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Trotskyism and the Vanguard Party By Ulli Diemer

Published on February 18, 2012 by in Articles/Essays, Marx, Trotsky
Leon Trotsky

By Ulli Diemer

Trotskyists, for those uninitiated into the sometimes confusing and special world of left-wing politics, are followers of Leon Trotsky, the man who was with Lenin a principal leader of the Russian Revolution, and who opposed the policies of Joseph Stalin. Stalin was able to gain control of the Soviet state after Lenin’s death, while Trotsky was driven out of the country and eventually murdered.

 

Trotskyists’ ideas have often been misunderstood or distorted. The Moscow-oriented Communist Parties and the Peking-oriented Maoists insist on calling them ‘Trotskyites’, the label being a term of abuse that is supposed to signify that Trotsky’s ideas don’t qualify as a coherent system of thought, as an – ism.

It is only relatively recently that the writings of Trotsky and other Trotskyists have become widely and inexpensively available in English, and particularly in Canada. The widespread availability of Trotskyist materials and history in Canada now is due primarily to the establishment of Pathfinder Press in Toronto, which is dedicated to their dissemination and is pursuing an ambitious publication schedule to achieve it.

Still, the activities of “the Trots” are fairly familiar to students on many Canadian university campuses. At the University of Toronto, they have been an institution for a number of years, with their candidacies for student council elections, their literature tables, their Vietnam demonstrations, and their call to “Repeal the Abortion Laws”, to name only a few.

Their story begins with the founding of the “Fourth International” by Leon Trotsky after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Trotsky’s Fourth International saw itself as the legitimate successor to the Third International (the Comintern), founded by Lenin, and destroyed by Stalin. This Fourth, or Trotskyist, International, was to be the world-wide organization to which local Trotskyist parties would adhere.

However, the Trotskyist organizations, tiny to begin with, almost immediately began to display a tendency to disagree among themselves, and to split into even tinier rival factions and groups, each claiming to be the only true interpreter of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. As a result, in addition to the official Fourth International, there grew up (and continue to exist) a swarm of other Trotskyist groups, each claiming to be the nucleus of the vanguard party. (more…)

 
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Re-Building Infrastructures of Resistance

Published on February 16, 2012 by in Articles/Essays, Labor, Occupy Wall Street, People of Color, Women's Struggles, Worker Struggles
Reclaim

It is sometimes said that while anti-capitalist and alternative globalization movements are clear on what we do not want, we are less clear on what we do want (socialism, anarchism, specifics). Certainly, recent movements have not been as effective as their predecessors (labor in the 1910s and ‘30s; the social movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s) in sustaining the sorts of practices – intellectual and material – that put into effect aspects of the alternative world we seek. My colleague Alan Sears attributes this current inability to a decline in what he calls “infrastructures of dissent” or what I prefer to call “infrastructures of resistance.” As anti-capitalist movements face possibilities of growth, as happened after Seattle in 1999, questions of organization and the relation of various activities to each other and to broader movements for social change can only become more urgent. Yet, the absence of durable organizations or institutions, formal or informal, rooted in working-class organizations and communities, makes for demoralization or a retreat into subculturalism, as has happened to many of the alternative globalization groups. We now face a pressing need to rebuild “infrastructures of resistance” that might sustain not only activists and organizers, but especially the poor and working-class people who are being disastrously impacted by the current crisis.

Re-Building Infrastructures of Resistance  by Jeff Shantz

It is sometimes said that while anti-capitalist and alternative globalization movements are clear on what we do not want, we are less clear on what we do want (socialism, anarchism, specifics). Certainly, recent movements have not been as effective as their predecessors (labor in the 1910s and ‘30s; the social movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s) in sustaining the sorts of practices – intellectual and material – that put into effect aspects of the alternative world we seek. My colleague Alan Sears attributes this current inability to a decline in what he calls “infrastructures of dissent” or what I prefer to call “infrastructures of resistance.” As anti-capitalist movements face possibilities of growth, as happened after Seattle in 1999, questions of organization and the relation of various activities to each other and to broader movements for social change can only become more urgent. Yet, the absence of durable organizations or institutions, formal or informal, rooted in working-class organizations and communities, makes for demoralization or a retreat into subculturalism, as has happened to many of the alternative globalization groups. We now face a pressing need to rebuild “infrastructures of resistance” that might sustain not only activists and organizers, but especially the poor and working-class people who are being disastrously impacted by the current crisis.

The notion of “infrastructures of dissent” is drawn from the literature on social movements as developed by resource mobilization theorists such as Mayer Zald and John McCarthy (1990); it refers to the accumulated resources available to social movements in going beyond spontaneous expressions of protest to build sustained mobilization and dissent. Infrastructures of dissent often include the resources of mainstream or reformist groups, like NGOs or unions, which can be used by more radical groups for their own purposes. Writers coming from anarchist and socialist movements, such as Howard Ehrlich and Alan Sears, have developed this notion in a more accessible fashion. Sears (2007) adapts it to refer to a variety of practices by which movements develop their capacities to sustain common memories, build collective visions, voice alternatives, and engage in debate and analysis. As examples, he mentions left caucuses within unions and socialist party organizations. As he notes: “The projects of rebuilding the infrastructure of dissent and revitalizing socialism are integrally connected.” These are clearly limited and problematic.

While such an approach emphasizes formal political organizations, I would argue that more priority should be given to social institutions, informal as well as formal, based on addressing the needs of poor and working-class communities. These contemporary infrastructures of resistance might include community centers, housing and shelter, food shares, transportation, community media, free schools, bookstores, cafes, taverns and clubs.

Large-scale civil non-cooperation and/or militant confrontation with the State and Capital obviously require previous successes in organization and experience. Thus, as Ehrlich (1996b) notes, these are necessarily the outward, and dramatic, manifestations of ongoing experiments in overcoming authoritarian societies. Directing his discussion at anarchists, he encourages them to first develop alternative institutions. These are the building blocks of what he refers to as the transfer culture, an approximation of the new society within the context of the old (Ehrlich 1996a). Within them organizers might try to meet the basic demands of building sustainable communities. At the present time, as Sears notes, this infrastructure of dissent is quite weak, its development having been cut short by the political counter-offensive following September 11, 2001.

Infrastructures of resistance, operating in the shadows of the dominant institutions, provide frameworks for the radical re-organization of social relations in a miniature, pre-insurrectionary form. It is the rudimentary infrastructure of alternative ways of being, an alternative future in the present. It is decidedly not a millenarian project in which hopes for liberation or freedom are deferred or projected into some imagined future. Rather than utopian longings, these infrastructures of resistance, or transfer cultures, express real world practices in which utopian desires – the hopes and dreams of the grassroots mobilizations behind Obama – are given life in the here and now.

Libertarian socialists and anarchists have always emphasized people’s capacities for spontaneous organization, but they also recognize that what appears to be “spontaneous” develops from an often extensive groundwork of pre-existing radical practices. Without such pre-existing practices and relationships, people are left to patch things together in the heat of social upheaval or to defer to previously organized and disciplined vanguards. Pre-existing infrastructures, or transfer cultures, are necessary components of popular, participatory and liberatory social re-organization. A liberatory social transformation requires experiences of active involvement in radical change, prior to any insurrection, and the development of prior structures for constructing a new society within the shell of the old society.

Various alternative institutions, whether free schools or squats or counter-media, form networks as means for developing alternative social infrastructures. Where free schools join up with worker co-operatives and collective social centres, alternative social infrastructures become visible at least at the community level. Contemporary projects are still quite new. None have approached the scale that would suggest they pose practical alternatives, except perhaps in the case of new media activities and Internet networks. Yet all are putting together the building blocks that might promote practical alternatives extending well beyond the projects from which they originated. (more…)

 
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Arizona Set to Abolish Public Unions

Published on February 15, 2012 by in Community Submitted News, Labor, Worker Struggles

By John Jacobsen of  Trial by Fire

Arizona sate employees’ unions were caught off guard this week with news that the state’s republican controlled senate was passing a series of bills which, amongst other provisions, would completely ban unions from engaging in any negotiation which effects the terms of a persons employment with state, county or city government.

The move, according to Nick Dranius of the Goldwater Institute – one of the bills shapers – is intended to “cause people to leave the unions as they recognized that unions no longer have an unfair bargaining advantage given to them by collective bargaining laws.”

Once unions are no longer legally allowed to negotiate with the state, he concludes, workers will “realize that unions don’t do much for them.”

The unions, however, may have already beat them to it.

Provisions of the bills:

Much of the inspiration for the assault on organizing rights in Arizona has come, unsurprisingly, from the State of Wisconcsin’s own successful fight to deny collective bargaining rights to state employees. One of the crafters of the bills, the Goldwater Institute, even flew Governor Scott Walker out to Arizona in November to offer counsel on how to pass similar legislation in their state.

Like the Wisconsin laws, the new legislation would prohibit unions from bargaining with the government over the terms of their employment. It would also prohibit state and local government workers from deducting money union dues from their paychecks.

The legislators in Arizona, however, have gone much further than their predecessors in Wisconsin, largely because Arizona conservatives believe – with justification – that they face far less opposition in their fight than Republican’s in Wisconsin. Because of this, they have been able to spread their attack further than Walker, who needed to at least feign support for local police and firefighters’ unions. In Arizona, no public employees union has been spared.

Further, the bills would ban government employees from deducting union dues directly from their paychecks – a feature of many modern unions rely on in order to fund their activities. (more…)

 
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A New Declaration by Derrick Jensen on Occupy Wall Street Journal

Published on February 6, 2012 by in Anarchism, Articles/Essays, Environment, Features, Occupy Wall Street, Plutocracy, Theory
killer_profits3

by Derrick Jensen on Feb 1, 2012 • 5:43 pm

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That the real, physical world is the source of our own lives, and the lives of others. A weakened planet is less capable of supporting life, human or otherwise.

Thus the health of the real world is primary, more important than any social or economic system, because all social or economic systems are dependent upon a living planet.

It is self-evident that to value a social system that harms the planet’s capacity to support life over life itself is to be out of touch with physical reality.

That any way of life based on the use of nonrenewable resources is by definition not sustainable.

That any way of life based on the hyper-exploitation of renewable resources is by definition not sustainable: if, for example, fewer salmon return every year, eventually there will be none. This means that for a way of life to be sustainable, it must not harm native communities: native prairies, native forests, native fisheries, and so on.

That the real world is interdependent, such that harm done to rivers harms those humans and nonhumans whose lives depend on these rivers, harms forests and prairies and wetlands surrounding these rivers, harms the oceans into which these rivers flow. Harm done to mountains harms the rivers flowing through them. Harm done to oceans harms everyone directly or indirectly connected to them.

That you cannot argue with physics. If you burn carbon-based fuels, this carbon will go into the air, and have effects in the real world.

That creating and releasing poisons into the world will poison humans and nonhumans.

That no one, no matter how rich or powerful, should be allowed to create poisons for which there is no antidote.

That no one, no matter how rich or powerful, should be allowed to create messes that cannot be cleaned up. (more…)

 
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Slavoj Zizek : “The Only Utopia is Thinking Things Can Continue the Way They Are”

Published on February 6, 2012 by in History, Libertairan Socialism, Occupy Wall Street, Theory, video
Slavoj-Zizek-Revolutionary

 

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My Body – My Rules: A Case for Rape & Domestic Violence Survivors Becoming Workplace Organizers By Liberte Locke

Published on December 18, 2011 by in Features, Women's Struggles, Worker Struggles
class-war1
by Liberté Locke on Sunday, December 4, 2011 at 4:00am

I was raped by a boyfriend on August 18th, 2006. The very next day I held back tears while I lied to a stranger over the phone about why I was unavailable to go in that day for a second interview for a job that I desperately needed.  When I hung up the phone I saw a new text message. It was from him. “It’s not over. It will never be over between us…”

The next day I went in for the second interview. It was inside of the Sears Tower Starbucks in Chicago.  I took the train to the interview constantly looking around me and shaking.  I needed work.  I had just been fired from Target two weeks prior and had no prospects.  I knew I would have to go through a metal detector in order to enter the building so despite every instinct in my body I did not bring a knife with me.

“What would you do if you caught a co-worker stealing?”

My mind is racing. I’m thinking that I risked my safety by leaving my house for a stupid job that pays $7.75/hr.  Aren’t I worth more than that? Aren’t we all worth so much more?

“I’d tell management right away, of course.  I’ve never understood why someone would steal from work…” I tell them what they want me to.

I started working at Starbucks on August 22, 2006.  That was a little over five years ago. Every year we have annual reviews where I generally get to argue with someone younger than me who makes significantly more than do about why my hard work, aching back, cracking hands, sore wrists, the bags under my eyes, the burns, the bruises on my arms, the cuts on my knees, the constant degrading treatment by the customers, the “baby, honey, sugar, bitch”, the “hey, you, slut…I said NO whip cream!”s, the staring, the following after work…I get to argue why all that means I’m worth a 33cent raise rather than 22cents,  Degrading for any worker.  Degrading especially for a woman worker.   Only for me, I get to do this every year just four days after the anniversary of when someone I was in love with raped me.  My annual review is truly the only reason I’m reminded of the anniversary of the assault.

303117 2504454487904 1149256066 3015022 2035763368 n2 My Body – My Rules: A Case for Rape & Domestic Violence Survivors Becoming Workplace Organizers By Liberte Locke

I wish I was exaggerating but truthfully I’ve just toned down how I really feel about it.  Since we’re talking about labor, I could also mention how when I was raped I didn’t leave the house where it happened until the morning because of two main reasons 1) I feared riding the subway home at 3am and 2) I was getting picked up in the morning by my then best friend (and my boyfriend’s other partner) to head to her wealthy parents’ house in the suburbs where they were paying me to clean.  Desperately needing to sell my labor in exchange for simple cash kept me laying awake next to my attacker. Not wanting to lose the gig had me lying to him. Promising that I’d never tell anyone. Promising not to leave him.  Promises that at the time I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t keep.

It was when I was on my hands and knees literally scrubbing the floor of her parents’ house that it occurred to me that being poor was truly enough of an assault. (more…)

 
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Karl Marx and the Iroquois – Franklin Rosemont

Published on December 12, 2011 by in History, Marx, Native American

Franklin Rosemont delves into Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and examines their significance and relevance towards today’s communist movement.

There are works that come down to us with question-marks blazing like sawed-off shotguns, scattering here and there and everywhere sparks that illuminate our own restless search for answers. Ralegh’s so-called Cynthia cycle, Sade’s 120 Days, Fourier’s New Amorous World, Lautremont’s Poesies, Lenin’s notes on Hegel, Randolph Bourne’s essay on The State Jacque Vaches War letters, Duchamp’s Green Box, the Samuel Greenberg manuscripts: These are only a few of the extraordinary fragments that have, for many of us, exerted a fascination greater than that of all but a very few “finished” works.

Karl Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks -notes for a major study he never lived to write, have something of the same fugitive ambiguity. These extensively annotated excerpts from works of Lewis Henry Morgan and others are a jigsaw puzzle for which we have to reinvent the missing pieces out of our own research and revery and above all, our own revolutionary activity. Typically although the existence of the notebooks has been know since Marx’s death in 1883, they were published integrally for the first time only eighty-nine years later, and then only in a highly priced edition aimed at specialists. A transcription of text exactly as Marx wrote it- the book presents the reader with all the difficulties of Finnegan’s Wake and more, with its curious mixture of English, German, French, Latin and Greek, and a smattering of words and phrases from many non-European languages, from Ojibwa to Sanskrit. Cryptic shorthand abbreviations, incomplete and run-on sentences, interpolated exclamations, erudite allusions to classical mythology, passing references to contemporary world affairs, generous doses of slang and vulgarity; irony and invective: All these the volume possesses aplenty, and they are not the ingredients of smooth reading. This is not a work of which it can be said, simply, that it was “not prepared by the author for publication”; indeed, it is very far from being even a “rough draft?’ Rather it is the raw substance of a work, a private jumble of jottings intended for no other eyes than Marx’s own-the spontaneous record of his “conversations” with the authors he was reading, with other authors whom they quoted, and, finally and especially, with himself. In view of the fact that Marx’s clearest, most refined texts have provoked so many contradictory interpretations, it is perhaps not so strange that his devoted students, seeking the most effective ways to propagate the message of the Master to the masses, have shied away from these hastily written, disturbingly unrefined and amorphous notes. (more…)

 
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You Choose: $105 Billion a Year for Health Care or Nuclear Weaspons?

Published on December 2, 2011 by in nuclear, War
war-choose

In 2011 the nine nuclear-armed nations will spend an estimated US$105 billion maintaining and modernizing their nuclear weapons, despite the International Court of Justice having declared it illegal to use and threaten to use such weapons.

3437b888b8dc09ea914e5004f74424f8af3f947d You Choose: $105 Billion a Year for Health Care or Nuclear Weaspons?

War or Hospitals? Bombs or Food?

This expenditure—up from $91 billion in 2010—casts serious doubt on the sincerity of leaders’ pledges to work for a world free from nuclear arms, suggesting instead a commitment to retain such weapons indefinitely.

Beyond the pro-disarmament rhetoric of the nuclear-armed states is the disturbing reality of a massive effort to bolster the world’s nuclear forces, the consequences of which are potentially catastrophic.

Nuclear Weapons: at What Cost?

The Global Zero group of ex-military and political leaders has calculated that the United States will spend US$61.3 billion on its nuclear arsenal this year—more than every other nuclear weapon state combined and twice what it spent on foreign aid in 2010 (US$30.2 billion).

Russia is forecast to squander $14.8 billion, China $7.6 billion, France $6.0 billion, Britain $5.5 billion, India $4.9 billion, Israel $1.9 billion, Pakistan $2.2 billion, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea $0.7 billion.

The design, development, manufacture, maintenance, and modernization of nuclear forces divert vast public resources from health care, education, climate action, disaster relief, and other essential services.

The World Bank estimates that an annual investment of just US$40 to $60 billion—roughly half the amount currently spent on nuclear weapons—would be enough to meet the Millennium Development Goals by the target date of 2015.

With opinion polls in nuclear-armed nations showing strong public support for the total abolition of nuclear weapons—and most political leaders also championing the cause—is it beyond time that these investments ceased.

The Promised Disarmament Dividend

In the years immediately following the cold war, the United States and Russia dismantled several thousand of their nuclear weapons. Over the course of the conflict, the two superpowers had amassed close to 70,000 warheads—enough to destroy every city in the world several times.

For a brief period in the 1990s, global military spending began to decline as both countries engaged in significant disarmament. Some nations expressed hope that the new order would result in wealth being redirected towards meeting the needs of the world’s poor.

But the dividend never came. By the late 1990s, military spending was once again on the rise, and the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 caused it to skyrocket. (more…)

 
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Authoritarian Leftists by Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin

Published on December 2, 2011 by in Features, History, Libertairan Socialism, People of Color, Theory

Authoritarian Leftists

Kill the Cop in Your Head

Author: Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin
Date: 1996

It’s difficult to know where to begin with this open letter to the various European-american leftist (Marxist-Leninist and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, in particular) groups within the United States. I have many issues with many groups; some general, some very specific. The way in which this is presented may seem scattered at first, but I encourage all of you to read and consider carefully what I have written in its entirety before you pass any judgments.

It was V.I. Lenin who said, “take from each national culture only its democratic and socialist elements; we take them only and absolutely in opposition to the bourgeois culture and bourgeois nationalism of each nation”. It could be argued that Lenin’s statement in the current Amerikkkan context is in fact a racialist position; who is he (or the Bolsheviks themselves) to “take” anyone or pass judgment on anyone; particularly since the privileges of having white skin are a predominant factor within the context of amerikkkan-style oppression. This limited privilege in capitalist society is a prime factor in the creation and maintenance of bourgeois ideology in the minds of many whites of various classes in the US and elsewhere on the globe.

When have legitimate struggles or movements for national and class liberation had to “ask permission” from some eurocentric intellectual “authority” who may have seen starvation and brutality, but has never experienced it himself? Where there is repression, there is resistance… period. Self-defense is a basic human right that we as Black people have exercised time and time again, both violent and non-violent; a dialectical and historical reality that has kept many of us alive up to this point.

Assuming that this was not Lenin’s intent, and assuming that you all truly uphold worldwide socialism/communism, then the question must be asked:

Why is it that each and every white dominated/white-led “vanguard” in the United States has in fact done the exact opposite of what Lenin Proclaims/recommends when it comes to interacting with blacks and other people of color?

Have any of you actually sat down and seriously thought about why there are so few of us in your organizations; and at the same time why non-white socialist/communist formations, particularly in the Black community, are so small and isolated? I have a few ideas… (more…)

 
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How do we overthrow the Plutocracy?

Published on November 28, 2011 by in Features, History, Plutocracy, Theory
300px 1963 march lincoln memorial3 How do we overthrow the Plutocracy?

Image via Wikipedia

I keep hearing people say at Occupations, “We shouldn’t address that until we fix the electoral process;” “We can do” or “We can debate that after we win.” This is not a new argument.  Women and People-of-Color have been told this by every radical movement in the US, and every time it was wrong. Now is no exception.

In the 60′s the argument went this way: “Racism and sexism cannot be eliminated until AFTER the revolution, so discussing them BEFORE the revolution is divisive.” Because of this attitude, there is a lingering distrust of white activists who betrayed the civil rights struggle for their own interests, ending the Vietnam War. When the war ended, the youth who had been trained and inspired by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee went on with their lives and left Blacks to struggle against Reaganism alone. The result is schools are more segregated now than during official segregation.

The women organizers of the 60′s got sick of men using “after the revolution” as an excuse to avoid dealing with sexism within the movement, and left to form their own movement. What was discovered is women have their own contribution to make to the revolution, and that the personal is political. In other words, unless men are willing to challenge their own sexism, and white people their own unconscious racism, their isn’t going to be a revolution, and the Occupy movement has reached it’s peak and usefulness historically. (more…)

 
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