redFlags

Kenya: World Social Forum Diary

by Jordan Flaherty

Nairobi, Kenya — This week, tens of thousands of people, representing nearly every nation and people, are gathered to strategize, debate and struggle for solutions to worldwide problems of injustice and inequality. For the first time, the World Social Forum has come to Nairobi, Kenya. The global conference is situated in a massive sports complex neighboring the slum of Korogocho, where tens of thousands of Kenyans live in abject poverty, a vivid demonstration of the themes discussed at the Forum, and a contrast to the wealth of many of the conference participants from the so-called “developed world.”

Workers Party of Belgium: Pageantry, Parliaments & Uncle Joe

By way of Jimmy Higgins from Fire on the Mountain, this report about the recent growth of the Workers Party of Belgium (PTB) is interesting on a few counts. The PTB has been the center of international gatherings to re-form the international communist movement on the conflation of revisionism and Marxism-Leninism, promoting left Stalinism against MLM. At the same time, they have grown from the "biggest of the small parties" to the "smallest of the big" in the Belgian parliament and local electoral lists. Running a high-profile campaign in her district and of mixed immigrant/European family, Miss Brussels Halima Chehaima came in second promoting the PTB platform. Cuts a better profile than Uncle Joe, but what of this program they run, what of their international profile, of shop stewards vs. tribunes of the people? What of syncretism vs. synthesis?

Maybe this is a good time to have a discussion about the Old Synthesis.

The full report is here on the link.

U.S. Peace Movement Plans to “Escalate” Street Protests

International ANSWER has released a statement calling for an "escalation" of street protests following the Bush State of the Union speech last night.

Dissent must turn to resistance.

The issue right now for the anti-war movement can not simply be opposition to a surge or an escalation: the issue is the war itself. The troops must be brought home now. As in Vietnam, that is the only solution. Those who initiated the war and who funded the war should be held accountable for one of the great crimes of the modern era...

If Bush fails in Iraq the people of the United States lose nothing. It is not our Empire.

Daring to Change Minds: Sunsara Taylor Back on the O'Reilly Factor

The day Congress opened with its new Democratic Party majority, activists with World Can't Wait confronted DLC bagman Rahm Emmanuel with chants of "De-escalate, Investigate, Troops Out Now!" Emmanuel couldn't handle the heat and like the chickenbutt he is, bounced from his own press conference.

According to Father Coughlin Bill O'Reilly, this was a "wild mob" of "lunatics" shouting poor Rahm down, or at least that's the approach he took with Sunsara Taylor on his show that night. Putting this surreal etiquette lesson from the bully pulpit himself aside, it was hot hot hot to see the Democrats put on the hot seat starting day one. World Can't Wait is pushing (yeah, pushing) for activists and people of conscience to not accept the Bush agenda as some "new normal"... whether Republicans or Democrats are serving it up — and to campaign for impeachment of the executive as repudiation of the program.

Legalization of torture, the shredding of the Fourth Amendment and a permanent, illegal war have to be stopped. We need a definitive repudiation. Impeachment is possible, but only if there is a broad mass movement determined to make it happen.

I urge any activist reading this to question their own work, and how they are contributing to the political fight shaping up (and not just the various issue-symptoms so many groups are built around).

UFPJ is building up for a big anti-war protest on January 27, and ANSWER is looking to March 17 with talk of direct actions coming from some others. If we all pick up the pace, we have a chance of turning this tide back instead of finding cold comfort in turning the reins of empire over to the Democrats. Judging from UFPJ's track record over the last couple of years, they cannot be trusted to do more than run scrimmage for the Democrats (and to avoid any "embarassments" to the now ruling party), having adopted a firm (and weak) pro-Democratic position over the last year.

If we fear disruption, resistance and honesty about the stakes — we are in trouble. Only in America are activists fatigued by success. The majority of people are now against this war, but they are sending more troops. Resistance, not dissent, is the order of the day.

Sunsara wrote up her experience for CounterPunch, Same As It Ever Was: The Democrats' First Day, and below is a recent speech by Sunsara Taylor from the World Can't Wait town hall at Fordham that lays out the basic analysis (edited for publication in Revolution).

Engage!

Day of Solidarity with the People of Oaxaca

An ad hoc network of activists in New York has taken up the Zapatista call for a day of actions in solidarity with the popular struggle in Oaxaca on Friday, December 22. Organizations, collectives and individuals are encouraged to plan autonomous actions, and to join gatherings at the Mexican consulate and later at Rockefeller Center (remember Diego Rivera!).

Download Oaxaca/NYC Solidarity Flyer

For more information, check:
El Enemigo Comun
Friends of Brad Will

Or for background on the conflict and the voice of the people themselves, check the website of the Popular Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO)

 

Leslie Feinberg's Lavender & Red, a history of communists and LGBT liberation

Serving as long-time editor of Workers World newspaper, Leslie Feinberg is perhaps best known for writings on transgender liberation, including the novel Stone Butch Blues about a working class transgendered lesbian in Buffalo, NY. Workers World has been running a lengthy history of the LGBT movement's intersections with, and conflicts within, the communist movement. With around 80 installments  so fa you can learn something new every day.

Click here for the complete archive of Leslie Feinberg's Lavender & Red

Or start with the same chapter I did: Sexual Freedom vs. Fascism in Germany

And now for something completely different...

I'll just post this one without introductory commentary, except by way of historical introduction.

Here's  an American professor of Marxism (at NYU no less!), giving a lecture in Havana in 1991 as Cuba went into a complete economic collapse with the end of Soviet subsidies resulting from their own disintegration as a contending world power.

The topic of this lecture? "A Pedagological Battle Plan to Check the Spread of Skepticism in Cuba." A daunting task if ever there was one... Prof. Ollman is not detered, and begins by way of what he learned in Russia from a fundamentalist American preacher himself just returned from Siberia... Read on...

Stan Goff Follows the Logic of the "Refoundation" Logic

What is a website like this to do? For regular readers that's obviously been an issue for me. My hope has been to create a discussion board for the broader communist trend in a time of tremendous political crisis. I don't think that "crisis" is mainly in socialism: but in the whole creaking, bloody edifice of capitalism itself, a crisis that has most certainly extended to those sections of the socialist movement that do not accept, or cannot honestly conceive, of a revolutionary break with the existing social relations.

Organized, self-described communist forces have tended to do one of two things. Either they pragmatically tailor their politics to what they take as their immediate needs, or they play the lonely beacon — shining the light into the conceptual darkness of the "masses." The pragmatists lose the forest for the trees, and more often than not themselves along the way. The vanguardists confuse the Forest for its dialectical ecology. And the system has stood through this, if not impervious to resistance – still standing, still dangerous, still wasting lives by the millions.

I've never believed that the conscious, active, vanguard element is fundamentally separate from the "masses." (Self-)Consciousness itself is not an alienation. I have to work. I've been a waiter and a glorified typesetter. Sometimes I've also led and participated in social movements; felt a glow from the people in struggle, like Etienne, the hero of Emile Zola's classic novel Germinal. My old friend Nilda, who introduced me to Wu Tang, also taught me a simple, important lesson: "you're in the mix, kid."

We are in the mix.

Why say all this? ...By way of introduction to Stan Goff's renunciation of Leninism as "doctrine." Goff has been one of the more interesting Marxist-identified writers in the US for a minute. A former Special Forces soldier, he served in Haiti, Somolia and Colombia, writing a chilling memoir of the former. Like a modern Smedley Butler, he went from being a "racketeer of capitalism" to a dedicated opponent not just "imperialism," but each of the systems of oppression that feed each other. In particular, he has dedicated substantial attention to questions of patriarchy. In one line he summed up the link between militarism and the domination of women in a way that helped me understand a lot: "Perfect masculinity is sociopathic." Indeed.

Renunciations are important — even when I disagree, strongly. It's necessary to reject "doctrine" if you want to think, let alone accomplish something. For those who view Marxism as a monolith, or conflate a scientific method with a search for purity, it is this same rejection of orthodoxy and dogmatism that has led me not to reject Marxism for the "sins of revisionism," as Lenin put it, but to engage what Avakian calls an "epistemological break."

There is no doubt the Soviet Union created a "doctrine" of Marxism-Leninism. They gave PhDs in it for crissakes. Sects have come and gone, it's true,  be they Trots or Mao-Maos (or Hoxjaites or New Americans or anti-authoritarians). There is also no doubt that the Marxist-Leninist party is the single most important "movement technology" to ever be developed. Where there are revolutions, that seek socialism and not just a re-shuffling of the same deck, these are the organizations that do it.

The reason for this isn't magical, or related to any orthodoxy or doctrine. In this, Goff always failed to understand what Marxism is. [Hint: It's not a normative vocabulary binding disparate reform struggles.]

I've posted Goff's piece in full on the continuation of this post to see what other folks think about it, and to comment myself when I've thought on it a bit. I hope those who respond do so having read what he's written. 

People of the Shining Path video, readings on the PCP – and analysis of the "peace accords"

                 

This film provides a sympathetic look at the Peruvian revolution and the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path) before Presidente Gonzalo's capture. The situation is now, very much, different. It was produced by the British TV station Channel 4. Most notable is how it actually includes interviews with guerillas and communist political officers. Considering the tremendous efforts to totally demonize these brave fighters, at a time when most of the Latin American left was hanging it all up, anyone who hasn't seen this documentary might be more than a little surprised. This honest, in-depth documentary shows why revolutionaries who refused to lower their sights found inspiration from this great attempt in a time of near universal dispair. It also shows what can be done when you try. Additional background reading:  Gordon McCormick's comparitive study of the MRTA and the PCP, Sharp Dressed Man | On the link, A World to Win's current analysis of the "Peace Accords," with some discussion of ideological issues related to Guzman (Gonzolo), the PCP's currently fractured leadership and Guzman's theory of "jefetura", or placing the Party's leadership above internal democratic centralist practice: A Sober Look at the Situation of the Peru Revolution and Its Needs

Interview with Flavio Sosa of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO)

Interview by Hernán Ouviña
Translation by Chuck Morse

Flavio Sosa is a member of the “provisional collective council” of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO, in Spanish). Despite being one of APPO’s most visible faces at the moment, he insists on stating that “ours is a movement of the grassroots, not leaders.” What follows are some fragments of a much longer conversation that we had with him and other comrades in the tent city in the emblematic Santo Domingo Plaza, a bastion of communalist resistance in Oaxaca.