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NEWS & LETTERS, January-February 2005

Readers' Views

STATE OF THE WORLD AS WE START 2005

The earthquake that has displaced millions and killed still uncounted thousands is an indicator of the powerful ecological and environmental issues that need to be faced. In many parts of the world, access to clean air or even water creates great misery for humanity. Against the challenges faced by humanity, the priorities of "anti-terrorism" seem more a means of avoiding issues and justifying increasing authoritarian rule. An alternative or alternatives need to be presented. Unfortunately there has been no adequate projection of one by the anti-war movement, the environmentalists, or the anti-capitalists. Rather, belief-based systems of fate or religion have been re-enforced.

A casual observation of the world's political and economic systems shows them to be both buckling and straining. There is an over-concentration on the passive act of voting rather than on demanding freedom of expression or labor rights or even the right of assembly. It has resulted in the continual encroachment into the life of the citizen under the guise of safety or security.

--P. Duffy, London

* * *

The dictionary defines fanatic as inspired by a deity, marked by excessive enthusiasm and intense uncritical devotion.

Today we live in an age of fanaticism. In Iraq, the fanatic Bush meets the fanatical terrorists, a perfect fit. In between these two monsters, tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans and other nationalities have had their lives extinguished or permanently mangled.

The capitalist system under which we live resembles nothing less than a ferocious wild animal, such as a lion or tiger or bear, ready to pounce on and tear to shreds anything it sees as prey. But the comparison is not fair to the animals, which act only out of an instinct for survival, whereas the rapacious ruling class acts on conscious, greedy, calculating decision. Ensuring the survival of the people on this earth requires doing to the capitalists what they have dealt to the noble creatures of the wild places. That is, we must bring the corrupt capitalist system itself to extinction.

--Ex-postal worker, Battle Creek, Michigan

* * *

I thought of Malcolm X's infamous "chickens will come home to roost" statement and the Vietnam War "pacification" strategy when I read about a judge's order, at the request of city officials, to evict ALL residents of a Los Angeles apartment complex because of gang activity. It seems as though Falluja has come to the U.S. and that our government and leaders know of no other way to save a neighborhood other than to destroy it. What insanity. The so-called gang members (insurgents?) will simply move to another neighborhood and dozens of innocent families will incur hardships all because of the failures of our racist, capitalist society.

--Angry citizen, California

* * *

I think we need a new kind of pledge of allegiance, moving past nationalism to worldism, or better put, humanism. It would show which side you are on and shine some light into the shadows to expose the enemies and fence-sitters on the question of proletarian liberation. It should be something people can hold onto and not be over-intellectualized. Simple principles of worldism to gain wide-spread support. (Look what 10 rules did for Christianity.)

--Sid Rasmussen, Nebraska

* * *

I recommend renting the DVD of "The Quiet American" and checking out some of the discussions and reviews written around 1956 of Graham Greene's novel of that name, and the commentaries anticipating the about-to-be-launched disastrous American intervention in Vietnam. I could have sworn I thought they were discussing G.W. Bush and his overly self-confident folly in Iraq some 50 years later. How some things never change. A case of bad history repeating itself.

--Video viewer, California

* * *

I've heard that a number of voting rights activists in Ohio were wearing orange ribbons which commentators said were chosen to remember Florida, where the wishes of the voters were ignored in order to put the Governor's brother in the White House. But orange-ribboned Ohio activists told a different story. They said they picked up the color from TV coverage of the Ukrainian election where a new election was ordered. They were saying that was what was needed here.

--Angry voter, Illinois

* * *

Is anyone aware that AIDS is the leading cause of death for African-American females between the ages of 25 and 34--and the second leading cause of death for African-American males of that same age group? Does anyone care that African-Americans and Latinos account for over 70% of newly diagnosed AIDS cases? When it was first diagnosed 25 years ago, it was seen as a "gay" disease and many thought they could ignore it. Today we are seeing the second generation of AIDS, which disproportionately affects the young, the poor and the disenfranchised. For a while AIDS cases dropped in Chicago, but now they are on the rise again. Those who would like to know how to help improve the lives of those affected by this epidemic can contact the AIDS Foundation of Chicago at 411 South Wells, Suite 300, Chicago, IL 60607-3924 or at www.aidschicago.org.

--Mark Ishaug, Executive Director, Chicago

* * *

Right after the announcement that "Preacher" Killen is to be retried for the murder of the civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi in 1964, I saw an interview with Mrs. Goodman who said she believed justice would now be done. Ben Chaney, James' younger brother, felt that it should be handled differently and that justice would not be done. Without faulting her, I felt she was thinking in a strictly one-to-one relationship about the murder of her son, while Ben Chaney was thinking about the whole context of life for Black people in Mississippi to this day, and the power and economic relationships underlying the events of 1964, 40 years later.

--Susan VanGelder, Detroit

* * *

For anyone who doesn't think that race matters, I'd like to share what doctors at the National Institute of Health wrote on this in the JOURANL OF HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY: "Our analyses document that race matters a lot in terms of health. Moreover, the sources of racial disparities are not unknown, individual or obscure. They can be traced to inequalities that have been created and maintained by the economic, legal and political structures of society. These systems, and not individual beliefs and behavior, are the fundamental causes of racial and socioeconomic inequalities in health. Eliminating these disparities will thus require changes in the fundamental social systems in society." I couldn't say it better myself.

--Ready for Changes, Chicago

SCIENCE AND CAPITALISM

Raha's essay in the October N&L on "Sham neutrality of science born of capitalism" took me by surprise. How could he not separate science from capitalism, or see capitalist science as molded by the needs of capitalism? I believe that the most irresponsible act ever committed by any individual or group was the creation and detonation of the first atomic bomb, not only because of its destructive power, but because these scientists weren't sure what would happen when the first atomic bomb was detonated. One of the scientists, Fermi, was taking bets that the detonation would ignite the atmosphere. Of course, we now know that wouldn't have happened, but at the time there was enough doubt that it should have prevented them from performing the detonation. I think the fact that the first atomic bomb was exploded, given the fact that there was a possibility of destroying civilization as we have known it, no matter how slight that possibility was, defines capitalist science.

--Worker-thinker, Colorado

IN TSUNAMI's AFTERMATH

I participated in the demonstration held on Jan. 3 by Achenese political refugees living on the East Coast, together with Indonesian students and a few U.S. supporters, to denounce Indonesia's resistance to aiding Acheh and its interference with international aid. It was heartbreaking to talk with those who have lost so many loved ones and to know that even the survivors will never have normal lives again. The Achenese are sure the Indonesian government is deliberately fumbling the aid in hopes that more people will die and Acheh will be too decimated ever to resist it again. They are calling this ethnic cleansing.

--Free Acheh supporter, New York

* * *

The director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Seattle, Dr. Eddie Bernard said that just a few buoys, like those scattered across the Northwest to detect earthquakes that might spawn a tsunami, could have done the job in the Indian Ocean. Scientists wanted to put two more there, including one near Indonesia, but the plan had not been funded. A mere half million dollars could have saved thousands of lives. When that is compared to the $1,500,000,000 the U.S. spends each day to fund the war machine, the only thing you can call the lack of funding for an inexpensive, low-tech early warning system is criminal negligence.

--Anti-war activist, Seattle

* * *

There are social as well as geologic reasons that the early warning system is in place in the Pacific Rim but not in Southeast Asia, or that geologists in Australia and Hawaii did not know how to contact the populations soon to be hit as "they were not part of any warning system." But it is not only on the response side that social processes play a role. One of THE NEW YORK TIMES' articles on delays in the Indonesian government's relief effort mentions that the only buildings that survived in Meulaboh on Acheh were the mosques, some well-constructed buildings, and the military station. The poor often are forced to huddle near the shore of the Indian Ocean and are thus more vulnerable to typhoons.

--Psychologist, New York

* * *

Right after we got news of the tidal wave Colin Powell was on TV talking of what a horrible disaster it was. Our ancestors would no doubt have wondered what they had done to anger the gods and cause this punishment. Most of us know better now. We also know that much of the tragedy could have been avoided with early warning devices. But so little is spent to help the impoverished and so much on weapons to protect the rulers that Powell's concern could only seem jaded and discredited when compared to his own part in the current slaughter in Iraq.

--Longtime socialist, Wisconsin

DIEGO GARCIA 

The year 2004 was rich in events for the campaign to close down the U.S. military base on Diego Garcia, to re-unite Diego with Mauritius, and to get compensation for the people forcibly removed in the 1960s and 1970s. No sooner did the idea of the Peace Flotilla to Diego Garcia get off the ground and receive support from the No U.S. Bases network than the effects of the movement began to be felt.

Our campaign contributed to the vast number of British citizens getting to know about the issue, despite their government's attempts to keep it all a secret. It was accomplished through the beautiful John Pilger film "Stealing a Nation." Now the British government has agreed to the Chagossians visiting Diego Garcia and the other islands in April 2005. At the same time, in Mauritius all the social, union and left political organizations have signed up to the Peace Flotilla declaration, and the No U.S. Bases network is preparing for an international conference against all military bases in the second half of 2005.

It is true that none of our goals has yet been achieved--the closing down of the base on Diego, full reparations and the right of return, as well as the re-unification of Mauritius, are all still to be won. But the precondition of making sure that many people know about the problem makes victory more possible. Thank you for all you have done to help us do that. Please tell your readers to visit our website <a href=www.lalitmauritius.com> www.lalitmauritius.com </a>.

--Lindsey Collen, for LALIT, Mauritius

EXCHANGE ON ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

From an exchange in the Chicago IndyMedia web site about an announcement for a meeting on Arafat's death sponsored by the Chicago News and Letters Committee:

How ironic that a project that supports "soft" Zionism--an oxymoron if there ever was one--is hosting a forum on the way forward for Palestine. NEWS & LETTERS has consistently supported the right of Israel to impose a settler-colonial state upon the Palestinians, and has been a vigorous voice from the so-called left in opposition to truly progressive solutions like a democratic secular state within the region.

--"Yikes" (an anonymous web poster), Chicago IndyMedia

* * *

How suspicious that anonymous poster "Yikes" makes an accusation about the position of NEWS & LETTERS without presenting any supporting evidence whatsoever? The truth is that "Yikes" blatantly misrepresents the position of NEWS & LETTERS on the topic of Israel and Palestine. NEWS & LETTERS has advocated the right of self-determination for both the Jewish and the Palestinian peoples for decades. Since the Six Day War, this has concretely meant support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. "Yike's" comment about "truly progressive solutions" pegs him or her as a neo-rejectionist, but I challenge "Yikes" to find any textual support for the charges leveled. He or she can start by looking in the recently published pamphlet "Marxist-Humanist Writings on the Middle East" available from NEWS & LETTERS.

--Kevin Michaels, Chicago

IRAQ:  'BATTLE OF IDEAS' OR 'BEAUTIFUL SOUL'?

In its analysis of Bosnia, Kosova, Acheh, and now Darfur, N&L has courageously tackled the risky subject of nationalism while other sections of the Left have either ignored it or--worse--ended up endorsing genocide. Peter Hudis' essay, "Resistance or Retrogression? The battle of ideas over Iraq" (N&L, November 2004) is in this worthy lineage. Hudis points out that the underlying reason for luminaries like Chomsky's and Zinn's disastrously false calls in Bosnia and Kosova is the lack of a proper philosophical grounding behind their politics. Without it, he says, one runs the risk of "empty negation" and he characterizes Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy's support of the Iraqi insurgency as instances of such empty negation. He rightly says that their justifying this by invoking the futility of waiting for "pristine movements" is wholly untenable.

As alert as he is to this pitfall, he chooses to ignore another danger that Hegel calls to our attention in the PHENOMENOLOGY: that of becoming the "Beautiful Soul" and maintaining the purity of our convictions independent of the actual consequences. Hudis' gesture of picking out well-intentioned but irrelevant players like Federation of Workers Councils and Unions (FWCUI) and Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), and suggesting this offers a way out of the "quagmire" comes dangerously close to the "Beautiful Soul" posture.

Hudis is correct to ask of Klein and Roy, "Where was the argument that liberation movements are never pristine when it was time to defend the Bosnians and Kosovars (or the Rwandans for that matter) from genocide?" But one could ask just as plausibly, "Where was the Western Left when the U.S. armed Osama bin Laden's mujahideen or when the U.S. supplied chemical weapons to Saddam?" Is it adequate to reply that one did take the correct oppositional stance when such questions were posed? Is it simply a matter of looking back 20 years from now at the ruins of Iraq and having one's stance vindicated by events?

The proper Hegelian demand is a far more unsettling one; it impels us to ask: how does the consistency of our own Beautiful Soul hang on throwing our weight behind the obscure and irrelevant entities we have nominated as worthy of our support? Is this an escape route to avoid coming to grips with the underlying forces that have led up to the present where the conflict is between two equally reactionary forces? Might this expose our own impotence in the face of electorates in the U.S. and throughout the Western world turning increasingly reactionary, anti-immigrant, and racist even as they claim to be upholding "moral values"? Might it be our own problems (crime, racism, unemployment etc.) that are being exported overseas in the form of wars and economic imperialism? If so, do we not need a better analysis of the dangerous rightward drift among working people throughout the West before we start picking which horse to back in Iraq?

--Roby Rajan, Racine, Wisconsin

* * *

Peter Hudis responds:

Roby Rajan is right to call attention to Hegel's critique of the "beautiful soul" that "lacks force to externalize itself...It lives in dread of staining the radiance of its inner being." Self-satisfied critiques that stand outside of the realities they aim to expose certainly cannot resolve the dilemma facing the radical movement.

Yet for this very reason, why presume that FWCUI or OWFI are "obscure and irrelevant"? OWFI publishes 10,000 copies of each issue of EQUALITY--no small number in a land the size of Iraq. FWCUI has organized unemployed unions and workers' councils numbering in the thousands. While such groups may not be massive, their calls for a secular, democratic society are shared by many Iraqis. Is it not incumbent on us to actively solidarize with such forces, no matter how marginalized they may appear? Otherwise, we WILL be left "looking back 20 years from now on the ruins of Iraq."

The same holds true when it comes to the U.S. Let's not forget that the presidential election was decided by a few hundred thousand votes. (Kerry's ineptitude hardly helped!). The Left will never be able to connect to currents in the U.S. opposed to the Right so long as it apologizes for reactionaries overseas that are (rightly) hated by the U.S. public. That doesn't make it any less important to search out liberatory currents--any more than the support for slavery in the 19th century invalidated the handful of "obscure and irrelevant" abolitionists.

To resolve the dilemma facing us the critique of false alternatives can't be separated from going "lower and deeper" into the subjects of liberation. The Left has failed at home; but one reason is its lack of confidence in "the second America."

MARCUSE AND THE ABSOLUTE IDEA

Russell Rockwell's important essay, "A fresh look at Marcuse's 'Ontology'" (N&L, December 2004). points out the limitations of any Hegelian-dialectical approach to Marx's thought that falls short of the Absolute Idea, the integration of the theoretical idea--the idea of the true--with the practical idea--the idea of the good. Our present situation, this dark night of retrogression, finds many of us reminiscing about another time, when Marcuse was a doyen of the New Left. Consider the role of Vietnam in the elections just past. But perhaps Marcuse's eventual disillusionment, which traced the decline and fall of the New Left too, has something to do with his failure to think the Idea all the way through to the end.

Rockwell shows how Marcuse was closer to Hegel in HEGEL'S ONTOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF HISTORICITY (1932) than in REASON AND REVOLUTION (1941). Having come up to the lip of the Absolute Idea in 1932, the rest of Marcuse's career traces a retreat from it, even though REASON AND REVOLUTION was a path-breaking book in the development of Hegelian Marxism. In the end, Marcuse's "Great Refusal" proved itself as powerless to call forth a new society as was the new left that once took it up as a battle cry. By rectifying Marcuse's philosophical mistake, Marxist-Humanism may be in a position to project something affirmative beyond Marcuse's initial step of first negation, an alternative to capitalist society, without which it seems likely that the Left today will founder just as surely on the rocks of the vicious present as that bright shining ship set sail of yesterday.

--Tom More, Spokane

* * *

What Russell Rockwell's essay reveals that is new is that Marcuse in 1932 was actually willing to follow Hegel through his criticism of the Practical Idea, which because it gets locked into the posture that the external world is "intrinsically worthless" can never fully recognize the positive in negative as the idea's own self-movement. The reef that allures so many, who then run aground, is Hegel's praise of the Practical Idea standing above the Idea of Cognition considered up to that point. In 1941, Marcuse drops the qualifier when Hegel's preference for the Practical Idea is only over cognition "already considered." Rockwell poses the centrality of the individual in Hegel and the Logic as showing "how the individual grasps the social and molds it such that it is the basis of the very possibility of each individual's freedom." My question is: why does he use feudalism to illuminate Hegel's concept of the "immediate actuality" of individual freedom in the Absolute Idea. After all, when Hegel reaches the Practical Idea as the Idea of the Good, he refers the readers back to a section of the PHENOMENOLOGY on self-certain moral spirit, which comes after the revolutionary overthrowing of feudalism in 1789. In other words, Hegel is addressing the problem of uniting organization and philosophy after the revolution.

--Ron Brokmeyer, Oakland, Cal.

Don't miss an issue NEWS & LETTERS in 2005!

Coming next issue...

* Report from the Porto Alegre, Brazil, World Social Forum

* What's new about the New Value Theory debate?

* Struggle against forces of nature and reaction in Acheh

* The mis-interpreters of Marx's GRUNDRISSE

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