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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2006

Readers' Views

REMEMBER HIROSHIMA

The Executive Committee for the 44th International Antiwar Assembly in Japan-representing Zengakuren, Antiwar Youth Committee, and Japan Revolutionary Communist League will welcome your message of solidarity to this annual event for developing international antiwar struggles.

A crisis of war is emerging now in East Asia. It is urgent to advance antiwar struggles internationally. The central and regional meetings of the Assembly will be held on the same day, August 6, in Tokyo, Sapporo, Kanazawa, Nagoya, Osaka, Fukuoka and Okinawa.

--International Antiwar Assembly, Tokyo

* * *

Editor's Note: Since its founding we have joined in solidarity with the antiwar assembly in commemoration of the infamous bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. more than six decades ago. Our greeting this year will include sharing with the assembly our "Draft for Perspectives for Marxist-Humanism, 2006-2007" published in this issue.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

In listening to the media, my neighbors, the gas station attendant, I am amazed by the lack of comprehension: "We leave Gaza, they shoot missiles at us from there. We leave Lebanon, they kidnap our boys. How do they expect us to leave the West Bank?" What is it about "end the occupation" that they don't understand? I don't justify Qassam missiles or Katyusha rockets hurled at Israeli towns or the kidnapping of anyone. I do not justify any attacks by missile or suicide bomber or remotely detonated device. Nor do I justify the endless shelling of Gaza and Lebanon-land, sea, and air-for any reason, let alone for purposes more related to posturing and domestic public opinion than with accomplishing any political objective. "How could we not respond when they kill and kidnap our soldiers?" asked Yuli Tamir, our Education Minister and a former Peace Now activist. As if shelling is sure to make the Hezbollah leaders remorseful and let our boys come home.

So, as usual in wars, we have an alliance of the jingoistic decision-makers on both sides, whipping up patriotism while they watch the fighting on-screen from bunkers deep in the earth. In Israel, this war absolutely thrills the right wing. The escalation keeps up the militaristic approach to problem solving, discredits the view that Israel must leave the occupied territories, and distances the current war from its roots in the ongoing occupation. And, as usual in Israel, a few cantankerous peace organizations-the Coalition of Women for Peace, Gush Shalom, Ta'ayush, and a few others- increase their presence on the streets. At Women in Black last Friday, we carried our regular signs and buttressed them with signs saying "Stop the Killing-Negotiate!"-but when cannons roar, so do the bystanders and a dozen police were there to prevent anything worse than words and gestures.

--Gila Svirsky, Jerusalem

My friends, Mansour and Imam, decided to tie the knot in Bi'lin village. They are involved in direct action and decided the weekly demonstration at the Israeli Apartheid Wall would be the best place to get married. As they approached the Wall, a stone was thrown and the Israeli Defense Force decided it was time to bust some skulls. They started beating us with batons, firing sound grenades and rubber bullets. The crowd became livid and everyone jumped in to protect us. The soldiers continued the beating for several minutes while our team successfully de-arrested everyone that was detained. Overall, 30 Palestinians and activists were injured, several had been shot. This is nothing new to Palestinians living in the West Bank or Gaza. Alert everyone in the U.S. that through their tax dollars their government is funding a brutal military occupation by a state that has violated UN resolutions and laws over 400 times!

--Kyle, Bi'lin, Palestine

BOLIVIA: LIBERATION OR STATISM?

What should be evident in your piece on Bolivia by Jorge Virana (June-July N&L) is the danger explicit in how the state paralyzes the dialectic. Virana mentioned that the relationship of capital and the state could entail a regression induced by the unfulfillment of the cycle of protest. The state may be pushing Bolivians into a time when their lives will be state-centered, and where the dominance of the state in terms of organizing and action implies the time of struggle and insubordination will be abandoned. This is important to comprehend because the electoral victory by Evo Morales of MAS came about through the anonymous abilities of the multiple self-organized collectivities. In effect, MAS only capitalized on the reality in the electoral process and the charismatic leaders and party appeals to make history. The dialectic of the masses becomes inverted and the alienation of the masses reappears. Virana shows the necessity of bringing the dialectic to the masses, in short, Marx's articulation of "revolution in permanence."

--Faruq, Crescent City, California

I loved Koigi wa Wamwere's "Life and politics in Kenya" comparison of the grass eaters to the meat eaters-the former being the common people. It is an appropriate metaphor because the meat eaters eat the grass eaters who don't realize how central they are to history. In "Bolivia Today" Jorge Virana gives total credit to those anonymous grass eaters and not the parties or intellectuals. When I sold this  issue of N&L at a poetry reading here, a guy was bothered by this analysis of Movement for Socialism as a statist party. To come out with this analysis now, when most of the Left is walking on the clouds over Morales' electoral victory, is important-and risky.

--David Mizuno'Oto, Bay Area, California

HUTCHINGS' FEMINISM AND HEGEL'S DIALECTIC

I feel that Kimberly Hutchings' book, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy, makes a valuable contribution by engaging feminist philosophy on the basis of Hegel's dialectic. Ron Kelch's review in the June-July issue of N&L goes beyond this by jamming up her self-imposed limitation against Dunayevskaya's grasp of the dialectic as itself an active agent needed for individuals to beat down the barriers to their universalism. The return to her view of the needed new relation between theory and practice not only responds to Hutching's limitation; it is urgent for our age, when so much theory is based on an assumption of the inadequacy of both the movement from theory and the movement from practice to achieve a new human society. The two are never brought together.

--Franklin Dmitryev, Memphis

Feminists construct subjectivity not just by economics and ideology but within the family. Women's subjectivity is about  relations with other members of the family, with neighbors, etc. Those relations have not been appreciated in theory. Most Marxists' use of class does not acknowledge women's experience. When gender and class are counterposed and the discussion of class is limited to economics, it robs it of its human bases.

--Inter-relational feminist, San Leandro, California

There are problems with the essay on Hutchings. Though it is sympathetic to her, it never mentions that she doesn't discuss Marx. She may have interesting things to say about Hegel, but is it possible to directly apply dialectics to feminism without the mediation of Marx-given that Hegel was a misogynist who also supported an authoritarian state (as seen from his critique of Antigone)? It also says that Hegel's dialectic came to life for Dunayevskaya "just when" the modern women's movement emerged in the 1960's. In fact, her work on Hegel preceded the birth of that movement by two decades, as seen in her 1953 letters on Hegel's Absolutes.

--Historian, Illinois

WORKER STRUGGLES, 2006

The assault by capital on American workers continues to intensify with each passing day. Plants close, jobs are outsourced, work forces are reduced, benefits and pensions are reduced or eliminated, safety procedures are violated or ignored with impunity, and jobs are inhumanly speeded-up in every mine,  mill, factory, office and laboratory. Now when labor contracts are negotiated, the question isn't how many worker benefits are increased, but how much and how many concessions were forced from the workers. Only now there is a very big new player in the negotiations-the courts. Corporations have discovered that by declaring bankruptcy, they have an open road to corporate-friendly judges who rule in their favor not only to grant concessions, but also to destroy the union itself. And as usual, it is the workers and their families that suffer from these attacks.

--Old Radical, Detroit

It was great that your June-July Lead article, "Immigrant struggles and the response to global capital" highlighted labor's potential to tear up this society. The immigrants' movement and labor are not at odds with each other. This could inspire and rekindle the labor movement. The Lead did a good job of revealing the connection between economics, politics and revolt, and the need to raise a new banner of human relations.

--Computer analyst, Tennessee

IMMIGRANTS, RACISM, AND LABOR

I see a parallel between the immigrant struggles and the environmental racism movement. They tried to make our movement benign, naming it "environmental justice," to sound nicer and more palatable. They tried to turn the focus on science, technology and the law, cleaning it up from the top instead of hearing the voices of the people from below. I don't talk about "environmental justice." I say our communities have been poisoned. Leaders want the immigrants to just sit and wave the U.S. flag, saying "We are Americans." The movement needs to come out with their own clearly stated goals, to reveal the human desire to be free without fearing being a racial minority.

--Kenneth Bradshaw, Black Environmentalist, Memphis

Some people say that an increase in the labor force drives wages down. But capitalism drives wages down regardless. Capitalism uses any population to bring down wages-Black, women, youth-not just immigrants. Or they try to outlaw labor union, as we see in China, which is experiencing massive immigration of the rural population to the cities. They are the "immigrants" supplying the slave labor there. As Marx said, capitalism creates a vast army of the unemployed and they are capitalism's gravediggers.

--Brown Douglass, Tennessee

In 1862 the Texas Prison System, using slave labor, became a major manufacturer of Confederate army uniforms, and continued to manufacture them until the "traitors" surrendered in 1865. That dingy gray uniform was and is an emblem and symbol of chattel slavery. At the end of the Civil War, manufacture of that uniform ceased-except in Texas, where it was kept as a defiance to the Union Army and Reconstruction.

It is still manufactured today by the Texas Penal System as the required uniform for its employees. The not-so-subtle message in 2006 is that it is a slavocracy and white Supremacist operation. Anyone who believes it is time to pull Texas out of the racist 19th century and abolish Confederate army uniforms for Texas state employees should write to the Governor and tell him so, at Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, State Capitol, P.O. Box 12428, Austin, Texas 78711.

--Robert J. Zani, Tennessee Colony, Texas

If the job of the prison system were justice, it would rightly be called a broken system. But since it is a system of social control, it's operating very well.

The past years have been full of thousands of reports from the imprisoned and their families describing inhumane conditions including cold, filth, callow medical care, extended isolation often lasting over a decade, use of devices of torture, harassment, brutality and racism. There are vivid descriptions of four point restraints, restraint hoods, belts and beds, stun grenades, stun guns, stun belts, tethers, waist and leg chains. When the news about Abu Ghraib broke, President Bush said, "What took place in that prison doesn't represent the America I know." Unfortunately for the more than two million Americans and countless immigrants living in U.S. prisons, this is the America that they, their loved ones, their lawyers and activists do know and experience daily. These conditions and practices are in violation of the UN convention against torture and the convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, both of which the U.S. has ratified. Many also violate the UN convention on the rights of the child.

The U.S. prison system is more than a set of institutions. It is also a state of mind. That state of mind led to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. That state of mind led to the American-style ethnic cleansing that many say occurred in New Orleans. Sending the military into New Orleans instead of caregivers is yet another piece of U.S. genocidal history. People in prison call freedom on the streets "minimum security."

--Prisoner, Pampa, Texas

The question "what after?" is the question to be asked not only as "what after the revolution?" but for prisoners it means what after being arrested, judged, and sent to prison? This can be a dialectic in itself. As a prison(er) abolitionist I/we must look at the eradication of prisons as a revolution, one which would need to be a "revolution in permanence" to abolish the system which is rooted in poverty, under-education, unemployment and all that stems from the fundamental root of capitalism. Your paper helps give a theoretical tool to guide the practice of those of us who are in the grassroots prison struggle.

--Prisoner, Madison, Iowa

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