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Current Issue #50
Vol 23, No. 2
For
texts of articles published within the past year, please contact us
(info@sdonline.org)
about buying a copy of the journal, or else
contact our publishers through their website: www.tandf.co.uk/journals
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Table of Contents
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50
(Volume 23, No. 2)
Socialism
in the Age of Obama
Introduction
by The Editors
Rick
Wolff,
Economic Crisis from a Socialist Perspective
Hester Eisenstein, Some Strategies for Left Feminists
(and Their Male Allies) in the Age of Obama
Andrew Kliman, “The Destruction of Capital”
and the Current Economic Crisis
Gregory Meyerson and Michael Joseph Roberto, Obama
and the Irreversible Crisis: Systemic Contradictions, a New New Deal,
and the Limits of State Capitalism
Rohit Negi, Political Economy of the Global Crisis
Jonathan Scott, Thinking Big
Mat Callahan, The Nature of the Beast: Its Vulnerabilities
and Its Replacement
Victor Wallis, Economic/Ecological Crisis and Conversion
Jeffrey Shantz, Re-Building Infrastructures of Resistance
Raúl Zibechi, Time to Reactivate Networks of
Solidarity
Poetry
George Snedeker, Cash Nexus
D.H. Melhem, For Gaza
George Wallace, Too Many Words
Correspondence
Shaka Zulu, 500 Years of Tears
Report
Nadya Williams, Trying to Undo: Veterans
of Conscience in Viet Nam
Review Essay
Joel Kovel, Mearsheimer and Walt Revisited
Reviews
Victor Considerant, Principles of Socialism: Manifesto
of 19th Century Democracy reviewed by Amy Buzby
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York,
Critique of Intelligent Design reviewed by David Schwartzman
Andrew Hartman, Education and the Cold War: The Battle
for the American School reviewed by Samuel Day Fassbinder
Nicholas Powers, Theater of War: The Plot Against the American
Mind Sam Friedman, Seeking To Make the World Anew: Poems of the Living
Dialectic reviewed by Howard Pflanzer
Aviva Chomsky, Linked Labor Histories: New England,
Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class reviewed by Ted Zuur
Robert J. Foster, Coca-Globalization: Following Soft
Drinks from New York to New Guinea reviewed by Noah Eber-Schmid
Messay Kebede, Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in Ethiopia,
1960-1974 reviewed by Teodros Kiros
Francis A. Boyle, Protesting Power: War, Resistance, and Law
reviewed by Ravi Malhotra
Michael Schwartz, War Without End: The Iraq War in Context
reviewed by Peter Seybold
Lance Selfa, The Democrats: A Critical History reviewed
by Chris Hardnack
Annelies
Laschitza, Die Liebknechts: Karl und Sophie – Politik
und Familie reviewed by Gerd Callesen
Notes
on Contributors
Designed
& Powered by MediaTek_
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Introduction
Radical
Perspectives on Race and Racism
By Ronald Hayduk,
Yusuf Nuruddin, Victor Wallis
This special issue of Socialism and Democracy marks the centennial of W.E.B.
Du Bois’s classic, The Souls of Black Folk. At the same time,
going beyond our coverage of the Reparations movement in S&D #31, it
deepens our commitment to implementing a thoroughly multiracial vision of
the goals evoked by the name of this journal. The close link that exists
in principle between the struggle against racism and the struggle for socialism
was well articulated by Du Bois himself. One of the most celebrated assertions
of his 1903 work was, “The problem of the twentieth century is the
problem of the color line.” Revisiting that prophecy fifty years later,
he wrote (citing Marx’s influence):
I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem
of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of
the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures
and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are
willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance
and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege
men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous,
and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.
Today, despite another fifty-year lapse, the relevance of these observations
is undiminished. In the interim, while the long-term project of socialism
still nurses the wounds bequeathed by its first nation/state-level embodiments,
and while the “universal and continuous” character of the war
waged by the privileged becomes even more pronounced, there are nonetheless
hopeful signs of a revived popular movement cutting across hitherto formidable
barriers of distance, language, and culture. Some of these signs have been
recorded in our pages, with articles inspired by the anti-corporate- globalization
movement and the World Social Forum (both in S&D #30), and by the World
Conference Against Racism (S&D #31). Despite the severe obstacles posed
by post-9/11 developments (especially in the U.S.), these movements continue
to grow.
With our present focus on race and racism, while still keeping the global
dimension clearly in view, we focus much more sharply on racism’s
roots and ramifications within the United States. The general importance
of such a focus hardly needs to be underlined, but some of the specific
reasons for its urgency may be worth mentioning. In the first place, despite
the important achievements of the Civil Rights movement, which reached a
high point during the 1960s, it is clear that institutional racism remains
deeply entrenched. The articles below help give a composite picture of this
situation, which is manifested not only in continuing economic and social
disparities, but also in the sometimes deliberate disfranchisement of oppressed
communities (a notable factor George W. Bush’s “selection”
as president), and in the global projections of U.S. imperial power. More
recently, with the implementation of “homeland security,” discredited
practices of racial profiling have been revived, as the ruling class has
opted for discriminatory and repressive measures in preference to a reconsideration
of its provocative geo- political agendas.
Taken together, these circumstances have in some ways raised the stakes
of anti-racist political work. While such work has always been necessary
for the oppressed as a matter of survival, and while it has also had, for
other sectors, both the aspect of a moral imperative (going back to anti-slavery
campaigns) and that of a strategic alliance (relative to labor organizing
and to progressive social legislation), it is now becoming more clearly
central to the survival of humanity as a whole. With the socialist project
at an ebb and with the consequent almost completely unrestrained rule of
corporate capital, both the need and the space for a popular movement of
unprecedented scope and cohesion have become clearly apparent. Such a movement
cannot afford the weaknesses of its predecessors, among which a failure
to thoroughly address the “color line” was, along with comparable
shortcomings vis-à-vis gender, perhaps the most devastating.
In any effort to overcome such weaknesses, dialogue of the kind that we
are promoting in these pages will have an indispensable role.
This collection had as its initial core a series of presentations at the
Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School. Ward Churchill’s article is
a greatly expanded version of such a talk; the articles by Eric Foner and
by Gerald Horne, as well as the symposium on “Critical Black History,”
are edited transcriptions that essentially retain their original format.
The articles by Anthony Monteiro, Maulana Karenga, and Regina Naasirah Blackburn
are revised from talks given at the symposium “The Color Line Then
and Now: A Tribute to W.E.B. Du Bois,” which was the opening plenary
session of the conference “Challenging the Color Line: Confronting
Issues of Race and Class in the Era of Global Capital.” This conference
was sponsored by the Brecht Forum and held at New York University in February
2002. We are grateful to the organizers of these events, especially Liz
Mestres and Joel Washington, for facilitating our access to the materials.
Beyond these sources, we have ranged widely in our search for writings that
would do justice to the immense scope of our subject. We wish to thank all
those authors who responded to our special solicitations (in some cases,
on rather short notice)—not only for their confidence in our project,
but also for their cooperation throughout the editorial process. We trust
that the importance of their contributions will inspire other writers to
continue and extend, in future issues of Socialism and Democracy, the conversation
that we have started here.
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Winter in America
By Yusuf
Nuruddin
The Constitution was a noble piece of paper
With Free Society it struggled, but they died in vain
And now Democracy is begging on the corner
Hoping for some rain/It look like it’s hoping for some rain
And I see the robins perched in barren treetops
Watching last-ditch racists marching ‘cross the floor
Just like the peace signs that vanished in our dream
Never had a chance to grow/never had a chance to grow
And now it’s winter, winter in America
And all of the healers have been killed or betrayed
Yeah but people know, people know
It’s winter
Lord knows it’s winter in America
And ain’t nobody fighting because nobody knows what to save
Save your
soul from winter in America
-- Gil Scott-Heron, “Winter in America”
Welcome to the Winter/Spring Issue of Socialism and Democracy.
Two editorials are rare for this journal. They represent not disunity
but diversity. There are many voices in the struggle for human rights
that are rarely heard, and many constituencies, powerless and impoverished,
who are often spoken about but rarely spoken to. My voice, constructed
from an African American inner city experience speaks, hopefully,
to all
of the readers of this journal, but most of all it beckons a new readership—young,
and older, people of color who come from the same apartheid urban experience
as I do.
In conceiving this special issue and soliciting articles from some
of the major known and not-yet-known radical scholar/activists who
are writing
and struggling around the issue of race and racism, my intent was not
only to broaden the discourse for the dedicated readership of Socialism
and Democracy, but also to reach out to my sisters and brothers from
the
Harlems, Bedford-Stuyvesants, Brownsvilles, and South Bronxes of America
who have never read an issue of Socialism and Democracy: the
black (and Latino) knowledge—and wisdom-seekers who have probably
never read any socialist literature at all but who feast on knowledge—especially
consciousness-raising esoteric knowledge, cultural/ Kemetic knowledge,
and knowledge about conspiracies, avidly buying such books from black
bookstores and street vendors, and following professors on the Afrocentric
lecture circuit. My beloved college intellectuals and street intellectuals
need to broaden, deepen and sharpen their analysis of the capitalist system
that oppresses us all, just as my comrades-in-arms, my fellow academicians
and activists who regularly read this journal, need to challenge their
own understanding and analysis of a system of racism which oppresses many
and demeans us all.
From where I stand, the enslavement, segregation and continued oppression
of African people has been the central contradiction in the American
experiment
with democracy, from the days of the Founding Fathers to the current
era of neo-fascism. Yet it was the conquest and genocide of Native
Americans
and the theft of their land by European colonial settlers which set
the stage for the foundation of the white male bourgeois republic.
The supreme
irony of history was that this colonial settler state turned slavocracy
turned apartheid state turned superpower turned empire—was born
in a bloody revolution against the tyranny of a British monarch, declaring
its sovereignty and independence based on the self-evident truths that
“all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness,” and that it is the right and duty of the
people to alter or abolish any government which would reduce them under
despotism.
A passage charging the British crown with the crime of waging a “cruel
war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life
and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him,
captivating them and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere,
or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither,” was,
of course, deleted from the final draft of the Declaration; a Constitution
declared such people only three-fifths human; and a Supreme Court said
that they had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.
Some say that this means that democracy is a work-in-progress—
that the struggle for civil rights, human rights, democratic rights is
the struggle to continually expand the vision of the Founding Fathers
to secure the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for
all marginalized peoples: African Americans, Native Americans, women,
poor whites, gays, lesbians, and all those falling outside of the definition
of “Christian moral majority.” Perhaps. A radical interpretation
of the Declaration is that the phrase “pursuit of happiness”
was but a code word which meant that the white patriarchs, the Founding
Fathers, had the right to the pursuit of private property—that is,
the pursuit of massive accumulations of private wealth—through the
capitalist exploitation of labor, the forced labor of enslaved Africans
and the exploited labor of a white working class.
So the question arises as to whether these are incompatible goals:
democracy for all and the exploitative pursuit of enormous private
wealth by a few.
The incompatibility is evident to socialists of all stripes. It is
not so apparent to those whose critique of American society begins
with the
contradiction of race—especially in an era when “getting paid”
is the byword, and the commodification (that is, the marketing and sale)
of black culture by the recording and media corporations is a multi-billion
dollar industry. There’s a whole generation of young black people
who uncritically (and understandably) want a piece of the American Pie,
after generations of racial exclusion from the prosperity and affluence
of the society around them. These young people are buppy-oriented if they
are college-bound or educated, and “ghetto-fabulous”-oriented
if they dropped out of or only finished high school. Another group of
alienated African Americans have retreated into the comfort zone of racial
chauvinism and romantic quests for authentic cultural identity. That’s
understandable too, given the nature of the apartheid society we live
in.
A quest for national liberation and democratic rights, which was born
of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power/pan-Africanist Movement
of the ‘60s, crumbled under the weight of COINTELPRO, Reaganomics,
the values of a “me-generation,” a genocidal crack epidemic,
fratricidal narco-terrorist wars for inner city drug-dealing turf, the
warehousing of black males in prison, gender inequality, the irresolution
of black male-female dynamics, and indecisiveness on the question “Which
way forward?” In the vacuum, romanticism and escapism of all sorts
begins to flourish—the commercialization of sex and violence, the
isolationist retreat into houses of worship, the lumpen-bourgeois pursuit
of the illusion of happiness, and the seeking of all solutions in the
resurrection of mummified culture. It’s all good. . .but in due
proportion! Ma’at means balance in all things, and sacred traditions
say the best way is the middle way.
The quest for financial security in an uncertain economy with its attendant
emphasis on entrepreneurship at all levels—street vending, multi-level
marketing, small business ownership—is a conservatizing force which
impedes a class analysis. But labor-intensive proprietorships such as
“Mom and Pop” stores are not and have never been enemy; the
enemy is the global capitalism driven and perpetuated by multinational
corporations. You can be an entrepreneur and a socialist too!
Which way forward? Some say nationalism, some say socialism. But it
has never been an “either/or” question. The path forward is self-determination/national
liberation and class-struggle. And class struggle means international
solidarity with all progressive people. We began constructing that community
of progressive people through the radio waves with the Pacifica network
(WBAI 99.5 FM for those of you in New York), and we have to continue talking
to each other not just anonymously or through call-ins on the airwaves
but in person at venues such as the Brecht Forum.
It’s Winter in America: the right-wing reactionaries have taken
over, last-ditch racists like Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott march across
the Senate floor, the mindless fools are in control of the ship, civil
liberties are being curtailed, a creeping Homelands Security police state
is upon us, and the robins see no spring in sight as the world drifts
perilously towards World War III. Gil says that the soul—the core
of humane values—is what we have to save. And we who are most oppressed
and exploited are the soul-force. Without us taking on the moral mantle
of leadership, and having the vision, the determination and the
knowledge of how to reconstruct this society—and this world—so
that all people can live in harmony, there is no salvation from Winter
in America.
Welcome to the Winter/Spring issue of Socialism and
Democracy. We bear the brunt of the Winter of capitalism and
racism, and we seek and struggle for the Spring of Socialism and True
Democracy.
Peace and Blessings,
Yusuf Nuruddin
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