People Before Profit blog

Hip-hop Renaissance

Sat, 31 Jan 2004 07:04:00 +0000

The morning of March 5th, I threw on my big cammy fatigues that I used to wear for bombing* because of all the hidden pockets. Walking out the door, I grabbed a large papier mâché book, the title reading, “Books Not Bombs,” and headed toward Manhattan’s Hunter College for an interview with Good Day New York. The sky slowly took on an ambrosia haze as the rain beat down. On the corners and streets, people began to converge everywhere. Through the halls, kids in oversized pants swished and hollered, “Yo ma, Good Day New York, ‘Books Not Bombs!’” I smiled and looked on as a young African woman declared, fist in air, “It’s time for a revolution!” She had not worked so long and hard to go to school just to get her tuition raised!

In her pause, I felt the thumping of a familiar beat and saw a small crowd collecting around the corner. There it was, the ghetto-blaster and young men in velour “breaking.” I couldn’t believe it. I felt so nostalgic. (Breaking is a style of dance made popular in the 1980s.) I thought I had gone through a time warp. But then again I had that same feeling about going to war with Iraq. I had that same feeling when a Bush came into the presidency. I got that same feeling when I looked out at my students and saw that same sense of disparity as they were newly required to say the pledge of allegiance.

Listening to people accuse today’s generation of being devoid of culture or out of touch with today’s politics, I can’t help but immediately think of hip hop culture and question how they missed it. Today’s political and economic climate is so similar to that of the height of hip hop, I’ve been kind of bracing myself to see what working-class subculture will grow from it. Now I realize it’s actually hip hop reborn.

In her newly released book, New York Ricans From the Hip Hop Zone, Raquel Z. Rivera points out the economic conditions that caused hip hop to arise. She writes: Early Puerto Rican and Afro-Caribbean and Black American hip hop artists transformed obsolete vocational skills from marginal occupations into raw materials for creativity and resistance…. Hip hop culture was born out of material deprivation, in the midst of dwindling income, educational access and job opportunities. Rivera discusses not only the Puerto Rican presence in hip hop but also touches upon its power to get young working-class people to unite. One reason I am so nostalgic about hip hop is because it caused a sense of awareness among African Americans, preaching educational and nationalistic rhymes. I also saw another way to fight or settle disputes through “battling” – what better way to take out your aggressions than dance or graffiti art?

New York Ricans From the Hip Hop Zone primarily focuses on the Puerto Rican presence in hip hop since its inception. Often hip hop is associated strictly with African Americans and ignores the African diaspora in its entirety. Rivera points out the socio-economic commonalities among African Americans and darker-skinned Puerto Ricans especially in the South Bronx (the birthplace of American hip hop). Not only did they speak the same slang, live in the same neighborhood, undergo the same discrimination from the cops, but their roots reflect the same rhythms in their music and dance. However, it was Puerto Ricans that often got charged with “trying to be Black.”

Even the music was characterized by the features that both Puerto Ricans and Black Americans are often charged with. The mass marketing of hip hop has had much to do with the exoticization of dark ghetto “virility” as a temporary distraction rom “white” suburban monotony. The ways in which breaking tended to be described (“natural,” “instinctive,” “vibrant,” “gritty,” “dynamic” and “exciting”) bring to mind cliché exoticizations of the ghetto, particularly Black ghetto as primeval, exciting, dangerous, mysterious and cool. Breaking’s magic resided in its purported primitive simplicity.

Aside from addressing obvious class and economic issues that are/were prevalent in society, one of the most important features of this book is that it was initially written as a thesis and discusses hip hop from an educational perspective, legitimizing hip hop as an academic subject. As an educator and a student, I find this a significant step toward advancement for struggling students. One of the most enowned educational philosophers, Paulo Freire, explains the importance of teaching in terms that others can grasp or relate to. Freire articulates that “the raising of critical consciousness in people who have been oppressed is a first step in helping them to obtain critical literacy and, ultimately, liberation from oppressive ideologies.” I myself have had 14 to 17-year-old students who performed at or below a second-grade level, never read a book in their lives, but witnessed their capacity to read Vibe magazine from cover to cover.

I’ll never forget walking into a classroom of 20 or so juvenile offenders in Van Nuys, California. They were screaming, throwing paper, laughing, intimidating each other and trying to intimidate me, but waiting to see what I was going to do. I took a deep breath, turned to the chalkboard and wrote “Hip Hop,” then I asked, “Who can tell me what the nine elements of hip hop are?” Suddenly a dozen kids who usually used school as an excuse to fight, sleep or otherwise cause trouble because they were either overwhelmed or patronized by the curriculum, were vying for a chance to be called upon.

Today several post-secondary schools across the nation do teach hip hop as a subject. Now, Rivera proceeds to advance this trend by introducing it as more formal academia among university students and professors, making her book an invaluable contribution both to the Puerto Rican community as well as the academic community.

--Melissa Chadburn is a law student from California. *bombing refers to doing graffiti art.

Hollywood Red: The Life of Abraham Polonsky

Sat, 31 Jan 2004 06:54:00 +0000

I was introduced to Abraham Polonsky through two films on late-night television that aired around 1957. The films were Body and Soul and Force of Evil. Both starred John Garfield at the peak of his powers, both were written by Polonsky, and he directed the second, darker film as well. Abraham Polonsky was a filmmaker and novelist whose work consistently critiqued the violence and corruption of capitalism.

Made soon after World War II by the independent Enterprise Studios, the films hearkened back to the Depression. Both are rich in imagery and language. Body and Soul follows the career of middleweight boxer Charlie Davis. Attempting to slug his way out of the slums, he finds himself turned into a money machine by the gamblers controlling the fight game.

Force of Evil charts the course of mob lawyer Joe Morse as he tries to force his older brother into the corporation controlling the numbers racket. Polonsky’s Marxist critique was organic to the film’s structure, making this the most truly radical film to come out of Hollywood. The haunting final sequence, shot at dawn, shows Joe descending an endless staircase to find his brother’s body on the rocks below the span of the George Washington Bridge.

As a middle-class teenager growing up in the post-war boom years, I had no idea who had made these amazing films and no clear picture of the Great Depression. All I saw was Garfield. After that, I looked for anything he appeared in, and while some of the other films were good, it was the two by Polonsky that made the deepest impression. Later, I would read William Pechter’s interview with Polonsky in Film Quarterly and begin to know the man behind the movies. Later still, I would meet him and have the privilege of becoming his friend.

Polonsky was born in New York City in 1910. He attended the City College of New York (CCNY) and later taught literature there until the Second World War. He also worked his way through Columbia University law school. Briefly employed with a law firm, he found the work unexciting and was happy to meet Molly Goldberg, the author and star of the long-running radio show, The Goldbergs. She was hoping to find someone who could help her with a story that involved legal matters.

Goldberg was so impressed with the young attorney that in 1937 she asked him to accompany her to Hollywood to help her write a film for the popular boy-singer, Bobby Breen. Some of Polonsky’s CCNY friends were there working in the film industry and involved in the causes of the day – helping to build the union movement, anti-fascism and support for Republican Spain. On his return to the East Coast, he and his wife Sylvia moved to upstate New York. At this time he was writing for a number of radio shows and commuting to New York City to teach at CCNY. He became involved in efforts to organize autoworkers at a GM plant near his home in Briarcliff, and in 1939 he began working as educational director of the CIO in upstate New York.

It was during this period that he wrote his first novel, The Discoverers. Peopled with a disparate cast of radicals, frustrated intellectuals and bohemians, the book was announced for publication by Modern Age, but the publisher went out of business. Considered by many who’ve read it to be his best book, it remains unpublished.

Two books followed, The Goose Is Cooked, published in 1942 by Simon and Schuster, and The Enemy Sea, an adventure story, originally serialized in Colliers Magazine and published in hardback by Little Brown. Polonsky had briefly gone to sea after college and brought that experience to the novel, which he dedicated to the National Maritime Union. Enemy Sea caught the attention of Paramount Pictures, and they offered Polonsky a screenwriting contract.

By this time America was in the war. Turned down for active service because of poor eyesight, he managed to get into the OSS which, at the time, welcomed radicals into its ranks. Prior to going overseas, he signed a contract with Paramount that guaranteed him a job on his return. Polonsky’s first assignment was in London where he was put to work interrogating high level German officers who’d been taken prisoner (he chatted with Rudolf Hess about the future of computers!) and working in what was called Black Radio, broadcasting false information into Germany.

Later he was part of the Normandy invasion and spent the concluding year of the war with French partisans. He left the OSS (soon to be transformed into the CIA) when he was asked to take part in an operation designed to prop up the corrupt regime and derail the coming revolution in China. He moved his family (there were now three children) to Hollywood and went to work at Paramount.

He got an official screen credit as co-author on Golden Earrings. Polonsky’s draft was a depiction of Hungarian Jews as Holocaust victims, but by the time it reached the screen it was transformed into a fanciful tale involving a British Intelligence operator and his love affair with beautiful gypsy. Polonsky claimed that despite the credit, not one word he’d written made it to the screen. He was happier writing for the radio program, Reunion USA, sponsored by Hollywood Writer’s Mobilization and broadcast over ABC in Los Angeles throughout 1945. One of his scripts, The Case of David Smith dealt with an officer who had fought with native partisans in the South Pacific and had suffered a complete mental breakdown on his return from the war. During the course of his analysis, his doctor realizes Smith’s breakdown was not related to combat but to the betrayal that followed. Smith had told the partisans that winning the war would also bring an end to colonialist oppression. Seeing his promise broken with reinstitutionalization of the colonialist regime had been the true cause of Smith’s breakdown.

Unhappy at Paramount, Polonsky had a visit from an East-Coast friend, Arnold Manoff. Manoff, who had been working on a script about middleweight champ Barney Ross for John Garfield at Enterprise Studios, had just learned that Ross had been arrested on narcotics charges (he’d become addicted as a result of painful war wounds). Narcotics addiction was still a movie taboo and Manoff found himself out of a job. He suggested that he and Polonsky walk over to Enterprise and talk to Garfield. Polonsky composed the story of Body and Soul on the two-block walk from Paramount to Enterprise, and that afternoon he found himself on loan from his studio to write the script.

Body and Soul turned out to be the only hit Enterprise ever had. Both a financial and critical success, it earned Garfield a Best Actor nomination and cleared the way for Polonsky’s complete artistic control on Force of Evil. Unfortunately, the studio took enormous losses on what was to be their blockbuster, Arch of Triumph, forcing them to sell distributing rights to MGM. Because of their losses, MGM released Polonsky’s film with little publicity, and it was years before it would be recognized for the great work that it is.

Polonsky then wrote a screenplay for Fox based on Jerome Weidman’s I Can Get It for You Wholesale. The 1937 novel about the garment industry was riddled with anti-union and anti-Semitic passages. Changing the protagonist from Harry to Harriet and adding a major character, a Jewish tailor, to serve as conscience and narrator, Polonsky was able to deliver a progressive film with something to say about equal rights for women. Polonsky then moved his family to France and worked on a new novel, The World Above. He also hoped to write and direct a film version of Thomas Mann’s parable about the rise of fascism, Mario and the Magician.

There were growing rumors of a second round of HUAC hearings. Stars like John Garfield felt their careers threatened and saw offers vanish. Yet Darryl Zanuck had been pleased with Polonsky’s work on Wholesale and offered him an opportunity to write and direct for Fox. Fully expecting a subpoena and welcoming an opportunity to stand up to HUAC, Polonsky accepted and returned to Hollywood. Called to testify in April 1951, he refused to cooperate and was blacklisted. During the course of his testimony Congressman Velde demanded the names of Polonsky’s associates in the OSS. At that point, an unidentified man (presumably CIA) appeared at Velde’s side and after a brief whispered conversation, the line of questioning was dropped. The thwarted interrogator then accused Polonsky of being “the most dangerous man in America.” “Only to yourself,” his wife retorted on his return home.

The World Above was published to generally good reviews. The novel’s protagonist, a scientist/psychologist who, after dedicating his life to pure science and avoiding social engagement, concludes that the injustices of capitalist society represent a major contributor to mental illness, and that the sickness of the society must be eradicated. Brought before a committee that mirrored HUAC and asked to recant, the scientist refuses.

His next novel, A Season of Fear, published in 1956 by Cameron and Associates, portrayed the witch-hunt through the eyes of an engineer for the Department of Water and Power in Southern California. This neglected work, a classic in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Horace McCoy, brilliantly captured the terror of the McCarthy era. By then Polonsky had moved his family back to New York where, writing under the disguise of various “fronts” and in collaboration with fellow blacklistees Walter Bernstein and Arnold Manoff, he wrote for the hit television series You Are There. From 1953 to 1955, when the show moved to the West Coast, he wrote scripts championing free thought and speech, grassroots democracy and justifiable revolution. He also worked uncredited on a number of films, the most famous being Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), one of the last and best of the classic film noirs, starring Harry Belafonte.

As the 1960s drew to a close, Polonsky made his way back into movies under his own name. First, he wrote the screenplay for Madigan (1968) and then scripted and directed Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (1969), a Western with things to say about the treatment of American Indians and, obliquely, anti-war and youth movements. He completed one more film, Romance of a Horsethief (1970), before a heart attack ended his directorial career. The film was a sunny parable involving Jews, Cossacks and the Russo-Japanese war, ending happily with boy and girl escaping to the new world.

Continuing to work as a highly paid script doctor, he began teaching again at the University of Southern California. He was a frequent lecturer on panels about the blacklist. Both Garfield films, now recognized as classics, were screened and introduced by Polonsky at film festivals all over the world. Critical editions of his scripts were published. He published one more novel, Zenia’s Way (1980), and directed a production of his play Piece de Resistance in Los Angeles in 1981. He was working on another novel at the time of his death in 1999. The World Above was reissued in 1999 by the University of Illinois Press as part of its “Radical Novel Reconsidered” series. One would hope for a second printing of A Season of Fear and that perhaps The Discoverers might finally be made available to readers.

Polonsky’s gift was his passion. He may have preferred to be remembered as a novelist, and his books are vivid and unforgettable, yet it is the always restless, ever stirring cinematic images that flash forever through our waking and sleeping dreams: Charley Davis coming back in the final round like Blake’s Tyger, hitting out at the system that betrayed him; Joe Morse, having lost everything, going “down and down and down...to the bottom of the world” to find his brother and regeneration.

Staying Human on the Left Coast

Sat, 31 Jan 2004 06:33:00 +0000

Bay-area hip-hop artist and political activist Michael Franti (of Spearhead) recently put out an anti-war single titled “Bomb Da World.” In this song, Franti calls on the people to rise up against the insanity of Bush’s perpetual war. “Power to the peaceful people,” he intones. The song is an excellent example of both the beauty and the social and humanistic significance of his music.
Franti has worked closely with many political projects including the prison reform organization Critical Resistance (led by Angela Davis), the defense of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Music Bridges project in Cuba, which brings American musicians to Cuba to build international friendship. Franti speaks out frequently on the need to create jobs, education and health care, not more prisons. He stands against racism and national chauvinism. He consistently links these issues with war and violent US foreign policy. He calls for the unity of America’s peoples and working class to unite against oppression and for peace and equality.

Along with his band Spearhead, Franti released his critically acclaimed album, Stay Human (Six Degrees records) in 2001. This album uniquely blends hip-hop, jazz, R&B, with reggae and smooth soulful sounds reminiscent of the early 1970s music scene. The political and social subjects of many of these songs draw the listener into another time – but not the past. It is a post-war, post-oppression future of peace and justice. This particular album, distinct from the previous Spearhead releases, combines dramatic scenarios (represented as brief radio segments) with the music to create a multi-dimensional reality for the listener. It enlists the listener in an active participation in the democratic movements and in the musical movements of the album. This album inspires and cultivates what is best about humanity as the most basic of forces against the anti-humanism of wars and warmongers.

On the racist violence and the injustices of the criminal justice system: Oh-my, oh-my God, Out here mama they got us livin’ genocide (Oh My God) On one of the meanings of voice and musical expression: I speak low but I’m like a lion roaring Baritone like a Robeson recordin’ I’m givin’ thanks for bein’ human every morning... (Stay Human) On the current times: We livin’ in a mean time and an aggressive time A painful time, a time where cynicism rots the vine… (Rock the Nation) Spearhead’s musical and poetic talents and social message have gotten them a lot of attention from tens of thousands of fans around the country. But that’s not all who are interested. Recently government agents harassed a relative of one of the band members, trying to discern the level of the threat to Bush’s war drive Spearhead posed. This particular incident, along with other attacks on the rights of poets, musicians, artists and actors to speak out against an illegal and unnecessary war has many Americans questioning the state of democracy – a major irony, given the Bush administration’s claim to be fighting in Iraq for democracy and freedom.

Franti’s latest album, an acoustic recording, Songs from the Porch, can be purchased, along with the other recordings, on the Michael Franti and Spearhead website (www.spearheadvibrations.com). Franti has also been featured on various albums and collections of songs, including Gascd (2002 Ram Recordings). All of these beautiful recordings are a must buy.

Book Review - An Execution in the Family, by Robert Meeropol

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 08:30:00 +0000

Robert Meeropol’s An Execution in the Family renders a fiery challenge to the family values of the right. It is a timely exposé of the violence that flows from the destruction of civil rights and liberties experienced by victims of the “McCarthy-era abuses of power.” It indicts the prison-industrial complex and denounces the death penalty as a “barbaric practice” primarily used as a political tool to silence progressive voices or attack disenfranchised communities.

Meeropol was six years old in 1953 when his parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were executed for conspiracy to steal atomic secrets for the Soviet Union. Just before they were put to death, the Rosenbergs wrote a letter to their two sons saying they were “secure in the knowledge that others would carry on after them.” Using the most recently released US government documents (Venona transcripts) and new witness accounts, Meeropol also reveals the results of his research into his parents’ case. Significantly, this book documents the evolution of Meeropol’s own perception of his parents’ case and the political importance of the complexity of the truth.

Not without anger, but imbued with a deep and enduring political commitment to justice, Meeropol lashes out at his parents’ killers, “Those who tried to have us taken away from the Meeropols were not satisfied with killing our birth parents; they wanted to kill the Rosenberg’s legacy as well. They wanted me to grow up forgetting or rejecting my birth parents. In fact they wanted to prevent my growing to create something like the Rosenberg Fund for Children. But they failed.” Today, the Rosenberg Fund for Children provides support for the children of targeted progressive activists and young activists who are targeted themselves.

An Execution in the Family describes a personal and political odyssey from being the Rosenbergs’ son to becoming a prominent political activist in his own right. One focus of his current work has been on capital punishment. Meeropol recalls that in the 1970s, he was interviewed in Philadelphia by an African American journalist. He was asked if he believed that something like what happened to his parents could happen again. Meeropol agreed that it could. That journalist, as it turned out, was Mumia Abu-Jamal. The author points to George W. Bush as “Governor Death,” because while Texas governor, Bush “had ultimate responsibility for the execution of more people than any other person alive in our country today.”

We are fortunate to have this historical and personal account of a difficult time for democracy and justice. It is a remarkable and moving testament of commitment and loyalty and is indispensable for readers of this magazine. Don’t assume that you already know Meeropol’s story until you read this and honest and compelling book. His life hasn’t been easy, and there are no easy answers here.

An Execution in the Family: One Son’s Journey by Robert Meeropol New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2003.

Book Review - Miracle at St. Anna, by James McBride

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 08:21:00 +0000

Close your eyes and imagine a scene from World War II. What do you see? US troops storming the beaches of Normandy? A Russian soldier placing the red flag of victory atop the German Reichstag in Berlin? The mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The grim gray dawns of the years long siege of Stalingrad? Search the awful war-torn terrain. Among the scorched steel and rubble, the twisted trees and cratered earth, between the near ruined armies arrayed against each other in that titanic struggle, do you discern any faces of color?

Sadly, the image of the war shaped in people’s minds by such great works of fiction and film as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead or Steven Spielberg’s more recent Saving Private Ryan is largely an image cast in grays and white, marked by a glaring absence of color. Works depicting the 20th century war stories of the US’s darker citizens never received the prominence accorded those depicting their white counterparts. John Oliver Killens’ And Then We Heard the Thunder (the title drawn from Harriet Tubman’s famous Civil War battlefield lines), written in the same era as The Naked and the Dead, depicted the tensions and ambiguities faced by Black soldiers fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific. Segregated by the white officer corps and harried day and night by Japanese infantry, they often found themselves between the devil and the deep blue sea. Exasperated and perhaps drawn at times to contemplate mutiny, these soldiers advanced the “double V for victory”: to defeat the racists and fascists at home and abroad.

This tragic tale rarely told and often forgotten has been told again, masterfully, by James McBride, author of the bestseller, The Color of Water. Inspired by the experiences of the all-Black 92nd Infantry division, his Miracle at St Anna, tells the story of a group of Black soldiers caught behind enemy lines while fighting Hitler’s armies in Italy. Drawn across the no-man’s land separating the engaging armies by a mission of mercy to save an orphan caught in the cross fire, the soldiers embark on a journey from which few will return but through which some find deliverance. Writing in the tradition of, and at times with the grace of, García Márquez, McBride uses magical realism to tell a fantastic tale that is as radical and mysterious as reality itself. In the forests of the Italian mountains, belief, faith, loyalty, trust, hate and unbounding love are tested in the fierce match between democracy and fascism, a match where friends at times seem enemies and enemies become unwitting friends.

And yet across and through this dialectical dance a great divide exists and choices have to be made, from which there can be no return and upon which there is no middle ground. As the journey unfolds, Sam Train, a sleepy giant of man, is cut down by machine-gun fire from an opposing bank. Miraculously reborn on the breath of another soldier he rises to find a young boy in the middle of a fierce firefight. Gripping a magical statue head from a bridge in one hand and the boy in another, Train uses the power of invisibility to avoid enemy fire and heads off into the mountains. Pursued by soldiers from his company who attempt a rescue, Train and the near-fatally-wounded boy come across a church and village where an atrocity has recently occurred. The soldiers are befriended by the villagers and there all meet their fate: partisans, Communists, fascists, Italians, Germans and Americans Black, Latino and white.

The African American characters of Miracle at St. Anna, like those of its predecessor, And Then We Heard the Thunder, confront what W.E.B. Du Bois called “double consciousness,” the dilemma of being of two minds, two cultures, two societies, one a victim of the racist discrimination of the other. Jim Crowed, forced into near-suicidal campaigns by stupid racist officers and under constant enemy fire, the soldiers fight for their lives, dignity and desperately for the future of humanity. And while the stakes are clear, racism disfigures the fight, not only obscuring the enemy but also assisting it.

Through the trusting eyes of a child and the gentle touch of a giant, McBride manages in this lyrical story to uncover the uniting power of love. It is a love born in battle, nurtured in pain, fed by magic and powered by an abiding faith. It is a love supreme.

Miracle at St. Anna: A Novel of World War II by James McBride New York, Riverhead Books, 2002.

Book Review - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by J. K. Rowling

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 08:05:00 +0000

Harry Potter is an annoying, conceited little brat. Anything that was likable about the character through the first four books of the Harry Potter series has been overshadowed now by his generally distasteful personality. After reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I wished I could have apologized to my mother if I’d ever acted anything like that. And therein lies the genius of the book – Harry Potter is 15-years old.

The book serves as a subtle warning to children who have not yet hit puberty, and their parents, while also providing a certain painful nostalgia for all readers who have made it through those horrible years. The jokes about Harry’s burgeoning manhood have been around as long as the series. It was a question many of the series’ older readers were asking – how is it going to be dealt with or will it be dealt with at all? In this book J.K. Rowling dispels any notion that puberty doesn’t exist or is all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows in the wizarding world she has created.

Of course, as in all the books in the series, Harry and his friends fight adventurous battles in the fight to keep the evil Lord Voldemort from regaining his power and taking over the world. But unlike the other four books, that is not the main focus of this hefty novel. If you pared it down to just the adventures, you’d have something smaller than an issue of TV Guide.

What bulks it up is Rowling’s investigation of the 15-year-old mind. Harry’s crush on Cho Chang continues, and they even go on a date and lock lips. Ginny Weasley, though a year younger than Harry, is shown with multiple boyfriends through the course of the book. Hermione Granger still hangs out with the boys – Ron Weasley and Harry – but a certain sexual tension interrupts their friendship’s giddy and conspiratorial conversations. Harry’s adult friends and mentors aren’t as prevalent in this book as they were in the previous installments. And while he deals with feelings of abandonment, he’s also unable to stop thinking about how superior he is to all the know-nothing adults around him. In other words, he’s 15.

Many of the themes and conflicts that were central to sidestories in previous books are continued in the fifth installment. The financially overburdened working-class Weasley family is still in conflict with the wealthy and politically connected Malfoys. Severus Snape is still good and evil all at once, keeping up the mystery of what side he stands on. Hermione is still smart, and still trying to free the enslaved house elves. And school pride still revolves around which house wins the Quidditch Cup. While there is much humor and lightness in Order of the Phoenix, it is a very dark book. As readers, we are pushed along with Harry as he feels the weight of the world on his shoulders, whether it really is or not.

And that’s the problem I have with this book – Harry himself. The maturity beyond his years that was seen in earlier books has faded away. In his conflict with his cousin Dudley, it’s no longer a good vs. bad situation. If anything, you start feeling a little bad about Harry’s treatment of Dudley, rather than the other way around. His maturity has been replaced with a textbook stereotype of middle adolescence. I felt compelled to look up what some child psychologists had to say about that age. “Self-involvement, alternating between unrealistically high expectations and poor self-concept,” says the website of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology. Based on their list of what the “symptoms” of adolescence are, one wonders if Rowling didn’t try to get every single one of them into Harry’s character for this book.

It doesn’t make Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix a bad read, though, just harder to endure. The black-and-white morality of the earlier books has faded away. The good people are bad, and the bad people are often only slightly worse. While, for adult and child readers alike, this gritty truth might be an unwelcome change, it is far overdue. Rowling’s series has been banned for its “heathen” subject matter. In praise, it has been favorably compared to J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings series, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Now, with the fifth book, I think it actually belongs in that crowd.

The dark side of children’s literature has been around for years, and perhaps only hidden in recent decades thanks to the likes of Disney. Rowling’s turn at realistic adolescent psychology places the Potter series firmly in the realm of great children’s literature.

I was once told by an English professor that literature at its best reflects real life, whether placed in an unrealistic locale or down the street. Rowling has now turned the Harry Potter series from a bunch of kids’ books to literature – maybe not at its best – of a very high standard.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling New York, Scholastic, 2003.

Book Review - Rogue Nation, by Clyde Prestowitz

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 07:19:00 +0000

Clyde Prestowitz’s Rogue Nation is an important book, not necessarily because of what it says but because of what it represents. Prestowitz is a former Reagan Administration official, who was catapulted to prominence during the 1980s because of his scorching critique of Japan, and what he then saw as its unfair trading practices.

In Rogue Nation, he assails the Bush Administration’s foreign policy on matters ranging from the Middle East to the Kyoto Treaty, the environment, the International Criminal Court our policy toward the European Union and China. Readers of this journal will find little new information within these pages – but that is precisely what makes this book important.

When a self- described “conservative” makes a critique of the Bush White House that, in a sense, would not seem out of place in Political Affairs, then something remarkable is taking place. Moreover, this book comes with a murderers’ row of endorsements from the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish former National Security chief in the Carter administration; billionaire investor George Soros; and former high-ranking General Wesley Clark; even leading European Union officials Chris Patten and Pascal Lamy weigh in with words of praise.

The title itself is bracing. Referring to US imperialism as “rogue” is infrequent in leading bourgeois circles. But what better term can be deployed to describe a nation whose justification for war on Iraq relied on the “imminent threat” posed by “weapons of mass destruction” that have yet to be discovered. Yes, there were “WMDs” involved that drove this nation to war –“whoppers of mass dimension.” There is increasing unease in ever wider circles about the policies of the present occupant of the White House.

This book is just one more bit of evidence that this unease has yet to diminish.

Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions by Clyde Prestowitz New York, Perseus, 2003.

Book Review - The Great Wells of Democracy, by Manning Marable

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 07:09:00 +0000

The preface of The Great Wells of Democracy sets the tone for establishing this book as a document for those who are unfamiliar with African American history and its struggles. The African American quest for equality is graphically described through historic events and personal vignettes about the author and occasionally his father’s experiences in a racist America.

Despite the decades of heroic fightback by African Americans, democracy seems to be elusive. These experiences are followed by detailed historical confirmation about his thesis of structural racism. Structural racism is illustrated as the right for Blacks to sit at a lunch counter, but not to have the right to live next door to whites. This racism extends to discrimination by banks and loan institutions towards African Americans who seek to purchase homes. These policies contribute to establishing Black neighborhoods that eventually make for segregated neighborhoods and schools.

The author’s personal anecdotes about himself and his father were heart arming and reminiscent of many African Americans’ experiences. These anecdotes about the author and his father’s experiences are interspersed throughout the book. Each of the examples is followed by historical data. One such example was the author’s job expectations upon receiving his doctorate. He followed this with statistics that illustrated the percentage of African American academics and scholars who were able to secure a “full-time teaching position at a college or university.”

These personal accounts were engaging and at times I found the transition to the more academic historical discussions a bit awkward. Marable is a master in relating actions that occurred in a specific time period. The book is chock full of names and struggles to illustrate historic civil rights events. He draws conclusions that are not often part of today’s mainstream thinking, relating the slave legacy to the shorter life span and spate of medical problems that are part of today’s African American life.

Marable deftly weaves events that have a national racial context together: the Rodney King case, Clinton and his attack on rap artist Sister’s statement about Blacks killing Blacks and Malcom X’s “chickens come home to roost.” Connecting a string of presidential initiatives provides a wonderful reminder to the reader of the initiatives and half steps of modern presidents to address the endemic nature of racism in the US. President William J. Clinton’s proposal for “a year long conversation about race” made him the fourth president “in half a century attempting to engage the nation in a dialogue about issues of race.” Harry S. Truman “authorized a commission that produced the document ‘To Secure These Rights.’” Challenging racial segregation in the armed forces and government hiring, Dwight D. Eisenhower elevated the Justice Department to enable it to enforce equal protection of citizens under the law. Lyndon Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders that produced the Kerner report that stated “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”

This is not a book of the past. Reparations and its historical relationship and numerous people from Queen Mother Moore, James Foreman, Martin Luther King to the Black Manifesto are cited as paving the path to today’s movements and struggles. This book has a wealth of information for the young and the old, the student and the activist who is interested in contemporary, as well as, historical struggles of African Americans.

The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life by Manning Marable Perseus Books Group, New York, 2000.

Book Review - Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 06:59:00 +0000

During the period between the first and second World Wars, two different intellectual doctrines vied for control of shaping the future of Black Americans: nationalism and Marxism. In his book Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars, Anthony Dawahare illustrates the influence of this struggle and provides an excellent and thorough examination of the two most influential ideologies of the Harlem Renaissance, historicizing the movements in their proper context.

As the book opens, Dawahare provides an excellent background. The nationalism of Du Bois and Garvey was directly influenced by the Wilsonian nationalism, which appeared after World War I. Garvey’s ethnic nationalism is strongly preoccupied with origins and traditions. He proposed hat people of the African Diaspora “return” to Africa to create a Black republic, the leader of which would be he himself. As Dawahare rightly notes, Garvey had the misconceived belief that a person can return to a place he/she has never been. Garvey’s ideas are rooted in patriarchal notions of the sons returning to the mother, “Mother Africa,” in order to redeem frica. This included the “‘civilizing’ of backward tribes and the expulsion of colonists.” In his desire to “civilize” backward tribes we see that even though he saw Africa as the “ur-mother,” Garvey was not averse to “giving her a makeover to render her more attractive to her modern sons.”

In contrast to Garvey, Du Bois believes in the existence of “a dual identity or ‘double consciousness’ that is both African and American, and, consequently rejects black nationalism proper.” Du Bois makes no suggestion that Black Americans should “return” to Africa, but that they actually have more right to call themselves American since they did the bulk of the work to build America. However, his nationalist ideas are similar to Garvey’s in relation to his beliefs of “origins” and the historical basis of modern Black identity. When he discusses beginnings “he makes a number of claims about the superiority of Africa,” and like Garvey “he professes that more so than other groups, Africans advanced ‘from animal savagery toward primitive civilization.’” Du Bois sees African Americans as a “protonation” not yet realized, a “nation within a nation,” and “privileges an African Gemeinschaft (an organic community based on kinship) over the European Gesellschaft (a rationalized, mechanistic community).”

In direct opposition to these different nationalist programs was socialism. Dawahare believes that “[t]he nationalism of Du Bois, Garvey, and the Harlem Renaissance cannot be fully understood except within this political dynamic and context.” He examines this political dynamic through the three varieties of socialism that confronted Du Bois and Garvey at the time; the Socialist Party, the African Blood Brotherhood and the Communists’ Workers Party. These leftist movements represented a real challenge to the rhetoric of the nationalists. The greatest challenge they raised against Du Bois and Garvey was their belief that identity was more complicated than ethnic nationalism would have it, and that only by allying themselves with the white workers could they overthrow capitalist rule and bring about the liberation of Black Americans. By rehistoricizing these competing positions Dawahare shows that Harlem Renaissance writers did have political choices, and that our popular perception of the Renaissance has been influenced, and often skewed.

Dawahare also provides a study of the poetry of Langston Hughes. It is tragic that Hughes’s radical poetry of the 1930s has been largely ignored in the academic world, especially since it challenges “scholars of Black literature and culture to look more critically at Black nationalist literary aesthetics and politics, and prodding us, perhaps, to rethink the historical relationships between poetics and politics.” Here Dawahare analyzes several of his works, beginning with Scottsboro Limited. According to Dawahare the agit-prop play illustrates Hughes’s move away from his “nationalist perspective as a Harlem Renaissance writer and toward a view of class rather than race as the basis for both racism and collective struggle.” He goes on to examine Hughes’s first anti-imperialist poem “Merry Christmas,” as well as other poems like “Song for Ourselves.” In “Song for Ourselves” Hughes parallels the “‘lynched’ Czechoslovakia and thousands of lynched Black Americans.”

In the end Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars proves to be an important book in the study of Black American literature and culture. It continues the tradition of Black Marxist studies in the vein of Cedric Robinson’s groundbreaking Black Marxism and William Maxwell’s New Negro, Old Left. Dawahare’s use of primary sources such as speeches and pamphlets provides the reader a close look at the period’s important works. A study of the socialist works of the time will prove important to Black cultural studies in the future. As Dawahare says: “[W]e can expect ideologies of race and nation to continue to play an important role in misleading the working class to attack each other instead of the systemic causes of their oppression.

Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars: A New Pandora’s Box by Anthony Dawahare Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2002.

Finally a Stamp for Paul

Thu, 29 Jan 2004 08:28:00 +0000

Victory. There is no other way to describe the US Postal Service’s decision to honor the life of Paul Robeson with a commemorative stamp. After eight years of struggle and with the support of a quarter of a million signatures from Robeson supporters, the USPS relented and decided to honor the life of this working-class giant.
In 1998, this magazine, along with organizations such as the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the Paul Robeson 100th Birthday Committee, and many other individual and organizations, urged the issuance of a stamp to honor Robeson. Paul Robeson sacrificed a successful movie, theater and singing career for the causes he held dear. In the 30 years of his active political life, he fought the fascist menace in Germany and Spain. In 1938 he traveled to Spain where he met with and entertained the soldiers of the International Brigades. The necessity of his personal commitment to this cause stemmed from his belief that “the artist must elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”

From the 1930s through the rest of his public life, Robeson vigorously supported organized labor, speaking and performing at labor rallies, conferences and festivals. In 1943, in the depths of the international struggle against fascism, Robeson saw the connection between “the disseminators and supporters of racial discrimination and antagonism” and the Nazis. “They are the people,” he said, “who believe Hitler’s lie that Nazism and Fascism were and are necessary in order to save the world from Communism.” They are the people, he argued, who support discrimination. They turn a blind eye to lynching and racial violence. They perpetuate the economic insecurity of Blacks and are satisfied with employment discrimination and other forms of social marginalization. They do not regard African Americans as worthy of full inclusion in our universities and other institutions of learning and culture.

Robeson struggled mightily for the unity of the working class but believed deeply that the full struggle for racial equality was the minimum necessary to achieve that unity.

At the height of his theater career, Robeson delivered a Broadway performance of Othello that ran for 296 shows in 1943-1944. By the late 1940s, he came under attack by the ultra-right for his anti-segregation, pro-labor, pro-peace beliefs. The McCarthyites accused him of supporting the overthrow of the government and other offenses. His right to travel abroad was curtailed and many of his performances and concerts were cancelled. After World War II, he helped found the National Negro Labor Council, the Civil Rights Congress and the Council on African Affairs. He published the Freedom newspaper in Harlem. Though he was strongly supported by sections of the labor movement (especially the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers) violence and government pressure put on him and the organizations he built forced him into ill health and early retirement.

After finally having his right to travel restored in 1958, Robeson went to the Soviet Union to recuperate. He died on January 23, 1976, at the age of 77.

Though many in the Communist and progressive movements continued to remember him as a hero of our class and our struggle, his fame – in the 1940s he was believed to be the most famous person on earth – languished to obscurity in the US. His celebrity continued in much of the rest of the world.

Robeson’s autobiography, Here I Stand is currently out of print, but is available through small book dealers. In 1965, dozens of essays by Robeson and tributes and poems by his supporters were collected together in the book Paul Robeson: The Great Forerunner (International Publishers). One particularly memorable tribute comes from DuSable Museum founder Margaret Burroughs: For years, Paul Robeson has been my barometer, a system of checks and balances to measure how much my life, our lives, have been involved with concern for people and the liberation of our own black people, of oppressed peoples all over the world. This commemorative stamp is but a small token of the honor Paul Robeson deserves.

Charting a New Course: An Interview with the Communist Party of Vietnam

Thu, 29 Jan 2004 08:16:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: Political Affairs editor Joe Sims spoke with Professor To Huy Rua, Vice Standing President of the Ho Chi Minh National Political Academy, Professor Nguyen Duc Binh, Dr. Luu Dat Thuyet, Director General of Department of International Cooperation and Dr. Ngo Huy Duc, interpreter and Deputy Director of the Institute of Political Sciences also all of the Ho Chi Minh National Political Academy.

PA: Can you describe the process of reform in Vietnam and what led you to initiate it?

CPV: Our reform and innovation process arose from the fact that we made some quite serious mistakes. The first mistake was a simplistic understanding of socialism. Vietnam was at best at the beginning of the transition period. At that time we wanted to build pure socialism instantly. This mistake is very obvious in our economic life. For example, we destroyed other economic sector in order to keep only two: the state and collective sector.
The second economic mistake was that we destroyed market relations. Other serious mistakes were made in management and social life. For example, the party’s life became bureaucratic. By that time our mechanism of economic management became bureaucratic, centralized and subsidized. Our socialism had become so-called state socialism, which means everything was concentrated in the state. This mistake was later viewed as dogmatism, voluntarism and subjectivism. These are the main reasons that led to the innovation.

However, the reform doesn’t only mean to fix mistakes but also while overcoming them, find a new way. We had to have new initiatives. Even if we didn’t make any mistakes, we should still have had a reform process continuing the innovation. So the innovation process is not only a process of fixing mistakes.

PA: You described your economic situation as being in the process of transition to socialism. Is that correct? How would you define Vietnam’s economy now? Is it a mixed economy, a socialist market economy? What is the scientific definition of the stage you’re at now?

CPV: Of course we don’t have a full and satisfactory definition of our economy, but we can define and identify some essential characteristics. Generally, speaking we define our economy as a complex [multi-sectoral] economy operating under the market mechanism with the management of the state with a socialistic orientation. This general definition can be sharpened as follows: a market economy with a socialistic orientation.

PA: Could you describe some of the accomplishments of the reform?

CPV: We have many clear achievements of the reform. These can be shown in the following three main points. The first is the very widespread participation of the people in the reform process. The second is Vietnam’s ability’s to participate in the international economy and in international activities. The third part is reflected in the economic indicators. After 10 years since 1986, Vietnam came out of crisis, inflation has decreased from 700 percent in 1986 to ten or 12 percent in 1995 and five percent for the last few years. The gross domestic product has risen to all-time highs. After 10 years, the average growth rate is 7.5 percent a year over the ten years since reform.

Before the reform we didn’t have enough of a supply of rice. But now we are the second or third largest rice exporter in the world. We export between three and four million tons of rice. That’s why we can have food security and can still export. The trade deficit also decreased from $2 billion to $1 million per year. Total foreign direct investment is $43 billion. So the results of the reform is that Vietnam now has a good atmosphere for investment. Our economic structure is also changing for industrialization. For example, before the reform, the agricultural sector accounted for the major part [of the economy], but now it only accounts for a minor part. This year the industrial sector accounted for 39 percent of the economy. We have had a two-digit growth rate of the industrial sector over the last ten years. The service sector accounts for about 38 percent. Last year agriculture accounted for about 23 percent. So we have a very rich and growing economic sector.

And after the reform it can also be seen that in terms of social indicators such as the living qualities of the people if compared with 1993, the per capita income increased two times. We have also had good achievements with the poverty rate. We reduced the poverty rate or poor households from 50 percent to about 10 percent at present. This was recognized by many international organizations. Despite the fact that our national income is not very high, we have a very high human development index (HDI) comparatively a much higher HDI.

We also have a policy of developing friendly relations with many countries. We worked under embargo, but now we have diversified relations, diplomatic relations with 167 countries, and we have trading relations with more than 100. We also have very good political stability. Vietnam was also recognized by international organizations as one of the most stable political environments.

The Communist Party as well has become more credible, and the people believe in the leadership of the Communist Party. Clearly, after more than 15 years of the reform, Vietnam is in a better position and has a good future.

The Pre-retirement Blues

Thu, 29 Jan 2004 08:08:00 +0000

The figures are staggering. The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, using figures from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, reports that mental illnesses and depression are the leading causes of disability and premature mortality, costing more than $150 billion in 1997 alone. Yes, staggering. What is more outrageous is that most of this cost can be prevented.
A new public health report says that a significant portion of those figures comes from pre-retirement people. We are not talking about much older senior citizens. In this case the figures represent pre-retirement people, that is, people between 55 and 65 years. This is the range of people who have struggled their whole lives to save, to gain an early retirement benefit through their unions or were fired or laid-off as cost saving measures by greedy or bankrupt employers. This is a highly vulnerable and angry cohort.

While all working people within this age range face these conditions, new research from the Feinberg School of Public Health at Northwestern University has found that African American and Latinos face an even great problem. The researchers noted that while it had been widely assumed that this kind of discrimination existed, there had been little research on it. Now they’ve found that for this age group, “Major depression and factors associated with depression were more frequent among members of minority groups than among whites.” The defeat of the right-wing proposition Proposition 54, which would have eliminated collecting race and ethnic backgrounds, is important for keeping this kind of research possible.

Some factors that bring on depression include being widowed, divorced or the pressures of providing care for a parent. Living alone is another documented factor. Providing social support in these instances makes sense, but with cutbacks in city and state budgets, these conditions will only grow worse. But, the Report continued, “economic factors most strongly associated with major depression were lack of employment and lack of health insurance coverage.” The combination of all of these factors is not uncommon and puts millions of people at great risk.

While depression is widespread and must be addressed for everyone, it is important to understand that this condition falls on certain populations more than others. Public health specialist Dorothy D. Dunlop writes in the November American Journal of Public Health, “Elevated depression rates among minority individuals are largely associated with greater health burdens and lack of health insurance, factors amenable to public policy interventions.” Progressives should demand that the federal Medicare program incorporate people 55 years and above. This demand was put forward and supported by the Clinton Administration and should be a major demand of all candidate running for the White House and Congress. The demand has not so far been derailed by the Bush anti-Medicare wrecking ball. On the contrary, by putting it forward the discussion in regard to Medicare can be returned to a desperately needed level of sanity. This is a simple measure and one that would be very popular. It would be a step toward gaining health services for everyone regardless of their age, race or ethnic background, gender and sexual orientation. City and state budgets must be expanded to provide social services to people at risk of this kind of depression. Federal dollars can and must initiate these programs. Massively increasing the funding of federal community health centers is a good step.

Where’s the money? If there is one thing that the Bush administration has shown with its demand for a $87 billion Iraq war budget, there is money. Removing the Republicans from Congress and the White House is the first step in redirecting that money to socially useful programs. Getting to that first step will be to get all candidates running for office to adopt programs that attract the broadest number of people. People aged 55 to 65, regardless of their backgrounds, are voters with rich histories of struggle. Avoiding their needs could spell electoral disaster, but mobilizing them with real solutions is a strategy for victory.

Poem - My Shani Star and Ray of Light

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 12:12:00 +0000

I remember Shani Born, October 23, 1971 The eve of her birth She danced in my womb To Scott Joplin’s Opera 'Treemonisha' The motion sent me to the Restroom Blood was in my urine Her farther and I made stayed until The Concert was over The morning after Shani B Our first and only girl together Shani, a wonder Amazement She joined her two brothers Obalaji and Ras In life Soon there would be Amiri Jr. and Ahi

For all time When the Ice Cream truck comes Playing 'the Entertainer' I will think of Shani and Scott Joplin And her many flavors

Shani my Shining Star A flower grew in October Indian Summer She named the night 'Dark time' She reasoned with rhyme The Sun brought light

My 'Little Darling' The sound of, Nat Phipps Band Terrace Ballroom, Newark, N.J. When the dance was over Time to go home

Shani is Sweet potato pie Made of Brown Sugar Collard Greens and Hot Sauce Salmon and Lamb Chops perfectly grilled A crisp Green Salad everyday

Woman, Daughter Talked fast Played Fast Ball Won it all Brought the Gold Home The Basket Ball court Her back yard Amiri Jr. called it The Black yard Neighborhood came Played the Game Her brothers taught her To kept the Team tight

I remember Shani A puzzled little girl Statement about Race on application 'Ain't we Human' without guile

At Johnson C. Smith, in North Carolina Shani called to tell The Klan marched downtown Hoods and all She saw Racists Shani, questioned their intelligence Said they were 'dumb' Graduated, Magna Cum Laude

Came home to Newark, New Jersey Where she taught Science, Math, English One year she taught French

Fast learner Isn't she lovely

I remember The day she brought Rashan Holmes To the house 'Mommy this is Ray'

Shani would find a Ray of Sun That Ray Be Isn't they Wonderful Unforgettable, Irreplaceable I know their Spirit lives on I want my Daughter and her Ray

I will forever carry a tear in my eye A pain in my heart For my daughter Wanda abused Blamed Her estranged husband is the suspect For the murder of her sister and Ray Unrestrained by Law

Shani and Ray were here Now the are gone

I wore the same white dress First, to Shani's Baptism Second, to Ray and Shani’s Wake I wore Black to the Funeral Trees in the Neighborhood have become Tombstones

Violence-- Domestic violence Families, Communities Worldwide violence Violated by the chill The wind of war

When will Human Beings evolve? Evol learn to Love Learn how to Learn to fight To abolish All Forms of Oppression Let Justice See Seek Peace In the Name of All

Mommy, Amina Baraka October 23, 2003

Book Review – Love, by Toni Morrison

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 11:36:00 +0000

A young woman looking for work as a live-in personal secretary in the Cosey household rekindles memories long since tucked away in the mind of the quiet neighborhood. Within the Cosey household, the arrival of this young woman, Junior Viviane, sparks suspicion and fear. Why has the somewhat familiar Junior – “call me June” – looked for work with Heed Cosey, the “meanest thing on the coast”? How did the isolated and elderly Heed Cosey place an ad in the local newspaper for a personal secretary anyway?

In a house seething with sibling animosity perhaps sparked by past romantic competition, will Junior prove to fit, or will she upset a silently habitual, if indeed cold, existence?

Will Junior, who seems to have secrets embedded in her own run-away appearance and just out of the bus station eagerness, crack the past and bring to light the forgotten lives of the members of the Cosey family? In the job interview, trying to impress her future employer with her charm, if not her questionable resume, Junior winks: startling Heed into a momentary recall of something just out of reach, like a shell snatched by a wave. It may have been a flick of melancholy so sharply felt that made her lean close to the girl and whisper, 'Can you keep a secret?'

What are the ancient secrets to be unraveled in this story brimming with mistrust, layers of deception and a buried past that needn’t be unearthed? And who is this man, this “commanding, beautiful” Bill Cosey, who seems to be at the center of all secrets and memories that haunt the Cosey house and this decaying seaside town? Will memories continue to divide this aging community or will they serve to bring together feuding factions?

In her superb new novel, Love, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison combines her special gift of sensual imagery with well-developed, sympathetic characters, realistic social and historical scenery and a flare for the mystical and otherworldly that grips the imagination. Morrison’s skill at moving seamlessly among the internal emotional and mental lives of various characters fills a book with rich human characters unencumbered by an authoritarian narrator bent on a single perspective.

Textured by the complexity of class and gender relations, there is something unswervingly democratic about the form and feel of this novel, even if the content and plot seem ordinary or simple. This is Toni Morrison at her very best.

Love Toni Morrison New York, Knopf, 2003.

Let the Dreamer Awake: Talking with Robin D. G. Kelley

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 11:23:00 +0000

Editor's note: Author/activst Robin D. G. Kelley teaches at Columbia University in New York City. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe and Freedom Dreams. He is currently working on a book on musician Thelonius Monk.

PA: How has your politics informed your study of history, and your study of history shaped your politics?

RK: I came to history because of politics. I chose this discipline when I was in college. I was reading in those days, in addition to C.L.R. James and Du Bois, Chancellor Williams, George M. Janestone [of the Marcus Garvey Institute of Ancient Research], and I was also interested in ancient research and proving people of African [descent] have a long and noble history. In doing that, I began to realize these issues were informed by politics. What I was interested in was not resurrecting a romantic past, but charting a new future. So I began to read more of the history of 20th century social movements and became interested in the Communist Party, and I discovered Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg and Antonio Gramsci. At the same time, I became interested in being active. I went from the Black Student Union to being in the Communist Workers Party, reading more Marxism-Leninism and trying to figure out historically how had people of color, particularly Black people and Africans, understood Marxism and its promise.

The core of the question was for me “what does self-determination look like?” Not so much what does the nation look like – I wasn’t so much trying to prove the Black-belt existed – but what happened when people tried to make it a reality. In the process I learned a whole lot from meeting people like Hosea Hudson and Lemon Johnson, who totally turned my head around. I went there trying to find their reading of Marxism, and found something much deeper. They brought an understanding of their particular history and legacy, the church, grassroots organizations, the legacy of Reconstruction: this was the lens through which they read.

I began to try to figure out what is the history of people you can’t see. What of the people who struggle every day, who sometimes join movements, and most of the time don’t – because most are convinced it won’t do anything. How do we write their history and understand it in the context of class struggle? I wrote Race Rebels to do that. Yo' Mama’s Dysfunktional! was really an attempt at intervention in public policy. My main concern in regard to its relationship to Marxism was what do the current labor-based urban movements look like? We were living in an era when everyone is saying “if you only had the movement of the 1960s,” “if you only could go back to the 1930s.” Everyone was talking about the past, but meanwhile all this stuff was popping up here and there: women of color organizing in cities and labor organizing emerging with people of color at the forefront.

The second question I was trying to get at goes back to this idea of cultural hegemony. How does the ideology of the dominant culture convince us that the ghettos of America are full of criminals, lazy Black youth, welfare mothers? What damage does that do, not to the self-esteem of those residents but to organizers, to struggles, to public policy, to voters?

Freedom Dreams came out of giving a series of lectures on social movements. Depending on how you read it, some might see it as a kind of retreat from Marxism. I actually disagree with that. I think it is very much a Marxist text, but it is a Marxist text in that I try to recover the early Marx, the romantic Marx, the Marx who was really shaped by the 1838 revolution, as opposed to the political economy Marx. Not that they are disconnected, but later in life he was really trying to [do] Capital. In trying to resurrect that [early Marx], I am also trying to resurrect the spirit of the romantic socialists in England in the 19th century, the people whom Engels called the utopians. There is something going on there that it is really interesting.

I came to surrealism in the last chapter [of Freedom Dreams] by way of Marxism, because the surrealists joined the French Communist Party around 1927. They were committed Communists for a while and then they broke off. Some didn’t – Louis Aragon and people like that. I am interested in what surrealism has to offer that Marxism could not, not because it is incapable but because that wasn’t the focus.

I think Marxism is not something that just sticks to the body of the text. You need to experience the struggle in relationship to what we know and read. Even though I get jibed about the surrealism chapter, it really is an attempt to figure out how we think about the unconscious and understand that, to understand culture, religion and spirituality, not as false consciousness but as part of people’s desires.

PA: It seems the challenge of developing and applying Marx creatively has gone unfulfilled. What’s the problem?

RK: This is not inherent to Marxism, but many Marxists and Communist organizations coming out of the factory-concentration movement in the 1970s and 1980s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union kind of lost their way and the organic connection between working-class creativity, imagination and new ways of moving forward. That became harder to see, because they were bound by the texts, bound by the history. When I was in the CWP, we wasted a lot of time reading over and over about Mao’s Long March, Stalin’s crimes, the problem of state and revolution. These were important issues in 1948 or in 1956, but where do we go now? Who is writing the analysis for the future? The CWP did something I thought was a mistake, which was why I left. They decided to concentrate their efforts on the petite bourgeoisie and people with technical skills. They saw the future as an emerging technocratic society and decided to take Communist out of the title.

I would have disagreed if they had said, “We just need to go back and do more factory concentration.” You need to come up with something different. One thing that is different is you have this whole population of urban youth who are just ripe for organization. None of the organizations I knew were really doing a lot of work with youth in a way that is on their terms. We need to have new theory.

I wouldn’t say that Marxism failed, as much as the Marxist-Leninist left was kind of wavering at that moment, and you needed to move to something else: something else that is not liberalism, or has not given up that dream. Because one thing I can never imagine is giving up the dream of socialism. Socialism is utopian; it has to be. Otherwise, it is just another form of state capitalism where people can just can get things they need. We need to dream much further and do the thing science fiction does so well: produce a vision of society where people can actually be happy.

PA: There was a moment when there was more organic relationship to the working class and popular culture. It seems the left has difficulty finding its way back. Is that the problem? Or has the Communist movement never developed working-class intellectuals?

RK: I actually think the Communist Party developed organic intellectuals who did play critical roles in the 1930s and 1940s. In fact, you can attribute to the left the opening of forms of public education like City College, which allowed working-class communities to have access to higher education.

Regarding the first part of your question there was an organic relationship between popular culture and working-class communities, both as producers of that culture and consumers. After the Cold War popular culture changed and become more corporate. Every single thing working-class communities invent is picked up, marketed and sold back to them before they have a chance to claim it. Think about community theater, the Federal Writers’ Project, popular film. As you move into the 1980s and 1990s, with the formation of hip-hop culture the working class had all kinds of possibilities. As it became a marketable commodity, it was picked up. Break-dancing was on all major television programs; people made money teaching it.

The other problem – and this is just speculation – what was identified as the radical politics of the 1960s was so generation-bound, whereas the radical politics of the 1930s was cross-generational. Unfortunately, the counterculture movement became the heart of radicalism in the 1960s, when what should have been radicalism in the 1960s, I think, was the cross-generational character of Black radicalism.

PA: What lessons can be learned from the uses and abuses of culture?

RK: Every left movement has tried to produce a popular culture, tried to create a culture organically out of what movement leaders, activists and theorists thought of as the needs and desires of working people. They have always tried to do something, whether it’s Joe Hill’s songs of labor or the civil rights movement, which I think is part of that left thrust, although not entirely. Also, movements have influenced the larger corporate popular culture. There was a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s where you had to have a movement song, or you had to have a song critical of the ghetto – Curtis Mayfield, the Ojays, everyone had a hit. Even corporate forces said “you know, this sells!” And why does it sell? It doesn’t sell because suddenly people are waking up. It sells because there are social movements providing it for people, making them desire this kind of music as a reflection of their situation.

One of the things I think leftists have a history of is suppressing aspects of the culture they think are not revolutionary enough. There are specific examples, but you can point to them generally. Sometimes there are self-proclaimed arbiters who see themselves as culture critics and the culture police. The late 1930s is a good example. There was a big debate in Masses & Mainstream where you had really progressive Black radicals saying “this be-bop music is retrograde; Charlie Parker is the worst thing that has ever happened; what we need are more Paul Robesons.” Meanwhile, Paul Robeson started listening to Charlie Parker. He loved Charlie Parker. It becomes a debate where they are sort of deciding what is authentic working-class culture and what’s derivative and oppressive. Sometimes these things merge, and I think as activists we have to be really good listeners. If there is a sudden flurry of music or literature about urban violence, and it seems like it is romanticizing it, there may be something else going on we have to pay attention to. We should listen and figure out what they are trying to say. What are people afraid of? What is the ultimate lesson in some of this music?

The second thing is why do we always listen to or read things in a very literal sense? Sometimes these could be amazing metaphors showing off the literary skills of a particular artist, even if the metaphors are violent and retrograde. The history of African American culture has had that stream too – the bad-man story, that can have a didactic element to it, and that didacticism always centers on “this could happen to you. I think you need a more complicated reading.

PA: You pay a lot of attention to women’s struggles and even say we once had the view that socialism would solve the problems of women’s oppression, but maybe it is the case that the struggle for women’s liberation will help make socialism possible.

RK: These are things I learned reading Barbara Smith and from all the women I talk about in the Combahee River Collective. Those Black women radical theorists considered the whole of life. To them it wasn’t just the public fight in the streets; it wasn’t just the public fight for representation; nor was it just socialism defined as providing resources in a very public way – decent jobs, collective labor.

It was about the way Black women’s labor was commodified and sold as domestics. There was household labor. As much as you don’t want to believe there is patriarchy in Black households, there is.

The analysis they came up with is one that made connections between production, reproduction, household labor, the exploitation of children, the sexual violence and physical abuse that women deal with, which never end up getting placed on the agenda of a lot of Black nationalist organizations or some socialist ones. I think for that reason Black feminist analysis ends up being a lot deeper.

PA: Dr. Du Bois was one of the great dreamers, perhaps the greatest dreamer of the 20th century. In an article entitled '100 Years of Negro Freedom' he sharply criticizes the nation thesis, and puts forward the idea of a radical democratic America where Black and white labor create a new society founded on a rigorous affirmative action program. How does that legacy hold up? In your book you do a fascinating study of the Black liberation movements in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, but there is a section that you do not address: the section that grew out of the civil rights movement, that was in SCLC and SNCC and the NAACP. It was a different kind of freedom dream.

RK: I agree with Du Bois’ vision. I think that Du Bois’ vision of radical democracy is really the only thing that could move us some place that would be mass participatory. But I think there are two problems: one is the perennial problem that Du Bois identified in Black Reconstruction. One of the biggest barriers to radical democracy is this investment in whiteness. Not by all white people – there has been a willingness by many to commit their lives to the anti-racist struggle, but most don’t. I think even with the current response to the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, there is so much anger among whites, who somehow still don’t understand it. The mere fact they think that, the mere fact that you even have plaintiffs who are making a whole case around Black people who allegedly took their spot at the university, when most people who took their spot were white, who had lower test scores, who were legacies means we have a lot of work to do.

And yet all those moments, and this is a thing that is often forgotten, were moments of promise. We actually did have interracial cooperation and struggle. People were transformed by the prospect. The promise was always there.

Reconstruction didn’t fail because whites refused to come out, it failed because they did come out and then retreated. They came out in the 1930s and ended up retreating. In the 1950s and 1960s, they came out and then retreated again.

When we get to the second problem: what happened with the NAACP, SCLC, CORE – these are the organizations that had, for the most part, a radical democratic vision. I think they ended up losing that vision through institutionalization. By the mid-to late-1960s, a lot of the leadership of these organizations, with the exception of King and others, really fell back. We did achieve the end of Jim Crow, but they forgot what they were there for in the first place.

But one of my regrets, is that I didn’t do a whole thing on SNCC, the Poor People’s Movement and Ella Baker. And the reason was very simple: there was so much scholarship on them. But the more I thought about it I could have still talked about them in the context of RAM and other organizations. They were the heart of the movement to democratize America.

PA: You critique the concept of white privilege. On the one side there’s the appearance of a benefit, and on the other side there is downward pressure on wages because of racism. Objectively, is it in the interest of whites if in fact there is downward pressure? How do you deal with that?

RK: My take on this is that racism simply is not in the interests of the working class. No matter how much privilege is gotten, it’s not as great as the privilege of a society where everyone is paid fairly and gets the benefits and fruits of their labor. This is the bottom line. And this is one of my problems with some of the whiteness literature, that nowadays makes it seem as though white working-class privilege drives society, that somehow to dismantle racism would mean the white working class giving up a lot of privilege. I don’t think they would have to give up that much privilege. I mean they would actually get more in the end. Therefore it is really important to always press for a return to this question – that there literally is no benefit for anyone except for big capital from racism, and that white privilege is a reality but it’s like peanuts. Du Bois solved the problem for me, because he talks about the wages of whiteness in terms of the psychological wage. The psychological wage was significant because it allowed white workers to feel like they had a chance to move up in the world. As long as you had that dream, then you continue to let yourself be exploited. As long as you make 10 cents more than the colored people do, then it’s okay.

There are two ways to win people. One is to say, if we were able to eliminate capitalism all together, this is what life could be like. But the second thing, and this is one of things that I am trying to grapple with, is that you have to be able to make the case without always putting the emphasis on self-interest. In other words, there is a moral case for it politically, and that is that we do not want to live in a world where there are oppressed and exploited people. Why is that in anyone’s interests?

Paris Gets a Bad Rap

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 09:30:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: Paris is a Bay-area artist who has made a big impact on hip-hop as an independent artist through his use of the Internet as an organizing tool for political activism as well as making his work available to the public. His most recent album, Sonic Jihad, was released last summer. Most recently, he has come under fire for his criticism of Bush’s perpetual “war on terrorism” and on Iraq.

PA: How important is the Internet for artists who are rejected or ignored by big labels because of differences over artistic or political values?

Paris: It actually goes beyond artists and music. It speaks to a time right now where there’s such a concerted attempt to clamp down on dissent and on alternative points of view that it’s necessary for us to turn to the Internet. The Internet is the only thing that exists now that remains uncensored. For people to really get news from credible sources and to have access to real information, the Internet is the only place left to go.

PA: Your website guerrillafunk.com has a lot of content other than merchandise or downloads. Can you talk about what we can find there?

Paris: I do that website in tandem with a website called Guerrilla News Network. Guerrilla News Network really is what CNN is supposed to be in that it provides the truth and talks about information and issues that are neglected in the mainstream media. What I do with guerrillafunk.com is take a lot of that same information and make it applicable to the hip-hop audience. The whole idea right now is to give information with entertainment, because that’s all that people seem to respect nowadays. It’s pretty effective from what I can tell so far. I have a huge subscriber base and people are receiving the e-newsletter with all the current goings-on and alerts when additional information is posted.

The website talks about the adverse affects of the military on the hip-hop community and the need to become involved politically and exercise our rights to vote. It talks about taking financial responsibility for your individual situation. There’s a lot of financial advice; I have licenses for all that. There are video documentaries on the site that were produced in conjunction with Guerrilla News Network. The Diamond Life is specifically relevant to the hip-hop community because of our fixation on diamonds. It exposes Sierra Leone’s dilemma and the fact that many people in Africa are murdered to provide these diamonds illegally to these corporations. Aftermath: Unanswered Questions from 9/11 talks about the lies and the unanswered questions surrounding 9/11. It really goes far towards exposing the truth about a lot of these issues and being sure that people understand that what they are being told in the mainstream media is not the full story.

PA: How do you encourage people to oppose Bush’s war and his domestic policies?

Paris: First of all, realizing that the policies are wrong. The first step is breaking the hold that organizations like Fox News have over people. There are so many people who are blindly in allegiance to everything they see on TV. A recent survey, that CNN turned me on to, said that 85 percent of the people in America get their news from, not reading, but watching television. When you have a propaganda machine that influential (it is a propaganda machine, there’s no such thing as a liberal media, that’s a lie) in making people believe this administration can do no wrong and that there really is a valid terror threat, you begin to realize how difficult it is to undo this.

There’s really not a whole lot of sugar coating that goes on with Guerrilla Funk. It’s intended to be incendiary, to spark dialogue. It’s not intended to skirt around any issue to make people feel comfortable, but rather it’s supposed to be the hard truth. That’s why I have this Hard Truth Soldiers in Cyberspace for people that want the information straight. They want things that are applicable to their lives. So it’s a way to shed light on issues that need to be discussed other than diversionary propaganda that we get like the Laci Peterson investigation or whatever.

PA: Your work often reflects the pervasiveness of violence in our country. Because you are honest about that, you often get accused by right-wingers of being pro-violence or of being a violent person.

Paris: And some people on the left. I had a lot of people in anti-war organizations up in arms about the cover [of the album Sonic Jihad], and the Sonic Jihad project, saying that I’m going to miss people that need to be reached the most. Again that goes to speaking about watering down what I do to be palatable to people who probably don’t like Hip-hop anyway. The whole objective was to make a statement, and in the case of Sonic Jihad to show solidarity among artists who feel similarly who now no longer are able to reach people on a mass scale, most notably Public Enemy and Dead Prez. It’s easy for people to come out and be up in arms and say that I’m pro-violence, when they don’t listen to the music anyway.

I did an interview with Fox News not too long ago, and, of course, they hadn’t heard the record. They might have read a couple of the lyrics and saw the cover, and their knee-jerk response was that I’m some type of a terrorist sympathizer, and that I don’t know what I’m talking about. And “who am I to comment about the state of political affairs”? But, who are they? I’m just as qualified as any talking head that you may come across to speak on what’s going on right now.

PA: Is there hypocrisy between them attacking you for this and then turning around and saying its ok for Bush to go to war on Afghanistan or Iraq?

Paris: Of course that hypocrisy is evident – even without bringing Bush into the picture – in their widespread silence, which amounts to complicit approval of other people’s sentiments in Hip-hop. Sentiments that reflects negativity, a degradation of our culture, Black-on-Black violence, misogyny, an endorsement of the drug trade and the corporate rewarding of this type of behavior and imagery. Hip-hop is in everything now: Toyota commercials, Mitsubishi, Reebok, Nike, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King, anything you can think of. The entire genre for the most part as it is presented on a mass scale has been presented that way by large corporations who profit from debauchery. I do my best to counteract that. I’m not saying I’m the moral police or anything, but what I do is supposed to be an alternative to bullshit you get in on BET, Viacom, MTV, Clear Channel, Radio One and Infinity broadcasting stations. They have banded together and for whatever reason only support and endorse negative imagery with the explanation that they are only reflecting the street, which is bullshit, because they dictate the tastes of the street. In our community life imitates art; art doesn’t imitate life.

Making the Dream Real: A Conversation with Bill Fletcher, Jr.

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 09:05:00 +0000

Editor's note: Bill Fletcher is the president of TransAfrica Forum, a founder of United for Peace and Justice and the Black Radical Congress. This interview was conducted by Debbie Bell.

PA: How did you become involved in progressive and left politics and causes?

BF: My parents and my sister were and are very progressive. They were union members, and we regularly talked, both in my nuclear family and in the expanded family, about politics. I had an uncle who was close to the Communist Party and would regularly agitate at family gatherings about politics. I was also a child of the 1960s, and the developments in the African American and anti-war movements all affected me. What brought it all together was reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X. I picked it up when I was 13. When I finished it, I knew what I needed to do with my life. My politics began to become more consciously radical, by the time I got to high school. I was influenced by the Black Panther Party, read their paper and got involved in student organizations that were Panther-like. I started seeing myself as a socialist pretty early. My politics kind of mirrored the Panthers: revolutionary nationalism and socialism. When I went to college, I originally intended to be a lawyer like William Kunstler.

But I lost interest in going in that direction and became more interested in committing myself to social justice and organizing. Part of what happened was that being a radical and being an aspiring Marxist, like many other people of my generation, we decided that it was important to be in working-class struggles. I was influenced while at Harvard by an old family friend, Ewart Guinier, who was the chair of Afro-American studies. Guinier took me on like a grandfather, and I developed a deep devotion and love for him. He taught from a working-class point of view and really emphasized the importance of the trade union movement while never portraying it as a panacea. Guinier emphasized the potential of the trade union movement, and particularly the critical role that Black workers could and can play in influencing its development.

I graduated and decided to go to work. At first I took some odd jobs and then ultimately became a welder in the shipyards. I got involved in the trade union movement as a conscious Marxist, as someone committed to Black liberation. I felt that it was very important to organize Black workers, not simply as part of the working-class movement but in order to influence the Black freedom movement. So there I was a Harvard graduate at the shipyard. I worked in the shipyard for three and one-half years and was involved in the reform movement there. Then I left, got involved briefly in community organizing and then fell into a job as a paralegal involved with desegregating the building trades in Boston. From that I ended up on the staff of UAW District 65. It was a very mixed experience, but it eventually led to my going to the National Postal Mailhandlers Union, the Service Employees International Union, and ultimately going to the AFL-CIO.

PA: Can you talk about your current work at TransAfrica and its role today?

BF: I took over at TransAfrica in January of 2002 and have been working to rebuild it. The organization had fallen on hard times and was near collapse. We’ve been working to focus its mission which is two-fold: to influence US foreign policy when it comes to Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America and, secondly, to build solidarity between African Americans and the peoples of those regions. Specifically, we are working right now on a major campaign called the “One-Standard Campaign.” It focuses on the plight of Haitians immigrants and refugees. The thrust of the campaign is to level everyone up to the status of Cuban refugees. If you think of the refugee situation, there are these bookends. On the one side are Cubans; on the other are Haitians. Everyone else is in between. It’s cynical and racist and is driven by political and racial objectives. Part of what we are attempting to do in this campaign is expose this.

We are also working to publicize a major lawsuit against 20 banks and corporations that collaborated with the apartheid regime in South Africa. We are beginning to explore the issue of pharmaceutical genocide, and the approach of the Bush administration as well as the pharmaceutical companies when it come to providing assistance to those countries that are suffering from the HIV/AIDS pandemic. And obviously we are very involved in the anti-war movement.

In relation to the anti-war movement I would like to make a point. Some months ago I was asked to call to one of the original founders of TransAfrica. She wanted to know what we were doing these days – she had long since parted company with the organization. I described to her the anti-war work and also talked about trying to increase the profile of the organization when it came to Latin America. In fact, I’m taking a delegation to Venezuela in January. This person took issue with us for being so outspoken on the war of aggression against Iraq. She said, had we been quiet and reserved we might have been effective in getting the US to better things for Africa. In other words, we would have been listened to inside the administration. I had to stop for a second after hearing that. I said that there was no way in the midst of a world-historic event such as the preparation for and actuality of the Iraq war that we could take a pass. It would have been morally unacceptable for us to do this.

The board of TransAfrica Forum really understood this. I went to them soon after I started helping to build United for Peace and Justice, because I really needed their involvement and they unanimously passed a strong resolution against the build up for the impending war. That was the right thing for us to. White people often pigeonhole us, but even we – this person who I’m talking about is a Black woman – often pigeonhole ourselves and say that we should only be focused on matters explicitly having to do with Africa, the Caribbean and Black Americans. Somehow stepping outside of that realm and taking up the war against Iraq, the threats against North Korea or globalization in general is inappropriate. That’s not the approach TransAfrica Forum is taking at all. As far as we are concerned, if it has anything to do with foreign policy, we have every right to be involved.

People of color need to be leading the global justice movement. While there are obviously criticisms that can be made of white organizers out in the global justice movement about what they have or have not done, the notion that we should sit back and wait for an invitation is absurd. We should be the ones leading the movement. We should be the ones that are taking up the issue of pharmaceutical genocide. We should be the ones taking up the US aggression against Venezuela.

I’ve heard people say, “foreign policy is well and good, but Black people are getting our butts kicked here in the US and there are more pressing issues.” Tell that to the people who died on September 11th. Foreign policy has an immediate impact on our existence. Tell that to the people who are suffering because every state in the union is nearly bankrupt because of the war and occupation.

PA: What about the Black Radical Congress?

BF: I continue to believe that the BRC is one of the most important developments in Black America and on the left in the last ten years. The Seattle demonstrations against the WTO were earth shattering. The birth of the BRC was not earth shattering, but it was very significant. I often quote Jarvis Tyner who said, “If the BRC wasn’t in existence, someone would form it anyway.” There’s truth in that, in the almost mythological way it exists out there. There needs to be a voice and a home for broad, disparate groups on the political left. We made some important advances, despite many significant problems that we ran up against. But when I think about where we were in 1995 at the time of the Million Man march, or in 1996 when frankly many of us weren’t talking with one another, we were all in our own little cocoons or foxholes carrying on struggles, sometimes more, sometimes less in significance. But through the BRC, we’re able to build a camaraderie, which I think for the most part will last.

We ran up against some significant problems though, which cannot be underestimated. At some point we need to write about it and actually theorize the problem. Trying to build an organization that is both a united front of organizations and individuals is historically complicated. When I look back at the history of the formation and existence of the National Negro Congress (NNC), I see some of the exact same problems. In the initial stage there were a lot of organizations and individuals involved. But when you remove the mythology around the NNC, a lot of those organizations dropped away. The National Negro Congress ended up being mainly a membership organization. That was a problem. I don’t think we have come up with a solution, but you begin by accessing and identifying the problem. We also ran up against the difficulty of limited resources, financial and otherwise, which in a period such as this where the political right has the initiative, is very complicated.

There is a common recognition that a campaign is needed to unify the organization. I felt – and I was in the minority – when we formed the BRC that there was a certain interesting moment that we existed in. There was a reform movement going on in organized labor that I believed Black progressive and radicals could influence if we were sufficiently organized and focused. I wasn’t able to convince the majority in the BRC that this was something we should focus on. So there were tension between different poles: reparations, economic justice and education. That might have been ok if we had more resources to anchor each of those, but we didn’t and that tore at us. But there is nothing that has convinced me that the BRC is any less necessary than it was in June of 1998 when we went to Chicago.

PA: When you reflect on the BRC’s Freedom Agenda and the Principles of Unity, how do they impact the BRC’s ability to engage in struggle given the overwhelmingly democratic and progressive sentiment in the Black community?

BF: The Principles of Unity and really do outline the basis for strategic engagement within the Black left. Anyone who fits within those POUs, whether they are formally or informally in the BRC, should be working together and looking at that working relationship as a long-term engagement, as opposed to tactical. It’s really important when you look at what the POUs say. There are many people who consider themselves as activists and radicals, but are weak on the issue of gay and lesbian rights or may be homophobic. They may be Pan- African, but not thoroughly anti-imperialist. They may be interested in progressive Black politics, but really may see the future narrowly constrained within the two-party system. What we came up with in the principles of unity was that if you are in this big tent, then we should be working together. I think that’s the attitude we need in order to continue to build the BRC. The Freedom Agenda is a concise and great proclamation of the issues that face our people and what needs to be done. It is something – and I don’t think we’ve made good use of it – that should be moved, along the lines of a plank, that we hold our leaders and elected officials accountable to.

My answer to your second question may not be very popular. Part of the problem that Black America faces is the economic and emotional depression we are in. What I mean is that in many respects the Black working class reached at point of strength around 1973, particularly in the manufacturing sector. There was a high percentage of the African American population in unions there still are, actually and Black workers were poised to play influential roles in many key unions. When the 1973-74 recession hit, followed by the 1982-84 recession, (the Volcker/Reagan recession), Black workers took a battering unlike any group in the country, which has not stopped. The economic costs of that battering have included the destruction of our communities. When people like William Julius Wilson talk about the desertion of the black middle class to the suburbs, that’s not really what happened. There were certain Black middle-class people who moved to the suburbs that’s true; but the so-called Black middle-class included – because that section is determined by income – a section of the Black working class along with a section of Black professionals. What in fact happened with the destruction of the economic base of the Black workers in places like Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, California in the aerospace industry and in auto, the Black working class eroded and imploded. That is what has had an impact on our communities.

What we are looking at today is the devastation brought about by nearly 30 years of the economic restructuring of capitalism and the corresponding impact on the Black working class. We can then see the effect that this has had on our people. Then you had the political battering, the murders and assassinations, etc., as well as the political attacks by the anti-affirmative action forces and others.

When you bring all of this together, part of what has happened to our people is that many in US question whether struggle – social, political or economic – pays, that is, whether it makes any sense to fight back or whether it is hopeless. This is critical for Black organizers. If we don’t recognize that there is a certain level of despair that exits in our communities, you come up with bad strategies and tactics. In fact, you can find yourself engaged in voluntarism. Take the war situation for example. African American opposition to the war at it’s lowest was 61 percent; at its height it was about 85 percent. More than any other group, Black America realized this war was nuts! Anywhere you went Black folks were saying, “this is crazy!” The difficulty was translating that angry, verbal opposition into active opposition. That is not just a problem I want simply to foist on the anti-war movement and say, “once again white folks should have been better.” I think that Black organizers actually did not do a bad job, but we need to do much more to really motivate folk into recognizing that taking this struggle up was essential.

PA: Anything you would like to add?

BF: I’ve enjoyed working to help build the BRC with you. I feel like the relationship we have developed over seven years now is in some ways a metaphor for the possibilities in the Black left. We didn’t know each other, and we approached each cautiously, though cordially, but with some mutual suspicions because we came with very different political histories. And over six or seven years this has changed dramatically to viewing each other as comrades. That is a benefit of the BRC. That’s a very valuable lesson for the larger Black left regardless of generations. We can build something. There will be substantial obstacles, but at the end of the day that unity can both translate to important friendships but also sound working relationships. That’s something we should hold up and cherish and celebrate.

A Mighty Force: Black Vote 2004

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 08:36:00 +0000

This African American history month, as the nation approaches one of its most important elections, is a good time to remember the great significance, both past and present, of the Black vote. Without the African American component of the anti-Bush vote it will not be possible to defeat the administration and the ultra-right Republican domination of Congress or change the Supreme Court. The whole fight for democracy and economic and social justice cannot be advanced apart from a strong showing of African American voters.

In 2000, African Americans accounted for about 10 million votes or 10 percent of the electorate. Most impressive was the fact that while 84 percent of African Americans came out for Clinton in 1996, 90 percent cast their ballots for Gore in 2000. For African American women voters it was 94 percent. African Americans constituted 18.9 percent of Gore’s total. Combined with the Latino voters, the figure comes to 28 percent. Black people voted nearly unanimously against Bush. In fact, African Americans voted at higher rate against the Republican standard-bearer than any other group. This history-making vote was motivated primarily by a strong dislike of Bush and his policies. It took a century to overcome this betrayal of Reconstruction, and out of this great struggle for freedom the African American people have learned to use their vote, at times deploying very sophisticated tactics. They have overcome great odds and while the battle for equality is far from won, the struggle advanced to where they are a powerful progressive/democratic voting block, able to affect decisively the outcome of national elections. This great accomplishment must be acknowledged and not belittled or taken for granted, if today’s challenges are to be met. This struggle was not done alone but in unity with labor and other allies. Broad alliances have been built along the way.

Thus, what happened in Florida in 2000 and since should be a wake-up call for all progressives that the fight to defend democracy cannot be won if the right to vote is not defended. Today’s Republicans are determined to weaken, divide and destroy the Black vote because it is a major obstacle to carrying out their ultra-right program.

It should not be forgotten that the legacy of Florida continues unabated. Unscrupulous tactics are being utilized to achieve this goal. The attacks on Cynthia McKinney and Earl Hilliard are examples. In both cases, Black Republicans were put up to run against progressive Democrats in states allowing crossover primary voting. In states controlled by Republicans, they are redistricting congressional districts so that more Republican conservative racists will replace Black and Latino Democrats. The intense battle over redistricting in Texas is now in the courts.

Another tactic is putting up wealthy so-called “moderate Republicans” against weak unpopular center-right liberal Democrats in the hope of weakening Black voters. Once elected these fake moderates become loyal supporters of Bush and the Republican program. New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Governor Pataki followed this trend. The Republican right is also working with fake Black progressives like Lenora Fulani who really work hand-in-glove with Republicans.

Yet another tried and tested device is the use of Black accommodationists like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice who are conscious instruments of racist Republican policy. Black faces in high places spouting the administration’s policies cannot be considered progressive. Like Booker T. Washington, they are there to cover up racism not eliminate it.

Suppressing the Black vote is also achieved by disenfranchising incarcerated Black men. While only 12 percent of the population is Black, half of the two million people in prison are African American men. This figure is 10 times its size 30 years ago. In addition, the right wing has led the way in taking the vote from convicted felons. This has meant that 4.5 million people can’t vote: over 2.5 million of them are Black. Forced outside the political process they suffer what is called “civic death.”

In a throwback to the original debate on the Constitution, these prisoners can’t vote but are counted as part of the population when it comes to determining political representation and the allocation of federal funds. This occurs in predominately white rural areas. Ironically these areas elected conservative Republicans who oppose progressive social spending but are totally subservient to the prison-industrial complex.

While the ultra right is conscious of Black voters, unfortunately many on the left, including sections of the Black left, still do not see the great strides made by Black people in the fight for democracy over the centuries. As a result, they fail to understand the necessity to defend the right to vote and join with the broad masses of African Americans in the current struggle to defeat Bush. In that sense, they are out of step with the current struggle of the African American people. This fight is bigger than Democrats versus Republicans and should not be reduced to that elementary equation: fundamentally it is a fight for democracy.

The Republican Party – as imperfect as it was – was the main electoral vehicle African Americans used to fight against slavery during that period. Today, the broad masses of African Americans and most working people are using the Democratic Party (as imperfect as that is) as their main electoral vehicle because the party of new slavery – the Republicans – cannot be stopped otherwise. They understand the Republicans must be stopped before we can go forward.

This highly sophisticated voting tactic is rooted in a conscious anti-racist understanding but is also a product of the overwhelmingly working-class composition of Black people. They are among the most conscious voters because they skillfully unite the class and national question in their struggle for survival and advancement. For example, since the 1964 Voting Rights Act Black representation has grown substantially. The Congressional Black Caucus has grown, but Black voters do not just vote for other Blacks. They have shown an understanding of the basic class issues and most of the time will reject a right-wing candidate be they Black, Brown or white. They will elect a white or Latino over an African American if the African American is weak on the issues. Some honest conclusions need to be drawn. If Bush had not stolen the 2000 election, it is probable, based on Gore’s present positions and the growing opposition from Democrats today, the whole package of post-9/11 policies would likely have been avoided. In fact, based on new facts now emerging, the terrorist attacks may have been avoided. This administration has taken our country much further to the right then it was under the previous administration, as imperfect as it was.

The dots must be connected. Once again we learn a hard lesson. Unity of the left and center is key to victory and cannot be taken for granted. Together, Nader and Gore received 52 percent of the popular vote. This percentage is a fairly accurate assessment of where the people of the US are at politically. Yet Bush won because of disunity between the left and the center and dirty tricks. Where was the left in the 2000 election? Most of the left voted with 62 percent of labor, 90 percent of African Americans and 62 percent Latinos. But too many were mere observers of this crucial election struggle, out of touch or resorted to Democratic Party baiting.

The times call for connecting the dots and drawing new lessons. The left must end its isolation. The Black left must end its isolation from the broad mass upsurge of Black people and find the way to build principled unity in struggle.

Without racism Bush could not have become president. Racism as directed against African Americans and other people of color domestically was decisive in bringing about the severe attack on the rights and well being of the vast majority of the people. It set the stage for this brutal war against the people of Iraq and led to a new destabilization of world we live in.

All people of good will who believe in democracy and real freedom must build greater unity and step up the effort to help everyone understand that racism is a grave threat to their lives and their survival. Racism kills. It is a weapon of mass destruction.

When Al Gore broke a precedent and made an early endorsement of Howard Dean, it was not accident that he chose to do it in Harlem.

Voter registration and education activities are unfolding across the country mainly by civil rights, labor, women's, youth, students and prominent figures in the entertainment industry. The hip hop community is organizing to especially bring out a large anti-Bush youth vote.

The labor movement is committing substantial resources to guarantee a large turn out of union families, African American and Latino voters. African American workers through organizations like Coalition of Black Trade Unionist and the NAACP are playing a leading role in this fight. This is no time to de-emphasize or under funding these special approaches to racially oppressed working families. It has been working-class Blacks and Latinos who have continually been the target of the sharpest attacks because they have also been the driving force in the fight against racism, war and injustice.

On November 2 African Americans and labor, Latinos, women, immigrants, youth and seniors, will continue their historic drive towards freedom by scoring an great victory for peace, economic and social justice. Defeating Bush and the ultra-right Congressional majority will require a lot of hard work but it can be done. All progressive have a responsibility to help make this happen.

Our Best Defense: Labor and the Anti-war Movement

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 10:47:00 +0000

The world’s working class and people had no side in the war in Iraq and nothing to gain. George Bush, with his narrow band of extreme right-wing ideologues, corporate interests, military fanatics and racists, was willing to spill gallons of other people’s blood for economic and political domination. The corrupt, dictatorial regime in Baghdad, while really powerless in this situation, was willing to sacrifice its people in hope of preserving its rule.

In response to the slaughter, the world’s overwhelming majority, the working people, demand an immediate end to the war and the complete withdrawal of all US, British and other forces from Iraq and the region. Meanwhile, the largest, broadest, most global peace movement ever has developed. Millions around the world, including hundreds of thousands in the US, have taken to the streets. In much of the world this movement is led, in part, by the trade unions. In many countries, strike actions and boycotts were used to oppose the war and to block military supplies.

Here at home the labor component of the anti-war movement was unprecedented. Hundreds of local unions, dozens of central labor bodies and joint councils and many other labor- related coalitions denounced the war. Several international unions condemned the war outright. The AFL-CIO Executive Council seriously questioned the war drive of the Bush administration. In many cities labor anti-war coalitions, which combine labor leaders and rank-and-file activists, have sprung into life – even helping to lead broader, massive anti-war demonstrations.

Labor and Peace

Issues of war and peace have always been critical questions of the class struggle – many times, they become overriding issues. For the working class and the labor movement the struggle for peace is ultimately inseparable from the struggle for economic and social justice.

This is not at all a new idea. Eugene Debs, one of the greatest labor leaders in American history, put it this way in 1918 in his famous Canton, Ohio peace speech: The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose – especially their lives. Debs, one of the great pioneers of industrial unionism, was arrested and jailed for this speech and for counseling young workers to refuse military service in World War I. From his jail cell, Debs received close to a million votes for president in the 1920 election. Debs was not alone in opposing World War I. Most of the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World opposed the war and spoke out. Many locals of the American Federation of Labor passed resolutions condemning it.

In fact, labor anti-war sentiment is deeply rooted in US labor history. Samuel Gompers, president of the AFL, made a fiery speech against war at a meeting called by the New York Central Labor Union in 1890, saying: Labor is never for war. It is always for peace…Who would be compelled to bear the burden of war? The working people. They would pay the taxes, and their blood would flow like water … The battle for the cause of labor, from the times of the remotest antiquity, has been for peace and for good will among men. The capitalists and their elected supporters became alarmed at the unity and militancy of the CIO and labor emerging from World War II. Though labor fully supported this just war to defeat fascism, it also expected greater democracy and a more peaceful world to emerge. The labor movement fully expected, also, to recoup equally for the many sacrifices made by workers in support of the war. Corporate and banking profits were up and labor expected wages, health care, pensions and the general welfare of working people to improve also.

Wall Street had other plans. A vicious anti-labor offensive, including the Taft-Hartley Act and the McCarthy red scare, were tools used to put labor in its place. This campaign effectively killed democracy in labor and drove out progressive and militant labor leadership from most of the unions. In time, this led to domination by the right-wing, class collaborationist leadership of George Meany and later Lane Kirkland. Central to the Meany/Kirkland leaderships’ thinking was full support for the US government’s anti-Communist, cold-war foreign policy.

In this process, foreign policy issues were moved out of the local union halls and workplaces and into small committees in the national offices of the AFL-CIO. The Meany/Kirkland leadership argued that unions should leave foreign policy to the experts, including the CIA and State Department agents they welcomed into the house of labor. It got worse. As rank-and-file movements and some labor leaders began to question the war in Vietnam, the AFL-CIO leadership made it clear that any labor council that passed an anti-war resolution would be expelled from the federation.

Regardless, the basic self-interest of working people for peace began to reassert itself in labor. Local unions passed resolutions against the war and some labor leaders spoke out. Eventually this jelled in a national Labor for Peace movement that played a role, with the larger peace movement, in helping to end the war in Vietnam. Another closely related development was going on at the same time. Rank-and-file union activists, many of them veterans of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, were beginning to be elected to leadership positions in labor. These activists began to have a progressive influence far beyond their numbers, even in top circles of the AFL-CIO.

In the 1960s, 1970s and in to the 1980s, rank-and-file union caucuses were changing the face of labor. These included Black caucuses, Latino caucuses and women’s caucuses. These caucuses tended mainly to deal with questions of promoting more militant trade unionism and union democracy. Most also took on peace and civil rights issues. Very few had a narrow focus on just “bread-and-butter” union issues. After all, that was the kind of trade unionism they were fighting to change. The grass roots caucuses and activists and even some higher level progressive labor leaders began to reintroduce foreign policy issues into labor.

In the 1980s and early 1990s attention shifted to US policy in Central and Latin America. The Reagan/Bush years saw an aggressive big business assault on labor and working people at home coupled with an aggressive foreign policy. Many in labor saw the political connection between runaway shops in places like El Salvador and Nicaragua and union-busting at home to support those same company profits. During this period labor leaders like John Sweeney spoke out against US policy in Central America while the old guard Kirkland leadership continued to aid and give comfort to US government efforts in support of anti-labor dictatorships around the world.

The election of the Sweeney/Chavez-Thompson/Trumka leadership was a watershed event for labor. The stagnation and class collaborationism imposed on labor by the McCarthy-era attacks was coming to an end. Another change was an end to AFL-CIO blind obedience to the foreign policy goals of the State Department. The door was opened for labor to once again assume its natural role as a champion of peace.

After the Sweeney team’s election many unions and central labor bodies began actively questioning US foreign policy. This included things like questioning labor’s own involvement in the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. What a difference – from Meany threatening to lift charters for opposing the Vietnam war, to hundreds of local unions and labor bodies demanding the Bush administration not invade Iraq.

From “Bread and Butter” Comes Peace

This engaging of foreign policy and peace issues in labor did not happen in a vacuum, separated from other important developments in the class struggle.

In the past, labor was at the heart of great movements. The fight for public education, the eight-hour day movement, the fight for unemployment compensation and Social Security, and the fight against fascism are prime examples. Under the Meany/Kirkland leadership the unions were no longer identified with the great social movements of the day. Nor was labor seen as the social movement around which great coalitions and struggles could be built. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, it was the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, and the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s that helped to shake labor out of its lethargy.

Coming out of the McCarthy era, the center of gravity for rank-and-file movements and for progressive labor leaders who wanted change was the killing organized workers were taking in the workplaces. The massive restructuring of industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s meant the loss of hundreds of thousands of good-paying union jobs. In steel, auto, electrical, rubber and manufacturing in general, union jobs and benefits were being decimated.

Union density, or the percentage of workers in unions, was plummeting. New technologies were not only cutting down the number of workers needed in manufacturing, but were also making it easier for industries to move production around – from north to south, or to other countries. Though it wasn’t called globalization yet, a new wave of that process was beginning. Added to this, was the fact that the business unionism style of Kirkland and friends was not attracting new emerging sections of workers. With the exception of a few unions, most were doing little to organize new members.

Most of the unions that backed the Sweeney team against the old leadership in 1995 were also deeply concerned about the stagnation and declining power of the unions to influence economic and political life. There was no strategy. Labor’s influence at election time and in the halls of Congress was in steep decline.

With the new Sweeney leadership, this began to change rapidly. Debate was on labor’s agenda again. How to build coalitions with other social movements – the African American, Mexican American, Latino, Asian American and other oppressed people’s movements, the women’s movements, youth movements, seniors movements, gay and lesbian movements, civil liberties and religious movements? How to make the unions the champions of all working people, organized and unorganized?

How to bring new vigor and strategy to organizing the unorganized? How to build labor’s independent political action? And yes, how to build ties with peace and solidarity movements? These were the kinds of questions swirling around at all levels of a labor movement that suddenly seemed released from stagnation.

This most recent burst of anti-war sentiment in labor against the Bush administration’s pre-emptive, go-it-alone war on Iraq has been explosive, broad-based and qualitative. Yet it is logically and organically linked to these other developments in labor mentioned above.

It was a good thing the fog was lifting because the new George W. Bush administration was radically renewing the assault on labor. But in the new situation, labor was fighting back like it hadn’t in many years. Important victories like the recent longshore union’s West Coast agreement (ILWU) and the transit workers victory in New York (TWU) are prime examples. Of course, fighting back doesn’t always mean winning, but it does mean lessons are being learned and connections are being made.

Even as the new peace movement continues to grow in labor, it’s instructive to look at the other key components of labor’s fightback agenda. Just a few important examples: the AFL-CIO has opened a broad offensive against Bush’s radical budget and tax give-away to the rich plans. Labor is sponsoring a dramatic new “freedom ride” across the country to champion legalization of undocumented immigrant workers. The AFL-CIO is active in coalitions to protect affirmative action at the University of Michigan. Unions and the AFL-CIO are leading all kinds of campaigns to expose the corruption and criminal activities of some of the biggest corporations. And labor is gearing up to continue to refine its independent political action and mobilization abilities for the 2004 elections.

Once labor moves to a position of again questioning the right of corporations and the government to run roughshod over workers’ lives and rights, certain other conclusions have to be drawn. There is a connection between the company that shuts down your plant to move it overseas and the foreign policy that props up right-wing dictators in the countries where your plant moves. This developing understanding of the link between “bread and butter” issues at home and international affairs and peace are key components of class consciousness.

Fighting Globalization

The worldwide anti-globalization movement of the past few years played a special role in American labor’s radicalization. So-called “free trade” agreements like NAFTA were grave object lessons for labor. Labor quickly got past the (corporate inspired) notion that runaway shops are foreign workers stealing jobs. The same communications technology that makes capital more mobile around the globe also brings workers closer together.

American workers could see for themselves how workers in runaway shops were treated in anti-union havens overseas. The same corporations that destroy whole communities in the US with shutdown create terrible working conditions for grossly underpaid workers in low-wage areas abroad.

Alcoa Aluminum is a great example. Alcoa has shipped thousands of jobs off to the maquiladora areas just over the Mexican border. The steelworkers and the United Electrical workers unions have done a great job using the Internet and other communication technologies to expose the horrible conditions these runaway jobs provide for Mexican workers, including horrible slums and terrible health conditions. Unions like the Steelworkers, also learned the power of international labor solidarity from global campaigns against Bridgestone/Firestone. Another good example is the international ties forged in support of the West Coast longshore union in fighting for a contract.

American workers have also learned how the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are instruments of transnational capital to enforce a global “race to the bottom,” as the AFL-CIO calls it, for all workers. Through participation in global protests against the WTO and IMF vast sections of the US labor movement have learned about the struggles and situations of workers in all parts of the globe. Again, with the same technologies that foster capitalist globalization, American workers have cemented ties of international solidarity, a people’s globalization, with workers and social movements from around the world.

Equally important is that these struggles acquaint workers and their unions with other broad global social movements. American unions and workers build ties and learn firsthand about world farmers, environmental movements, anti-genetic engineering movements, anti-poverty movements, anti-racist movements when they participate in anti-globalization demonstrations like the “Battle in Seattle” march against the WTO. They are also exposed to brutality faced by people and unions in US-backed countries like Burma, Colombia and Indonesia.

The fight against transnational-based globalization has helped to radicalize the world trade union movement also. The growing internationalism of world labor has contributed greatly to the tremendous global peace movement and actions against the illegal US invasion of Iraq. And again the anti-globalization movement, built on broad coalitions of a wide variety of social movements around the world, helped cement the global anti-war movement and link up labor with these other social movements opposing the war.

Labor and the War This Time

It is no overstatement to say that the depth and breadth of American labor’s anti-war actions and response marks a qualitative change in a class struggle direction. That genie cannot be easily put back in the bottle. Still, now with the war in progress an inevitable caution and nervousness set in with the center forces in labor.

The AFL-CIO issued a statement by John Sweeney expressing “unequivocal … support of our country and America’s men and women on the front lines as well as their families here at home.” It also reiterated the AFL-CIO’s belief that the best way to disarm Saddam Hussein is “with a broad international coalition with the sanction of the United Nations.” And it strongly stated that protest and dissent against the war policy is not grounds for questioning anyone’s patriotism. In a cover letter to affiliates Sweeney goes even further. He launches a blistering attack on Bush’s go-it-alone policy which he says isolates the US and undermines institutions of international cooperation.

In addition, the AFL-CIO has been relentless in attacking the Bush/Republican disastrous budget proposals and their radical tax cuts for the rich. They are also organizing against Bush proposals to cut veterans’ benefits. In this way they are continuing to press the link between the war at home and the war in Iraq. This is an important way of winning over the center in labor that is wavering now that war has begun. It is the height of childish leftism to attack the AFL-CIO for its caution. We have to continue to convince the center that their initial misgivings about the war are valid and win them back to opposing it.

The radicalization process in labor will continue as will the anti-war sentiment. We only have to look at the long-range contributions that civil rights and Vietnam-era anti-war activists continue to have on labor to see the long-range possibilities of the current peace upsurge in labor. It bodes well for the class struggle and the future.

(Illustration by John Kim)

Book Review – Fat Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 10:13:00 +0000

As a few corporate criminals are paraded before the press to show government concern for the kinds of deception practiced by some Enron officials, Vijay Prashad’s book, Fat Cats and Running Dogs, delves more deeply to reveal the true extent of their crimes. From schemes to control Bolivia’s water, Nigeria’s, California’s, India’s and Argentina’s electricity, natural gas pipelines in Afghanistan, Enron, beside the corrupt Mafia-like organization that it was, is emblematic of a particular stage of capitalism, according to Prashad.

This stage of capitalism is called neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a period of “weak social regulation, strong repressive apparatus, and cultural conservatism.” The purpose is to hand over what was once held and regulated by the state for the public good to corporations, such as Enron, for private profits. If people complain put them in prison. Use the police and the military to destroy progressive movements. Or push a conservative ideology that justifies attacks on publicly operated services and on the people who support them.

For Enron, the privatization of publicly owned electricity and other energy producing facilities was the target of their corporate schemes. Enron used its financial leverage over governments and it bought political influence in both Washington and in whichever nation it happened to be operating, to pressure countries (and US states) to sell their public assets. Enron would then charge energy consumers exorbitant rates for what was once a much cheaper public utility. There seemed to be no limit to the corruption, price-gouging or environmental destruction that corporations would engage in to make a buck.

Political influence, bought and sold by Enron lobbyists, extended wide and deep in the Washington “sleaze,” as Prashad characterizes that crowd. The Bush family, including father and son, George, and brothers, Jeb, Neil and Marvin – no strangers to corporate corruption and fraud – were only the most prominent. Political support was further assisted by military support, as regular global US bombing campaigns, arms deals, CIA “economic espionage” and military aid attest.

Lest we think that Enron is the only great Satan and focus too much attention on a single company, Prashad warns us that these practices are systemic. Everywhere you look “Enronization,” aided by the coercive authority of what Prashad calls “IMFundamentalism,” or the set of structural adjustments imposed on countries that need capital to stay afloat, is the dominant ideology and practice of US imperialism. The main goal is to deliver to private corporations the public “commons,” as Prashad terms it. Health care, education, water, energy, land – whatever can be commodified and resold to the people is the main strategy of Enronization. All of these practices are protected by the US government and its military.

How do progressive people stop this trend? Part of the answer lies in the reasons for Enron’s collapse. Aside from the crooked deals that hid Enron’s financial woes, its problems were caused in no small part by the confrontation of Enronization with organized people’s movements. In places like India, Bolivia and Argentina, people’s opposition to privatization of public utilities and resources slowed Enron’s profit-making abilities just enough to force them into illegally hiding their losses. And though some politicians, such as Jeb Bush in Florida, pushed state employees’ pension funds into Enron stock to try to prop it up, resulting in the loss of over $330 million from the retirement fund of thousands of Florida employees, Enron’s problems were too deep to be salvaged.

A people’s movement such as those that arose in these countries, in Prashad’s view, is the first of a three-pronged solution. First, we should strengthen social control of public services for the public good, not profits. Second, we need to oppose the repressive state apparatuses such as police, prisons and the military industrial complex. Finally, our opposition to right-wing ideology that pushes jingoism, sexism, racism, violence, fear, national chauvinism and theocracy is decisive. A convincing blueprint for progressive resurgence accompanies Prashad’s solid analysis of the current stage of late capitalism. In today’s near-war condition of diminished civil liberties, diverted economic resources and rampant xenophobia, Prashad’s book is well worth reading.

Fat Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism By Vijay Prashad Monroe, ME, Common Courage Press, 2002.