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NEWS & LETTERS, March 2002
READERS' VIEWS
FIGHTING U.S.'S
NEW WORLD ORDER Because Marxist-Humanism has
from its beginnings been free from even a vestige of Stalinism, it was able to
critique U.S. imperialism during the Cold War without any sort of
rationalization for the Stalinist counter-revolution that occurred within the
revolution. It was able to project an alternative vision of new forms of human
social relations without tripping into the false dilemma of the bipolar world
that vanished in 1991. Yet in the decade since, the
Left has continued to be hamstrung by a binary logic. Anti-imperialists and
prominent voices in the anti-globalization movement somehow feel compelled to
dismiss serious criticisms of a Milosevic, Hussein, or in the most bizarre
example, even a Taliban militia. They seem unable to achieve a higher viewpoint
of what to be for and not only against. The editorial "After
Afghanistan, What?" (January-February 2002 N&L) can foresee how
escalating the "war" by sustaining a permanent war economy and the
national security state that goes along with it, will create more terror and
terrorists, the opposite of the Bush administration's supposed intentions. We
don't need to apologize for the depredations of Islamic fundamentalism any more
than for Christian fundamentalism in order to criticize the new world order of
U.S.-dominated global capitalism. Teacher The lead article in the
January-February issue did a fine job describing the new perils facing
immigrants under the oppressive measures taken by the Bush administration under
the guise of "fighting terrorism." However, I think the report would
have been strengthened by specific reference to the "Patriot's Bill"
rammed through Congress that threw out many of the legal rights immigrants had
before the September attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Old Radical Fully 212 years of the orderly
constitutional transfer of power were trashed in the "coup by gavel"
that put in power the regime we now have in the White House. Its first major
fascist measure was the "USA Patriot Act of 2001" which is 342 pages
long and is in reality a refurbished version of the "Protective Custody
Law" of Nazi Germany, the law that started the concentration camps. We
already have an occupied concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay. But other
unoccupied ones exist at undisclosed locations since the Reagan administration,
ready to confine people in case of "massive civil unrest." Worried The large number of protesters
at the World Economic Forum who turned out despite a huge police force,
barricaded streets, helicopters and media attacks was encouraging. I believe
opposition will continue to grow as the repression deepens. I see strikes and
threats of strike already, from airline workers to teachers in Detroit.
Capitalism's gravediggers are alive and kicking. Ready to dig I usually enjoy watching the
Olympics, but the jingoism this year was just too much. When commentator Bob
Costas referred to the U.S. as the "homeland," it reminded me of
Hitler and I almost threw up. No watching KING'S LEGACY John Alan's column in the last
issue raised the provocative question of who will carry on Martin Luther King's
legacy. The idea of freedom doesn't belong to any specific time or place. Anyone
can borrow from anyone freely. The ideas of the Civil Rights Movement were
powerful beyond the U.S. At the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott there was
also the Hungarian Revolution. A continuity appeared decades later in Tiananmen
Square when the Chinese students sang "We shall overcome." The
universality of the idea is there. The question of the struggle for freedom in
our everyday lives is what the fetish of "violence vs. non-violence"
overlays. Asian worker John Alan's column made me
think of the many liberation theologians who try to make a relation between
religion and theology. Many of the most active women in prison are very
religious, trying to draw strength from their beliefs, but it can't stop there.
Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses, but he also called it the soul
of the soulless world and distinguished between the religion of the oppressed
and the oppressor. The difference between a theologian who is revolutionary and
one who's not, is seen in whether you're told to wait for your reward in heaven
or to try to realize it on earth. Support activist 'LIFE AND DEBT': A REVIEW "Life and Debt" is a
movie about the economic conditions affecting present-day Jamaicans and how the
World Trade Organization and the IMF loans drive the country deeper into debt
and intensify the repression of the workers. Imported powdered milk undersells
local milk producers and drives them out of business. England stops buying
bananas under pressure from Western banana corporations. Local Black women lose
their jobs in the sweatshop when they protest their conditions and contractors
respond by importing busloads of Chinese women laborers. The movie emphasizes the
contrast between the affluence of Western white tourists and their insulation
from and ignorance of the massive poverty of the Black Jamaicans. What the movie
doesn't show is that, though the local Jamaican companies producing cattle,
bananas, milk, coffee, etc. were profitable even after the British colonizers
left in 1947, the people weren't freed from poverty. Nothing fundamental changed
in the system of production. Workers were still doing the physical labor under
the rules of the bosses who controlled the productive process. The movie ended
with a few local women growing their own food on a small plot of land. Basho ENRONIZING THE U.S. The SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
recently juxtaposed pictures of the Enron officials taking the fifth and the
cases of hundreds of people locked up for 25 years to life for shoplifting
(under the three strikes law). It showed the gulag of the justice system out to
discipline labor. There is an army of people focusing on bringing labor under
the heel of capital while Enron is presented as "just" a financial
market scandal. The mechanism of the state as an extension of capitalism
recognizes freedom only for capital. R.B. Sen. Trent Lott responded to
questions concerning Cheney's refusal to disclose information about the Energy
Taskforce meetings with Enron executives by claiming, "If we require these
kinds of meetings to be open, that would put a chilling effect on input by
industry." It put new meaning to what Sen. Daschle introduced into the
American lexicon when he said he would "not allow the Bush administration
to enronize the U.S. economy." Daschle was only referring to the tendency
to make economic projections based on mirages. But increasingly to "enronize"
is beginning to signify a shadow government "behind closed doors,"
based on deception and secrecy and flouting U.S. legal and constitutional
requirements. Observer A NEW SLAVE TRADE? Moving prisoners around at the
drop of a hat as prisons in the U.S. do is tantamount to the slave trade. That
is something that began with the process of private prisons. Most disturbing of
all is that there seems no rhyme or reason behind how the decisions are made of
who moves and who is allowed to remain. Since 1983 I have been moved to 11
different facilities in three different states. The longest I have been in any
facility has been five, four and three years. The rest of the time I have spent
anywhere from a year to a month and a half somewhere before being moved again. Prisoner on the move I have been looking everywhere,
including surfing the internet, looking for "jobs for felons" but
there is nothing, Nothing, NOTHING. I know that God is supposed to be a
forgiving God but where are the jobs, so you can move on with your life? Unemployed felon THE HOMELESS The article on the homeless
youth in the last issue counters statements in a PBS series on the brain. They
examined the "teenage brain" and "scientifically" concluded
that young people are physically incapable of making mature judgments. But
N&L showed these are very capable individuals who care very much about their
lives. Not homeless I happily received a copy of
N&L that was distributed at a meeting in Berkeley and had to tell you how
much appreciated reading the article by Sonia Bergonzi about the homeless youth
holding a vigil in Chicago. I am a disabled 54-year-old woman living at poverty
level and am a survivor of the kind of sexual exploitation Sonia wrote about.
That article made me feel more sane. New supporter I cannot forget the article I
read in the LOS ANGELES TIMES reporting that the rate of homelessness had shot
up 80% during the past year. What was unforgettable was the story it told of a
51-year-old woman who was single, lived alone, and for the last five years had
cleaned rooms in a downtown Cleveland hotel. She had worked her way up to
earning $8 an hour plus benefits until the hotel's business collapsed after
September 11, and she was laid off. To buy groceries she had sold all the
belongings she could but had not been able to pay her rent after November. When
she admitted in court she could still not pay it, the magistrate gave her ten
days to vacate the premises. The article described her eyes filling with tears
as she left the courtroom saying, "I'm going to have to get a lot of
quarters because I'll have to call a lot of shelters." What makes the story
unforgettable is the "statistic" that says this kind of story has
"shot up 80% during the past year." No Statistician SEGREGATION IN 2002 The Detroit News recently ran a
series on segregation and found that both Blacks and whites are
"comfortable" with segregation. However, on a local TV talk show, Dr.
Shirley Stancato, Director of New Detroit, a non-profit founded after the 1967
rebellion, said that wrong questions had been asked. She said people might agree
with a statement such as "I am comfortable where I live, or in my
house," but what if they were asked, "Are you comfortable with the
choices you have about where you can live?" You have to dig below the
surface to get to real answers. S. Van Gelder HEGEL AND THE DIALECTIC The "In Memoriam to Wang
Ruoshui" (N&L, January-February 2002) says he got excited about Raya
Dunayevskaya's critique of Lenin's comment that Hegel's "Absolute
Idea" equaled "Objective Truth." Wang's own critique of Lenin was
that Lenin only got as far as objectivity but not the unity of subjectivity and
objectivity. In other words, Lenin stopped at the identity of opposites as the
dialectic principle. But the real problem today is how to transcend opposites
that are identical. Dunayevskaya's view of the PHENOMENOLOGY points to just
that. Nobody else thought to say that Hegel's Preface to that work
is a continuation of his chapter on Absolute Knowledge or that an
actively engaged philosophy can make the difference between the long night and
the breaking of the dawn, because that is what the future needs. People are drawn to different
aspects of the dialectic. Marcuse, for example, was also drawn to the identity
of opposites. But the departure for our age is not that, but seeing absolute
negativity as new beginning. Marxist-Humanist FREE SPEECH VICTORY Readers of N&L should know
about a victory for pluralism and free speech which was won when the Union for
Radical Political Economics (URPE) retracted a false charge made against Andrew
Kliman and lifted a publishing ban imposed on him. URPE had falsely charged that
Kliman violated professional ethics by submitting a paper to another journal
while it was still under review by them and banned all further articles authored
by him. In its retraction (see
www.urpe.org/rrpehome.html) URPE accepts that the paper was no longer under
review when it was submitted elsewhere. Although the fundamental issue of
pluralism remains unresolved, the retraction removes a decisive obstacle to
genuine scholarly debate around the substantive question of Marx's Value Theory
which has been raised by Kliman. Alan Freeman FOR WOMEN'S LIBERATION, MARCH
2002 An enthusiastic overflow crowd
joined an array of talented local musicians to shout "you are not
alone" to the video camera at the conclusion of an inspiring benefit
concert for Revolutionary Association for the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)
organized by Detroit-area composer/musician Mark Gottlieb. The music was
punctuated by short readings and commentary about the history and struggles of
RAWA. In a concert with no low points, the high point was a string quartet
composed by Gottlieb which was played to a reading of "I'll Never
Return," a poem written by RAWA founder Meena before she was assassinated
by Islamic fundamentalists at the age of 30 in 1987. Mark told the audience that
he had known of RAWA and had intended to send a donation but never got around to
it. After September 11 he saw a film in which fundamentalist men were beating
the faces of Afghan women protesters "and smiling, they liked it."
That was when he had decided to organize the benefit concert. Anyone interested
in more information can visit www.gott.musik.com. Women's Liberationist Yael Dean, as the speaker who
opened a "Women Who Shook the Jewish World" series in Northern
California, had been asked to discuss the status of women in Israel. That she
did, but not without spending at least half of her talk railing against the
Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. She is a Labor Knesset member
whose views put her at the extreme left of her party. She insisted that you
cannot believe in the concept of a "Greater Israel" and be a feminist
at the same time, that you cannot have a double standard when it comes to basic
human rights. The audience was quietly receptive. Women's Liberationist A full week after the letter
from the soldiers who refused to serve in the occupied territories was
published, their act was still all over the media in Israel. An incredible
one-third of Israelis expressed support and several support groups have sprung
up. One is by disabled army veterans. Another is by the wives of reserve
soldiers who are circulating a petition that says in part, "We are not
willing to be pawns of a government of occupation and oppression, which corrupts
the values of our loved ones and our nation...while our families pay the
price." At the same time, vigils of
Women in Black and others are growing all over Israel. There are now 18 regular
anti-occupation vigils throughout Israel, about half of them Women in Black. Gila Svirsky FIGHTING AN ATTACK ON FREEDOM
OF EXPRESSION Marxist.com was the victim of a deliberate act of politically motivated aggression when our web server was hacked into by unidentified individuals in January with the clear intention of destroying our site. As a result of the sabotage a number of web sites were deleted, including "In Defense of Marxism," "Socialist Appeal," "Socialist Labor" and "Trotsky year 2001." It was not a random act of vandalism. Other non-political sites hosted by the same server were not touched. They clearly wanted to shut us up. Our work has obtained wide
recognition, even from people who would not consider themselves Marxists, as
shown by the increasing number of visits to our site and the correspondence
received from all over the world. A few dedicated collaborators
have worked day and night to get the web site up and running again. We have
recovered practically all the lost material and will soon be running a normal
service again. We depend exclusively on the support of our readers and friends
to continue our work and appeal for your help. Please pass this appeal on to all
those interested in fighting against this attack on the most basic principle of
free speech and democracy. Alan Woods MUMIA ABU-JAMAL AND THE DEATH
PENALTY Since the judge threw out the
death penalty for Mumia his sentence has most likely been relegated to life
imprisonment. Will the focus die out now that death is off the table? Or does it
mean we will now start looking at the whole picture? Although the death penalty
is a big issue to the community—and of course, to those sentenced to
die—there are many more lifers in our prisons than those on death row. The
fickleness of liberal attitudes when they have a "cause" is widely
discussed among prisoners. It is great that Mumia has gained the reprieve from
an early death but his case has always been simply the tip of a very large, very
convoluted, very repressive iceberg. Political prisoner When a Giant food store in
Pennsylvania placed an ad in the window: "In honor of Black History
Month—Fried Chicken on Sale" an African-American woman called the NAACP
and now they are on the scene. My problem with this situation is that they will
not go far enough for a good solution. Here is mine: since the state of
Pennsylvania had been planning to "fry" Brother Mumia Abu-Jamal with a
"hot needle" of chemicals you couldn't give to a chicken without being
fined or arrested, I suggest that the Giant food chain be made to fund freeing
all political prisoners, starting with Mumia. Meanwhile, since the NAACP is
preparing for their National Awards dinner with the main honoree to be
Condoleezza Rice, I have these questions: Does Ms. Rice have a membership in the
NAACP? What about the action she took against letting Secretary of State Colin
Powell go to the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa? The
NAACP should change its name to National Association for the Advancement of
Certain People. "No frying of Brother Mumia Abu-Jamal" should be the
chant heard inside and outside the dinner area. George Wilfrid Smith Jr. WHO READS N&L? A fellow worker told me about
N&L at the IWW convention in 1979 and I figured I couldn't go far wrong for
the $1 a sub cost then. I have been a subscriber ever since and can't imagine
life without it. I appreciate the way you look for the revolutionary potential
in wide-ranging acts of revolt. Your conception that the revolt of the most
oppressed strata of society is the most socially advanced movement of our time
has broadened and deepened my understanding of world events. Two Wobblies I consider myself a green
anarchist (not of the neo-primitivist sort) but I am always open to other ideas
and viewpoints. The only truly important goal is liberty and equality for all,
regardless of personal labels. New Reader It meant so much to me when I
started seeing articles about our Defense Depot work in N&L. This is an
international paper and I knew my message was getting out all over the world. I
travel a lot and meet people who know about our struggle because of this paper.
One of my relatives found an article I wrote in N&L and wanted to know:
"How did you manage to get into a paper in Chicago?" Defense Depot activist NEWS & LETTERS and Marxist-Humanist literature is available at a new radical bookstore in Indianapolis's Fountain Square neighborhood. Visit SOLIDARITY BOOKS, 860 Virginia Ave. Call (317) 252-4842 for hours and information. |
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