http://www.revleft.com/vb Submit articles for our article section here. *Guest posting enabled* Forum Led by: Jacob Richter en Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:55:46 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/misc/rss.jpg http://www.revleft.com/vb http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Che-lives/~3/458767332/showthread.php Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:59:08 GMT _Why the Israeli Occupation of Palestine Cannot be Justified in the 21st Century_ To begin with, let me state firmly that I am not...

Why the Israeli Occupation of Palestine Cannot be Justified in the 21st Century

To begin with, let me state firmly that I am not anti-Semitic, despite the conclusion you may have jumped to upon reading the title of this article. However, I am an advocate of freedom and equality for all. And it is precisely due to my firm belief in a world free of racial prejudice that I feel compelled to to argue this point. Zionism is the political movement whose aim is to establish a homeland for the Jewish race of people. And it is wrong.
We live in a world where every individual has, according the UN, a fundamental right to practise their religion freely. Therefore it is, of course, the right of the Jewish people to practise their beliefs with unrestricted freedom. However, despite what leading Zionists might have you believe, the reclamation of Palestine as the home of the Jewish people was not an exercise of a right to practise religion freely. This was, and is, a criminal act of expropriation. A criminal act which involved the eviction and displacement of thousands of innocent people in a series of planned moves over a number of years. And what is the justification for such a heinous act? The fact that according to a book written several thousand years ago, Jewish people have the right to do so. This is the cornerstone of the Zionist movement in Palestine, thereby linking religion with politics in a way which can only be compared to Islamic Fundamentalism. It should be considered unacceptable by all citizens of the world that one set of people justifies its right to oppress on foot of a 2,000 year old scripture.
The arrogance inherent in the actions of these Zionist activists causes one’s stomach to churn. Who are they, or anyone, to forcefully displace a settled and workin community of families for the purpose of the betterment of the quality of life for their own race of people? If white people were to have done this to black people in the same decades, it would correctly be labelled an act of white supremacy. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that ongoing Zionism in Palestinian territories is nothing more than an act of Jewish racism and supremacy.
This is a world where it is widely accepted that peace and happiness can only be attained through the equity and equality of all individuals on this planet. Therefore, I find the U.N.’s acceptance of Zionism to be a testament to the lack of substance to its promises, its purpose, as an organisation. Article 17 of the U.N. Charter of Fundamental Rights states that no person can arbitrarily be deprived of his property. The Charter also states that every person has the right to shelter. How, then, can the U.N. be so hypocritical in its ignorance of such a major, ongoing issue? The key players in the U.N. do not merely remain close-lipped on the issue. The most powerful nation on the planet, the United States, actively supports and promotes the actions of Israel in Palestine.
I do not accept that Palestinians can justify their right to retaliate against Israeli oppression with murder on foot of a divine revelation to Mohammed. The fact of the matter is that one group of individuals cannot have the right to oppress another. I am certain of one thing. That is that we, the citizens of the world, who supposedly long to live in a happier and more peaceful planet, can no longer stand idly by and accept the abuse of a nation of people any longer. We must refuse to turn the other cheek. Zionism is racism. Zionism is sectarianism. You wouldn’t accept racism in your community. So why accept it in your world? ]]> Article Submissions wigsa http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=94838 http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetItemData?uri=Che-lives&itemurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.revleft.com%2Fvb%2Fshowthread.php%3Ft%3D94838http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=94838 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Che-lives/~3/453819542/showthread.php Sat, 15 Nov 2008 07:56:45 GMT Party-Recallable, Closed-List, and Pure Proportional Representation

"A complete democracy is to be found nowhere, and everywhere we have to strive after modifications and improvements. Even in Switzerland there is an agitation for the extension of the legislative powers of the people, for proportional representation and for woman suffrage. In America the power and mode of selection of the highest judges need to be very severely restricted. Far greater are the demands that should be put forward by us in the great bureaucratic and militarist States in the interests of democracy." (K.J. Kautsky)

Before continuing, it is fortunate that my quotations of the senile renegade Mister K.J. Kautsky, along with his obsession with “refuting” the Russian Revolution, are limited to this section. The quotation above comes from his controversial work The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, whose “refutations” of the Russian Revolution directly prompted the justified and timely response by Lenin now known as The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.

Much has been said time and again about the benefits of proportional representation (PR) over single-winner district “representation” (plurality/first-past-the-post, instant-runoff, and so on), in spite of the “pure PR” caricature presented by the Israelis. These benefits include the elimination of tactical voting for the “lesser of two evils” and the elimination of wasted votes for losing candidates and for winning candidates (excess votes in safe seats), thereby increasing voter turnout.

Does this reform facilitate the issuance of either intermediate or threshold demands?

First, under any form of single-winner district “representation,” the constituents can call their misrepresentative legislators and tell them to vote a certain way, but usually this does not happen, even if the constituents dislike the voting record of their respective legislators. In fact, the senile renegade had these choice words in the ultra-monetarist The Labour Revolution, written shortly after Lenin’s death:

Since then the responsibility of the deputy towards his constituents has tended to be overshadowed by his responsibility towards his party. It becomes ever rarer for candidates to come forward on their own account. The candidate comes before the electors as the representative of a party. In this capacity and not because of his personal popularity he is elected. This is most strikingly manifested in the system of proportional representation, where the electors are confronted, not with individuals, but with whole parties with a long list of candidates. As a rule neither the parties nor their candidates are new-comers, but are tried and known by long years of public service.

The individual member may no longer do what he likes in Parliament. He is subject to the discipline of his party group, and is constantly controlled by his party – unless the party itself should go out of existence. But even then the elements that have been released gravitate towards new groups, which are controlled by new party organizations outside Parliament.

Before contrasting the above with what happens under a party-recallable, closed-list, and pure-proportional-representative electoral system, it must be pointed out that this senile renegade had illusions in the aforementioned “party control” over both its legislators and its legislative seats. In 1907, long before the outbreak of the mislabeled “First World War,” it was thought that a “revolutionary victory” had been achieved in the Second International against Bernstein’s class-collaborationist revisionism. In fact, however, there were no factional struggles afterwards to purge the opportunists from the SPD and its Executive Committee, especially those who were also legislators (and were hence practically free from subordination to party decisions outside the legislature). This absence of purges ultimately led to betrayal of the working class by the Executive Committee and the party’s legislative group, in the form of voting for war credits. In terms of “party control” over legislative seats themselves, who can prevent opportunist “representatives” from switching party affiliations (usually from some opposition party to the governing party), or conscious legislators (district representatives or otherwise) from becoming independents, thereby depriving parties of the relevant seats in either case?

On the other hand, under electoral systems based purely on party-recallable, closed-list proportional representation, there are no direct links between the "constituents" and the "representatives.” Such formalization of the distance between the "constituents" and their so-called "representatives" except through political parties can induce the former to exert party-based pressure for certain laws to be passed, especially through increased party memberships and increased participatory democracy within the various political parties.

Second, since the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle remarked that “it is thought to be democratic for the offices to be assigned by lot [and] for them to be elected oligarchic,” the pure implementation of party-recallable, closed-list proportional representation would go a long way towards combating the very degenerative personality-based politics, ranging from individual corruption scandals that can be addressed through party-based replacements to person-based attack ads not being as widely circulated. These days, many if not most electoral campaigns have truly revealed the oligarchic nature of electoralism, dispensing with sufficient discussions on electoral platforms and strategic policies bound to be unfulfilled by those “best qualified” to be in the halls of legislative power.

Third, the pure implementation of party-recallable, closed-list proportional representation can and should be extended – on an immediate basis, in fact – to those in the higher halls of executive power, starting with the singular chief executives and the cabinet officials! This extension may have the potential to go a long way towards the full integration of legislative and executive powers “after the type of the [Paris] Commune,” as Lenin once remarked.

Does this reform enable the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view” – the criterion set out by the same individual responsible for writing the horribly illusory words above? If electoralist universal suffrage is nothing but, as Engels said, “the gauge of the maturity of the working class” that will one day show “boiling-point among the workers,” then steps need to be taken in order to replace this with a better gauge, if not with real political enfranchisement.



REFERENCES:

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat by K.J. Kautsky [http://www.marxists.org/archive/kaut...prole/ch10.htm]

“Non-reformist” reforms and “social fascism” [http://www.revleft.com/vb/non-reform...845/index.html]

The Labour Revolution by K.J. Kautsky [http://www.marxists.org/archive/kaut.../ch02_c.htm#sd] ]]> Article Submissions Jacob Richter http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=94427 http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetItemData?uri=Che-lives&itemurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.revleft.com%2Fvb%2Fshowthread.php%3Ft%3D94427http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=94427 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Che-lives/~3/451527035/showthread.php Thu, 13 Nov 2008 06:13:01 GMT BEWARE Companeros/Companeras! Make no mistake how the Racist Xenophobe RepublicsKKKum adversary is not going away anytime soon! After losing the... BEWARE Companeros/Companeras! Make no mistake how the Racist Xenophobe RepublicsKKKum adversary is not going away anytime soon! After losing the Presidential elections with Barack Obama as the soon-to-be President of the U.S., and a Black man to add insult to "their" injuries, the white supremacist enemies will not rest until "their" white virtues are "vindicated"!

"If you ignore them, ...they will go away!" Yea, ...right! Now, where have we heard that phrase before?! Wasn't that what the German Jews used to think of the Brown Shirt Nazi goons who were at Adolf Hitler's behest and direct orders to terrorize Germany's Jewish population in 1936? We all know what happened thereafter in 1941, ...don't we?!

This is no different than the inhumane atrocities that were committed on the indigenous natives and against other non-white population on this continent. AMERICA'S CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY is an eternal history that was written in the blood of our many oppressed ancestors of color! It's unfortunate that many of our Stepnfetchit Kneegrows and Brown Coconut serape wearing HI-spanic Judases have become our worst enemies as well.

NEVER underestimate these white racist enemy animal creatures of habit! When Barack Obama was voted overwhelmingly and declared the next President elect, many rightwing adherents, mostly white uneducated Mayberry RFD male types and their GOP "leaders" were already organizing and are in a timely fashion, plotting everso eagerly how to retake the White House through more hatemongering, fear and whatever it takes to accomplish their macabre and sinister political coup d' etat within the electorial American VOTERS, ...especially against the overwhelming non-white population!

It's up to US Revolutionaries of the Left who are commited to the People's Struggle, ...not only in rhetoric, but in revolutionary deeds! Get involved and organize in your immediate communities or at-large as the "chickens will eventually come home to roost"!

President Obama hopefully might and might not turn out to be OUR "Progressive" cup of tea in the final outcome, but for the moment this is all we got going for our oppressed people of America now. I strongly suggest WE Revolutionaries of the Left must take a "wait and see" attitude until our soon-to-be President Obama implements his on hands policy after January 20, 2009, Inauguration Day.

However, has anyone noticed how CNN and other media news reports have exposed how white racist Americans are using the facade excuse; "Obama will enact laws that will curtail the present Gun Shops to go out of business when he (Obama) restricts the sale of guns and gun ownership per se."

I have witnessed the television news media report how most Gun Shops throughout America are almost full of mostly aggressive white supremacist males standing in line by the ringing sound of cash registers throughout the nation!

After a careful analysis of this gun buying spree phenomenon, I wonder in awe why all of a sudden white "Conservative" (Racists) wants to own guns more than he needs right after Obama won the Presidential elections and not before!

It has also come to mind as I question why do these backwoods mindset types of "John Wayne" gun toting white people at most Gun Shops are doing their best to cover themselves of their real sinister motives of gun hoarding and by accusing the soon-to-be President Obama's new possible "strict gun laws". (NOTE: U.S. Presidents do not enact Gun Laws, ...U.S. Congress does.)

In reality I, like many, assume that these same white racist looking people are just stocking up with these guns because they are in the erroneous warped belief of an "impending race war" between them and the "non-white mongrel mud people" (Blacks, Browns, Yellow, Red, etc)! I am in the belief that this is white racist America's worst case scenario once Obama takes office!

This is the year for ALL oppressed people of America, including poor non-racist progressive whites, to be vigilant and ready for these XENOPHOBE bigoted rabid racist wounded losers to commence their vicious verbal and even physical attacks enmasse on those who do not look like "them", especially on UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS! Keep your powder dry Comrades!

I sincerely hope this worst case scenario is just a figment of my imagination, but nevertheless, after hearing our racist enemies speak in most local Los Angeles, Ca. racist "conservative" talk radio programs, I gather it's best to be on the lookout for any wrong move AmeriKKKa's white supremacist losers will make against US ALL!

SAVE AMERIKKKA! ...MUG A WHITE XENOPHOBE RACIST TERRORIST MINUTEMAN!
POWER TO ALL OPPRESSED PEOPLE!
"IF IT'S A GOOD FIGHT, ...I WANT TO BE IN IT!"
SI SE PUDO! / YES WE DID!
HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE! / TILL VICTORY FOREVER!

E.F. Mohammed Martinez=WHITE RACIST AMERIKKKA'S WORST NIGHTMARE!


]]> Article Submissions E.F. Mohammed Martinez http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=94225 http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetItemData?uri=Che-lives&itemurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.revleft.com%2Fvb%2Fshowthread.php%3Ft%3D94225http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=94225 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Che-lives/~3/454808180/showthread.php Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:31:53 GMT Interesting article about African socialism (http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_eastafrica.html). If you wonder, it is not written by Barack Obama... Interesting article about African socialism. If you wonder, it is not written by Barack Obama the US president, but by his father together with some other African intellectuals from the 1960;s. ]]> Article Submissions Serpent http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=94185 http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetItemData?uri=Che-lives&itemurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.revleft.com%2Fvb%2Fshowthread.php%3Ft%3D94185http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=94185 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Che-lives/~3/447852889/showthread.php Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:05:04 GMT *Fetishizing Decentralized Social Movements and So-Called “Spontaneity”* “People talk about stikhiinost. But the stikhiinyi development of the... Fetishizing Decentralized Social Movements and So-Called “Spontaneity”

“People talk about stikhiinost. But the stikhiinyi development of the worker movement goes precisely to its subordination to bourgeois ideology […] because the stikhiinyi worker movement is tred-iunionizm, is Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei – and tred-iunionizm is precisely the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie.” (Vladimir Lenin)

This particular rendition of one of the “scandalous passages” in What Is To Be Done?, courtesy of historian Lars Lih and his lengthy analysis of the historical context of that pamphlet, better illustrates the history of “spontaneity,” back then in the form of so-called “trade unionism.” Before continuing, his remarks on translation problems should be reiterated:

"Spontaneity" seems like a plausible translation of stikhiinost because both words revolve around lack of control - but stikhiinost connotes the self's lack of control over the world, while spontaneity connotes the world's lack of control over the self. Thus, our attitude to stikhiinost is usually hostile, or at least wary, while our attitude toward spontaneity is usually positive.

Lih also commented on the first form of stikhiinost in the history of worker movements, specifically in the German worker movement itself:

The technical term within [German] Social-Democratic discourse for the effort to keep the worker-class struggle free from socialism was Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei, "trade-unions-only-ism."

This tred-iunionizm of a distinctly “yellow” type (“yellow” referring to class collaborationism, as opposed to “orange” and “red”) is the prevalent ideology of the trade union movement today, ranging from the organizational enslavement of the AFL-CIO to the “Democratic” Party in the United States to similar relationships in the United Kingdom and its liberal “Labour” Party, as well as to similar relationships nurtured by the emerging, trans-Atlantic Workers Uniting union (the name of the planned union discussed in my earlier work’s section on union globalization).

What, then, does tred-iunionizm share with “horizontalism,” the “movement of movements” phenomenon, the fetish for the structure of today’s non-government organizations (NGOs), and other forms of what should be called “social-movements-only-ism”? Consider once more the post-modernist radical Ben Trott, himself indicating the end result (shared by the various, naïve worshippers of stikhiinost, himself included):

Simultaneously, the 'movement of movements' finds itself in crisis too. We would seem to have run up against our own limits. The current cycle is drawing to an end; entering a 'downturn', if not necessarily quantitatively, then certainly qualitatively. The movements' beginnings (the time when 'we were winning') were characterised by a tremendous celebration of our 'unity in diversity' […] However, a movement as broad and contradictory as ours was always going to have to ask (and try to answer): 'Walking where, actually?' and 'What sort of world?' [...] If the challenge, then, is to move beyond a relatively uncritical celebration of unity in diversity, without slipping back into the 'old' (tried, tested and failed) ways of doing things, surely the question is as follows: How do we set in motion a process by which one group (most often, but not always, a party) is no longer able to dominate all the others, seeking to remake them in its own image; and where, at the same time, we are able to move beyond merely existing indifferently alongside each other?

It is for this reason that “directional demands,” in order to be properly articulated, can neither “emerge from, and are taken up by, the movement of antagonistic subjectivities” nor "seek to open up unlimited and undetermined possibilities for another world" by rejecting "the teleology of Hegelian and Leninist Marxisms" and "predetermined destinations." The latter, ill-informed suggestion is rejected in the latter two directional demands raised [here] (and especially in the highlighted text below):

1) The suppression of all public debts, the end to imperialist conflicts (not just wars) as vehicles for capital accumulation, and the preclusion of all acts of legalized predatory lending to the working class – all through the monopolization of all business-to-business and business-to-consumer credit in the hands of a single transnational bank under absolute public ownership; and
2) The extension of litigation rights to include class-action lawsuits and speedy judgements against all private employers who extract any sort of surplus value from their workers, thereby recognizing in law that human labour (both manual and manual) and its technological, labour-saving equivalent are the only non-natural sources of value production (as established by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and of course Karl Marx).

One more note must be made, and it is with regards to that last form of “social-movements-only-ism” that makes a fetish out of the structure of today’s NGOs. A highly critical article appeared in the September-October 2008 edition of International Socialist Review (a Cliffite magazine in the United States) titled “Funding for activists, and the strings attached”:

The rise of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the non-profit sector in the developing world has been the subject of several studies over the last twenty years. Revolutionaries have taken a highly critical view of this phenomenon, and this interpretation seems to be gaining credence in the broader radical left.

Curiously, however, these studies have largely not been carried over into the developed (imperialist) countries, even though the role of non-profits is substantial. In the United States, “charitable” foundations control $500 billion in assets, and there are over 830,000 registered non-profits, excluding religious organizations. The national leadership of several social movements, for instance the antiwar movement, is effectively in the hands of NGOs.

The “NGO-ization” of the U.S. Left has been a cause of distinct unhappiness—even dismay—amongst radical activists, but no accessible literature has attempted to address it. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is a welcome initial contribution to the discussion, although it exhibits several serious weaknesses that must be criticized. The contributors […] coin the term “non-profit industrial complex” (NPIC) to suggest the penetration of the non-profit sector by big business and the state.

[…]

The rise of the NPIC has allowed the neoliberal ruling class to achieve three interlocking goals: first, it has provided them with a monumental tax dodge; second, it has given cover for the retreat of the state from social welfare goals; third, it has increased the penetration of bourgeois ideology into all areas of social and political life—including the Left.

[…]

Also problematic are the solutions offered by the essays in Part III of [The Revolution Will Not Be Funded], which attempt to articulate alternatives to the NPIC model. All four essays in Part III endorse the anarchist program of “horizontality,” which situates the failures of the non-profits in their hierarchical, or “vertical,” decision-making structures.

[…]

Indeed, the concept of horizontality, which rejects the “old Left” notions of political program, political parties, and the centrality of class, enabled the rise of the NPIC. James Petras notes “NGO ideology depends heavily on essentialist identity politics.” Clarke elaborates: “[L]arge-scale social movements that once were ideologically and organizationally cohesive, fragmented amid a shift in the ‘themes’ of social mobilization [...] Lehmann argues, ‘In the place of large formal organizations, we find a myriad of small-scale dispersed movements engaged in an enormous variety of conflicts.’”

Without denying the problems of the “old Left,” or the tragedy of Maoist “party-building” efforts, it is beyond dispute that the fragmentation of the Left into the various “New Social Movements” helped foundation capital to co-opt it “piece by piece.” As Eric Tang writes, “These [New Social Movements] would […] become the social justice silos that guided the funding strategies of philanthropic foundations.”

[Note: A better summary quotation of the aforementioned ISR article may be found here: http://www.revleft.com/vb/fetishizin...791/index.html]

In short, all these expressions of stikhiinost, the defeatist worship of the self’s lack of control over the world, is a dead end!



REFERENCES:

Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done? In Context by Lars Lih [http://books.google.ca/books?id=8AVU...ummary_r&cad=0]

Walking in the right direction? by Ben Trott [http://www.turbulence.org.uk/index.php?s=fumagali]

Fetishizing social movements: a tred-iunionizm relative [http://www.revleft.com/vb/fetishizin...791/index.html]

Funding for activists, and the strings attached by Shaun Joseph [http://www.isreview.org/issues/61/re...otfunded.shtml] ]]> Article Submissions Jacob Richter http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=93982 http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetItemData?uri=Che-lives&itemurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.revleft.com%2Fvb%2Fshowthread.php%3Ft%3D93982http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=93982 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Che-lives/~3/446057758/showthread.php Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:01:43 GMT The election of Senator Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States has been met with joy and a renewed faith in the “American dream”... The election of Senator Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States has been met with joy and a renewed faith in the “American dream” around the world. Rama Yade, the black French junior minister of Human Rights, remarked “On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes.” Egyptian feminist Iman Bibars commented "When Obama won, I felt it was the return of the American dream.” Obama’s election, however, raises some critical questions, as does the world’s embrace of him.

President George W. Bush brought severe condemnation upon the United States for bellicose rhetoric, hardcore unilateralism and a disregard for world opinion. His invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, open policy of torture, state terrorism, support for authoritarian regimes in places such as Pakistan and Colombia, undermining of international institutions, subversion of international law and agreements, and insistence on shoving disaster capitalism down the world’s throat pushed many in the global community to the brink of discovering the nature and causes of American imperialism. Heads of states rose to power and international fame on the wave of anti-imperialist populism, including Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The United States lost considerable power, prestige, and respect globally, thereby discrediting American intervention and its underlying rationale of American exceptionalism more than under any president prior to Bush. The more intelligent sectors of the American ruling class understood this well, and thus threw their support behind Senator Barack Hussein Obama – the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, who was born in Hawai’i and raised in Indonesia.

Prior to Obama’s victory, the forty-three previous presidents were all white Protestant males, save for John F. Kennedy, a Catholic. To be sure, the new President-Elect is not the only candidate to have “inspired hope” in the hearts of people. Comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy are often made, both presidents promising a fundamental shift in American foreign policy. With Franklin Roosevelt, it was a “Good Neighbor Policy” toward Latin America, the region afflicted by American imperialism the most aside from North America itself. It is of no small note that Roosevelt trotted out this policy when he did – during the apex of the Great Depression – when American hard power and soft power were at their weakest. As NYU professor of Latin American history Greg Grandin notes in his book Empire’s Workshop regarding the Good Neighbor Policy, “Rather than weaken U.S. influence in the Western hemisphere, this newfound moderation in fact institutionalized Washington’s authority, drawing Latin American republics tighter into its political, economic, and cultural orbit through a series of multilateral treaties and regional organizations.” This, Grandin explains, is what taught the United States to use soft power effectively.

Upon becoming president, John F. Kennedy faced a world with potentially bleak prospects for American hegemony. Revolutionary sentiment and movements had engulfed the poor and oppressed nations of the world, from Asia to Africa to Latin America. Most troubling of all, however, was an island a mere 90 miles from the coast of Florida – an island coveted by imperialist slaveholders in the 19th century who sought to form a “Golden Circle” of slaveholding states – Cuba. Not only had a revolutionary, mass-based movement led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara overthrown a US-backed dictator, but Cuba had disobeyed the then 136 year old Monroe Doctrine. Kennedy ushered in decades of subversion, state terrorism and economic strangulation against Cuba to preserve hegemony in America’s “backyard.” Kennedy also attempted to co-opt the revolutionary fervor in Latin America, employing American exceptionalist rhetoric as a rallying cry for the poor and oppressed of the hemisphere: “Let us once again awaken our American revolution until it guides the struggles of people everywhere.” Perhaps Rama Yade and Iman Bibars should take note of this tactic. For the world’s critique of American hubris, it sure does enjoy reinforcing its underlying assumptions.

Still, Obama is no Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy. He is, as one member of RevLeft put it, a “biracial white man.” Looking at Obama’s political history, it can be argued that he is considerably calculating, despite the façade he erects. In 2000, Barack Obama ran for a seat in the US House of Representatives against a former Black Panther, Bobby Rush. The district, on the South Side of Chicago, is primarily African-American. In the race, Obama ran on the familiar theme of opposing a politics “rooted in the past.” He lost. Bobby Rush criticized Obama for not being sufficiently rooted in the African-American community. Obama attempted to compete with him in this regard, as opposed to trying to reframe the election. From this loss, Obama learned the value of a “postracial politics,” which propelled him to victory in 2004 and 2008.

Upon Senator Obama’s election, millions of minorities warmed up to the idea that America has overcome racism. That Senator Obama had to run a campaign which disregarded any legitimate grievances articulated by minorities and marginalized groups is of little matter. Obama’s reimagining of American history – of the “Founding Fathers” as freedom-fighters instead of staunch imperialists and of minority resistance to oppression as giving life to “American ideals” instead of resisting “ideals” whose only purpose is to provide euphemistic value, is telling. Regardless of whether or not Obama delivers on policies he won the Democratic nomination on, it is clear that a great number – millions – of Asians, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Indigenous peoples have finally been converted into wholehearted Americans who now feel they have a true stake in America’s success. Barring an absolutely catastrophic Obama presidency, the American bourgeoisie has won a definite victory over the global left, which will set the left back two or more decades. The American Empire is looking less like the American Empire of the past two centuries and more like the Roman Empire of two millennia ago. Although racism will continue in the United States, the broader society may embrace a race-neutral form of imperialism. Minorities have signed a Faustian deal. In The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud wrote: “No doubt one is a wretched plebeian harassed by debts and military service, but, to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen, one has one’s share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws.” People in the Third World can no longer count on segments of the American population for much sympathy and support based on common experiences. Instead, they can expect to be condemned not by rich white capitalists with a few brown faces sprinkled here and there, but by an increasingly multiracial society in which whites will soon be a minority. ]]> Article Submissions FreeFocus http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=93867 http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetItemData?uri=Che-lives&itemurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.revleft.com%2Fvb%2Fshowthread.php%3Ft%3D93867http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=93867 http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Che-lives/~3/432170353/showthread.php Sun, 26 Oct 2008 00:07:08 GMT Socio-Income Democracy: Direct Democracy in Income Taxation

“Direct legislation by the people through the rights of proposal and rejection. Self-determination and self-government of the people in Reich, state, province, and municipality. Election by the people of magistrates, who are answerable and liable to them. Annual voting of taxes.” (Eduard Bernstein)

Continuing with the grossly underrated minimum section of the equally underrated Erfurt Program, that last particularly historic demand for what I call “socio-income democracy” goes a long way to highlight the broad economism infecting many (if not most) traditional Marxists, class-strugglist anarchists, left-communists, class-strugglist pareconists, and others on the “anti-capitalist” left, even those in favour of the “directional demand” approach. Now, the conventional Trotskyist who adheres to the transitional method (thus upholding the first major critique of the original minimum-maximum programmatic approach) may protest at this charge of broad economism and point to the Transitional Programme, but why was this demand missing from that 1938 document? Well, consider one more aspect of the question raised [...] concerning the best approach to bridge the gulf between the vulgar-minimum and maximum demands, as posed by the Weekly Worker’s Jack Conrad in 2006:

Trotsky insisted that if the defensive movement of the working class was energetically promoted, freed from bureaucratic constraints, and after that nudged in the direction of forming picket line defence guards, then pushed towards demanding nationalisation of key industries, it would, little leap following little leap, take at least a minority of the class towards forming soviets and then, to cap it all, the conquest of state power.

[...]

Winning over the majority intellectually and organising the workers into a political party was dismissed as the gradualism that belonged to a previous, long dead, era [...] Winning state power and ending capitalism internationally will, though, be revealed to [workers] as the real aim only during the course of the rising spiral of struggle. Not quite, but almost, socialism as conspiracy. In essence, Trotsky, from a position of extreme organisational weakness, had re-invented the Blanquist putsch or the anarchist general strike ‘road to socialism’. This time [the Trotskyists] would be the educative elite, the tightly knit, highly disciplined, minority, operating as the command centre. They would drive the entire juggernaut of world revolution through their cogs and wheels of transitional demands, using trade union and other such levers.

[...]

No place, then, for high politics, demands for a democratic republic and extreme democracy, in the Transitional programme.

In one word: economism! That being said, the dynamic minimum test alluded to at the beginning of this chapter must be applied.

Does this reform facilitate the issuance of either intermediate or threshold demands? Because socio-income democracy is intimately linked to class-strugglist democracy itself (not least of which by going against the aforementioned broad economism), it meets and exceeds the Hahnel criterion. Not coincidentally, it also illustrates the antiquated nature of the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois slogan “No taxation without representation!”

Socio-income democracy meets and exceeds the Hahnel criterion in one other way: by planting additional seeds of participatory democracy to grow in other macroeconomic affairs. This was alluded to in my earlier work [...]:

One particular “transitional demand” that has emerged with the development of information-communication technology is the demand for “socioeconomic democracy” as advocated by Robley George in Socioeconomic Democracy: An Advanced Socioeconomic System. In its narrowest form, there is some form of […] “maximum allowable personal wealth” that is democratically established and adjusted by society as a whole. Within the context of this thesis, this establishment, through class-conscious participation (as opposed to representation), would go beyond the minimum demand in the Communist Manifesto for “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.”

Does this reform enable the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view”? Well, given the complications of modern income tax laws, this demand needs to be phrased in a very specific manner, taking into consideration the various, class-based sources of income, such as:

1) Regular and management employment income;
2) Individual property income such as rent;
3) The respective business incomes of sole proprietorships, ordinary and limited-liability partnerships, and corporations;
4) Both individual and corporate dividend income; and
5) Both individual and corporate capital gains (including those arising from deemed dispositions upon death, thereby leading to inheritance taxation by any other name).

In addition to taking into consideration the various, class-based sources of income, there are other, class-based income tax mechanisms to consider, including alternative minimum taxation (aimed at high-income taxpayers using various tax deduction mechanisms to significantly reduce or eliminate their tax liabilities) and non-employment income gross-ups or multipliers, such as capital-friendly discount percentages applied to “taxable” capital gains and “taxable” dividends.

With the aforementioned emphases on class, does socio-income democracy meet that all-important Kautsky criterion in relation to other basic principles? Since full worker control over the economy entails more than just enterprise management, and since socio-income democracy is fully consistent with the transnational emancipation of labour being brought about only by a highly class-conscious and organized working class itself, socio-income democracy does indeed meet that all-important Kautsky criterion of enabling the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view.”



REFERENCES:

Programme of the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (Erfurt Programme) by Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein [http://www.marxists.org/history/inte...rt-program.htm]

Programmatic masks and transitional fleas by Jack Conrad [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/649/programme.htm]

Socioeconomic Democracy: A Very Brief Introduction by the Center for the Study of Democratic Societies [http://www.centersds.com/verybrief.htm] ]]> Article Submissions Jacob Richter http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=92929 http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetItemData?uri=Che-lives&itemurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.revleft.com%2Fvb%2Fshowthread.php%3Ft%3D92929http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=92929 http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=Che-lives