Splintered Sunrise

Right, so I just wanted to make a few short comments on the question of autonomy and self-organisation. And what I’ve been thinking about in this regard is the great flowering of minority radicalism in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Everybody, of course, knows of the Black Panthers, the great trailblazers of this sort of self-organisation, and there’s an enormous amount could be (and has been) written about them. In some ways, though, I’m at least as interested in the groups that came after and which, in contrast to the rather inchoate politics of the Panthers, were a hugely important part of the New Communist Movement.

There were lots and lots of these groups about, but they’re very little known these days and, with the significant exception of Max Elbaum’s invaluable Revolution in the Air, there’s almost no accessible material on them. This is a pity, because there are all sorts of fascinating aspects to the movement that seem really odd to us now.

One might not have expected, for instance, the emergence of Red Guards in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a place that’s been in the news a lot over the last few days. Actually, from the outside, it would have seemed a deeply unlikely place to be a hotbed of radicalism. Much of the community was petty bourgeois (in the strict economic sense) and the leading figures in the community were extremely reactionary people, fiercely loyal to the Kuomintang. And yet, in the late 60s, a very large layer of Chinese youth became radicalised, partly under the influence of the Cultural Revolution and partly inspired by what the Panthers were doing to resist racism in Oakland. And, with the youth in motion, you found old-time Chinese communists, who had kept a very low profile for decades, coming out of the woodwork. And this combination of circumstances led to some fairly strong organisations and the revival of a tradition of militancy that had been almost forgotten.

And you had similar phenomena in other minority communities. And, what was most important, you had organisations that were not simply ethnic advocacy groups but openly identified themselves as part of the revolutionary left.

Now I’m not going to go in any detail into the history of these movements. I want to consider a few points about their strengths and weaknesses and why they failed in the end, after showing so much potential in their early years. This is where a lot of observers go in for the unattractive phenomenon of Marxist hindsight – you know, like in those books telling you what great things Lenin and Trotsky could have achieved had they only had Cliff or Grant around to advise them. Often the criticism says more about the critic than about the criticised – if you ever hear anyone saying that the problem with the Black Panthers was that they didn’t build a multiracial socialist party with a transitional programme and an orientation to the industrial working class, it’s a bit like criticising a fish for not having feathers.

In the end, the failures of the movements had a lot to do with a period, a fair bit to do with state repression and yes, their own mistakes were a significant factor. But we shouldn’t be so arrogant as to assume that we, the possessors of hindsight, are immune from making those mistakes.

There are three issues I’d like to point out.

The first is that minority radicals, in their great majority, were drawn to some variant of Third World Marxism. This is often held against them, but it’s quite understandable. Yes, cultural links might explain why Puerto Rican radicals might turn to Castroism, or Chinese (and Korean and Filipino) radicals to Maoism. Yes, the CPUSA’s tradition of antiracist work might explain the affinity of many Black militants to pre-1956 Stalinism. But it goes beyond that. The big attraction of these brands of Marxism was their practical involvement in the anti-colonial struggle. Which wasn’t just a matter of “Third World solidarity” or some theory of ethnic minorities as “internal colonies”. You literally couldn’t be a Chinese militant in San Francisco without opposing the Kuomintang, you couldn’t be a Puerto Rican militant in New York without having something to say about what was happening on the island. It’s sobering to realise how few minority radicals were attracted to Trotskyism, which after all is supposed to be the permanent revolution tendency and has an impressively sophisticated theoretical apparatus for dealing with racism and imperialism.

The second is the question of democracy. Let’s take the Black Panthers, who get cut a lot of slack in retrospect because of their cool image. You can talk about the various failings of the Panthers in terms of, say, the primitiveness of their politics, or their backward attitudes towards women, or how the movement became vulnerable to an influx of criminal elements. Most of the Panthers’ internal failings could have been dealt with had they been a democratic movement, but they weren’t. The internal regime of the BPP was one of total military centralism, combined with a compulsory personality cult of “Supreme Servant of the People” Huey Newton. Weirdly enough, although the more orthodox Maoist and neo-Stalinist groups continued to uphold the monolithic party as an ideal, their record in this respect was actually much better than that of the Panthers.

Finally, we have a history on the left of clever white blokes pontificating about whether or not minorities have the right to self-organise. This is really a moot point, not to say an entirely counter-productive discussion. History teaches us that minorities have a habit of self-organising without bothering to ask the permission of clever white blokes. That’s how it works in the real world, and that’s how it should be.

There are some rather transparent parallels for the present day, but I’ll leave them to yourselves for the time being.

Morticia: What’s closer in this world than a boy and his mother?

Pugsley: A boy and his octopus?

Nick Cohen these days has a barn door quality about him, which is sad for those of us who remember when he was one of the sharpest critics of the pretentions of Blairism. Even so, I continue to be astonished by his heroic ability to miss the point.

Or, in this case, to meander away from the point. Nick is dealing with the American election, and specifically the appeal of Irish-American candidate Barack O’Bama. Barack leaves the Brits cold, so Nick tells us. At least those Brits Nick has been talking to. Or possibly just Nick. Now, Nick has a potentially good point in dealing with O’Bama’s media coverage and what that says about race and class, but then he meanders away off into a parallel universe.

This has already been done by Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber, and followed up at Aaro Watch, but an article that crams so many non sequiturs into such a short space is worth a look. Nick has a go at “conservative anti-Americanism”, but thankfully doesn’t expand on that. His thoughts on the subject will be familiar to those of us who have read the chapter of What’s Left? where Nick demonstrates that, er, Douglas Hurd and Noam Chomsky are co-thinkers.

Anyway, Nick tells us that support for Hillary Clinton among some British politicians is an index of anti-Americanism. He also reckons that enthusiasm for O’Bama in Europe is an index of anti-Americanism. Maybe it’s just me, but I get the sense that Nick is suggesting the only way to avoid the trap of anti-Americanism is to support McCain’s Chips. If so, why doesn’t he say so?

Actually, there seems to be some coalescing of the Decent Left around McCain. I expect that to continue as the election approaches. I confidently predict that Oliver Kampf will come out for McCain if he hasn’t already, thus maintaining his unbroken record of supporting the most rightwing candidate in every foreign election he’s blogged about. Another man to watch is our friend Marko, who may find he has an affinity for McCain’s tough stance against the threat to the Free World posed by, er, South Ossetia. And Alan (Not The Minister) Johnson, as a devoted aficionado of the late Max Shachtman, might fancy a go at recreating one of Max’s more arresting initiatives, Socialists For Nixon.

But really, if you’re a pro-war liberal, the US election should provide an embarrassment of riches. Okay, O’Bama may have blotted his copybook over Iraq, but he does have some other points going for him. He’s very keen indeed on the war in Afghanistan. And, when it came to appointing his foreign policy gurus, the first people he turned to were the professional Russophobe Zbigniew Brzezinski and the (now sadly departed) professional Serbophobe Samantha Power, both of whom should have reassured muscular liberals.

As for Hillary, she has Mr Bill’s record of humanitarian bombing in the Balkans to fall back on, and she’s been flagging up her support for “free Kosova”. She has a record of extreme bellicosity on the Middle East. She’s been very close indeed to the Israel lobby. But for some reason, the Decents seem not to like her very much. Maybe they’re taking their lead from the Dude, or maybe it’s just all those Republican blogs they read.

So, there you have it. If you’re not anti-American, the only option is to row in behind the most bellicose presidential candidate in recent memory. Hmm. Really, why don’t the Decent Left stop pretending to be the authentic representatives of progressive thought, and just admit they’ve moved to the right?

As for Nick, who I like a good deal and whose incisive writing I miss, maybe he should ponder whether he really wants to be the second coming of Norman Podhoretz.

Rud eile: This excellent discussion on Cedar Lounge may be of interest.

So, for those of us who don’t live in the United States, the big question about the US election is - what’s this going to mean for the rest of the world? Specifically, once the two oilmen are out of the White House, will this mean a more pacific international order?

Probably not, from the looks of things. On the Republican side we have John McCain, the hawk’s hawk, a man so bellicose he doesn’t think W has started enough wars. It’s one thing, of course, to promise to hunt down bin Laden. But this is the guy who led a Senatorial delegation all the way to Tskhinvali, which may not quite be the end of the earth but comes pretty close, just so he could demand that every square inch of South Ossetia be returned to Georgian rule, and no matter what the South Ossetians had to say on the matter. Those goldarn South Ossetians, y’see, just a little too keen on the Russkies.

Surely the Democrats must be miles better? Well, you would hope so, but then we have the Clinton family running, and we know how peace-loving Mr Bill’s regime was. Just to remind us, back in Iowa Hillary was flanked by prize gargoyles Wesley Clark and Madeleine Albright. This raises the prospect of yet more comic-opera interventions in the Balkans. If Hillary starts making cryptic references to Novi Pazar or Dobruja, it’s probably time to run for cover. And then of course there was her demand for US forces in Iraq to overthrow the, er, puppet government because it was showing signs of independence - which actually put her to the right of the Bush administration.

Then again, we do have a fresh face in the person of Irish-American candidate Barack O’Bama. O’Bama may be a political rookie, but he’s smart enough to know that the war in Iraq is extremely unpopular. And despite mixed messages on foreign policy generally, Barack’s patented brand of stump poetry has convinced lots of folks that he’s the man to heal the division between America and the rest of the world.

He does on the other hand tend to look a bit lost when it comes to the big wide world out there. But despair ye not! Barack has gone and got himself a foreign policy guru. You’ll never guess who it is.

Natalie: Go on, then. I am agog to learn.

Me: Zbigniew Brzezinski!

Natalie: Gesundheit.

Me: Come on, you remember Zbigniew Brzezinski. The Afghanistan guy. Not Tom Hanks, the other one.

Natalie: Oh, that guy. I thought he was dead.

Well, apparently not. And, if Barack is short of ideas, old Zbigniew is just full of good ideas. Most famously, he was the guy who thought it was a good idea to recruit a bunch of mad Wahhabis, arm them to the teeth, and send them to Afghanistan to fight the Russians. That couldn’t possibly have anything but good consequences for the American people.

Or, then again, there was Zbigniew’s contribution to peace in Cambodia. You would have thought that by 1979 the Cambodian people had suffered enough. But no, they had to be punished further, because behind the National Salvation Front government stood Vietnam, the country that had so recently humiliated the Empire, and behind Vietnam stood The Bear. And so it was that we got that great triumph of democratic geopolitics, the US’s long-running diplomatic support for Pol Pot.

Of course, Zbigniew couldn’t do that openly. He outsourced the dirty work to China. Let Zbigniew explain:

I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot…Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.

Now isn’t that the sort of change we can all believe in?

Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!

And to return to the US elections, a couple of links that readers may find interesting. I’ve long found CounterPunch to be invaluable for following American politics, so that was the first place I turned when looking to find out about the Ron Paul candidacy, and how a slice of the American left finds itself supporting a Republican, and an anti-abortion, anti-gay, evolution-denying Texas Republican at that. Of course Ron may be bonkers, but he does have his principles. This article from Sherry Wolf is as good a leftist analysis as I’ve come across.

Meanwhile, over at the compulsively readable antiwar.com, the always trenchant Justin Raimondo tells it like it is about John McCain and the War Party. Enjoy!

Notwithstanding the results from New Hampshire, I guess the man of the moment is Irish-American candidate Barack O’Bama. I hate to be cynical - all right, I don’t - but I have to ask this. Is it just me, or does Barack bear a remarkable resemblance to Chauncey Gardiner in Being There? Except that he might actually be blander.

It seems extraordinary to me that you can get this far by just saying “change” a lot. On the other hand, lots of American punters seem to like that kind of thing. Remember that Arnold got to be Governor of California by waving a broom around and declaiming “I vill clean haus”.

It helps, of course, that O’Bama’s family background (barring the obligatory Irish link) isn’t African-American but African, and his links to the ghetto are tenuous to say the least. He doesn’t have that anger that suburbanites seem to find so offputting. In fact, he appears to be joining Will Smith and Tiger Woods in that select category of black men who don’t scare white Americans.

No, he doesn’t really inspire me, although he is performing a service by putting the skids under the Holy Clintons.

Meanwhile on the Republican side, it’s not surprising that religion is looming large. You have Mitt Romney, a competent administrator and a centrist Republican with a record of appealing to Democrats. Yet the man is hobbled by his faith, which involves believing that the angel Moroni helped Joseph Smith write the Book of Mormon. To much of the Republican base, that seems downright weird, and they prefer the surer ground of Mike Huckabee, who just believes that God created the world in seven days.

I can almost hear Dawkins tearing his hair out.

Any readers’ captions would be most welcome.

And so Big Ian and Marty are off on their grand tour of the States to sing the praises of the New Dispensation and to promote Norn Iron as a site for inward investment. Well, they do say travel broadens the mind. Certainly, since the Smithsonian’s Norn Iron exhibition earlier this year, when over half of the entire Executive decamped to Washington, you can almost taste the sweetness and light.

Our joint presidency have so far been doing New York. They’ve been chumming about with Bloomberg, who has hinted he may reciprocate with a visit to the City That Never Wakes Up. They got to go to the opening of the NYSE and make speeches – they didn’t actually get to ring the famous bell, but they did get to ring the Nasdaq bell. Which, to my mind, is a bit like being the celebrity guest on the Lotto draw and only getting to press the button for the Thunderball.

But never mind. Here’s something to silence all those cynics who keep asking where the investment is that’s promised with each of these Stateside trips. For Big Ian has a cunning plan to relieve the toiling masses of North Antrim. You know that big fuck-off golf resort Donald Trump was going to build in Scotland? The one that’s just got the bum’s rush from Aberdeenshire council for being a giant eyesore stuck in the middle of an area of outstanding natural beauty? Well, Big Ian has been lobbying the Donald to relocate his folie de grandeur from Aberdeenshire to Antrim.

Here’s a thought. Why not get Seymour Sweeney to build it?

I was going to write something about Pat Rabbitte falling on his sword, but WorldbyStorm has that well covered, so instead we’ll consider all this crack about Nouri al-Maliki, prime minister of the Iraqi occupation government. Over the last couple of days various Democratic bigwigs in Washington, with Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) leading the charge, have been calling for the overthrow of Maliki and his replacement with – well, they aren’t too sure, but they have decided Maliki is not fit for purpose and want some other numpty to be appointed in his place. President W, on the other hand, is chary of overthrowing the elected government in Baghdad, which might strike you as being a bit ironic from the man who invaded the country in the first place.

It tells you a little something about the Democratic Party. One is that the Dems are the graveyard of the American radical’s hopes – take somewhere like New York, a heavily Democratic state where 85% of Democrats are against the war, and who do they get for senator? It’s true that Hillary has positioned herself as critical of the war’s conduct, but that must be down to the war’s enormous unpopularity, with even W’s own Republicans fracturing on the issue, and Irish-American candidate Barack O’Bama making headway with the Dems. But the call for Maliki’s ouster demonstrates that there are other forces at work as well.

There is a lot of guff talked about the influence of the neocon ideologues on the Bush administration’s Middle East policy, not least by people like the Dude who should really know better. Any sway the neocons have had results from them being patronised (in a very real sense) by nationalistic militarists like Cheney and Rumsfeld, who saw the utility of having some tame intellectuals on board. Until quite recently, most of these guys were registered Democrats, and Kissingerian realpolitik still cuts a lot of ice with the Bush White House. It’s a reasonable assumption that Bushite policy in the Middle East derives rather little from Wolfowitz’s fond dreams of remaking the region as a haven of democracy, and rather more from an unideological mixture of projection of force, smiting the enemies of America and, not least, a smash-and-grab raid on Iraq’s oil reserves. Maliki is fine by George, as long as he doesn’t become an outright liability. And then the Republicans, who actually have to wage this unwinnable war, may well be considering the outcome from dismissing someone they’ve been trying to build up as an elected leader.

The Dems’ beef against Maliki has been running since shortly after his election, and has a lot to do with his critical remarks towards Israel, which have been extremely mild considering his electoral base. The Israeli government is also a little twitchy about the fact that overthrowing Saddam – a known known, in Rumsfeld terminology – and introducing elections has resulted not in the friendly regime they were promised, but a distinctly pro-Iranian regime. The differences between the parties in the US are of course more a matter of degree than quality, but the Dems are notable for being much more in thrall to the Israel lobby – due not least to electoral arithmetic in key states, but also to a fair whack of campaign money (Hillary, of course, has by far the most Israel money in her warchest of any presidential candidate). The Republicans, on the other hand, still have a considerable wing that adheres to the old James Baker III maxim – “Fuck the Jews. They don’t vote for us anyway.”

So how is this going to pan out? The Bush administration seems to have serious trouble holding on to its Iraqi prime ministers, and talk of the new Iraqi sovereign democracy starts to look seriously hollow when the occupation forces can just dismiss elected officials. But it’s an interesting little conundrum. W probably has more ability to do stuff in Iraq than he does at home these days, so it all comes down to what the Emperor decides to do. As for the Dems, for all their striking poses around the war, they still haven’t come close to pushing Bush into doing anything he doesn’t want to do. Will they ever?

A thousand thanks to the reader who emailed me this New York Observer story about Jack Barnes, Maximum Leader of the US Socialist Workers Party.

Communists Capitalize on Village — Get $1.87 M. for Loft
by Max Abelson

If bow-tied, cigar-mouthed Republicans can have nice seven-digit, six-room co-ops, don’t a few old Manhattan communists deserve multi-million-dollar real estate, too?

A two-bedroom loft at 380 West 12th Street, a 109-year-old building on a cobblestone block by the Hudson River, was sold by American socialist leaders Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters. Their buyers, Sony BMG Music Entertainment vice president Ole Obermann and his fiancée, Stephanie Jakubiak, paid $1,872,500.

“I don’t want to hurt the sellers’ feelings at all, but they definitely had a funky style in terms of how they did the apartment,” said Mr. Obermann. That means there are sliding stained-glass doors, plus a wall of bookshelves. (Ms. Waters is the president of publishing house Pathfinder Press, which publishes Marx and Trotsky, and Mr. Barnes, too.)

“Personally, our tastes are different and we’ll probably do something different,” the buyer said. “It will be open, airy, simple, whereas when it was done 15 years ago there was a lot of light-colored wood shelving.” He’s adding six or so wireless speakers, “a nice music system.”

Edward Ferris of Brown Harris Stevens was the listing broker.

It isn’t clear when Mr. Barnes and Ms. Waters bought the place or how much they paid, but city records date back to 1993, when apartments were massively cheaper.

Unlike most people in six-room lofts, Mr. Barnes once met with Kim Il-sung, the late North Korean president. The leader “conversed with the guests in a cordial and friendly atmosphere and arranged a lunch for them,” a report published by the BBC in 1990 said. “US Socialist Workers’ Party, led by its National Secretary Jack Barnes… presented him with a gift.”

So what is the couple like? “We only met Mary-Alice, and she was incredibly friendly, interesting, had a nice warm way about her, seemed like a very nice woman,” Mr. Obermann said. “She mentioned she really liked to cook, they would have friends over—it’s like a social space.”

Nice one Jack! I should point out that I’m not a hairshirt socialist. If Jack Barnes wants to own a Manhattan apartment, or even make a profit selling one, that’s fine by me.

That’s not to say that there is no issue here. The late Jim Cannon, whom Jack professes to follow, used to be very hot on the idea of communist leaders setting an example for the rank and file. So there is, and let’s be kind here, an itty bitty tension between leading a group that fetishises “footloose revolutionaries” and discourages comrades from owning property, and dabbling in the property market yourself.

Then again, maybe Jack is onto something. After all, this is the guy who was perspicacious enough to dump Trotskyism for Stalinism just as the latter entered its period of terminal decline. Perhaps Jack’s latest wheeze is the Sarah Beeny road to socialism.

 More on this from Louis.

No, I’m not doing the Scottish elections. Frank’s piece on Cedar Lounge pretty much says what I wanted to say, and there’s very little I could add to it. For some background, these two articles from the Irish Socialist Network and Socialist Democracy, representing the more thoughtful end of Irish leftism, may be of interest.

But there have been a few amusing snippets over the last day or two, starting with this story from the Beeb about the Ulster Scots hotline that took zero calls in three years. This boondoggle derives directly from the parity of esteem provisions of the GFA, which stipulates that promotion of Ulster Scots, on a par with Gaeilge, will build confidence amongst the Prods. Actually, most Prods find the thing a bit of an embarrassment. Even OUP peer Lord Laird (or should that be Laird Laird?), former Heid-Yin of the Ulster-Scotch Heirskip Cooncil, reckons the thing is a waste of money. Although, unsurprisingly, he still begrudges any public cash being spent on Irish. [Update: As has been helpfully pointed out in the comments below, this story was first broken by the Belfast Telegraph, having got the facts under FOIA. As we believe in giving credit where it's due, have a look at the original story here.]

A tiny article appears in a sidebar in the Irish News on the introduction of yet more repressive legislation, the purpose of which is obscure since we’re supposed to be at peace now. This latest measure, which applies only to the North, allows the peelers to seize computers belonging to journalists who won’t divulge their sources. One might refer to it as the Ed Moloney Order. Normalisation, forsooth!

Irate small businesspeople from Protestant areas phoning Talk Back, wondering if the UVF’s historic statement means they can get away with not ponying up next week’s protection money.

Finally, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack O’Bama turns out to have Irish heritage, as is traditional for prospective US presidents, seemingly being a Kearney from Offaly. I could have sworn his family was from Kenya, but there you go.

The title, as anyone from Ballymena could tell you, is the negative of “Scots wha hae”.