place is (mostly) not here and now.

Just gotta keep our eye on the ball and make sure we are as transparent as possible in what we're doing

Hey everyone another revealing newsflash offered by the butthurt Buccaneer- Counterpunch publishes a bunch of crappy authors. This is startling news. It will take weeks to recover from this revelation.

Street also waffled a bit on Hillary this cycle therefore everything he has ever written and will write is useless. Which means...


LOL..my point is not that Paul Street is useless. My point is you are a fucking hypocrite Chlams in your highly selective outrage on such matters.

An intelligent critique of the article would both recognize the merit in the factual material presented and criticize aspects such as the ambiguous "eco-communism" referred to in the article or the reference to Klein's "disaster capitalism" or the constant use of "neo-liberalism" as a replacement term for capitalism. There are other weak spots to this piece that are asking for analysis- but no our local sot can't amass the mental horsepower to do anything other than critique the author.

The article should have stopped at "Hello" or in this case, "Hello, lest you forget Hillary Clinton wanted to privatize social security"

That's my criticism

LOL..my point is not that Paul Street is useless. My point is you are a fucking hypocrite Chlams in your highly selective outrage on such matters.

This is not really a conversation we're capable of having on The Bell at the moment because it absolutely MUST be conducted on an impersonal level and it must be about PRINCIPLE and not personal integrity (it is the former that generates the latter and not the reverse).

The trouble is that we have not even explicitly broached the subject of principle.

I tried to explain this to you once before when I told you that "we don't judge". I suspect you know the history on this perfectly well without needing me to tell you.

Careful. Remember that none of this is personal -- even if SP thinks it is and goes out of his way to try and make it so. When he says that you are wading into some very repugnant and dangerous cesspools he is not wrong -- regardless of whether you extract biting social commentary/criticism from said cesspool. There is not necessarily anything wrong with doing that but SP is asking to see some discernment on your part (ostensibly because you almost always post articles without comment, but this could be opportunism on his part).

Its hard for me to tell (on the surface) whether the dispute is one of approach or not. SP sees almost everything through the lens of compromising principle which can't help but lead to zealot-level stridency. But there IS a time and place for that..although that time and place is (mostly) not here and now.

Just gotta keep our eye on the ball and make sure we are as transparent as possible in what we're doing

It ain't personal Kid but I'm not at all averse to rolling around in the mud. It appears Chlams has now gentrified himself while earning an intellectual Doctorate in agitation. He now believes that his work and his sources are unassailable and above challenge. Kind of reminds of the upscale intellectual progressive bootlickers in suburbia that he does so despise.

Careful. Remember that none of this is personal -- even if SP thinks it is and goes out of his way to try and make it so. When he says that you are wading into some very repugnant and dangerous cesspools he is not wrong -- regardless of whether you extract biting social commentary/criticism from said cesspool. There is not necessarily anything wrong with doing that but SP is asking to see some discernment on your part (ostensibly because you almost always post articles without comment, but this could be opportunism on his part).

Its hard for me to tell (on the surface) whether the dispute is one of approach or not. SP sees almost everything through the lens of compromising principle which can't help but lead to zealot-level stridency. But there IS a time and place for that..although that time and place is (mostly) not here and now.

Just gotta keep our eye on the ball and make sure we are as transparent as possible in what we're doing

I think that there is another aspect of this. Why should we expect his "zealot-level stridency" to ever have a "time and place" when that zealotry is in the service of idealism, ant-communism, and utopian dead-end-ism. He is not interested in materialist research or working class struggle (at least not realistic working class struggle). I am not saying that any of us has all the answers or that we are dispensing Marxist golden truths. We are trying to work on getting better at materialism. I do not know what SP is working on.

We all like the work Paul Street has done but this is dead ass wrong. This makes it obvious that he ain't no Marxist and has not a clue about the function of the dictatorship of the proletariat, like a dumb ass anarchist or Trot. But then he's been big on the Greens and that's idealists city.

SP, you are entirely all over the place, you have changed your critique several times, seemingly hunting the next outrage. It also seems to me that your primary interest is pursuing vendetta. Stop it, just stop it.

The problem you have though BP is that the majority of the anti-capitalist left and the near entirety of the working class agrees with Street on that. I'm not sure how you don't view that as a problem in getting people on board. As I told someone else elsewhere the American working class will band together to kill leftists before they band together and allow leftists to lead the way in the implementation of Soviet America under autocratic party rule that bears ZERO resemblance to a working class democracy. No amount of trying to make it all good and sweeping the mistakes under the rug will change that. Idealism, reaction, or whatever aside... that is fact BP. I'm not sure how you imagine we can hide from that, sweep it under the rug as if it doesn't exist, and just keep trying to shove a square peg into a round hole.

You forgot to add "so little time spent sober."

Now let's get another one-liner with a forty page link from the village idiot who complains about folks using links.

BTW Hendrick's self-indulgent attempts at poetry are remarkably flaccid. Why would anyone use such a self-important source. Does she sing bad opera as well- no doubt to herself.

You keep failing to address the astounding amount of right-wing reaction and conspiracy quacks you are attracting all over the place with some of your methods and sources though. Let me remind you again Chlams in light of this convergence against war.

"Ironically, the only faction of the existing body politic which even begins to come close to the policy of the Socialists is the Republican radical isolationist faction centered on Ron Paul. The problem here is that this same faction is one of the most reactionary in American politics, standing with one foot in radical Libertarianism and the other in crypto-Fascism. As such, there is no possibility of common action, the convergence of policy on this most important (but singular) issue counting as only a curiosity."

--Anaxarchos

There does not appear to be any real "convergence" against "war". There is just the old liberal/progressive "convergence" against their mirror opposites, the Republicans. Anti-war stances are taken as cudgels against Republicans in power, when Democrats are in power the anti-war "movement" dries up. An increase in anti-war sentiment is a general "good", not because non-violence is good or desirable in any way, but because "war" for the US means aggressive, imperialist war. Actual leftists should always be against that - not "war", per se, but war within the bourgeois perspective. Most of these anti-warriors have no ideology, at all behind them. The question for them seems to be: "Which party is in power? We will be pro or anti war based upon that answer."

I think that there is another aspect of this. Why should we expect his "zealot-level stridency" to ever have a "time and place" when that zealotry is in the service of idealism, ant-communism, and utopian dead-end-ism. He is not interested in materialist research or working class struggle (at least not realistic working class struggle). I am not saying that any of us has all the answers or that we are dispensing Marxist golden truths. We are trying to work on getting better at materialism. I do not know what SP is working on.

I don't see what SP has to do with it, to be honest. At what point does piling on social criticism from every direction -- with a notable LACK of accompanying materialist analysis -- become substitutionism? How often can sources be invoked before some endorsement or affiliation is implied?

Doesn't matter if we think we can answer those questions or if we believe we understand how to tread the fine line -- the questions themselves are still legitimate and they DO put the spotlight on our ability to be discerning.

What is more the practice certainly DOES open the door to charges of hypocrisy. Why criticize one source but keep the kid gloves on for others?

I think that there is another aspect of this. Why should we expect his "zealot-level stridency" to ever have a "time and place" when that zealotry is in the service of idealism, ant-communism, and utopian dead-end-ism. He is not interested in materialist research or working class struggle (at least not realistic working class struggle). I am not saying that any of us has all the answers or that we are dispensing Marxist golden truths. We are trying to work on getting better at materialism. I do not know what SP is working on.

Here is your Christmas gift Dhalgren. No bow for you... I couldn't afford it. I'll let you decide if it has any value or points that are useful. I see a few but I haven't put many brain cells into breaking it down. 35 years and counting from this little screed and where exactly is the left...?

https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/basoc-20-years.htm

A Twenty-Year Legacy of Ultra-Leftism

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the communist movement, in this country and throughout the world, began a radical process of reorientation, fragmentation, and regroupment–a process that continues today, far from completed either ideologically, politically, or organizationally. The new communist organizations and collectives that arose in the United States shared the position that the CPUSA was a hopelessly revisionist organization that could never lead a successful revolution. After years of dissatisfaction with the CP’s orientation and practice, this rejection crystallized in the context of the attack on Soviet revisionism by the communist parties of China and Albania. The split within the U.S. movement had been developing for some time, but was given greater ideological clarity and confidence by this international development.

In the 1970s, particularly the last five years, many of us who were close to or participants in the anti-revisionist “New Communist Movement” recognized the persistent recurrence of ultra-left errors within the movement and began to build an “anti-revisionist, anti-ultra-left trend.” Despite this self-definition, the nature of ultra-leftism has been a subject of ongoing controversy within our trend. Debates centered on the characterization of dogmatism as the central element of this deviation and the significance of international line.

We believe that not only the New Communist Movement but the anti-ultra-left trend as well is characterized by a tendency to make seriously “left” errors. This paper outlines our understanding of the problem at this time. After a preliminary definition of ultra-leftism, we examine the main forms of this error. We focus on two: sectarianism and economism. Sectarianism isolates communist organizations from each other as well as from the masses, and is tied to other mistakes in viewing the relationship between reform struggles and revolution. Economism, which is generally a right error, has often taken a “left” form in our movement, as we explain in this paper.

After defining and illustrating these concepts, we look at their ideological underpinnings–idealism, subjectivism, dogmatism–and their organizational prop, ultra-centralism. We then suggest some of the prevailing conditions that foster ultra-leftism: the level of struggle in the United States, the composition of the communist movement, the international context.

We believe that the tendency to repeated ultra-leftism will not be easily corrected, but we are optimistic that it can be changed if we take it seriously. We indicate some of the steps we believe are necessary for this to happen. Finally, the paper concludes with a brief look at developments in the anti-“left” trend, particularly the weakness of its analysis of ultra-leftism and the danger of ultra-leftism in the trend itself.
“Left” and Right Errors

Ultra-left (or “left”) errors generally involve overestimating how close the country is to revolution. Typically, a “left” framework pictures the spontaneous resistance of the working class as an indication of revolutionary class consciousness; isolated militant actions or individual advanced workers are regarded as representative. Ultra-leftists downplay the contradictions within the working class (such as racism, sexism, homophobia) or between the working class and its potential allies. The influence of communists (or of the particular organization making this analysis) is exaggerated: the roots of communists in the working class, the respect of the people for the communists, the development of revolutionary program, tested leadership, committed cadre–all are overestimated. The road to revolution is envisioned as relatively smooth (and the turns and twists of revolutions in other countries are regarded with disdain).

Some ultra-leftists think that they live in permanently revolutionary conditions that only await bold action by revolutionaries; others anticipate a spontaneous act of popular resistance that can be turned into a revolutionary uprising by ingenious communists. The different variations of this perspective all amount to thinking that we are in a situation where “a single spark can start a prairie fire.”

In contrast to this “left” perspective, a rightist analysis discounts the possibility of a revolutionary situation and underestimates the potential of building a revolutionary movement. While ultra-leflists ignore or explain away every obstacle, rightists are intimidated by apparent difficulties. They distrust the capacity of the people to understand and act upon Marxism-Leninism, and they put off the revolutionary’s role of bringing such an analysis to them. Working within established channels for reform, they rationalize that people are not ready for anything more–without taking responsibility to prepare people for anything else. At its worst–revisionism–the right deviation glorifies reformism as a replacement for revolution itself, foreseeing a peaceful parliamentary transition to socialism.

The differences between rightism and ultra-leftism can be highlighted by looking at their views of objective and subjective factors. Objective conditions are essentially those over which communists do not have direct control, for instance contradictions within the ruling class or particular state policies. Subjective factors include the consciousness of the communists and the masses, their readiness to act and their understanding of the situation. (This distinction is not absolute; for instance, the subjective militance of the working class will affect the stability and options of the bourgeoisie.) Ultra-leftists tend to discount objective factors, as if the revolution can be planned and orchestrated solely on the basis of the desires of the communists. Rightists tend to absolutize objective factors, as if the communists (and the masses) cannot affect the direction of events significantly. They see what is, not what can be, while ultra-leftists see what can be and not what is. Either deviation represents a partial view of reality.

Understanding the relationship between “left” and right errors has been complicated for many people by the formulation “left in form, right in essence.” The point of this expression is that both “left” and right errors result in setbacks for the revolution. Right errors slow the potential development of the revolutionary movement, while “left” errors alienate the masses from revolutionary ideas and actions. This formulation is an argument against the view that “left” errors are not as serious as right errors. However, right and “left” errors should not be so equated too glibly. They have different origins, different consequences; the means to correct them are different. Thus, communists frequently debate whether a particular line is a “left” or a right error. Different analyses reflect different perspectives in the movement: whether one considers a line or an organization to be “left” or right depends on one’s assessment of objective conditions, one’s grasp of Marxism-Leninism, one’s strategy and program.

A common mistake is to equate a given line with the right or the “left” outside of its historical ’context. Among Marxist-Leninists, for example, it is generally considered a right error to belittle the importance of an organized party leading the revolutionary forces. Populists and social democrats criticize this conception of a party directing struggle “from above”; instead they advocate mass revolutionary organizations. But this line is not always a right error. The German communists who took this position after World War I were considered by Lenin to be making “left” errors. Like social democrats in the U.S. in the 1970s, the German “left” communists liquidated the role of leadership and promoted the spontaneity of the masses. But in the U.S., this spontaneity tends to be reformist and liberal, while in Germany in 1919 a section of the working class had been radicalized. Depending on this sector alone, the German “lefts” would isolate themselves from the masses as a whole, making a “left” error. This is an example of a line–in this case relying on spontaneous activity rather than organized leadership–taking right and “left” forms in different contexts and conditions. Conversely, lines that appear to be opposites can spring from the same “left” perspective. In this paper we focus on the “left” forms that sectarianism and economism have taken in recent years. These mistakes can, of course, take either “left” or right forms. For example, sectarianism, commonly associated with ultra-leftism, can be found in rightist groups too; in the Bay Area in 1980, the CPUSA, like the RCP, promoted its own newspaper while doing door-to-door campaigning against racist attacks on black families living in predominantly white suburbs. The CPUSA was just as effective as the RCP in antagonizing the neighborhood and the victimized families, and in undercutting their anti-racist work–although the content of the newspapers was very different. On the other hand, economism is generally thought of as a right error. We believe that recent mistakes in our movement have appeared as a form of economism that is “left,” a position we develop later in this paper.

Our analysis may appear too one-sided, since no communist organizations have been known to make only “left” errors. Over time, each has occasionally pursued a correct line, and has at times veered to the right. This is true both of organizations that are not firmly oriented to Marxism-Leninism, which tend to swing wildly from one extreme to another, and also of groups with a basically sound perspective, which inevitably make particular mistakes, overcompensate in correcting them, and experiment with different approaches as they struggle to find the most appropriate.

In this paper, however, we are not talking about individual errors of one sort or another; we are talking about operating within a framework that is so consistently ultra-left that it can be considered a consolidated perspective. In this context, occasional right errors are less significant than the organization’s overall ultra-left orientation.

Some comrades are overwhelmed by the diversity of political activity in the last two decades and fail to look for patterns beneath the surface of events. In effect, they adopt an attitude similar to the cynical outlook of 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who said that “history is just one damned thing after another.” Such an attitude is the antithesis of Marxism, which looks for the underlying structure and direction of historical change, and thus demands that we analyze both our own movement and the history of the class struggle in general.
Adventurism

Adventurism is the most straightforward and easily recognized form of ultra-leftism. Left adventurists exaggerate the imminence of revolution and project unrealistic forms and levels of political struggle. Heroic examples are expected to arouse the masses. Carried to its logical conclusion, this is the politics of terrorism.

Historically, left adventurism dominated the Weather Underground, the Venceremos split-off from RU, the Black Panther Party for several years, and later the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee. Perhaps the most striking recent example was the CWP’s leadership of the 1979 march against the Ku Klux Klan in Greensboro, North Carolina. Provocative and militant slogans of “Death to the Klan!” were combined with no preparation for an assault upon the march itself–with tragic consequences. Of course, the KKK is fully responsible for the murders in Greensboro, and their acquittal was an appalling example of bourgeois judicial processes. Nevertheless, the role of the Communist Workers’ Party must be criticized for its drastic underestimation of the enemy.

Adventurism has a high “burn-out” rate. Not only are adventurist practices demanding; they are rarely successful, frequently infiltrated, and invitations to repression. On the other hand, adventurism remains tempting when communist work moves slowly. Lenin pointed out in “Left-Wing” Communism that “it is not difficult to be a revolutionary when revolution has already broken out and is at its height, when everybody is joining the revolution .... It is far more difficult–and of far greater value –to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist.. .among masses who are incapable of immediately appreciating the need for revolutionary methods of action.” Too many would-be revolutionaries project themselves into a fantasy of imminent revolution because they cannot sustain the slow process of building toward a real revolution.
Left Sectarianism

Sectarianism is in essence the substitution of one organization’s perspective for the interests of the masses and the revolutionary movement as a whole. While not leading to the anarchist extremes of adventurism, sectarianism in its left form still involves an assessment of reality colored by subjective desires to move faster than conditions permit, with resulting impatience in mass and theoretical practice.

A left sectarian organization overrates itself. Its leaders and cadre are the core of the revolution, its program is the only correct one. Its small successes–leadership of a strike, mobilization of a demonstration–are blown out of proportion. In 1977, for example, OL wrote that “the influence of communist ideas and leadership in the working-class movement has increased significantly over the past years.... Communists are playing leading roles in strikes and drawing workers of all nationalities into the growing fightback and the party-building movement... The rudiments of communist cells and fractions are being built in many factories and trade unions.” An illustration shows The Call being sold outside a factory gate; the pamphlet goes on to discuss “a strike of great significance” at Mead Packaging Corporation in Atlanta. (See October League, “Building Class Struggle Trade Unions,” p. 36ff.)

On the one side inflating its own contributions, the sectarian organization also downgrades other communist groups. “The OL wages a continuous fight against opportunists of all stripes... anti-party forces... armchair revolutionaries...” The result is a proliferation of warring sects. Each tries to magnify its own inadequate grasp of the difficult task of making revolution in the U.S. into a claim to have an acceptable “general line” for the entire movement. Afraid to admit its shortcomings for fear of losing its “leading” role, each thus stubbornly upholds inadequate assumptions, incorrect policies, and next-to-useless generalities. This “small circle mentality” is substituted for principled and rigorous struggle, for internal and mutual criticism by these groups.

All organizations make mistakes. By shutting itself off from the experiences and criticisms of others, a left sectarian organization becomes locked in its mistakes. If it does in fact come to recognize a mistake and correct it, such a group rarely makes a public acknowledgment of its self-criticism, because sectarian groups do not consider themselves accountable to others in the movement.

To militants in the mass movements, the most striking feature of such groups is their habit of criticizing one another more vigorously than they attack the bourgeoisie. Usually, sectarian groups spend much time and energy polemicizing against one another, competing for the allegiance of independents or each other’s rank and file. These polemics ignore unity, exaggerate differences, fail to acknowledge valid criticism, indulge in sarcasm and personal attacks at the expense of systematic analysis. Bad enough on the pages of the left newspapers, this method of “struggle” becomes disastrous in the course of working in the mass movements.

How many promising groups have dwindled to insignificance as unaffiliated progressives walked out on debates that appeared irrelevant or esoteric–or made them feel stupid? For example, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union in San Francisco developed several rank-and-file caucuses that degenerated because of ultraleftism. Workers wanted their contract printed in several languages; they became alienated by extensive debates on different aspects of the “national question.” Ultra-lefts insisting on a high “level of unity” on such issues exclude, rather than educate, people new to the issues. Frequently, an organization’s desire to be thorough and “correct” becomes a means of establishing its hegemony, often at the expense of the struggle itself.

A sectarian attitude toward other left groups, then, is essentially a sectarian attitude toward the masses. The struggles that concern the people are seen only as arenas for recruitment and inter-left controversy. Left sectarians rarely attempt to connect a revolutionary perspective to the issues that the masses are more concerned about and prepared to struggle on. In fact, such an approach is often labelled “tailist,” “bowing to spontaneity,” or “catering to backwardness.” If the masses do not flock to communism, it is never considered that the communists should meet them part way and lead them forward.

This contempt for the people is revealed in the recurring tendency to downgrade or even negate reform struggles. Progressive Labor withdrew from anti-war, black liberation, and trade union struggles, declaring that reform struggles were not the business of communists, whose activities must have immediately revolutionary objectives. CP-ML recently supported “striking the main blow at reformists,” with the notorious boycott of the campaign for Sadlowski’s leadership of the Steelworkers Union. When a rank-and-file caucus of the Hotel and Restaurant Workers in San Francisco proposed running progressive candidates in a union election, several communist groups instead advocated boycotting the election; they quickly returned to the caucus when the progressives took office but were unable to give any guidance to the continued struggle against the corrupt union establishment.

In other cases, the “lefts” fear that if reform is actually won, people will be “bought off.” This attitude clearly reflects lack of faith in the people, and perhaps an underlying belief that capitalism really can reform itself, making the need for revolution even further dissociated from objective conditions. The possibility of partial victory is seen, not as an opportunity for education in struggle and its limitations, but as a danger to avoid.
Left Economism

Many Marxist-Leninist groups have taken a narrow view of the arenas for communist work and focused their efforts almost exclusively on the struggles of the industrialized working class against their employers and union officials. This orientation is based on the classic analysis that the industrial working class is the key element of a socialist revolution. It is wrong, however, to ignore the rest of the population, and to assume that economic issues are the most significant struggles in radicalizing the working class. Lenin extensively criticized “economism”–glorifying the bread-and-butter struggles of the proletariat. In his day, “economists” held that political struggle would develop spontaneously out of economic struggle. Lenin pointed out that the abuses of Tsarism were already stirring the working class as well as other sectors of the population and that such political struggles can provide richer lessons about capitalism than can the economic struggles of the working class alone. In Russia in 1902, economism was a right error: the economists underestimated the degree to which workers could develop a broad political perspective and ally with other sectors of the population to fight for a wide variety of demands.

In our movement today, there is a similar tendency to see “factory organizing” as more communist or more revolutionary than work in the community or in other sectors of the work force. We believe this is a “left” form of economism. It comes from overestimating the level of development of the working class and the significance of trade union struggles. The economists of our movement do not wait for economic struggles to spontaneously evolve into political concerns; they raise political issues, in fact, often prematurely or dogmatically. And for many groups, the focus on the workplace is accompanied by a disregard for other areas of struggle, which are scorned as inherently “reformist,” and without revolutionary potential. This, too, is a “left” error because struggles are judged against an imaginary and unrealistic standard of militance.

Many of these groups tended to caricature the workers in their move to join the working class. When PL and RU first began factory organizing, for instance, their cadre were expected to get married, cut their hair, and drink beer. Yet their contemporaries in the work force were living with lovers, growing long hair, and smoking grass. This tendency to mimic superficial characteristics of the workers–or stereotypes of workers–is a product of distance from them, and inevitably involves overgeneralization and distortion. “Workerism” is a term for this glorification of the “appearance” of the working class. Workerism may appear amusing, but underlying it is a serious problem. People with this approach tend to cater to prejudices of the workers, such as anti-gay or racist sentiments; they have an undialectical view of the working class and its ability to change, and fail to identify or challenge backward ideas in the proletariat.

The economists exaggerate the significance of what is basically trade union work. They confuse the militance of advanced workers in the U.S. today with the militance plus socialist understanding of advanced workers who are prepared to form the backbone of a communist party. For example, an important strike is promoted as the prelude to revolution, or at least a milestone in the development of the working class movement–when often it is merely an important strike. This was, for example, apparent after the 1977 West Virginia coal miners’ strike. Instead of studying this particular example of militant defiance for its specific features, communist groups regarded it as the sign of a new upsurge in the working class. This optimistic analysis is then made the basis for ambitious party-building projects: left economism thus comes to serve left sectarianism. For example, PWOC extolled the miners for their “readiness to confront state power” (Organizer, Sept. 1980, p. 18) and used this analysis to justify the OCIC’s party-building endeavors.

Another reason we consider this form of economism to be “left” is that groups making this mistake do not generally narrow their political demands to the lowest trade union denominator, a classic rightist error. Far from it. In fact, they usually sabotage trade union struggles with political demands that are advanced or irrelevant. Within union caucuses, “left” groups frequently raise struggles of international or national politics at the expense of advancing the agreed-upon work of the caucus. This leads the workers involved to feel manipulated. When and how it is appropriate to raise such concerns is a question few communist groups have successfully resolved. Too little attention is given to the basic political education that will enable people to take informed positions on other issues; the role of caucus work as part of that political education is also underestimated.

Furthermore, these ultra-leftists isolate the working class from potential ties to other sectors of the population. A simplistic view of class struggle characterizes the ultra-left perspective. With the workers lined up on one side and the bosses on the other, there is little role for other social forces. This view denies the complexity of actual class struggle–with its intra-class divisions and cross-class unities. Most “left” groups are therefore unable to sustain, or even undertake, united front work. Rejection of all trade union officials (sometimes extending categorically to include elected shop stewards), contempt for the black churches, indifference to the progressives in the Democratic Party are some features of this tunnel vision.

Many left economists are suspicious of broader, cross-class issues and movements, especially the democratic rights issues of women, gays, and national and racial minorities. The working class does not already have hegemony in these struggles. A reformist leadership and outlook may already be established, and the relationship to class oppression may not be explicit. Instead of contending with this leadership and struggling for their political perspective, the ultra-lefts dismiss these movements as if contact would contaminate their revolutionary purity.

Examples of this sectarian tendency to downplay democratic rights struggles include RCP’s liquidation of black and other minority struggles, notoriously its opposition to the Boston busing program, and PL’s rejection of these movements for “narrow nationalism.” While RCP, again the extreme, openly opposed the ERA, the OL found itself unable to participate in International Women’s Day events with the CPUSA present, and also had difficulties with women-only committees or lesbian involvement. The gay struggle has usually been seen as a minor issue of democratic rights for a group that presumably will be cured of all its problems–including its existence–after the revolution.

Needless to say, the struggles of the aged or the disabled, the ecology and anti-nuclear movements, the opposition to cutbacks in social services, and many other of the most volatile issues of the last few years have been avoided by the left economists. A somewhat different example of this sort of narrow vision was the position of I Wor Kuen in its struggle with the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP) over the direction of a fight to stop the eviction of elderly residents of the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Chinatown. KDP hoped to mobilize throughout San Francisco in support of the Asians whose home was to be torn down; this group argued that many in the city would unite around the need for housing. IWK, however, felt that the only question that communists should raise was that of the national oppression of the Chinese community. Support against the eviction should be based in Chinatown, and others who fought the eviction should do so on the basis of supporting the rights of the Chinese people. To IWK, housing was a “reformist” issue, while the oppressed nationalities had “revolutionary” demands.

Such an approach denies the development of political consciousness from particular issues to a broader understanding of class struggle. On the one hand, people are expected to leap into Marxism-Leninism in a single bound; on the other hand, their ability to learn from their own experience in reform struggles is distrusted.

To sum up, we have looked at four features of left economism in our movement: the glorification of the industrialized working class and its trade union struggles; the hasty attempt to “politicize” these struggles by raising external political concerns in inappropriate ways; the distrust of united fronts with other class forces; the avoidance of non-workplace struggles as “reformist.” All of these phenomena stem from an ultra-left analysis, rejecting any struggles except the mobilization of workers against capitalists and anticipating that workers will fall into the outstretched arms of communist organizations.
Foundations of Ultra-leftism
Ideological Factors

The ultra-leftism of the past two decades has been sustained by idealism. Looking at many of these groups, the outsider is impelled to ask, “How could they possibly think that what they are doing makes sense?” Idealism means proceeding from one’s thoughts, fantasies, and wishes rather than from an analysis of concrete reality (materialism). We have already mentioned some features of this idealism, particularly the mis-assessment of objective conditions that enables organizations to overrate their own importance and inflate the significance of working class militance. Many groups have failed to sum up social practice, either their own or that of their peers. Reality has been ignored or explained away, rather than analyzed.

Several years ago a split within the Progressive Labor Party led to the departure of some activists who had worked in this group for a decade. Many of them said that they were only able to do mass work by ignoring the directives of their leadership. Those responsible for PL’s political direction were so removed from ongoing struggles that their instructions would, if followed, have proven disastrous. The group was forced to split when disobedience was no longer tolerated. When reality and party line diverged, one person remarked, the response was to shut out reality and only read publications approved by PL. Needless to say, an organization that functions in this never-never land is bound to be estranged from the people it hopes to organize.

Wishful thinking, or subjectivity, also operates when such groups substitute their own ideas for those of the people. They assume that the rest of the population is familiar with left jargon; for example, the OL and IWK in rank-and-file caucuses would refer to “TUBs” (trade union bureaucrats) as if the term were self-explanatory. An RCP newspaper provides another example of how out of touch with reality the ultra-lefts can be. A passerby recoiled in horror as the vendor offered his newspaper. “But that’s a COMMUNIST paper,” she protested. “Oh, you don’t understand,” the communist replied, “we are anti-revisionist.” The idea that fear of communism is in fact fear of revisionism–or that a militant strike is the opening act of a revolution–reflects the extent to which ultra-lefts live in a world of their own making, fantasies produced by isolation and desperate wishful thinking.

The desire for a simple, quick solution, and impatience with the often-slow, uneven pace of real life, leads to voluntarism–actions on the basis of what one wishes were true, rather than what actually is true. Voluntarism is idealism in action. It is often identified with premature party-building initiatives, but justifies many rash moves in the mass movements as well. Voluntarism can consolidate as adventurism.

Idealism is often propped up by references to authorities, usually quoted without regard to their context. There is much that is valuable in the experience of the communist movement. Very rarely, however, is it sufficient to understand what Marx or Lenin wrote on a subject in order to know how to deal with the problem today. In fact, the great revolutionary leaders all emphasized that Marxism is not a dogma, but a guide to action. Over and over again, however, the communist movement has suffered from dogmatic interpretations; following what has been written is, after all, easier than thinking a problem through. Lenin described this tendency with an example of the misuse of a quotation from Marx. At a time when the Russian movement desperately needed to raise its theoretical level, some groups argued that practical work was more important. One newspaper justified its pragmatism by quoting Marx that “every step of the real movement is more important than a dozen programs.” Lenin retorted that “to repeat these words in a period of theoretical chaos is like wishing mourners at a funeral ’many happy returns of the day.’”

Such abuse of quotations is a persistent tendency in our movement. The polemics between PWOC and PUL on party building provide an example within our trend of the method of argument by quotation that resembles medieval scholasticism more than materialism. (See as an example PUL’s “On the ’Progressive Role’ of the Soviet Union and Other Dogmas.”)

Dogmatism can lead to either right or “left” errors, depending on the conditions of the struggle and the character of the ideas that are made into dogma. Dogmatism is, however, a natural component of ultra-leftism because those who tend toward simplistic and abstract solutions will buttress their non-materialism with “principles” and “historical experiences.” In the U.S., dogmatism frequently supports ultra-leftism because the conditions described in revolutionary texts tend to be more advanced than those in which we are working. As we mention elsewhere in this pamphlet, a classic example of this is the identification of “advanced workers” here with the committed socialists who Lenin called “advanced workers.”

Alongside the reliance on written authority is deference to contemporary authority, to a “leading international center.” For much of the anti-revisionist movement, the People’s Republic of China served such a role, despite the refusal of the Chinese Communist Party to pull together a formal International. The results of this mimicry included the ludicrous spectacle of groups that tried to follow every fluctuation in Chinese politics, often without understanding the changes they faithfully imitated. Even worse was the attempt to use the foreign policy of China as a general line for revolutionaries in this country, as if revolution could be imported. The recent shift of China toward economic interdependence with the U.S. and the beginnings of a military alliance only underscores the dangers of uncritically following the leader without thinking for oneself.
Ultra-centralism

Many of the communist organizations of the 1960s and 1970s have adopted the organizational model of democratic centralism developed for illegal, revolutionary activity in tsarist Russia. As we indicate in our paper on democratic centralism, we believe there has been a consistent tendency to overemphasize the need for centralism in a period when the entire movement is inexperienced and needs open debate and mutual criticism. Instead, many groups established hierarchies that could not be challenged; any errors were due to the cadre, never to the organization’s line or leadership. Leaders with minority viewpoints, for instance in RU, were unable to circulate their views to the membership as a whole, and members who shared a minority viewpoint were forbidden from meeting together. The result of this practice was that critical or opposition perspectives could not be presented thoroughly and openly.

This structure has reinforced the ultra-leftism in recent years. Leaders who are removed from mass work develop lines based on literature and insular reasoning rather than concrete recent experience. Feedback that these policies are inappropriate may be stifled, or may boomerang upon the cadre making these criticisms rather than leading to changes in strategy or tactics. Such practices only deepen the isolation of the communist movement from the reality of life in this country. Ultra-centralism is a consistent partner of both “left” dogmatism and sectarianism in internal communist organization.
Objective Conditions

Why are these particular problems so common in the U.S. left? We believe that the conditions in which our movement works encourage a certain set of mistakes. As pointed out earlier in this pamphlet, we live in a period of relatively little mass political activity. This generation of communists has inherited a situation of popular alienation from radical politics–and has so far been unable to significantly reverse this trend.

The lack of a politically conscious mass movement among workers and other oppressed groups has characterized the 1970s. This makes it very difficult for the movement to find its bearings politically, since it has limited opportunities to test its ideas in class struggle. Left debates may appear more stimulating than popular movements that are not moving forward. Without many advanced workers to struggle with, communists substitute their own fantasies of what the people are really thinking. Any flareup of activity is so welcome that it is overrated. Many of the characteristics of ultra-leftism can be tied to the problems of revolutionaries in a situation that is far from revolutionary. These conditions are the most significant impetus to “leftism” and will take the longest to change.

Another adverse condition is the inexperienced leadership of the movement. Except for some members of PL and CLP, few of the communist groups have personal continuity with the CPUSA, for example, and its wealth of positive and negative experiences. There have been relatively few leaders developed recently who are experienced in party building, in mass working class struggles, and in the variety of forms of political struggle. Few soundly understand Marxist theory and have experience using it to solve problems in their political work.

The historical roots of the anti-revisionist movement also propel it in an ultra-left direction. The 1960s were a decade of international revolutionary upsurges. For many radicalized at that time, it has been difficult to abandon the idea of imminent revolution and settle in to devise new tactics for new conditions. In general, too, the need to rely on historical experience has led the movement to consult literature written in periods of greater mass resistance and mobilization. There is a temptation to unwittingly abuse principles developed for more revolutionary eras.

Contemporary Marxist-Leninist organizations are dominated by petty bourgeois intellectuals, many coming out of the student movement without direct contact with working people. Compared to the population as a whole, the membership and leadership of these groups is disproportionately drawn from the intelligentsia. This is typical of the early phases of revolutionary organizations throughout the world. Up to this point, the U.S. anti-revisionists have been unable to develop a working class base that would fundamentally change the movement’s class composition.

We have already referred to the “workerism” that is fostered by isolation from the proletariat. Furthermore, many of the ideological errors we described in this article are typical of the world view of the petty bourgeois intellectual. Self-importance, impatience, and scholasticism are of course not limited to one class nor are they found in every member of a class. In advanced capitalist countries, in fact, public education and mass media systematically impose bourgeois ideology upon the working class. Nevertheless, class strata are shaped by their members’ experience and mode of life in a class-divided society. A political movement that is based on one or another stratum will, regardless of its intentions, be likewise influenced. The particular weaknesses of the intellectual, then, are to be expected in the new communist movement as a whole.

Identification with the class interests of the proletariat does not come easy for many intellectuals. They may carry with them the baggage of their initial training and lifestyle: individualism, competitiveness, the attempt to resolve problems exclusively in the realm of ideas, expectations of personal prominence. Throughout history the intellectual who supports revolution has had to struggle with such tendencies. Many ultra-left errors can be traced to these class-based weaknesses.

This is particularly true in a movement that is composed largely of young people–almost entirely less than 35 years old. Many of these people are college educated but are working in situations where many of their coworkers are not. Many have a background of financial comfort and have not resolved their relationship to past or potential privileges. Many have not had the experience of settling down to a long-term commitment to a job, a community, or a family. These are significant characteristics that affect our world view and our methods of political work. Furthermore, the lack of social stability has made it difficult to identify and change the weaknesses that are typical of intellectuals–or, in fact, to recognize and develop the corresponding strengths.

The points raised in this section should not be taken too mechanically. We are talking about factors that shape our movement and encourage errors in certain directions. The movement is not, however, totally at the mercy of “objective conditions.” We can change these conditions–build a strong political movement, develop experienced leadership and cadre, make the analysis appropriate to our period, recruit from all sectors of the working class and its allies, and transform ways of thinking that do not reflect the interests of the masses as a whole. Needless to say, this is a long-term task. We must be able to identify and confront obstacles without letting them overwhelm us.

In particular, the conditions of our work today have encouraged a disposition to ultra-leftism in the movement. This does not mean we are doomed to make ultra-left mistakes; it does mean we should not lightly assume we have understood and solved the problems of ultra-leftism.
The International Context

The context of our work is not only the low level of U.S. struggle, but also the situation around the world, including the struggles for national liberation, the rise of Eurocommunism, the fragmentation of the communist movement. Particularly significant for the problem of ultra-leftism has been the influence of China on our movement.

Many of today’s communists were inspired by the Chinese revolution and learned Marxism-Leninism from the writings of Mao Zedong. Some seized upon these experiences and analyses as a model for our work, without criticism or adaption to U.S. conditions. The RCP’s 1975 Draft Programme, for example, was directed to the “workers and peasants” of the United States.

The development of Chinese politics in the 1960s and 1970s further complicated the problems of ultra-leftism in the U.S. Many communists here approved of the Cultural Revolution and find it impossible to accept the repudiation of that entire decade by the current Chinese leadership. However, there were certainly ultra-left errors in the Cultural Revolution that reinforced “left” inclinations in our movement; these will have to be identified and corrected.

The other major development by the Chinese Communist Party was its international line, based on “the theory of the three worlds.” When this position was elaborated, it led to bizarre tendencies in the U.S. movement. It was an appalling spectacle to see U.S. communist groups abandon their attack upon their own ruling class domestically or internationally and instead encourage a militarism that would be directed against revolutionary struggles. It was infuriating to see the attack on “Soviet social imperialism” dragged into every political movement, only complicating the task of explaining socialism to the uninitiated by reinforcing anti-communist prejudices.

However serious and distressing these developments have been, we do not think they are the central feature and cornerstone of ultra-leftism in our movement. This is the position of most organizations in the anti-ultra-left trend and has been argued most forcefully by the journal Line of March. We believe that it oversimplifies the history of the trend to consider the events in Angola in 1975/76 as the “watershed” of the anti-ultra-left movement, important as the demarcation around Angola was.

For one thing, many ultra-left groups became much more “left” after rejecting the international line of the CPC. PL’s critique of China, for instance, was part of a general shift to purism that included rejecting every movement not immediately dedicated to revolution–including the compromise of the Vietnamese 7-Point Peace Plan. Similarly, the RCP has become ever more extravagantly ultra-left with its championing of the “Gang of Five.” In short, the CPC actually provided somewhat of a political anchor for these immature groups. Abandoning that analysis, they became even more disoriented. Furthermore, it is a mistake to oversimplify the unity of the ultra-lefts on international questions. This leads, for instance, to lumping together the views of Deng Xia-ping, Enver Hoxha, and the Gang of Four (see Line of March, v. 1, no. 3, p. 125-6, where all of these perspectives are identified as variants of “Maoism”). The significant differences between these lines indicate that ultra-leftism is not merely a matter of echoing China’s party. When the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, for example, the U.S. ultra-lefts offered a variety of analyses.

On the other hand, many rejected ultra-leftism long before the Angolan crisis. In fact, by presenting such poor practice in the name of communism, left sectarians kept many progressives from identifying with Marxism-Leninism for years, or at all. The increased influence of social democracy, in particular, must be partly attributed to “left” excesses of the New Communist Movement.
Deja Vu

The Revolutionary Union was formed with the recognition of PL’s degeneration into ultra-leftism. But beginning in 1972, RU began to dread economism, rejecting the struggle against racism as “divisive” and abandoning trade union work for its own “revolutionary workers’ organizations.” The October League, too, had a period of productive mass work, but by 1975 had adopted the slogan “No united action with revisionists” that effectively blocked work in any broad coalition. The anti-ultra-left trend that developed in reaction to these and other groups also soon began to reproduce the errors it initially had criticized.

The history of the Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center reveals familiar ultra-left features, in many respects paralleling those of earlier groups that began by opposing sectarianism and wound up as sects themselves. The OCIC was unable to recover from the failure of its original plan to unite the trend in one organizational process. Rather than developing new processes and different structures for joint work to build greater unity, the OCIC clung to its self-image of a single center and furiously attacked those who did not join. It denied any validity to the political differences that kept groups from joining the OC. Instead it accused such groups, particularly the National Network of Marxist-Leninist Clubs, of having a “small circle mentality.” However, the OCIC began to act more and more like a “small circle” itself, one with an increasingly inflated estimate of its own accomplishments. The first year’s summation of the OC’s “leading role” suggested the sectarian direction of this group, did that document’s passing off the OC’s problems as a few “soft spots.”

The OCIC originally derived considerable prestige from the trade union work of the PWOC, one of the initiators of the organization. Without adopting the PWOC’s position explicitly, the OCIC tried to provide leadership on a national scale, again, as in its party-building initiatives, putting organizational unity before political consolidation. The mass work fractions established under OCIC auspices were based on typically sectarian estimates of communist influence in the working class. (From the first draft of a “call” for an education workers’ fraction: “Our communist work within the trade unions has been advancing at a steady pace over the past few years and the beginnings of a genuine Marxist-Leninist current in the working class can be seen in local work in a number of cities.” Compare this with the OL statements we quoted earlier.) At the fraction conferences, little discussion of conditions in different localities took place; there were no analyses of the industry as a whole and few summations of the practice of different participants. Yet the OCIC forces called for the establishment of national groups with democratic centralist discipline over members’ industrial work. The sense of urgency and self-importance, the substitution of hopes for analysis, typifies the “left” approach of recent years.

The rectification forces analyze the basic line of the OCIC as pragmatist and economist; the emphasis on fusion with the working class and the devaluation of communist theory are seen as right errors. We argue that the fusion approach might be a right error in certain contexts, but that in fact the OCIC is predominantly making left errors. Its undeclared fusion line is part and parcel of its left sectarian and left economist approach. This line emphasizes the subjective will of communists, perpetuating the myth of permanently favorable conditions. In the OCIC view, the working class is ripe for communism–an assessment based on overrating the role of advanced workers and the significance of militant trade unionism. The OCIC’s economism is “left” economism used as a justification for its emphasis of organizing the OC over the development of a general line. As such, the fusion strategy in this context is part of the OCIC’s ultra-left constellation along with sectarianism, voluntarism, and dogmatism.

When it became clear that the OCIC was not achieving the goals it set for itself–independent elaboration of Marxism-Leninism, the unification of the anti-ultra-left trend, the creation of a communist current in the working class–these aims and strategies to achieve them should have been reevaluated. Instead the OCIC took a classic “left” position: blame the cadre. The OCIC was torn apart by a campaign against “white chauvinism” as well as “petty bourgeois chauvinism” and “bourgeois feminism.” This witch-hunt, fueled by guilt, was based on the assumption that the failures of the OCIC were due to the inadequacies of its rank and file–rather than the incorrect lines of its leadership and its overestimation of objective conditions.

It is ironic that the OCIC continues to maintain that ultra-leftism is the greatest danger within the trend, without seeming to recognize its own “leftism.” On the other hand the rectification forces consider the main danger to the trend to be rightism, which they identify with the OCIC. The Line of March groups are undertaking serious theoretical work; nothing comparable was ever attempted by the OCIC. However, the monthly forums sponsored by Line of March have seen the presentation of some positions that should have been offered in only the most tentative formulations, if at all. The criticisms of Mao Zedong’s united front work or of the Polish workers’ movement, for example, were highly questionable analyses. Particularly instructive was the forum on trade union work, which demonstrated the classic “left” fear of economism and the familiar dogmatic approach that a thorough understanding of What Is To Be Done? is what we need to save us from economism. There was no analysis of the specific problems of trade union work in this period and no critiques of the lines and practices of rectification or other trend organizations.

Because of these features of both the OCIC and rectification forces, we consider that ultra-leftism remains the main danger within our party-building trend. We have not studied recent developments in other communist trends to see whether they have made significant shifts away from ultra-leftism. We are, however, cautious about the analysis put forward in the October 1980 Organizer asserting that CP-ML and other groups have swung to right opportunism. It is a natural corollary to an ultra-left position that over views appear, by comparison, to be rightist. Furthermore, the history of the anti-revisionist movement has seen other occasions of temporary reverses in orientation, without resolution of the basic tendency to “left” errors; if CP-ML and other groups now appear to veer to the right, this phenomenon may be a superficial one.
Correcting “Left” Tendencies

We have described the “left” forms of sectarianism and economism that dominate the U.S. communist movement, and some of the ideological and organizational underpinnings of these errors. Looking at conditions in the movement and in the world, it is not surprising that ultra-leftism has been so difficult to change. Given a new and inexperienced movement with a poor grasp of Marxist theory, relatively isolated from its intended base in the working class, in conditions which make it extremely difficult to test and improve its politics, in a bewildering international political scene, without guidance from more experienced communist parties internationally–the overwhelming disposition of such a Marxist-Leninist movement is likely to be, as ours is, toward ultra-leftism. The fact that a few thousand people have begun over the last five or six years to identify themselves as anti-dogmatist or anti-sectarian does not change the fundamental conditions in which we work. Consequently, the struggle against ultra-leftism must be seen as a longterm and difficult one.

We are convinced that the direction of our movement can be corrected. We have insisted on the seriousness of the obstacles we face because the first step toward change is to recognize the magnitude of the problem. At the present time our movement does not agree upon the identification of ultra-leftism as its greatest failing, nor do we share a common understanding of the nature of “left” errors. Developing this analysis is clearly the first step–but it is only a first step. It would be a “left,” idealist mistake to think that understanding alone can change the movement.

To reach a common view of ultra-leftism will require study of our own movement and the international communist movement. The points in this paper are only a tentative outline of some aspects of the problems we need to address. Other important work has been done on this subject. (We would recommend PUL’s Two, Three, Many Parties of a New Type?, Line of March’s first issue, and numerous articles in Theoretical Review, particularly Nos. 13, 14, and “Leninist Politics and the Struggle Against Economism” in No. 15.)

Along with a review of our background, our movement must undertake to examine itself. On the one hand, this means open communication of opinions between different organizations, developing a more amiable style of criticism/self-criticism than the traditionally bitter polemics of our movement. Equally important is internal criticism/self-criticism; we have spoken already of the way over-centralization stifles the impetus to change. The movement must learn to evaluate its work in light of concrete effects, not intentions. To do so, we must taken seriously the reactions of other people to our activities– both other communists with differing perspectives, and non-communists.

Of crucial importance will be our movement’s ability to develop a theoretical practice and, ultimately, a general line that breaks with the ultra-left ideological practices of idealism and dogmatism. A general line based on an accurate assessment of the political situation using a renewed Marxist theory can, in the long run, change the tendency of our movement to ultra-leftism as the composition of our movement itself changes through mass practice based on such a line. As activists become more experienced, changing their class stand through struggle, and as more working class militants join the movement, attracted by its relevance to their problems, the conditions in which ultra-leftism flourished will be transformed.

At the same time, the dangers of rightism should not be ignored. Frustration with the slow pace of work in this period and an overreaction to ultra-left politics can lead to cynicism about our communist tasks of party building. The danger of right forms of economism–immersion in the mass movements without concern for communist unity or theory–can be seen among our movement’s dropouts and is a tendency that must be combatted. Furthermore, changes in the orientation of the Chinese Communist Party may have repercussions throughout the U.S. communist movement. In addition, the social composition of our movement in general means that many have the option of joining academia or accepted political institutions and withdrawing from active struggle.

Recognizing then the need to analyze right errors and to combat them as they arise, we continue to think that the predominant threat to our movement is from the “left.” The tradition of ultra-leftism has not been thoroughly criticized and is bolstered by the concrete conditions in which we work.

There is no shortcut to the painstaking, protracted struggle that we must undertake to organize the people of the United States to fight for socialism. Rightist evasions and “leftist” daydreams will not arm the working class and its allies with the necessary revolutionary consciousness, strategy, and determination. For us to begin to approach this task in a sensible manner we must first of all identify and repudiate our ultra-left heritage. A serious critique of ultra-leftism is only one of our tasks; we must also analyze revisionism if we are to break new ground and develop a program for socialist revolution in the United States. But at this time, with so many important tasks, it is essential to prioritize our work to be sure that the most important activities are undertaken first. It is in this spirit that we emphasize the continued political priority of combatting ultra-leftism.

The problem you have though BP is that the majority of the anti-capitalist left and the near entirety of the working class agrees with Street on that. I'm not sure how you don't view that as a problem in getting people on board. As I told someone else elsewhere the American working class will band together to kill leftists before they band together and allow leftists to lead the way in the implementation of Soviet America under autocratic party rule that bears ZERO resemblance to a working class democracy. No amount of trying to make it all good and sweeping the mistakes under the rug will change that. Idealism, reaction, or whatever aside... that is fact BP. I'm not sure how you imagine we can hide from that, sweep it under the rug as if it doesn't exist, and just keep trying to shove a square peg into a round hole.

Not long before the February Revolution Bolsheviks were a tiny minority of socialists.

Your use of the words 'autocratic' shows that you don't know what you're talking about. It is not synonymous with 'authoritarian'. Go back to school. And speaking of school, nobody here sweeps the mistakes of real, existing socialism under the rug, it must be studied in order to do better next time. But I suspect the 'mistakes' you are delicately referring to here are the slanders of Nazis. We sweep nothing under the rug, we hide nothing, but will not tolerate slanderers.

What you advocate is nothing less than surrender, "if the working class ain't ready now they never will be. " You get neither the 'historical' nor the 'materialism'. Sucks that history doesn't move are your approved pace.

https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/basoc-20-years.htm

Stopped reading after learning that the Black Panther Party was 'adventurists'.

'Bay Area Socialists'....more fuckin' opportunism, anything but communism. Pffft. And at the end of the day that's the deal: Anything But Communism.

I don't see what SP has to do with it, to be honest. At what point does piling on social criticism from every direction -- with a notable LACK of accompanying materialist analysis -- become substitutionism? How often can sources be invoked before some endorsement or affiliation is implied?

Doesn't matter if we think we can answer those questions or if we believe we understand how to tread the fine line -- the questions themselves are still legitimate and they DO put the spotlight on our ability to be discerning.

What is more the practice certainly DOES open the door to charges of hypocrisy. Why criticize one source but keep the kid gloves on for others?

I think Anax once said write some shit... drag some people in ....write some more shit... drag some people in. All well and good... but it gets to the point where the dragging in turns to dragging in the baggage of every fucking agenda when there is no clarity of who is doing the talking and for what reason. Pound on the Democrats and liberalism. Hey... I'm all for it Kid (and fucking Chlams knows that and that him and Dhalgren claim otherwise pisses me off)...but at what point does it just turn into nothing more than an irrelevant hate fest in service to the agendas of some other reactionary bullshit. Chlams has now achieved some fucked up unity between every right-wing tool, raging Rand libertarian, and Green Party hack who share the disdain for the Democratic Party and the liberals. It don't mean shit Kid. If he goes opposite and starts pounding on the Republicans, conservatives, and the "libertarians" he'll get the same unity from every reactionary liberal and Democratic Party hack. It still don't mean shit Kid. There is no balance, there is no clarity, there is no nothing being advanced but confusion and it doesn't serve well as a program. It does serve well for every jackoff with an agenda that wants to dilute and marginalize anything that remains of the actual anti-capitalist left. I know you hate that term anti-capitalist left but what else can serve the distinction ? Just rumbling here Kid but I don't think I'm totally wrong on this.

Not long before the February Revolution Bolsheviks were a tiny minority of socialists.

Your use of the words 'autocratic' shows that you don't know what you're talking about. It is not synonymous with 'authoritarian'. Go back to school. And speaking of school, nobody here sweeps the mistakes of real, existing socialism under the rug, it must be studied in order to do better next time. But I suspect the 'mistakes' you are delicately referring to here are the slanders of Nazis. We sweep nothing under the rug, we hide nothing, but will not tolerate slanderers.

What you advocate is nothing less than surrender, "if the working class ain't ready now they never will be. " You get neither the 'historical' nor the 'materialism'. Sucks that history doesn't move are your approved pace.

Ridiculous post to hide behind your own sectarianism BP. Slander of Nazis my ass. This is the hypocrisy I'm referring to. Is Street a Nazi BP ? I don't much care for Hedges. Is Hedges a Nazi BP ?

http://www.paulstreet.org/?p=1330

According to Paul d’Amato, “[Michael] Parenti’s softness for [Julius] Caesar has something to do with his Stalinism – his view that the fall of Stalinism [that is, of the USSR and Soviet bloc – P.S.] was a ‘historic defeat for the people of the world.’ In his 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds, Parenti claims that the nastier aspects of Stalinism—the gulag, the mass removal of populations, the untold number of deaths, the inequality between workers and bureaucrats—were all exaggerated by Stalin’s critics. Is it any wonder then that Parenti tends to play down Caesar’s noble birth, his conquests, his support of slavery and empire?” See Paul d’Amato, “Dictator of the Proletarii,” International Socialist Review, Issue 36 (July-August 2004). I found d’Amato’s harsh description of Parenti likely accurate after I read a bizarre section of Contrary Notions where Parenti described the different components of the US political left as follows: “Further along is the political left: the progressives, social democrats, democratic socialists, and issue-oriented Marxists (There is also a more ideologically oriented components of the left composed mainly of Trotskyists, anarchist, anarcho-syndicalists, ‘libertarian socialists’ and others who will not figure in this discussion given their small numbers and intense sectarian immersion. What they all have in common is an obsessional anti-communism, a dedication to fighting imaginary hordes of ‘Stalinists,’ whom they see everywhere, and with denouncing existing communist nations and parties. In this they resemble many centrists, social democrats, and liberals.)” Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2007), 190. This passage wildly misrepresented the activities and world view of Trotskyists, left-anarchists, and libertarian socialists (many in each category would at some level describe themselves as a type of communist) at the time (and since). The strange notion that these groups and individuals were/are obsessed with fighting real or imagined Stalinists and so-called existing communist nations and parties could only have been held, well, by a Stalinist – so it seems at least to me.

--Paul Street

Stopped reading after learning that the Black Panther Party was 'adventurists'.

'Bay Area Socialists'....more fuckin' opportunism, anything but communism. Pffft. And at the end of the day that's the deal: Anything But Communism.

LOL...nobody communist but you BP. Merry Fucking Christmas man.

https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/index.htm

Ridiculous post to hide behind your own sectarianism BP. Slander of Nazis my ass. This is the hypocrisy I'm referring to. Is Street a Nazi BP ? I don't much care for Hedges. Is Hedges a Nazi BP ?

http://www.paulstreet.org/?p=1330

According to Paul d’Amato, “[Michael] Parenti’s softness for [Julius] Caesar has something to do with his Stalinism – his view that the fall of Stalinism [that is, of the USSR and Soviet bloc – P.S.] was a ‘historic defeat for the people of the world.’ In his 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds, Parenti claims that the nastier aspects of Stalinism—the gulag, the mass removal of populations, the untold number of deaths, the inequality between workers and bureaucrats—were all exaggerated by Stalin’s critics. Is it any wonder then that Parenti tends to play down Caesar’s noble birth, his conquests, his support of slavery and empire?” See Paul d’Amato, “Dictator of the Proletarii,” International Socialist Review, Issue 36 (July-August 2004). I found d’Amato’s harsh description of Parenti likely accurate after I read a bizarre section of Contrary Notions where Parenti described the different components of the US political left as follows: “Further along is the political left: the progressives, social democrats, democratic socialists, and issue-oriented Marxists (There is also a more ideologically oriented components of the left composed mainly of Trotskyists, anarchist, anarcho-syndicalists, ‘libertarian socialists’ and others who will not figure in this discussion given their small numbers and intense sectarian immersion. What they all have in common is an obsessional anti-communism, a dedication to fighting imaginary hordes of ‘Stalinists,’ whom they see everywhere, and with denouncing existing communist nations and parties. In this they resemble many centrists, social democrats, and liberals.)” Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2007), 190. This passage wildly misrepresented the activities and world view of Trotskyists, left-anarchists, and libertarian socialists (many in each category would at some level describe themselves as a type of communist) at the time (and since). The strange notion that these groups and individuals were/are obsessed with fighting real or imagined Stalinists and so-called existing communist nations and parties could only have been held, well, by a Stalinist – so it seems at least to me.

--Paul Street

Could really give a flying fuck what Street thinks of Parenti. Likewise what Parenti thinks. And totally what you think. There are some threads in Other discussions and the archives which put the lie to your fascist propaganda, go read them. Or would you prefer to lecture me about the fictional Holomodor? In this context, 'Stalinist', yeah, you bet. Boo!

Not long before the February Revolution Bolsheviks were a tiny minority of socialists.

Your use of the words 'autocratic' shows that you don't know what you're talking about. It is not synonymous with 'authoritarian'. Go back to school. And speaking of school, nobody here sweeps the mistakes of real, existing socialism under the rug, it must be studied in order to do better next time. But I suspect the 'mistakes' you are delicately referring to here are the slanders of Nazis. We sweep nothing under the rug, we hide nothing, but will not tolerate slanderers.

What you advocate is nothing less than surrender, "if the working class ain't ready now they never will be. " You get neither the 'historical' nor the 'materialism'. Sucks that history doesn't move are your approved pace.


This is very good. I don't actually think that many "mistakes" were made..they tried stuff and if it worked they kept it and if not they tried some different stuff. At least when they were weren't under the constraint strain of international turmoil and existential threats -- which was pretty much always.

Could really give a flying fuck what Street thinks of Parenti. Likewise what Parenti thinks. And totally what you think. There are some threads in Other discussions and the archives which put the lie to your fascist propaganda, go read them. Or would you prefer to lecture me about the fictional Holomodor? In this context, 'Stalinist', yeah, you bet. Boo!

Of course not and this exact inability to indulge in any kind of self-criticism and blindness to the failures of this bitter sectarian nonsense in reaching the working class is precisely the problem. Nice touch with labeling anyone who disagrees with this blind allegiance and bitter sectarianism as Fascists and Nazis though. Boo right back at ya BP !

here is no balance, there is no clarity, there is no nothing being advanced but confusion and it doesn't serve well as a program. It does serve well for every jackoff with an agenda that wants to dilute and marginalize anything that remains of the actual anti-capitalist left. I know you hate that term anti-capitalist left but what else can serve the distinction ? Just rumbling here Kid but I don't think I'm totally wrong on this.

You're not totally wrong on this; in particular there is precious little clarity and multitudes of confusion being advanced, none of which serves well at all as a program. I dislike the term anti-capitalist left because it is undifferentiated. I think it is diluted and marginalized but not to the degree that you seem to think so. I also think that EVERYTHING progressive in the world along a CLASS vector is the work of those who come from hard communist/Marxist tradition.

Of course not and this exact inability to indulge in any kind of self-criticism and blindness to the failures of this bitter sectarian nonsense in reaching the working class is precisely the problem. Nice touch with labeling anyone who disagrees with this blind allegiance and bitter sectarianism as Fascists and Nazis though. Boo right back at ya BP !

Hitler's entire premise was that Stalin decapitated the Red Army, demoralized Soviet society, and left the USSR a sitting duck. Throw in the claims of intentional mass starvation and/or inducing a famine (a claim directly fabricated by the Nazis and their adherents) and that's pretty much been the capitalist line for the the last 70+ years ever since (blithely ignoring the course of the war)

One would think that the 7 decades of ensuing capitalist horror (plus the previous century..and the century before that..and..) would dull the drumbeat a bit, but I guess being HYPO-critical cuts all ways..

417

Apparently I signed up for a one way trip...

Roaming Charges: the Russian Game
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

The Russian Game is a chess strategy developed in the mid-19th Century by Alexander Petrov, a grand master from St. Petersburg. Petrov’s thinking about chess was deeply influenced by Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Essentially, Petrov viewed chess as a kind of military exercise and his Russian Game was a defensive plan to protect the “homeland” of the chessboard from attack by an overwhelming imperial force through deception, misdirection and infiltration.

Petrov’s Defense, as the Russian Game is also known, is a devious scheme of counterpunching, where the movements of your opposition are mirrored, creating the illusion that your opponent’s pieces are fighting themselves, until a line of counter-attack opens with devastating consequences. When played by a master, the Russian Game is meant to confuse, disorient and induce a feeling of paranoia in the invading force of pawns, rooks and knights

Has Vladimir Putin deployed a Petrov Defense operation against the American electoral system? Has he mirrored decades of CIA and State Department-sponsored meddling in elections in eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America by unleashing a cyber-hack on the Democratic National Committee? Did the Russians hack the voting machines themselves, the way American operations once stuffed ballot boxes? Or is it all one big psy-op, an elaborate con out of a LeCarré novel, meant to make the American political and intelligence establishment re-enact the self-consumming witch-hunts of the McCarthy era?

In other words, what if the real Russian plot was to plant the idea that Russia had hacked the vote? Thereby sending panic through the nation, launching investigations that devolve into wild goose chases, pitting intelligence agencies against each other.

Frankly, I have no idea whether Russia influenced the US elections, though both nations have been meddling in each other’s business since at least the Russian Revolution. But it’s quite clear that both the CIA are FBI are meddling in the election, which should be a much more troubling reality for Americans. The CIA, in particular, is prohibited by statute from any kind of domestic operations, a ban which Obama’s executive order seems to violate.

+Isn’t it in the financial and budgetary interest of “cyber-security firms” and intelligence agencies to allege massive hacking, when many cyber experts without a financial or political stake in the game say that “leaking” of DNC emails is much more likely scenario?

+ Did the alleged Russian hacks of DNC emails really sway the election? Very doubtful, since the Wikileaked e-mails were largely, to use Joan Didion’s phrase “inside baseball,” and the content only confirmed what most thought of HRC to begin with: she was a duplicitous politician who was willing to carry water for Wall Street. How many “undecided voters” actually read Hillary’s tedious Goldman Sachs speeches? Most knew that she gave them and got richly rewarded for them, which is enough to draw the right conclusions.

But consider the case of Kurt Eichenwald, a “senior reporter” for Newsweek who clearly wanted Hilary to win and for his exposés to take down Trump. Several of Eichenwald’s big pieces for Newsweek quoted–anonymously in many cases–foreign officials and business executives about Trump’s financial dealings and entanglements overseas. These foreign officials clearly spoke to Eichenwald because they wanted Trump to lose. Couldn’t it be argued that Eichenwald himself, then, serve as a conduit for foreign meddling in US elections?

When it comes to assessing the true extent of Russian “influence” in Trump’s win wouldn’t you first have to subtract the Israeli influence exerted by Sheldon Adelson ($25 million), Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government? Will there be hearings?

After revelations that the DNC sabotaged Bernie Sanders, Democrats, who now quaver about the integrity of the democratic process, didn’t call fora “recount,” “revote” or for convention delegates to be freed to vote their conscience–those who had a conscience.

+ Just as the steam was beginning to run out of the 9/11 “Truth” movement–the totalizing theory to justify the impotence of the Left during Bush time–the Russian Truther movement is born to explain HRC’s loss and every horrible thing that will happen for the next 4 to 8 years. The big difference: this one has gone mainstream faster than the CIA killed JFK conspiracy.

Paul Krugman delivers right on cue….

Paul Krugman @paulkrugman
Thought: There was (rightly) a cloud of illegitimacy over Bush, dispelled (wrongly) by 9/11. Creates some interesting incentives for Trump
5:47 PM – 16 Dec 2016

+ Looks like Trump just claimed another head for his wall in the Map Room of White House to go along with the Bushes and Clintons: Bill Kristol, the man who was never right about anything, is stepping down as editor of the Weekly Standard.

+ Glenn Thrush, one of the “journalists” who submitted drafts of his stories to Clinton campaign to preview and approve, will now enter New York Times stable, grazing along side Maggie Haberman, one of the stenographers for Clinton campaign who was notorious for “teeing-up” stories for HRC.

+ Meanwhile, back in the Asylum of Big Time Journalism, Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald, who claims someone induced him into an epileptic seizure by sending bernie-the-sandernistas-cover-344x550-e1477943826411him a strobing light message, claimed this morning on “Good Morning America” that his previous tweets about Trump being confined to a mental hospital were “part of series of jokes & intended to be ‘signal to a source ‘s talk w/him.” What’s the frequency, Kenneth, I mean, Kurt?

+ Civil libertarian John Whitehead has written an evocative piece on how the goody-two-shoes Jesus would have fared under the current American police state, though I much prefer the petulant, moody, needy and greedy, ego-maniacal and deeply-flawed god of the Old Testament, who might have wiped them all out had they pulled a no-knock raid on one of his love shacks….

+ Joe Biden sought to reassure anxious Sierra Club types this week by saying that “Trump will not be able to undo too much of Obama’s environmental legacy.” True enough, mainly because there’s not that much of substance to undo.

+ Amid the justified outrage over Trump’s EPA pick, the oil hack Scott Pruitt, just remember that the toxic drinking water pouring out of the faucets of Flint, Michigan and Corpus Christi, Texas happened under Obama’s watch…

+ In a moment of pious reflection, Obama said earlier this week that throughout his presidency he has considered the effects each of his actions has on children. Is that before or after he drones their parents and siblings?

+ Amid his unwavering devotion to bettering the lives of children, it may be churlish to ask how many nights the President lay awake thinking of those kids sleeping on the sidewalk under a pile of dirty blankets a few blocks away from the White House trying to stay dry in a cold autumn rain. The homeless crisis, a crisis he never mentions, has only gotten worse during his presidency. According to Richard Schweid’s important new book, Invisible Nation: Homeless Families in America, in 2002 there were 1 million homeless children in America. By 2006 there were 1.6 million homeless children and by 2014 the number had risen to 2.5 million children.

+ Exxon’s Rex Tillerson was no stranger to the Clintons. They wanted his money…for the Foundation, naturally. According to the leaked DNC emails, they also considered Tillerson an enlightened CEO, a man you could do business with. In fact, Tillerson spoke at a Clinton Global Initiative forum on the education of women. Here’s a photo of Bill standing side-by-side wit the notorious Russian agent. Who will break the news to Rachel Maddow?

+ Condi Rice also says Exxon’s Rex Tillerson is “great choice” for Sec. of State. Of course, this praise comes from a woman who had an oil tanker named after her.

+ Rick Perry has been nominated by Trump to run the agency whose troubling name he forgot during the 2012 debates, even though it was one of the three agencies he desperately wanted to eliminate from the government: the Energy Department. Perry, whose CV lists his most recent job as professional soft-shoe man on “Dancing with the Stars,” is often described, accurately so, as a climate change denier. He is less often described as an unrepentant racist, whose hunting lodge in West Texas was named “Niggerhead Ranch.”

+ Two weeks ago word leaked out of Trump Tower that Donald was set to tap Rep. Kathy McMorris Rodgers, the congresswoman from eastern Washington, as his pick for Interior Secretary. But Rodgers’ nomination was scuttled a few days later, apparently through the intervention of Trump’s son Mini-Donald, in favor of the bombastic Montana congressman Ryan Zinke, a former member of Navy SEAL Team 6.

There’s a backstory to this that involves two outfits that represent the interests of big time hunters, many of them corporate executives and Wall Street hotshots: the Montana Elk Foundation and Back Country Hunters and Anglers. The heads of both of these organizations have recently bragged to the Montana press of having pressed Trump to name Zinke over Rodgers. But why would either of these groups from the distant interior west have any influence over Trump? That’s where Mini-Donald steps into the equation. It turns out that Mini-Donald, often referred to in the mainstream press as an “avid outdoorsman,” is a lifetime member of Back Country Hunters and Anglers and hunting pal of its director Land Tawney, a man who felt that it was his duty to shoot a sage grouse soon after the Interior Department buckled to pressure from ranchers, oil companies and hunters and decided not to list this imperiled birds as an endangered species.

“Tawney literally can’t say anything bad about Zinke,” longtime Montana environmentalist Matthew Koehler told me. “He doesn’t even mention of the fact that in March Zinke voted for the “Sportsmen’s Bill’ that would have allowed temporary road construction, dam construction and even commercial timber sales in designated Wilderness! How does Land Tawney get from Missoula and just so happen to be in New York and then Washington D.C. as the Trump Interior pick goes public…without a bunch of coordination between Trump, Zinke and Tawney?”

As for Zinke, his Christmas card from a few years ago gives much insight into his character and psyche. It depicts him dressed in a Captain America jumpsuit, holding an M-16 rifle, riding in a jet-powered sleigh with fighter plane wings featuring a decal of Osama bin Laden’s x-ed out face. The bag of presents is stuffed with an oil derrick, chainsaw, and miner’s pick axe. The front of the sleigh is draped with the carcass of a dead grizzly.

zinkecard

Let’s dispense with the “avid outdoorsman” nonsense and call Mini-Donald what he is: a depraved trophy hunter. So one depraved hunter picks another depraved hunter to head the Interior Dept.

As for Zinke, he is now being haunted by allegations of corruption and fraud during his time as a Navy Seal. According to a report in The Intercept, Zinke was investigated by the Navy for submitting false travel reimbursement reports in 1998 and 1999 for numerous trips back to Montana. Zinke claimed the visits to his hometown of Whitefish were for “training” and other official duties, when he fact he returned home to work on a house and visit his mother. Zinke was confronted and warmed about the travel fraud by Navy investigators, but, according to The Intercept, continued to submit false reports. Zinke was not sanctioned for the fraud because “the lack of formal punishment was part of a tradition at SEAL Team 6 of avoiding scandal and failing to adequately hold its officers accountable for criminal behavior and other misconduct.”

This is the kind of experience that will prove invaluable for Zinke in his new gig overseeing oil and coal leases. A plump resumé of fraud is a prerequisite to lead the Interior Department.

+ Obama: still 252 pardons behind his hero Reagan. Leonard Peltier, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Oscar López Rivera wait and wait and wait.

+ Apparently, Trump’s team is so desperate to find homegrown talent to perform at his inauguration that he has offered ambassadorships to agents and producers who are willing to sign up their clients to sing at the inaugural galas. Perhaps Mel Brooks could be bribed into slapping together an inaugural production of “The Producers” in exchange for the ambassadorship to Austria…?

+ Instead of the reading of a poem, the Trump inauguration team is leaning toward a performance by Andrew Dice Clay.

+ Allen West will never get that Undersecretary of Defense slot he craved now that he has deleted and denied responsibility for a Facebook posting calling for the “extermination of Muslims.” Trump needs a few good men with real backbone, who won’t retreat from their positions when the going gets a little rough.

+ Trump’s cabinet must come as quite the blow to K Street. Who needs to go to the expense of hiring a lobbyist anymore?

+ South Carolina Lindsay Graham, one of the most petulant and paranoid members of congress, announced to little fanfare that his fly-by-night campaign emails had also been hacked by “the Russians.” No doubt this was when Graham’s poll numbers had briefly doubled, from 0.25 to 0.50%, and Putin needed to act swiftly to snuff out the Graham surge!

+ Retail pot sales are doubling every six months in Oregon, Washington and California. Marijuana sales during Trump time will soar higher than AK-47 sales under Obama.

+ In 2001 Portugal became the first European nation to decriminalize drugs. Portugal now has 4.5 drug deaths per million residents, while Europe at large sees 19.2 drug deaths per million people.

+ Michelle Obama told Oprah that the portrayal of her as an “angry black woman” hurt her feelings. I would have thought that Michelle’s problem was not being angry enough…

+ If a combination of Russian hacking and homegrown misogyny defeated HRC, what defeated Russ Feingold and Katie McGinty?

+ Remember when being a billionaire was something to write home about? Now, all you get for a measly $1.8 billion is a sub-cabinet post like Secretary of the Army….

+ Temperatures at the North Pole this Christmas week may well reach 55 degrees higher than normal. On this chart, the green line represents the average Arctic temperature from 1958 to 2002, while the red line represents this year’s temperatures in the nearly ice-free Arctic.

c0n6rggw8aa_xeo-jpg-large

Over to you, Rex Tillerson.

+ Here’s the latest swill of condescension from Lena Dunham:

“One day, when I was visiting a Planned Parenthood in Texas a few years ago, a young girl walked up to me and asked me if I’d like to be a part of her project in which women share their stories of abortions. I sort of jumped. “I haven’t had an abortion,” I told her. I wanted to make it really clear to her that as much as I was going out and fighting for other women’s options, I myself had never had an abortion. And I realized then that even I was carrying within myself stigma around this issue. Even I, the woman who cares as much as anybody about a woman’s right to choose, felt it was important that people know I was unblemished in this department…. Now I can say that I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had.”

Oh, poor, poor, Lena, she couldn’t have her own abortion, sniff, sniff, but she tried desperately to get Hillary elected so that she could perform retroactive abortions in her name via drone on Iraqi, Pakistani, Afghan, Syrian and Libyan kids. Then she’d have really had something to brag about…Alas.

+ There’s an intriguing new site on the web called MormonWikiLeaks, where people can anonymously upload documents regarding the inner-workings of the Church of Latter Day Saints. It’s not yet clear whether MormonWikileaks is a Subsidiary of Vlad the Nosy Bear Enterprises.

+ For four decades, the federal government has concealed shocking data on birth defects in children whose parents were exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. This research was finally exposed this week in important stories by Pro Publica and the Virginia Pilot. The data found that the odds of having a child born with birth defects during or after the war were three-times higher for veteran who were exposed to Agent Orange than those who hadn’t been.

+ So much for the vaunted Obama recovery. A report by economists Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Alan Krueger at Princeton University shows that nearly 95% of all new jobs created during the Obama era were either part-time or contract labor, largely in the low-paid service sector. Indeed, the number of people toiling in these thankless temporary jobs swelled under Obama from 10.7% of the US population to 15.8%. You want some fries with that?

+ I’ve spent the last couple of weeks collating and organizing the first half of Native activist and poet John Trudell’s FBI file: 6,320 documents, 22,137 pages, dating only until 1980. Top that, if you dare!

+ Here’s a story my friend Michael Donnelly told me about the FBI’s harassment of a the editors of an underground hippy newspaper in Utah in the 1960s:

A guy told the tale of how he was an editor for an underground High School paper in Utah in 1969. And one day, the FBI came knocking.

They had put out an issue with Rocky and Bullwinkle on the cover and they added the Zig-Zag Man into the background to, as he put it, “Show the hippies we might be from Utah, but we were hip.”

The FBI had a line-up of agents across the table and they started in on “Who funds you?”

The guy took it seriously and answered, “Well, we raised $22 from a donut sale, I put in $2 and so did some others,. And, once we had $42 we had enough to print up 1000 copies.”

The FBI guy slammed down his notebook and screamed, “Enough of that. Who funds you?”

Confused, the guy answered again, We self fund.”

The FBI guy got furious and thrust the paper in the guy’s and there he sat looking at Moose and Squirrel.

“See. Right here. Fidel!,” he screamed, pointing to the Zig Zag man.

Come to find out, they had two agents assigned full-time to ferreting out Castro’s funding of student underground papers!

+ The search for a scapegoat goes on in Clintonworld. This week Bill blamed Hillary’s defeat on Trump’s ability to “get angry white men to vote for him.” Not so fast, Bubba. Trump won 63% of the white male vote, almost exactly the same percentage as Reagan (63%) and Romney (62%). And white males comprise a smaller share of the electorate than they did in Reagan time. Trump held the line with the Republican base, Hillary failed to get hers to turnout–mainly by turning them off.

+ The point is that Bill might not be all that convinced that Putin is the architect of Hillary’s ruin. After all, they were buddies, as made clear in this email from Hillary to William Burns, one of her chief deputies at the State Department:

From: H [mailto:HDR22@clintonemail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2010 9:19 PM
To: Burns, William J; ‘wburns66 Cc: Sullivan, Jacob J

Subject: Putin trip

Bill–My husband cannot go w PM Putin in mid-April because of his schedule, but he would be very interested in doing such events w the PM in the future. Will you pls pass on to the Russians? Thx. HRC

+ After attacking the escalating costs of the new Air Force One designed by Boeing, Trump has now turned his ire on the scandal-ridden F-35, the world’s most useless and expensive airplane. If the CIA doesn’t take him down, Lockheed just might…

+ Trump’s plan to fight global warming: nuclear winter.

+ John “I am the Walrus” Bolton, still in the running for some kind of gig in Trumpland, said this week that the DNC email hacks might not have been instigated by Putin after all, but could have been a false-flag operation directed by…yes…Obama. Why? Because that’s just the kind of devious thing the America-hating Kenyan imposter might do. Goo goo ga joob.

+ NPR’s talk show host Diane Rehm is finally unplugging her microphone. Her retirement has, naturally, elicited torrents of babble about the “end of civil discourse” in American politics. Nonsense. Why should political discourse be “civil”? It was far from civil in the origins of the Republic. I used to call her show Radio Narcolepsy. Rehm tried to make tedium a virtue.

+ Many of Clinton’s most ardent supporters now seem convinced based statistical analysis by the fully (but not fully enough, apparently) discredited stat-boy Nate Silver that FBI director James Comey’s letter to Congress announcing the re-opening of the investigation into her email server cost HRC the election. Was it a Russian forgery?

+ Eight years ago, Democrats like Donna Brazile ridiculed Sarah Palin for her ability to “see Russia from her house.” Now these same people see Russia in their emails, their i-Phones, their voting machines under their beds, between their sheets, behind every tree…

+ If the Russians did hack the election for Trump, the Democrats should respond by putting a new spin on the Asian Pivot and begin cozying up to the Chinese to hack it back for them in 2020.

+ How rotted out is the Democratic Party at an institutional level? In California, Clinton won 6 congressional districts held by Republican members of Congress–the Democrats took back NONE of those seats. There were no coatstails to those pantsuits.

+ Americans have been rightly conditioned to disbelieve almost everything politicians tell them, so it sticks like Velcro when they hear a candidate speak candidly. Who really bought anything Trump was selling? Hillary, however, was undone by two occasions when she was caught telling the truth, or if not the “truth,” at least what she truly believes: first, when she called half of Trump’s supporters a “basket full of deplorables” and second, and more fatally, I think, when she was outed telling her friends on Wall Street that she has a “public” and a “private” position.

+ The Democrats are convinced that the exposure of what their leaders really think cost them the election. So what changes are they likely to make? a) change their leaders; b) change what their leaders think; c) lie better; d) hire a new cybersecurity firm.

+ Obama’s Political Epitaph: the Peace Prize President, who was at war every day of his presidency.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/23/roaming-charges-the-russian-game/

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Apparently I signed up for a one way trip...

We aren't usually tis distracted. I am unsure what the problem is. Giving too much credence to worthless idealism is my guess.

We aren't usually tis distracted. I am unsure what the problem is. Giving too much credence to worthless idealism is my guess.

The problem is pretty easy to locate.

My apologies to you and solidgold- you were correct.