Socialism: Theory & Practice

Muddle-headed middle class "Liberalism" or Marxism?

2012-02-10T09:12:00.002-06:00

Robert Reich, like Paul Krugman and the rest of these over-paid pundits posing as liberals, continues to evade two major issues:

1. The cost of these wars.

2. Racism and the failure to enforce Affirmative Action.

I find it interesting how Robert Reich doesn't apply the same analysis to Obama as he does towards Romney as Reich is building towards supporting Obama because the Republicans are so bad when in fact Obama and Romney both have the exact same Wall Street agenda couched in different terminology but result in the same thing: wars abroad financed through austerity measures here at home.

No president has ever attacked the living standards as viciously and perniciously as Barack Obama has done yet Reich has the unmitigated gall and audacity--- not to mention total and complete dishonesty--- to pretend Obama is somehow better than Romney:

http://robertreich.org/post/17162027435

Shame on the left for not providing the American people with a clear and understandable working class Marxist analysis instead of all of this muddle-headed middle class apology for Barack Obama we are now getting from the well-heeled pundits like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman who build their fantasies supporting Obama around some kernels of truth that end up so distorted all we get is confusion.

Mitt Romney says he is not concerned about the poor while Obama pretends that he is concerned about the poor but really isn't concerned about the poor to the degree he takes the needed steps towards eliminating poverty--- which can be done with the massive redistribution of wealth to fund real living wage jobs and universal social programs like a National Public Health Care System (12-million new jobs if we just begin with primary health care) and a National Public Child Care System (at least three-million new jobs) combined with bringing back C.E.T.A., WPA and CCC we can put everyone in this country back to work if we end these dirty wars and cash in the peace dividends while taxing the hell out of the rich to pay for the rest of the bill.

Robert Reich writes and speaks from an upper-middle class perspective and then he has the nerve to talk about "us" when he has nothing in common with working people who he keeps inserting into his "middle class."

I like reading Robert Reich's "analysis" because he does provide some important facts as kernels of truth; but, one needs to carefully read between the lines and sort fact from fiction.

Working people need to establish their own Marxist think-tanks and action centers in the communities where they live and where they work because this kind of muddled nonsense will never get us beyond Wall Street's control.

Pick up a cheap used copy on-line of "Dynamics of Social Change: A Reader in Marxist Social Science, from the Writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin" by David Goldway, Harry Martel, Howard Selsam. Here are some selections from this book:

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=6859916

In Darwins shadow, a socialist pioneer of evolution

2012-01-08T18:50:00.001-06:00

A free e-book by Alfred Wallace, "The Wonderful Century Reader:

http://books.google.com/books?id=2KUzAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA369&lpg=PA369&dq=Alfred+Wallace+and+The+Plunder+of+the+Earth&source=bl&ots=MJ0KVDTnw4&sig=WyD3HqamttfuxH7cDfYA54TwoC8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ID0KT4L-BtCRgQeXl42NAg&ved=0CEMQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

The man was writhing in the grips of Malaria. A torrent of tropical rain beat on the roof of his Indonesian hut. In the calm interludes between the sweats and chills, he wrote about ideas — big ones. It was 1856, and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace was writing about how species evolve.

Little known today, Wallace went on to become the co-discoverer, with Charles Darwin, of the theory of natural selection, the engine behind evolution. And he became a socialist.

Who was this overshadowed scientific pioneer?

Wallace left school early to work as a surveyor. He loved to read, and England’s public libraries, not pubs, were his university. He was fascinated when he heard a presentation by socialist Robert Owen in a workingmen’s Hall of Science. While working in Wales, he found himself in the midst of the insurrectionary Rebecca Riots of 1842-43. These experiences left their political mark.

In 1848, Wallace’s interest in natural history led him to Manaus, deep in Brazil’s Amazon River Basin. While he contemplated the origins of species, he needed to earn a living, and it was dangerous. He collected insects, birds and other specimens along the Amazon and Black Rivers and sold them to interested parties. One of his customers was Charles Darwin.

After four years in the Amazon contemplating the variety among animals of the same species, he decided to return to England. He made his way to the port city of Pará with parrots, other birds and detailed notes of his experiences and observations. Disaster struck when his ship, the Helen, caught fire. A combustible balsam cargo had ignited. While he escaped in a lifeboat, his precious specimens and notes were lost.

Undaunted, Wallace journeyed to the tiny island of Ternate, among the Spice Islands of Indonesia in 1854. More collecting and observing wildlife led to his 1858 paper, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.” He mailed it to someone he felt would be most interested — Charles Darwin.

Darwin was astonished that this young collector had independently thought through, as he had, how species evolve. Darwin had kept his thoughts on this mostly to himself, knowing the explosiveness in Victorian England of a materialist explanation of species’ origins. Now there was a chance he could be “scooped.” Some friends of Darwin’s, botanist Joseph Hooker and geologist Charles Lyell, moved to protect their friend.

Both Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers were read on July 1, 1858, at the Linnean Society in London. They were among six other papers read that night. Not many took notice. It was a yawner. Meanwhile, Wallace was still collecting insects in New Guinea to make a living. Darwin, due to family fortune and some timely investments, was not burdened as Wallace was by the need to earn money. So he set to work. His famous “Origin of Species” (1859) was the result.

Charles Darwin is correctly referred to as the father of modern biology. He collected mounds of evidence for evolution and its associated theories. He experimented on worms and barnacles. He wrote prolifically. But he also tipped his hat to Wallace in “The Origin of Species.” He quoted from an 1855 paper of Wallace’s: “Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.” Darwin wrote that Wallace and he agreed that this was “descent with modification” in action.

Wallace was respectful of Darwin and his work. In 1882, he was a pallbearer at Darwin’s funeral. But he also differed from the famous biologist in some important ways. While both saw the importance of the environment, it was Wallace who developed this more in his later writing. And he did it from a working-class perspective. Note this sentence from his 1909 paper “The Plunder of the Earth”: “The struggle for wealth, and its deplorable results … have been accompanied by a reckless destruction of the storied-up products of nature, which is even more deplorable because more irretrievable.”

Wallace was the first president of the Land Nationalization Society of England. His advanced political ideas helped him avoid the pitfalls that trapped other 19th century evolutionists. Edward Bellamy’s utopian “Looking Backward” convinced Wallace of the socialist alternative. He opposed social Darwinism and eugenics. He understood that class-driven economics and politics, not biology, had much to do with the corruption and injustices of society.

While we give Darwin his due, is it Alfred Russel Wallace’s socialist views that keep his 21 books out of print? The political left, and especially those in the environmental movement, should read more of this far-seeing worker naturalist.

Taking apart the Wall Street web to create a beautiful tapestry

2011-09-07T21:30:00.000-05:00

I kind of like the comparison of the tapestry and the threads to our society that I read in a posting here on FaceBook but there is a lot left out.

It isn't so much that "we didn't see how the threads are connected;" most of the problem is that we didn't see that the threads now are put together to create a web rather than a tapestry.

There has been so much governmental repression against a way needed to examine what was, and is, going on in this country and around the world that people have feared articulating the problem/s.

Marxism has been the best and most effective critic of capitalism. This is the only country in the world where socialism has been successfully "purged" from the body politic, and as a consequence there is no socialist alternative political party critiquing the consequences of first capitalism, and then state monopoly capitalism in its imperialist stage.

Following on this government repression as mass opposition is arising to Obama's Wall Street policies and agenda resulting in the emergence of a left that has being resuscitated because of the vicious attack on the standard of living of the working class required to pay for imperialist wars; now, again, the FBI, the New York Times, the New Republic along with all the MainStreamMedia and Public Radio and Television is once again on the attack against "the left."

The attack on the left was first initiated by Obama, his campaign staff and his Administration, then picked up by the Tea Baggers and now we get this massive effort under the guise of "what the left doesn't understand about Obama." Like in the late 1930's, into the 1940's and then throughout the 1950's, this attack is broad and sweeping in scope branding everyone including liberals and progressives together with the Marxists as "leftists."

It was interesting to see how Naomi Klein's "soft" socialist analysis was welcomed enthusiastically in Canada and all over the world but here in the United States her "soft" socialist critique of capitalism was downplayed with most liberals, progressives and the left refusing to use the opening she created to open up a full-scale attack on capitalism.

We saw how the phony liberals, progressives and the left who used their "credibility" to create and provide Obama a false image of being something he was not--- liberal, progressive and left--- latched on to Naomi Klein in order to marginalize her in this country within a small circle rather than use her popularity to bring socialist ideas out into the public square.

Marxism not only provides the "magnifying glass" to closely examine the tiny threads of the tapestry or what holds the system together and how it works; but it enables people to articulate alternatives to the reactionary Wall Street agenda--- which has created not so much a beautiful rug, but a strong web trapping us all--- to free ourselves from this trap.

The "new" attack on "the left" (liberals, progressives and the left) is taking on the creation of this straw-man of what the left is and what the left believes in order to knock down this straw-man without having to debate--- or acknowledge--- the real left.

It goes like this: The left doesn't understand Obama. The left says Obama should have focused on the economy and instead he focused on solving the health care problems and then the left tries to toss these wars into the mix even though the wars have nothing to do with health care or the economy--- this left just has a moral objection to wars and tries to work the wars into everything else. This attack then goes on to say, "Yes, alright; the left has a point that Obama should have been more vigorous in pushing more taxes on the wealthy but the left doesn't understand that the presidency is just one branch of government and Obama has all these Republicans he has to work with because, after all, the Republicans represent an important segment of society, too."

What is ignored in this straw-man argument now making its rounds through the MainStreamMedia is that the real left said what we needed to do is create a National Public Health Care Program which would have create over ten-million new jobs providing the American people with free primary health care through a vast network of over 30,000 neighborhood health care centers--- in other words, health care would be publicly funded, publicly administered and publicly delivered just like public education or the United States Postal Service--- which, perhaps not coincidentally, has over 30,000 local post offices across the country now under attack by the very forces that refused to use the creation of a public health care system to create jobs and solve the problems of unemployment all at the same time; all financed by ending these dirty imperialist wars and taxing the rich... the only thing we need is our own socialist working class people's party made up of those of us under attack--- liberals, progressives and the left--- to explain all of this to the American people and advocate such a progressive alternative agenda to Obama's reactionary Wall Street's agenda of wars paid through austerity measures intended to decimate the standard of living of the U.S. working class.

In the past liberals, progressives and the left retreated when under attack--- this time we need to mount an attack of our own.

Together, we can take the fine threads that have been spun to create this "web" that now serves as a trap for the parasitical Wall Street coupon clippers to suck the life-blood from the working class, and turn these fine threads into a beautiful tapestry.

Some people object to my using Marxist terms like "imperialism" to describe these dirty wars. But, Mark Twain who was well on his way to developing a Marxist analysis declared--- "Before the Spanish American War I was not an anti-imperialist but after seeing what we have done to the Philippines and Puerto Rico after the war I am now an anti-imperialist." (the quote is not exact but it conveys accurately what Mark Twain thought and said)

Well, before the Spanish American War the United States was not a full-fledged imperialist Nation even though the campaign of genocide in the way the land and wealth of this country was stolen from Native Americans and how slavery was imposed reflected the embryonic stage of imperialism--- the highest and most barbaric and cannibalistic stage of capitalism.

Today Mark Twain is on a new "Forever Stamp;" the government would like Twain to be remembered as a teller of tales not a person of great political and economic understanding and vision.

Just like these same people would like us to remember Albert Einstein for his work with the atom and not his involvement in the struggles against racism and war and his socialist politics and vision.

Just like the people in power would like us to remember Abe Lincoln as the president who saved the union and not as the liberal who was strongly influenced by Marxist thought when it comes to the struggle between labor and capital.

It sounds to me like there are a lot of people who are really fed up; this might be a good time for people to read a little essay by Albert Einstein, "Why Socialism?," in which Einstein explained why he was a socialist:

http://socialismtheoryandpractice.blogspot.com/2009/04/why-socialism.html

Another good read is a new book by socialist Howard Pawley who had been the Premier of Manitoba, Canada--- elected on the socialist New Democratic Party ticket. His book is, "Keep True, A Life In Politics."

Here is an interesting recent interview of Pawley:

http://www.channels.com/episodes/show/14571014/Howard-Pawley-Pawley-on-Politics?page=38

Pawley and his NDP government started to tear apart the "web" using the threads to begin weaving together a beautiful tapestry for the people of Manitoba.

Of course, the history books have totally eliminated any mention of the socialist governments here in Minnesota led by Floyd Olson--- if you want to learn about Floyd Olson and the socialist Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party you have to go dig through the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society:

A most interesting perspective

2011-08-10T20:35:00.000-05:00

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to share an interesting project with you. I had gotten a letter from the China Daily, which ran the story on me back in January, to comment on a few questions they plan to deal with as a result of the S&P decision to demote the credit line of Washington. In answering the questions, some of which they may use, it occurred to me to share the ideas with you. Attached is a copy of their note to me and my response. As usual, your comments are always welcome. I have been working on a thesis generally titled “The 21st Century As An Epochal World Change In Economic Structure”.

Sincerely,

Sidney Gluck

-----Original Message-----

From: Kelly Chung Dawson

To: Sidney J. Gluck

Sent: Tue, Aug 9, 2011 7:50 am

Subject: China Daily request for comment on how stock market crisis might affect China

Mr. Gluck

China Daily is preparing a story on how the current stock market crisis might affect the Chinese economy, and I was hoping you might be willing to comment. If you are, below are some questions (feel free to answer as many/few as you have the time for).

Thanks!

Questions:

1. Is the slump of the world's stock markets following the S&P's downgrade a true reflection of where the world's economy is going?

2. How will the US debt crisis affect the Chinese economy? Will China's exports slow down due to weaker global demand? If the world's economy turns worse, will China's imports from the rest of the world be affected?

3. What should China do if the world's economy goes to another recession? Another stimulus package?

4. Do you have any predictions for what will happen with the RMB? Will it appreciate faster to help tame China's inflation or slower to help the ailing exports sector in case of a world recession?

Best,

Kelly Chung Dawson

Reporter

China Daily USA

-----Original Message-----

From: Sidney J. Gluck

To: Kelly Dawson at China Daily

Sent: Wed, Aug 10, 2011 1:37 pm

Subject: Re: China Daily request for comment on how stock market crisis might affect China

Dear Ms. Dawson,

I appreciate your request for comments. Here goes from the top of my head and my heart.

As an overall introduction, I believe the 21st century is an epoch of world change that is in some ways similar to the change from feudalism to capitalism. Capitalism has done a great job in building industry based upon wage labor and the free movement of former landlocked peasants. China is going through some of that process now with the development of an industrialized society and will no doubt be the first nation to develop a high tech industrialized society with the use of both private capital and government social capital while also developing socio-economic supports for its population which in some ways resemble the welfare state that sustained capitalism but is basically a part of a socialist program which seeks to develop harmony among the collective economic levels.

My answers to your questions follow:

Question 1:

Standard & Poor must be commended for being the first important institution in the capitalist system to take an objective view of the conditions among the varied countries. For truth, the dominance of US finance capital is a bulwark to the system on a worldwide scale. We have witnessed a shift in the past twenty years that had begun with the Reagan administration to the investment pattern, especially in the USA, from building new industry and high tech, which would continue job creation or pick up shifts in particular industries that would utilize the existing labor force. Fact is that the industrial structure of the USA in particular has decreased with the export of capital to cheap labor countries where US companies invested in China are now looking to move to countries like India and other former colonial countries for cheap labor.

As a result, when our country was driven into an economic crisis in 2008 China bearing the shock brought its country to a relative equilibrium but then has been affected by inflation generated by higher costs of imports. Wall Street recovered from the economic crisis but left behind what is now 14 million unemployed and no prospects of industrial growth to re-absorb them in productive and life supporting activities. Beyond that, inflation has been magnified, affecting China’s imports and creating serious price increases which it is now dealing with by increasing minimum wage laws, increasing the amount of workers non-taxable base in their income and hence their tax to the government and consideration is now being given to increasing one of the relatively low levels of taxation among the wealthy group growing in China whether personal or corporate and insisting upon corporate negotiation with a growing labor movement.

S&P’s alarm was inevitable because the distorted personal accumulation in all western countries and the USA has generated government debts for lack of taxation of high incomes and failure of governments to become involved in industrial development with one exception, Germany does not find itself in the same straits. Having first created a welfare state in the 19th century, they are maintaining it because of the multiplicity of political parties representing various economic sectors and the decision to trade and exchange with China that is a bridge supporting its own continuation.

We hear now suggestions of solutions that German banks pull Western European countries out of their financial tangles and failure of growth. Germany’s welfare state will not include these countries and will continue on its own independent economic direction. I do believe also that they will learn much from China because the two economic poles of the 21st century are a reality, especially with the development of BRICS, which is now planning a 2012 massive conference of developing countries and industrial development, job creation, and the end of colonial exploitation. So thanks to Standard & Poor’s for opening the eyes of the world a signal that change is necessary.

Question 2:

The world economy is changing. This century is making new history by creating economic relations around the world that aid in the industrialization of countries that have been exploited for hundreds of years by foreign powers. This is the major change that is taking place with China as an example of the possibilities. Once the privatization impulse in the growing economies among former colonial countries will be diminished in combinations of private and social support of economic development. This will be the new epochal impetus.

There will be an effect on China with exports to countries whose economic growth has been stalled. However, on the contrary, there will be an increase in exports to developing countries that are, in the last analysis, the world’s majority. Furthermore, the planned economy in China has the capability of capital formations both for industrial development and growing social necessities. There may be some problem with foreign investment; but then again, I suspect that finance capital from the West will invest in the development of China because they need it for their own survival.

The great danger is not economic failure because countries will be developing along with China, which now has a substantial base. The great danger is the possibility of war generated by the Pentagon. What is not fully known by the public is that President Obama’s position on dealing with international relations with China is based upon dealing with objective differences by using diplomacy rather than the military. (Note to the Editor: I say this because I had some hand in shaping his ideas. A copy of a letter received from the President in June of this year attests to his diplomatic approach in relations with China and enunciates his position, which differs from the Pentagon, State Department, and the military budget. This is for your information and may be used in a helpful manner. You will note from the copy of the attached letter received from the President only last June. You may use any of this any way you like, but you should know it.)

In sum, the world’s economy that had been dominated by private capital will probably turn worse; but the world as a whole will be on the upturn/ and create the possibility for economic stability as changes take place in the flow of private capital. China’s position as the second highest producer in the world, though it must produce three times as much to reach their per capita production which it will accomplish with its own as well as foreign capital and stimulate intensive growth as the effect of colonialism ends.

Question 3:

The question must be answered from two distinct competing conditions. The dominant one, at this time, is the failure of private capital investments and industrial growth. On the other hand, industrialization, on a wider scale than ever, is now emerging. BRICS is in the process of developing economic relationships among nations devoid of military structuring and expense. This newly developing organization represents the growing majority of the world’s peoples and countries even encompassing a controlled participation by foreign capital within its confines. But then again, in a changing world, that too can be augmented, nation by nation, adding overall national planning to their development as a change from planning by individual corporations based purely on their profitability rather than national growth.

Ultimately, we may be witnessing the worst and the last as planned economies are adopted by the developing former colonial countries, some of which are already on that track. Another stimulus package that might evolve will be strictly within the existing Western countries that will have to find ways in taxing private accumulations and inducing private and government investment to re-establish industrial development and job creation for their people. It might even be some form of redistribution of wealth in the form of legitimate and affordable taxes or eliminating concessions on tax rates that have been a gift to the wealthy and which, in many ways, has led to their present crisis.

Question 4:

As for your last question, the effect on the RMB is sadly a tough one. No doubt the action of S&P might affect the value of the RMB but not necessarily. Nonetheless, the truth it revealed on the direction of not only the US economy but that of the European capitalist nations could affect the RMB. However, the developing part of the world will accelerate despite the crises in capitalist countries, and private capital will still be investing in the growth economies, as we know from the experience with China. Furthermore, I do anticipate that accumulated private capital will still invest in China and in other large developing countries and some among the smaller countries. China’s holdings of US bonds may suffer in the process, but the RMB is not immediately affected by the movement of foreign capital and depends a good deal upon the planned banking system in China. While it is true that the currencies of many countries will be affected, I do not consider the RMB to be in the same category as the dollar, the pound, the franc, etc. in the West.

Why? The RMB’s control is in the hands of the government in China. This is not true of the Western countries. What China must carefully consider is the indebtedness of internal regional government and economic enterprises and its relation to the central planning functions and decisions. In other words, there are more possibilities for the RMB to protect itself than we are witnessing in other parts of the world. The specifics in many ways will depend on the rapidity with which industrialization grows in the developing part of the world and the role that China will no doubt be able to play in stimulating positive economic and social growth and avoiding negative expenditures for the military.

As for the export sector, it might be the necessity to reduce the profitability and accumulation by the government and private capital, domestic and foreign.

The one strength that China has, nonexistent in the West, is its national economic planning as well as the reduction private capital influence though it must be sensitive to maintaining conditions that attract investments needed for further growth. However, economic growth in China is a central part of the national plan and the federalization of the political scene together with development of democratic forms are inevitable and will also be helpful. With such experiences and possibilities, the RMB is not in danger as major Western currencies.

After all, China has inherited more contradictions of its own than the rest of the world living through eco-social relations of feudalism and wage labor and the combination of private and social capital in a high tech wage labor system. It is the most complex society and economy that has ever existed. But its economic and social structure embodies a philosophical approach based upon creating the well-being of a productive population which will become the first nation to succeed in building a high tech industrialized society despite the multiple contradictions and improve the conditions of all of its people. That is the new society that will show its strength in the 21stcentury.

I have answered all the questions from my distinctive point of view which is based on belief that China, with all its problems, is developing a Harmonious Society and ultimately will flower into socialism when the human nature of all its people on all economic levels achieve collectivity in their desire to have China succeed and create conditions for an ultimate growth into communism where the level of production and consumption are enough to take care of all of their people and fulfill Marx’s prediction “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”; an ultimate return to the human relations in the beginning of tribal communal society before the development of classes.

Sincerely,

Sidney Gluck

Winnipeg’s North End

2011-06-29T08:22:00.000-05:00

Culture

Winnipeg’s North End

Yesterday and Today

Jim Silver | January 7th 2010 | 5

Winnipeg’s Historic North End. Photo Courtesy of The Winnipeg Tribune / University of Manitoba Archives.

Images: 1 2 3

Winnipeg’s historic North End was a contradictory place. Poverty was widespread and deep; out of its midst grew a rich and vibrant culture. Today’s North End is similar in many respects — deep poverty and racism, and an emergent culture of resistance, for example — yet different in important ways.

Poverty in Winnipeg’s Historic North End

After 1896 Eastern European immigrants arrived in large numbers in Winnipeg, settling in the North End to work in the vast rail yards and associated industries. Housing was inadequate and terribly overcrowded. The 1908/09 Annual Report of All-Peoples’ Mission, then headed by J. S. Woodsworth, said of a part of its North End neighbourhood: “in 41 houses there were 120 ‘families,’ consisting of 837 people living in 286 rooms,” more than 20 people per house. Overcrowding, plus half the North End houses not being connected to the water supply, produced disease: in 1904 and 1905 Winnipeg had more deaths from typhoid than any North American city. A 1913 study by Woodsworth found that a “normal standard of living” required wages of $1,200 per year; many in the North End were earning less than half that.

Most people were working; they just didn’t get paid enough. Others worked seasonal jobs on farms or railway construction and endured cold, hungry winters in Winnipeg.

Winnipeg was deeply segregated, a city divided, the North End cut off from the rest of the city by the vast CPR yards and distinguished by its “foreign” character. A 1912 publication described the North End as “practically a district apart from the city,” adding that “those who located north of the tracks were not of a desirable character.” The largely Eastern European working class residents of the North End were called “dumb hunkies,” “bohunks,” Polacks; anti-semitism was rampant.

In Under the Ribs of Death, John Marlyn’s novel set in early twentieth Winnipeg, Sandor Hunyadi, a young Hungarian immigrant, lives in the North End, described as “a mean and dirty clutter … a howling chaos … a heap seething with unwashed children, sick men in grey underwear, vast sweating women in vaster petticoats.” When the young Sandor visits Crescentwood, the south end home of those of Anglo-Saxon descent who controlled the political and economic resources of the city, he was shocked to see that “the boulevards ran wide and spacious to the very doors of the houses. And these houses were like palaces, great and stately, surrounded by their own private parks and gardens. On every side there was something to wonder at.”

Much was extremely positive about the North End. Selkirk Ave was a thriving commercial street with a dazzling variety of shops and stores whose owners typically spoke several Eastern European languages. A rich and varied cultural life characterized the North End: newspapers published in many European languages; literary associations, drama societies, and sports clubs; a wide range of alternative schools; and according to one author, “a music teacher in every block in the North End to give the Jewish, Ukrainian, and Polish kids massive degrees of musical instruction weekly.” There was a thriving co-op sector, mutual aid societies, a labour temple, and radical politics of a bewildering variety of kinds.

Most of this was invisible to those outside the North End, but as Roz Usiskin has put it, from this vibrant culture North End residents “derived a dignity denied them by the dominant society.”

Post-War Change in the North End

In the post-Second World Large numbers of North End residents who could afford to do so moved to the larger, newer houses and greener spaces of the suburbs. Businesses andcultural organizations followed; economic and cultural life in the North End atrophied. Housing prices dropped; many became rental properties, some owned by slum landlords.

By the late 1960s-1970s manufacturing began to leave, and the character of the labour market shifted, with full-time unionized industrial jobs gradually being replaced by part-time, non-union, low-wage service sector jobs.

Just as these broad social forces — suburbanizationand de-industrialization — were unfolding, Aboriginal people began migrating to western Canadian cities, and especially Winnipeg, starting in the 1960s and growing by the decade. In 1951 there were 210 Aboriginal people resident in Winnipeg; in 1961 there were 1,082. By 2006 there were 68,380, the largest urban Aboriginal population in Canada. Many Aboriginal people located in the North End, attracted by cheap rental housing. When they arrived they were, generally speaking, ill-prepared for modern urban life, the result of a century of marginalization, colonization, and the damage inflicted by the residential schools. They arrived just as the good jobs were leaving, to the suburbs or out of Winnipeg entirely. And upon their arrival they faced a wall of racism.

Aboriginal people have replaced Eastern European immigrants as the poor and frequently reviled residents of the North End. They face the same racism and exclusion today that the newly-arrived Eastern European workers and their families did early in the twentieth century. They experience similarly inadequate and over-crowded housing conditions — the result of the severe shortage of low-income rental housing all across Canada that is accentuated in Winnipeg’s now sprawling inner city.

They have suffered racist abuse for decades. In a 1962 Winnipeg Tribune story, Jarvis Ave., just north of the CPR yards and previously the heart of the pre-Second World War Jewish North End, was described as “the worst street in the entire city.” Houses had long been little more than shacks; many of the small lots had two or more dwellings squeezed onto them. The Tribune story began: “The police, with ponderous legal irony, call it Jarvis Boulevard. Others, with more bitterness, have called it Tomahawk Row.” Aboriginal newcomers had located there, in search of low-cost housing. Their socio-economic circumstances were the root cause of problems in the area.

But, like their Eastern European working class predecessors who had occupied the same neighbourhoods before them, they were blamed for their poverty. A half-century earlier, in 1912, Winnipeg’s Associated Charities Bureau had written, referring to the Eastern European working class immigrants squeezed into inadequate North End housing and underpaid as they were, that “the large majority of applications for relief are caused by thriftlessness, mismanagement, unemployment due to incompetence, immorality, desertion of the family and domestic quarrels.” Such simplistic and stereotypical claims echo across today’s North End.

These things about Winnipeg’s North End have not changed. It is home to deep and widespread poverty; those who are poor are reviled and blamed for their own fate; and the North End remains spatially and socially segregated from the rest of the city. Many in Winnipeg do not venture into today’s North End; most are largely ignorant of life in the North End; it has ever been thus.

It’s Still the Same, but Different

Whereas the poverty of the early twentieth century North End was a working class phenomenon, today, because of dramatic shifts in the global economy, a much higher proportion of those in poverty are the jobless poor, largely outside of and in many cases with little or no experience of the paid labour force. This is disproportionately the case for Aboriginal youth, and is a source of many problems. Massive, publicly funded job creation is needed.

The North End poor of the early twentieth century typically lived in and benefited from intact, two-parent families, and ethnic cultures that were a source of strength and pride. Today, a much higher proportion of those who are poor live in families and communities that are less strong and resilient than was the case in the past, and in many cases their cultures have been seriously damaged. In the case of Aboriginal people, this is the result of the historic and contemporary process of colonization, by which the Canadian state set out deliberately to destroy Aboriginal families and cultures.

The route out of poverty taken by many of the descendants of the Eastern European working class is less readily available to the disproportionate numbers of today’s North End poor who are Aboriginal. Eastern Europeans were able to, and wanted to, assimilate into the dominant culture. Aboriginal people are less able to assimilate, less able to escape racism than their White predecessors in the North End, and less willing to do so.

The poverty of today’s North End has changed dramatically because of the intensified crime that plagues the inner city. Street gangs, the illegal drug trade, and damage done to families and cultures, and the almost complete disconnection of large numbers of young people from the labour market, have created a serious problem of crime and violence that is qualitatively different, and worse, than what existed in the North End during earlier periods of the twentieth century.

Finally, the poverty of today’s North End is experienced by many as a sense of hopelessness, of deep and dark despair. Inadequate housing, deep poverty, the prevailing crime and violence, the absence of jobs that pay a wage sufficient to support a family, have created a “spiritual” malaise among many that is particularly debilitating.

In many respects, today’s North End is unchanged from that of the early part of the twentieth century: deep poverty; widespread racism directed at the poor; their spatial segregation in a devalued part of the city. In other respects, it is different, perhaps even worse: the disconnection from a changed labour market; the erosion, in many cases, of families and cultures; the widespread crime and violence; the deep sense of despair and hopelessness amongst many.

Rebuilding from Within

These poverty-related problems notwithstanding, there is a dramatic process of rebuilding from within that is currently underway in Winnipeg’s North End and broader inner city. Like the vibrant culture of the early twentieth century North End, it is largely invisible to those who do not live there. It takes the form of a wide range of community-based organizations that have emerged from the ground up, and that use a community development approach to heal and empower those who are poor and have been damaged by poverty, racism, and colonization. Aboriginal people and Aboriginal women in particular are among the leaders in this work. The best of their efforts is aimed at rebuilding awareness and appreciation of their rich cultural heritage. Women’s centres of a wide variety of kinds, family resource centres, alternative educational institutions and neighbourhood development organizations are all part of an increasingly strong infrastructure of community-based organizations. Their work is creative and innovative; they hire local people thereby creating employment opportunities; they work in a way informed by their workers’ and leaders’ own experience of poverty and racism.

This rebuilding process is slow and difficult. For every step forward, another is taken back. It would be faster and less difficult with more public sector support. The civic and federal governments are largely absent from this process. The provincial NDP government has been supportive in many important ways. They have not done and still do not do enough to nurture and support this indigenous rebuilding process, but they have been quite supportive in some very important ways, and would be likely to be more so if they thought that there was public support for a stronger anti-poverty strategy.

The North End and the Left

The anti-poverty strategy that has emerged out of Winnipeg’s North End and broader inner city over the past quarter-century has not taken a form familiar to most leftist readers of Canadian Dimension. It has been and is being built by the poor themselves, and has taken a form that they have defined, and that has grown out of their realities. The labour movement is largely absent from this struggle; the far Left, to the extent that it exists at all in Winnipeg any longer, is absent from this struggle.

It is striking, however, that growing numbers of progressive young people are becoming interested in and active in this struggle. Although what follows is impressionistic, it may be that many young people recently energized by the anti-globalization movement have now turned their attention to local, community-based anti-poverty struggles in the North End and broader inner city.

If young, urban Aboriginal people were also to become politicized as part of this struggle, and were to begin to mobilize around demands related to antipoverty efforts, the pace of change would surely accelerate. There are few signs yet of that happening, and in fact an Aboriginal middle class is emerging, anxious to distance themselves from the poverty and related problems of the North End.
Yet there is deep anger in Winnipeg’s North End, the product of poverty, racism, and segregation. Much of that anger is inner-directed, in such forms as addictions and domestic abuse, but also in the form of increasingly severe street-level conflict and violence confined largely to the North End and directed largely at other North End residents, and frequently at police.

Most Winnipegers, spatially and socially segregated from the North End and its residents and steeped in stereotypes previously used to describe Eastern Europeans, are removed, in every respect, from these issues. If they could be mobilized in support of genuine, publicly-driven anti-poverty efforts, and/or if North End youth, and especially Aboriginal youth, were themselves to become politicized and direct their anger outwards, real gains could be made in the North End. Until that happens, and despite the exceptional community development efforts in the North End, change will be unbearably slow, and will come too late for many.

Tags: community renewal, jim silver, north end, winnipeg. Share or Email

This article appeared in the January/February 2010 issue of Canadian Dimension magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW to get a refreshing and provocative alternative delivered to your door 6 times a year for up to 50% off the newsstand price.

5 comments

I live in the South End of Nanaimo, which is considered the skuzziest neighborhood in the city. Yes, you do see some poor young girls in the sex trade walking down Victoria Road, and that is because men in fancy cars from the North End come looking to exploit their drug addictions which were induced by some other exploitative men. On what is considered THE worst block in this city, a couple of blocks from downtown, my friend just bought an 80 year old house, a Craftsman, which has unsurpassable charm. Three stained glass windows, original fir floors in good condition, coved ceilings, french doors with etched leaded glass panels, a sun room with windows on 3 sides, which leads to a sundeck with a sweeping view of the estuary and Gabriola Island, and spectacular sunrises which are reflected on the water. There is a walk-in closet off the master bedroom. There is a little inner courtyard outside, and a peach tree and 2 Kiwi fruit trees, and a fish pond in the yard. Next door to her live 4 men who are a brass quartet, and they have a big old boat in their backyard. My point in all this is that it is possible to find beauty and charm where you least expect it, and it doesn’t have to be about big money at all. In fact there can be something ugly about big money neighborhoods - the pretentiousness of them, and the lack of originality, spontaneity, history, and variety.
#1. Posted by Madeline Bruce, RPN in Nanaimo, B. C. on January 8th 2010 at 4:35pm
So , it would seem to me to solve the problem of poor people living in the North End, would be to double the rents to get rid of the poor .
#2. Posted by rosencrentz in winnipeg on January 28th 2010 at 6:58pm
No, that doesn’t sound nice at all. Speaking for South Nanaimo, the poorer section of Nanaimo, the price of houses and rentals is lower than the rest of Nanaimo. Gradually the old houses are being re-vamped, which makes for a very charming ambiance. As for unemployed people, many impoverished people are employed - just not getting enough hours, or enough wages. As for the chronically underpriviledged, some kind of entreprenurial initiative is needed to help them. Perhaps the teaching of new skills by retired people, which they could then market themselves, would get them on the road to a renewed self-confidence and hope for the future.
#3. Posted by Madeline Bruce, RPN in Nanaimo, B. C. on January 28th 2010 at 7:32pm
I enjoyed reading this article and found it very thoughtful. I grew up in the North End in the 1950s and 60s, spending all my time hanging around at the Sals and Sportsman’s. I am old enough to remember the unpaved back lanes that flooded every spring. Two formative events in the North End not mentioned in the article were the 1919 Strike and, less often noted, the tearing out of the street care tracks along Main Street. In the 1980s when I was Deputy Minister of Community Services in the Pawley government we ‘blew up’ the Winnipeg Children’s Aid Society and established five decentralized ‘Child and Family Service Agencies’ across the city, including one in the North End - with its HQ in the old Bank of Montreal building on Main and Bannerman (I think that was the cross street). Over 3000 people turned out for the election of the first Board. I think the agency could have made areal difference in the North End, as it included strong representation from within the Aboriginal community and took on a significant preventive mandate, but the Filmon government took over and got rid of all the agencies after a little more than a year, so we will never know what might have been. We did however fund the community effort to set up Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre which remains to this day. So perhaps it was not all for naught.
#4. Posted by Michael Mendelson in Toronto on February 8th 2010 at 6:17pm
Michael Mendelson speaks of the New Democratic Party Manitoba government led by Howard Pawley and just a few of its important initiatives of which there were many—- probably the most honest government in the history of the North American continent. He then goes on to mention how the thoroughly reactionary government of Gary Filmon destroyed several of the Pawley government’s programs of which there were so many destroyed by the Filmon government which leads me to wonder why no one has yet written a comparison of these two governments.

It seems to me now would be the time to write such a comparison.

I was living in Manitoba for about ten years at the time the Filmon government was coming into power. Filmon privatized the Manitoba Telephone Service and Manitobans are still suffering the consequences.

But, Filmon also did, what I consider to be one of the most callous and anti-human things imaginable in putting an end to the dental program in the elementary schools.

If every government in the world was just one iota as honest and caring about the needs of working people as was the Pawley NDP government, people could be living pretty decent lives.
There is a story that needs to be told here—- a tale of two governments; one for the people, the Pawley NDP government—- the other, the Filmon Government of Progressive Conservatives for the greedy wealthy few and the corporations.

(Now there—- Progressive Conservative—- is a real oxymoron if ever there was one.)
A webb site or blog would be the perfect place to tell this story of a tale of two governments. Working people across North America need to know and understand this story which is the history of the clash and struggle between classes.

This is an especially important story to tell at a time when working people are beginning to think there is no hope for change while taking such beatings and are being battered by Bay Street and Wall Street.

Working people across North America need to experience the all-inclusive government like that of Howard Pawley’s government which welcomed a full and complete expression of just about every political view from liberal to socialist to communist represented in the various people’s movements… proving people working together accomplish great things.

When people tell me about “hope” and “change” here in the United States, I always tell them: You don’t know what “hope” and “change” is all about unless you understand the people’s movements that brought governments like that of Howard Pawley, Tommy Douglas, Floyd Olson and Elmer Benson to power.

Unlike the Tommy Douglas story or the history of the socialist Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, the story of the Howard Pawley NDP government is still fresh enough to become an important factor in the struggles of today. Tell the story.

#5. Posted by Alan L. Maki in Warroad, Minnesota, USA on February 25th 2010 at 9:44am

Note: Howard Pawley has now written an excellent book, "Keep True, a life in politics." I would encourage everyone read and study this book.

North Winnipeg’s Seal of Identity

2011-06-29T07:53:00.000-05:00

Culture, Socialism

North Winnipeg’s Seal of Identity

Leo Panitch | January 7th 2009 | 1

A Glowing Dream: A Memoir

by Roland Penner

J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing, 2007
“The place of childhood provides the seal of identity.” This epigram opens the first chapter of Roland Penner’s memoir, Growing Up ‘Red’ in Winnipeg’s North End. It holds true even for those of us who grew up only “pink” — i.e. whose parents were CCFers rather than Communists, and who as a result never set foot in the Ukrainian Labour Temple at Pritchard and McGregor. Just how much Winnipeg’s working-class political culture sealed our identities was brought home to me last year when I sent my brother an article that touched on the strike at the Hurtig Fur Company in the early 1930s — during the course of which my father, while on the picket line, had his head split open by a scab. My brother, who was born in 1934, responded: “You know, when I was a little boy I used to get confused about whether the really bad guy’s name was Hurtig or Hitler.”

To be sure, the industrial side of Winnipeg’s history of class conflict makes very little appearance in this memoir — apart from a few sentences that recall Roland standing as a teenager “on the bald prairie with the temperature at about wind chill -50°F, handing out union leaflets” as part of an organizing drive at a plant on the outskirts of Transcona. This is hardly surprising, since the Penner family was preeminent for its involvement on the political side of the labour movement — so much so that on one memorable May Day, after some five thousand paraded along Portage Avenue and Main Street to end up at Market Square in front of the old City Hall, the three speakers who addressed them were Penner’s politically passionate and fiery mother, Rose; his eleven-year-old “child orator” brother, Norman; and, of course, his venerable father, Jacob, the famous Communist alderman for Ward Three. (Jacob Penner was “almost always dressed in a conservatively cut three-piece wool suit, a shirt with a stiff celluloid collar, a firmly knotted woolen tie, a carefully blocked and immaculately clean fedora, and sometimes, over his shoes, spats.”)

The story told here of the Penner family is a fascinating one, from its origins among downwardly mobile Mennonite ancestors who once owned an estate on the west bank of the Dniepr River to Jacob’s “form of marriage without clergy” to a Jewish orphan from Odessa, Rose Shapak. One of the most revealing aspects of north Winnipeg’s ethnic culture is uncovered here, as Jacob the Red, before his election as alderman in 1934 at the age of 54, moves from job to job for some two decades, including as a candy salesman with the help of Rose’s connection to the well-off Galpern family. Just as class conflict tore the Jewish community apart in a strike like the one at Hurtig’s, so did family ties often transcend the sharpest of differences in the class politics of Winnipeg’s North End.

The family anecdotes in this book are so profuse that many of the best are found in the footnotes. One of Rose’s nephews goes to the U.S.S.R. in 1933 and gets swept away five years later in Stalin’s murder machine. One of Jake’s brothers-in-law returns home after a visit to Germany in 1936, and becomes a supporter of the Winnipeg Nazi Party. Shortly after Jake is sent off to an internment camp as a Communist in 1940, sixteen-year-old Roland and his twin sister Ruthie are home alone listening to “Saturday Afternoon at the Met” (while Rose is in Ottawa heading up a delegation of wives petitioning for improvements in the camp’s conditions), and the RCMP come barging in waving a search warrant. As one Mountie moves to turn off the radio, Ruthie screams at him: “In this house no one turns off the opera!”

Indeed, so plentiful are Penner’s family anecdotes that one terrific example, which he told when Norman was honoured at a banquet at the University of Manitoba some two decades ago, is left out of this book. As I recall it (and have often retold it), when Norman marched into the principal’s office of his grade school to complain that the phys-ed instructor was picking on him because he was a Communist, the principal sternly and accusingly said (so everyone in the outer office could hear): “You’re a Communist?!” And then, after closing the door, he whispered, “So am I.”

Penner’s admiration for his parents’ Communist politics is palpable, and he explicitly contrasts this with the way other “red diaper babies” like Jim Laxer and Stan Gray have written disparagingly of their parents’ politics. Quoting Laxer to the effect that truth was “a very slippery commodity” in his home, Roland proudly writes: “That was not our experience…. We asked many questions and Dad and our mother told us what they sincerely believed to be true.” His father remains his “primary inspiration” — a man who “fought for the rights of others at great cost to himself” — and this is why his parents commitment to the “Glowing Dream” forms the title of his memoir. Yet, one might have wished that Roland had offered a more sober reflection on his father’s generation of Canadian Communists, not only with regard to what they knew or didn’t know about Stalin’s crimes in the U.S.S.R. or to the limitations of “democratic centralist” life inside the party, but also to the reformist strategy it pursued in the public arena.

Thus, we learn that Jacob Penner left the Socialist Party of Canada in 1911 because he felt it was too oriented toward raising class consciousness through Marxist education alone. He devoted himself to a life of “unceasing struggle for [the] daily needs and pressing problems” of working people in the belief that this practical activity would raise their consciousness as “the essential feature in the development of a socialist revolution.” Yet, when he died in 1965, aged 85 (having only retired as alderman three years earlier), the Winnipeg Free Press made a point of saying that he was a “political curiosity” who drew much of his support from people “who cared nothing for politics but who admired his efficiency and ability and who believed that he worked for the underdog.” Penner quotes this approvingly, without raising the question of how far this achievement nevertheless stood from the development of the class consciousness needed for supporting socialist revolution, which had been Jake’s original purpose. Would more attention to creative Marxist education have produced a better result? This memoir doesn’t go there, perhaps because Roland, from the time of his own engagement in student politics at the University of Manitoba in the late 1940s, adopted a stance “quite in keeping with my father’s approach to political activity on an issue-by-issue basis.” This approach did not mean that he often lost his bearings on the Left of the political spectrum — far from it. But as the main part of the memoir turns to cover Roland’s own adult political life, this “issue-by-issue” approach is visible all along the way: from his slow drift away from the CP (rather than exiting in flames as his brother did in 1957); to his joining Joe Zuken’s law firm; to his foundational role in the establishment of legal aid in Manitoba; to his almost happenstance decision to join the NDP; to what he calls his “life in government” as attorney general of Manitoba.

The limits of this approach came to a head with his role in the Meech Lake Accord, which he still sees as “a reasonable compromise” on the grounds that, while he agrees with those critics who said that “the separatists would always ask for more,” if the Accord had passed it would have ensured that “their call to break up the country [would have] fallen on less fertile ground.” This is pretty conventional stuff. He reserves his real ire, moreover, for the left critics of the Accord, especially those “many women … influenced by flamboyant statements … by Judy Rebick and the National Action Committee,” who saw the deal as concocted by “men in suits” with the aim of using Quebec’s recognition as a distinct society to override the Charter’s equality provisions (“This is, in my view, nonsense.”) and undermine federal social programs (the likelihood of which he sees as “essentially nil”).

Penner’s decision to side with the pragmatic men in suits against the socialist feminists during the Meech Lake controversy in 1987 was presaged by the controversy over the stand he took in 1983 over the newly opened Morgentaler abortion clinic in Winnipeg. In justifying why as attorney general he could not “authorize a blanket stay of proceedings” with respect to criminal charges against Morgentaler, Penner clearly sees himself as properly following the advice Justice Samuel Freedman gave him when he invited Penner to lunch after his appointment: the Attorney General “must not be political.” But if Penner now admits that his Morgentaler moment “still comes back to haunt me from time to time,” this may be because he knows very well (as he puts it in the memoir in relation to his discussion of the task force on legal aid in the 1970s) that “the legal system itself is so much the product of the establishment it serves that it cannot be turned into the front line for law reform and even more obviously for social transformation.” It most certainly can’t if attorneys general act as if their roles are non-political.

It is impossible to do full justice to Penner’s memoir without going even further over the word limit CD’s editors have allotted me. Suffice to say that this review touches upon only a few aspects of the rich and varied life recounted in this book. I especially enjoyed making the connection between Penner’s many entrepreneurial activities during his Communist boyhood in the 1930s with his “life as an impressario,” when he ran the Co-op Bookstore in the late 1950s and was responsible for bringing Pete Seeger and Odetta, among many others, to sing before Winnipeg audiences.

For me, at least, this enjoyable read was enhanced by being able to catch Penner out on such errors as telling us that Lenin “famously said that communism equals socialism plus electric power” (he actually said “soviets and electric power”). Or the misnumbering of the Chapter Two endnotes, so that the citation for the homage Penner pays to the great Fritz Hansen, the American running back who led the Blue Bombers to their first Grey Cup in 1935, amusingly offers sources to the On to Ottawa Trek of that year. The only unfortunate result of this misnumbering is that we never learn who actually coined that wise phrase: “The place of childhood provides the seal of identity.”

Tags: culture, labour, marxism, panitch, reviews, roland penner, winnipeg. Share or Email

This article appeared in the January/February 2009 issue of Canadian Dimension magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW to get a refreshing and provocative alternative delivered to your door 6 times a year for up to 50% off the newsstand price.

1 comments

Leo Panitch’s review of “A Glowing Dream: A Memoir” itself is food for thought, dialogue, discussion and debate as much as is Roland Penner’s excellent book, which I would strongly recommend to every worker to read and study.

Panitch finds problems with Jacob Penner’s approach towards politics and assumes that Marxist education was not simultaneously taking place with the excellent work Jacob Penner did in serving working people on the Winnipeg City Council.

Having personally known many of those in Jacob Penner’s Communist Party circle, I know that this contention simply is not accurate.

And I believe that where Panitch is inaccurate here is the very crux of what is missing in working class struggles in Canada and the United States today, which is holding back the struggle of the working class for real power: social, political and economic; the struggle for socialism—the only alternative to this failed capitalist system.

What Panitch fails to understand is the way the Communist Party works in a collective way… while Panitch’s contention that Jacob Penner paid too little attention to Marxist education of the working class—a very dubious contention at best seeing as how Jacob Penner was the longest serving Communist elected public official in Canada, and perhaps the world—it is hard to believe that Panitch’s assessment is accurate that there was a lack of socialist/Marxist education taking place. How a Communist repeatedly gets elected and re-elected when there is a powerful corrupt web of capitalism spun all around him creating such a hostile environment would then have to be explained… an explanation Leo Panitch never broaches… not everything he hasn’t broached can be explained away as not being provided more space by Canadian Dimension since Panitch has had ample opportunity to do this elsewhere; and he has not.

Panitch forgets, or intentionally omits, the role of the Communist Party Club. Jacob Penner always “had his back covered” by a very powerful Communist movement consisting of very important Communist Party clubs in Manitoba which were more than a little responsible for his repeated re-election campaigns because of the “collective” way these Communist Party clubs operate as the “think-tanks” and “action centers” of the working class and people’s movements constantly stressing that all the various movements for democracy, peace, social and economic justice and for socialism need to work together in unity.

I have noticed that failure to understand the all-important role of Communist parties by Panitch in many of his other writings, too; which boils down to not understanding the very important and significant role these Communist Party Clubs play in winning the day to day struggles working people are constantly embroiled in as a matter to survive the obstacles and problems created by a capitalist social, economic and political system.

Like in this current book review, Panitch even writes about the Communist Manifest but fails to understand that Marx and Engels in writing this brief pamphlet did so with the intent of encouraging workers to build Communist Parties to advance their demands for reforms AND winning social, economic and political power.

There is all kinds of ample evidence that Jacob Penner and his comrades and friends understood very well “What needs to be done?” And they did what needed to be done—on all fronts, from education to activism.

The real questions Leo Panitch might want to ponder is why Jacob Penner and the Communist Party in Winnipeg did so well while in most other places in North America the working class movement did not fare as well?

A big part of the answer to this question lies in attacks on the Communist Party by the government (which Jacob Penner and the Winnipeg Communists and their friends and allies so successfully fought back) and the attacks on the Communist Party from the right and ultra-left in the working class movement (again, attacks which Jacob Penner and the Winnipeg communists struggled against so successfully).

And Joe Zuken’s campaigns successfully built on all of this.

How and why this powerful Communist movement in Winnipeg lost momentum and suffered losses should be the topic of a forum with the proceedings published in another book… it would be very interesting to see if Leo Panitch’s ideas as to his “critique” (or not so thinly veiled attack on the role and objectives of Communist Parties) hold any water when placed side-by-side with the Communist perspective in all of this.

I really think we need to be asking what has held back the working class movements from achieving what Jacob Penner and his comrades and friends achieved not finding excuses to write them off because in these troubled times, there is not only a Canadian dimension to what these working class Communist Party activists achieved, there is something for all working class activists from throughout North America and the rest of the world to learn from… I find it rather ironic that many people who adhere and cling to Leo Panitch’s perspective regarding the Soviet Union and other socialist countries who found their own way to power and to hold on to that power which they so despise, now like to take cheap pot shots at the very man and the Communist Party he was a member of which climbed towards working class power so successfully in the electoral arena.

Which, also, begs the question: If Canada and the U.S.A. were the bastions of democracy capitalist politicians claim them to be; why then has the policy towards allowing Communists to freely participate in the political lives of these two countries been so restricted—and, I think I am being very charitable in using the term “restricted” when political suppression and repression are more appropriate.

If Leo Panitch would like to participate in an organized dialogue on this question concerning the legacy of the role of the Communist Party clubs I would be happy to participate, too.

Jacob Penner and Winnipeg Communists are not the only example of the success of Communist Party Clubs and how they combined electoral work with other facets of class struggle work—merely the best; an example which many working class activists today have a right to know about… just as working class activists today have a right to know about how Communists like Lyle Dotzert led the struggle to organize Ford in Windsor and his comrades like Phil Raymond, Nadia Barkan, Bob Travis, Bud Simons and Wyndham Mortimer across the river—south of the border—led the struggles to organize the Big Three and then elected the legendary working class activist and leader Coleman Young to public office… in order to know and understand this aspect of the working class struggle and history might make the difference as to whether the working class wins or loses the looming class conflict ahead.

The working class made numerous advances with Communist Parties in the lead… an historic fact that no amount of twisting and misinformation can erase—obscure, yes—but not erase because history as what it is.

Communists have made plenty of mistakes just like anyone else; but, the so-called errors attributed to us here simply are not correct.

There is this “movement” on the part of a section of the North American left which seeks to want to put everything from 20th Century Communism and socialism behind us as if it was all misguided and bad when nothing could be further from the truth.

Roland Penner’s excellent book provides us with aspects of working class history some people would rather just forget… just like they would like to forget Jacob Penner, Lyle Dotzert, Phil Raymond, Nadia Barkan (in Nadia’s case, the “historians” even give her the wrong name!)... but, forgetting primary aspects of history is not the same as these struggles and their leaders—with the Communist Parties at the forefront—being forgotten… or intentionally maligned as Leo Panitch does, and continues doing.

Recently Howard Zinn engaged in similar distortion on Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” when he stated:

“No, I was really gratified when Obama called for “Let’s tax the rich more, and let’s tax the poor and middle class less.” And they said, “That’s socialism.” And I thought, “Whoa! I’m happy to hear that. Finally, socialism is getting a good name.” You know, socialism has been given bad names, you know, Stalin and all those socialists, so-called socialists. They weren’t really socialist, but, you know, they called themselves socialist. But they weren’t really, you see. And so, socialism got a bad name. It used to have a really good name. Here in the United States, the beginning of the twentieth century, before there was a Soviet Union to spoil it, you see, socialism had a good name. Millions of people in the United States read socialist newspapers. They elected socialist members of Congress and socialist members of state legislatures. You know, there were like fourteen socialist chapters in Oklahoma. Really. I mean, you know, socialism—who stood for socialism? Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, Upton Sinclair. Yeah, socialism had a good name. It needs to be restored.”

Well Zinn—the great historian—apparently never heard of Jacob Penner, Willian Z. Foster, Paul Robeson Lyle Dotzert, Wyndham Mortimer, Phil Raymond or Nadia Barkan.

And Sam Webb, the revisionist “leader” of the CPUSA goes even further than Panitch or Zinn in saying he wants nothing at all to do with 20th Century socialism.

I find it very strange that all these attacks of a similar nature come at a time when the working class needs stronger Communist Parties than ever before… and slanting history to suit one’s own biased perspectives will not aid in building a winning working class fight-back as this rotten capitalist system collapses by the day from the time the bell rings on Wall Street until another plant is shut down, both throwing workers out into the streets as if they are merely disposable items like baby diapers.

Alan L. Maki
Secretary/Treasurer
Minnesota/Dakotas District, CPUSA
#1. Posted by Alan L. Maki on January 13th 2009 at 10:30pm

Workers of the World, Please See Our Web Site

2011-05-23T08:54:00.000-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/nyregion/leftist-parties-in-new-york-have-new-appeal.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&pagewanted=all

Workers of the World, Please See Our Web Site

From: New York Times

By JOSEPH BERGER
Published: May 22, 2011

You can still be a card-carrying Communist in New York, but these days committed Communists usually register online.

Yana Paskova for The New York Times
Jared Abbott, left, Andrew Porter and Frank Llewellyn, all Democratic Socialists, after a rally on living wages.

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Billy Wharton, a co-chairman of the Socialist Party, in his office on Lafayette Street.

Librado Romero/The New York Times Sam Webb, left, the national chairman of the Communist Party, and Libero Della Piana, communications director.

“We actually have a card, but we don’t make a big deal of it,” said Sam Webb, the national chairman of the Communist Party U.S.A.

The Socialist Party U.S.A. does distribute red cards to members willing to “subscribe to the principles” of the party, but another leftist group, the Democratic Socialists of America, prefers online registration, with members using a virtual shopping cart to pay yearly dues of about $60 by credit card — Marx be damned.

In some ways, the Left remains locked in place. Its three major national parties are still confined to cramped Manhattan offices that are plastered with gaudy posters and honeycombed with pamphlets for distribution and envelopes for stuffing.

But in other ways the landscape has changed significantly. All three parties are finding the Internet to be a fruitful recruiting tool and believe their message has been given a fresh, beguiling appeal by the failures of capitalist symbols like Lehman Brothers and by debacles like the billions of dollars in securities tied to subprime mortgages.

“The economic crisis of 2008 gave us new life,” said Billy Wharton, a co-chairman of the Socialist Party, who grew enamored of socialism while battling tuition increases as a student at the College of Staten Island. “We have ideas for resolving the economic crisis, and people began to listen to them.”

Rather than trumpeting membership numbers, the parties, embracing the norms of the digital era, prefer to discuss the number of hits on their Web sites and Facebook pages. And philosophically, they take a kind of I-told-you-so schadenfreude in statistics that indicate a growing gap between the rich and the poor, with top chief executives now making 275 times as much as the average proletarian.

Still, it is hard to imagine that the parties have inherited a revolutionary tradition once so popular that in the 1932 presidential election, Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate, garnered 884,000 votes and William Z. Foster, the Communist candidate, had over 100,000. But then again, after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse of socialist republics in Eastern Europe, some people may be surprised to learn that these parties are still around.

All three have greatly shrunk from their heydays. The Socialist Party has about 1,000 members nationally. The Communists claim 2,000. The Democratic Socialists, which for many years included luminaries like Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, have about 6,000.

“It’s not easy to make political progress outside the two-party structure because people don’t want to waste their votes,” said Frank Llewellyn, 62, the national director of the Democratic Socialists, who became a socialist as a result of the civil rights and antiwar movements.

Rather than battling for power through elections, all three parties try to sway the national conversation through coalitions with labor unions and other mainstream organizations. Both socialist groups turned out at City Hall this month to protest budget cuts, at a rally that was largely organized by the unions.

But on matters of principle, the leftist parties diverge. All three oppose President Obama’s health care program, seeing it as a giveaway to insurance companies and preferring either a single-payer government plan or a socialized system like that of Britain, where doctors work for the government.

The Socialists sometimes do have candidates who run in states where the rules for getting on the ballot are not too onerous; Greg Pason, the national secretary, ran for governor of New Jersey in 2009. But the Democratic Socialists see that effort as futile and prefer endorsements; they supported David N. Dinkins and Ruth W. Messinger in their mayoral bids in New York City.

The parties’ enduring character is obvious in visits to their offices. The Socialist Party is housed in a tumbledown building on Lafayette Street known informally as the “Peace Pentagon” or the A. J. Muste building, not because the name approximates its mildewed atmosphere but because Mr. Muste was a benefactor of the peace groups that the building houses. The Democratic Socialists even have a foothold on Wall Street, with cluttered offices in a building on Maiden Lane. It is not because Wall Street has suddenly adopted a philosophy of “to each according to his own needs.”

“It’s cheap,” Mr. Llewellyn explained. “This is an area of the city where you get the best deals.”

The Communists even own the means of production — they lease out their eight-story building on West 23rd Street to other left-wing organizations. The party has the most decorous space, having redesigned its office with glass walls and tall windows.

“We’re not up to some nefarious business we have to hide from the American government,” said Libero Della Piana, 38, the party’s communications director.

Physical space matters less these days than virtual space. All three groups have lively Web sites that flaunt their philosophies and histories. Mr. Della Piana, the child of an Italian anarchist, boasts that the Communists’ news site has 25,000 unique visitors a week; before it stopped publishing in the late 1960s, its newspaper, The Daily Worker, was read by just 5,000 subscribers. In 2010, he said, 700 prospective members applied through the Web site.

Recent disclosures of capitalist excesses have given the parties a second wind after the collapse of the Soviet Union suggested the bankruptcy of collectivist philosophy. Mr. Llewellyn said that since 2007 his party’s membership had increased by 50 percent, to 6,000.

“People see the consequences of unregulated markets, greed, a lack of checks on the power of the private flow of capital to drive the economy and undermine jobs,” Mr. Llewellyn said.

Mr. Webb, who joined the Communists in the 1970s, likes to emphasize the party’s rich history, including the fight against McCarthyism and the volunteers who helped the Spanish Republicans battle the Fascists, rather than more unpleasant episodes like the case of the American Communist Julius Rosenberg, who spied for the Soviet Union.

Mr. Della Piana says the Soviet Union’s dissolution freed the party to be more ideological because “no one could ever say again we were puppets.”

“We have a whole generation of young people attracted to the idea of communism without the baggage of the cold war,” he said.

After declining to 250 members in 1980, the Socialist Party’s membership has quadrupled, Mr. Wharton said. He was even asked to appear on a Fox affiliate when conservatives raised suspicions that Mr. Obama was a socialist.

“They thought I’d go on and on and actually support the policies of President Obama,” said Mr. Wharton, 42, a General Educational Development, or G.E.D., teacher in Brooklyn. “The question was ‘Is he a socialist?’ and my answer was ‘I’m not sure he’s even a liberal.’ I called him a hedge-fund Democrat.”

None of the parties view their existence as futile — immersing themselves in everyday local battles, they believe, will spread their influence.

“Socialism won’t come to this country until tens of millions decide capitalism doesn’t work for them,” Mr. Webb said. “If you’re a revolutionary, if you’re a socialist, you have to have patience.”

A version of this article appeared in print on May 23, 2011, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Workers of the World, Please See Our Web Site.

Letter published in Labor World

2011-01-31T21:14:00.000-06:00

“Letter to the Editor” submitted for publication in Labor World

Dear Labor World Editor, Larry Sillanpa;
I am submitting this “Letter to the Editor” for publication in Labor World; I hope you will consider its publication along with the title I have given it; I am also attaching a photo you might want to include.
Alan L. Maki

How is the WAR ECONOMY working for YOU?

With Labor Day just around the corner, I would like to share a left-wing working class perspective with readers of Labor World in the interest of dialog, discussion and debate.

I attended the Stewart Acuff “book signing” at the Duluth Labor Temple. This letter is largely based on the notes I made listening to Brother Acuff’s presentation, listening to questions and his responses and reading his excellent book: Getting America Back to Work which set me to thinking that it will only be through solving the problems working people are experiencing that most new jobs will be created.

The United States is the wealthiest country in the world.

This wealth created by working people is being squandered on fighting two wars, financing the Israeli killing machine and funding over 800 U.S. military bases on foreign soil protecting Wall Street's greedy interests--- instead, what we need is a public health care system of 800 primary care facilities serving as bases of support for over 30,000 neighborhood public health care centers spread out across the United States providing free health care for all Americans which would create around ten-million new, good-paying jobs with affirmative action enforced.

We wouldn't trust a private-for-profit free enterprise system to teach our children to read and write so why would we continue to rely on this failed private-for-profit health care system? Public education provides quality education for our children and a public health care system will provide us with a world-class health care system.

As for anyone concerned about the high cost of health care; VA, the Indian Health Service and the National Public Health Service have all proven we get the best health care at the best price through public health care.

Elected public officials should be able to comprehend the benefits from peace and a public health care system. Look at unemployment; our country and our state need jobs, not war.

By ending these dirty wars and implementing Mark Dayton’s call to “Tax the Rich” we can get America back to work.

In order to turn this country around, we are going to have to rebuild the historic coalition of liberals, progressives and the left; the only coalition which has ever won real progress for working people. To accomplish this we need to consider Brother Acuff’s suggestion (Getting America Back to Work- Page 83) that each and every worker needs to become “a warrior for peace and social justice.”

How is the WAR ECONOMY working for YOU? Does it make you sick?

Let’s talk about the politics and economics of livelihood for real change on this Labor Day.

Alan L. Maki
58891 County Road 13
Warroad, Minnesota 56763
Phone: 218-386-2432
Cell Phone: 651-587-5541
E-mail: amaki000@centurytel.net

This is from an interesting interview Playboy magazine did with Saul Alinsky...

2010-12-17T23:06:00.000-06:00

Alinsky had his own take on things a lot of people wouldn't agree with; others do. He obviously had a big influence in the left movement.

http://www.progress.org/2003/alinsky2.htm

[It's a long ten part interview but really very interesting.]

PLAYBOY: What was your own relationship with the Communist Party?

ALINSKY: I knew plenty of Communists in those days, and I worked with them on a number of projects. Back in the Thirties, the Communists did a hell of a lot of good work; they were in the vanguard of the labor movement and they played an important role in aiding blacks and Okies and Southern sharecroppers. Anybody who tells you he was active in progressive causes in those days and never worked with the Reds is a goddamn liar. Their platform stood for all the right things, and unlike many liberals, they were willing to put their bodies on the line. Without the Communists, for example, I doubt the C.I.O. could have won all the battles it did. I was also sympathetic to Russia in those days, not because I admired Stalin or the Soviet system but because it seemed to be the only country willing to stand up to Hitler. I was in charge of a big part of fund raising for the International Brigade and in that capacity I worked in close alliance with the Communist Party.

When the Nazi-Soviet Pact came, though, and I refused to toe the party line and urged support for England and for American intervention in the war, the party turned on me tooth and nail. Chicago Reds plastered the Back of the Yards with big posters featuring a caricature of me with a snarling, slavering fanged mouth and wild eyes, labeled, "This is the face of a warmonger." But there were too many Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians and Latvians in the area for that tactic to go over very well. Actually, the greatest weakness of the party was its slavish parroting of the Moscow line. It could have been much more effective if it had adopted a relatively independent stance, like the western European parties do today. But all in all, and despite my own fights with them, I think the Communists of the Thirties deserve a lot of credit for the struggles they led or participated in. Today the party is just a shadow of the past, but in the Depiession it was a positive force for social change. A lot of its leaders and organizers were jerks, of course, but objectively the party in those days was on the right side and did considerable good.

Good article for discussion: Cuba bows to pressure to reform its economy

2010-12-16T23:04:00.000-06:00

Cuba bows to pressure to reform its economy

By Marc Frank in Havana

Financial Times
December 13 2010

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e6fc6374-06d9-11e0-8c29-00144feabdc0.html#axzz187qw6wgg

Rising debt charges are forcing Cuba to reshape its Soviet-
style economy, with leading creditor China among those
cheering on the changes.

A Cuban Communist party congress, scheduled for April, will
discuss and likely ratify policies that are already starting
to be implemented. These include cutting 20 per cent of state
workers, cutting social benefits, eliminating state
subsidies, improving Cuba's trade balance and liberalising
rules for small business and foreign investment.

ChartCuba, which is the subject of a strict US embargo and is
excluded from most international lending organisations,
depends on China as a creditor of last resort. Its proposed
reforms are remarkably similar to those typically required
under International Monetary Fund bail-outs - although
privatisation of state assets is not on the agenda.

In a recent closed-door meeting of 500 senior officials
chaired by Raúl Castro, president, Cuba's economy minister,
Marino Murillo, reportedly stated that mounting debt and the
need for fresh credit had left the government no choice but
to put its economic house in order.

A video of the November meeting, called to discuss plans for
next year's congress, is making the rounds of Havana's elite.
Cuba faces rising principal and service charges over the next
five years and simply does not have the money to meet them,
Mr Murillo, reportedly said on the video.

Cuba last reported its foreign debt at $17.8bn in 2007. Most
analysts agree it now exceeds $21bn, or close to 50 per cent
of gross domestic product and 30 per cent more than annual
foreign exchange revenues. Many creditors have tired of
Cuba's debt reschedulings. China is a relatively new member
of Cuba's creditor club, having provided billions in loans
over recent years. But it is now Havana's biggest creditor
and second largest trading partner, after Venezuela.

According to a number of people familiar with the video, Mr
Murillo specifically talks about the need to repay China on
time. Plans to develop oil refineries, ports, railways, the
nickel industry and power generation will require billions in
fresh credit.

Mr Castro's point man for economic reform reportedly argues
in the video that state-run companies should be freed from
government administration and defends plans to shift hundreds
of thousands of workers to 'non-state' jobs such as small
businesses, farms and co-operatives.

'Mixed-capital companies, co-operatives, farmers with the
right to use idle land, rented property landlords, self-
employed workers and other forms that contribute to raise the
efficiency of social labour must be recognised and
encouraged,' adds a 32-page discussion document prepared for
the congress, which will set out Cuba's social and economic
policies through 2015.

Cuba is counting on China and Venezuela to provide fresh
development credit. Some of its debts to Beijing will be
backed by Venezuelan oil as collateral. A diplomatic cable,
released by WikiLeaks last week, describes a US diplomat's
breakfast meeting with the commercial attachés from Cuba's
biggest trade partners. 'Even China admitted to having
problems with getting paid on time,' the cable reported.
'[Officials from] France and Canada responded with ‘welcome
to the club'.'

According to Asian diplomats in Havana, Chinese and even
Vietnamese officials have repeatedly 'suggested' Cuba
modernise and offered their assistance. Discussion documents
for next year's congress, the Murillo video and government
statements all indicate that Havana may finally be heeding
their advice.

Fidel Castro, former president, recently praised China's
'rectifications' and told university students: 'China is
worth studying.'

'Cuba is prepared to take advantage of China's experience in
developing reform and opening up,' Ricardo Alarcón, a long-
time politburo member, added while visiting China last month.
Such words will surely be welcomed in Beijing as it ponders
further loosening its purse strings.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010

Elect Frank Komarniski... Vote Communist! On Monday, November 29, 2010

2010-11-20T15:48:00.000-06:00

Campaign message no. 2
Communist Party campaign in Winnipeg North

Dear Friends, Sisters and Brothers,

We need help to deliver the campaign leaflet to thousands of doors in Winnipeg North! If you can spare a few hours in the next week, give us a call at 586-7824 or reply by email.
The leaflet is attached to this email (pdf format); the text is below.

We are proud to nominate Frank and are campaigning to elect a worker to Parliament.

Darrell Rankin
Manitoba office, Communist Party of Canada

* * * * *

Put People
before profit!
On Monday, November 29,Elect Frank Komarniski
Vote Communist!
Main issues in Winnipeg North: Friendly to families. Unfriendly to crime.
1. Create good-paying jobsEnd the waste and fear of unemployment. We need jobs for everyone able to work, creating more resources for new universal social programs. How: A 32-hour work week with no loss in pay, lower the pension age to 60, more paid vacations, massive public works spending on housing and child-care centres and to curb carbon emissions.

2. Guarantee fair access to educationEducation should be free and accessible. Increase federal funding for universities and colleges and build highly-subsidized housing for out-of-town students. Ban federal equalization payments to Manitoba or any other province if they increase tuition fees. End the Harper governments racist under-funding of post-secondary education for Aboriginal students.

3. End the war in AfghanistanGet Canada out of this unjust war launched without the legal authority of the United Nations. The people of Afghanistan must decide their own future, like all nations. Support the troops by bringing them home. Tax the excess profits of the arms industry.

Frank KomarniskiFrank was born in Ste. Rose du Lac, Manitoba and grew up in Thompson. He moved to Winnipeg in 1982 and has worked 17 years for the City of Winnipeg as an outside worker. He is a member of CUPE 500. A father of four children, Frank joined the Communist Party in 2006.
The Communist Party is proud to nominate Frank.
Lets put a worker in Parliament!

Today...l Call us to help our campaign!l Ask us about joining!l Send us a cheque to build the Communist Party! Or smaller monthly cheques. We need funds!
l Ask us for the CPs full platform.
A Peoples Alternative for Canada includes justice for Aboriginal peoples, job creation, equality for women, taxing the wealthy and corporations, access to education, fighting racism, expanding social programs, saving the environment, opposing free trade, a foreign policy of peace, defending the family farm, and fair elections, among others.

Reach us at 586-7824 or cpc-mb@mts.net
387 Selkirk Ave., Winnipeg MB R2W 2M3

From Frank Komarniski,
Communist Party candidate
for Winnipeg North:The Communist Party is campaigning for good-paying jobs and access to education. We are demanding Canada get out of the terrible war in Afghanistan, right now.

I think Manitoba can stop being a low-wage, racist backwater. The North End of Winnipeg can stop being a backwater of this backwater. The Communist Party has real solutions for the real problems, not the same old policies that got us here in the first place.

Communists have always fought for a better society in Canada. But today, much of what we helped win is in danger because of the growing economic crisis, government cuts, privatization of health care and water, and the growing harm of climate change.

Young people are denied their future by the loss of nearly 10,000 manufacturing jobs in Manitoba in the last two years.

Young people are denied an education by tuition hikes in Manitoba and by the Harper governments racist under-funding of post-secondary education for Aboriginal students.

I dont want young people to inherit a planet destroyed by climate change. Backed by the Harper government, the giant energy corporations are recklessly promoting uncontrolled energy consumption for the selfish goal of increasing their bloated profits.

The Communist Party is demanding that the government nationalize the energy companies, that they become public property. We are demanding caps on carbon emissions.

The other major parties have no solution. The Manitoba government supports a system that failed in Europe (cap and trade). It will be a failure like the Kyoto treaty.

Canada is a wealthy country. Yet millions of nearly-retired Canadians owe the banks billions of dollars; their homes are almost entirely mortgaged. People who have worked all their life will retire to food banks and total poverty. The Communist Party will nationalize the banks and cancel the debts because housing is a right. We will increase public pensions above the poverty line.

Turning to the war in Afghanistan, which imposes death and destruction on the people of that country. We have no business being there. How is it that we are building schools, roads and water systems there, when we dont have the same for Aboriginal peoples in Canada? George Bush should be tried as a war criminal, and so should the Canadian politicians that put our troops in Afghanistan.

Liberal and Conservative governments have used the war against terror to trample on civil rights in Canada. Last summer more than 1,000 mainly young people were arrested for peacefully demonstrating at the G8 summit in Toronto. This must stop.

The people of Afghanistan have every right to resist the occupation of their country, just as the Aboriginal peoples of Canada have every right to fight politically and however they can for full national self-determination, a right all nations have in international law.

The Communists have a dream, where all nations in Canada are equal and develop in a voluntary partnership. Canada must stop being a prison house of nations where only the corporate elite in Canadas English speaking nation have control

The low wages caused by racism and national inequality create a super-profit gravy train for these elite, a huge problem in Manitoba.

We live in a society where people live in constant fear of losing their job, where families are on the edge of losing their homes, where children are afraid every month when there is no food, where young people cant start a family, and where all these fears are doubled for Aboriginal people, people of colour and women and youth and people with disabilities.

There is too much fear in the North End of Winnipeg. The Communist Party has a plan to end these fears, and for everyone to have a good-paying job and an education.

No single political party can change society. No party can claim credit for establishing medicare or unemployment insurance. Accomplishments like medicare were made by thousands and millions of working people, in trade unions and in their faith organizations, in student groups and womens organizations.

We need to build up those historic struggles once again, to turn society around.

We can create good-paying jobs, we can create a society that takes care of children and educates our youth. We can end poverty and social inequality. We can get Canada out of Afghanistan and we can solve the problem of inequality among the nations in Canada.

Read the Communist Partys policies and see why they are the only realisitic solution to the injustice of our present society. They are the most advanced ideas in this election, but we need them today. Their time has come.

A vote for the Communist Party is a vote for real change. It is a vote for the future, a vote against war, a vote to put people before profit, a vote for jobs and education. It is a vote to end fear and to create a far better society.

People First!

2010-06-23T14:40:00.000-05:00

http://www.ofl.ca/index.php/news/index_in/people_first_we_deserve_better/

--- En date de : Mer, 23.6.10, Communist Party of Canada a écrit :

De : Communist Party of Canada
Objet : CP of Canada Statement on the G8/G20 Summits
À : "Recipient List"
Date: mercredi 23 juin 2010 12 h 06
Re: G8/G20 Summits to be Held in Toronto

Dear comrades and Friends,

As you are well aware, the G8/G20 Meetings are being held in Toronto this week. We are enclosing the statement issued by the Central Executive of our Party with respect to these imperialist-dominated ‘Summits”. For those of you who plan to be in the Toronto area during the G20, we also enclose a mail-out regarding the June 26th People First!” march and rally.

Comradely yours,

Central Office,
Communist Party of Canada

___________________________________

G8/G20: Fight for a Real Alternative
to the new Capitalist “Consensus”

On the eve of the G8/G20 meetings, mass labour and democratic mobilizations are building in Southern Ontario and across Canada to protest this wasteful, security obsessed extravaganza. The Communist Party of Canada salutes this resistance and takes its rightful place alongside workers, students, women, Aboriginal peoples and social activists in denouncing these summits which aim to hammer out a strategic line among the ruling imperialist states and international finance capital on how best to advance their shared interests, and then present their agenda as a fait accompli to the world’s peoples.

This set of G summits is particularly important because global capitalism continues to be mired in a profound economic and structural crisis, notwithstanding the soothing media reports that the ‘worst is behind us’ and that recovery is well under way. Saving capitalism and restoring profit margins are the main concerns of these ‘leaders’, rather than solving the burning problems afflicting the world today. That is why issues like climate change, the world food crisis, ending wars of occupation and rampaging military spending, and the worsening problem of “under development”, especially in Africa, have all be swept off the agenda of the G8/G20 meetings.

Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney admitted as much this June when he declared that the Summits must focus attention on the continuing crisis, especially in Europe , which has had a serious “impact on financial conditions ... [and] it’s not over.” He then parroted the World Bank which earlier raised the possibility of a “second recession affecting most of the industrialized world if governments don’t deal successfully with the unfolding European debt crisis.”

In fact, the leading imperialist countries, including Canada , want to use the Summits to showcase their determination to impose further social and economic austerity on all states and peoples, as the only viable solution to overcome the crisis. But this is a false ‘international consensus” one that serves the interests of finance capital, but which consigns the vast majority of the world’s working class and oppressed peoples to even more hardship and suffering.
In Europe , the Austerity agenda pushed by the European Union brass and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is already having a devastating effect, especially on public sector workers, youth, and pensioners. Minimum wages are being slashed, social programs cut, and the retirement age extended for workers.
But this savage attack is being met by heroic resistance across the European continent, especially in Greece and Portugal where the left, Communist led unions and popular movements are mounting escalating general strikes and other forms of mass resistance to fightback against this anti social onslaught of Big Capital and its governments.

In Canada , we need to replicate the kind of militancy building in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere around the world. The right wing Harper government and their pro corporate provincial counterparts (both Conservative and Liberal) are also moving to deepen the assault on workers’ conditions, social programs, and democratic and equity rights. And they will succeed in pushing through these reactionary ‘reforms’, unless the labour and people’s forces move quickly to mount a militant, coordinated, Canada wide counter attack.

There is such a progressive alternative to this reactionary, pro capitalist ‘solution’, but it must go beyond, palliative demands to soften the impact. It must include sweeping measures which challenge the dominance of monopoly capital, such as the nationalization of the banks, the big energy monopolies, and other key sectors of our economy. These steps need to be combined with social measures like expanding access to healthcare, public and post secondary education, raising the minimum wage to $16/hour, reducing the workweek with no loss in take home pay, and improving public pensions. And with sweeping tax reform which would shift the burden from working people onto the corporations and the wealthy, and with an immediate withdrawal from the disastrous war of occupation in Afghanistan , along with a 50% cut in military spending which would save another $10 billion every year.

As we state in our May Day 2010 statement, “the big monopolies and banks want to make working people pay for the economic recovery through lower wages, higher unemployment, and huge cuts in social spending. We say: those who reap billions in profits must pay! Unite and fight for a fundamentally new direction, placing the needs of working people and our environment before corporate greed, [and for policies] based on peace and disarmament!”

Issued by the Central Executive Committee
Communist Party of Canada
June 2010

_______________________________
Protest the G20
this Saturday!

Dear friends and comrades,

Protests against the pro-corporate agenda of the G8/G20 Summits are already building, despite Harper’s attempt to ‘lock down’ Toronto and ‘lock out’ dissent. Whatever the diversity of these actions, they reflect various aspects of popular anger and the people’s demands for change – for peace, for protection of our environment, for jobs and living standards, for healthcare, education, pensions and social programs, and not least, for equality and democratic rights.

Of all the myriad events making place around Toronto leading up to and during the G20 meetings this coming weekend, the most important will be the “People First!” march and rally to be held on Saturday, June 26 at 1:00 pm, starting at Queen’s Park. This is because Saturday’s “People First!” march & rally will be the one event which brings together all the streams of protest into one united action – workers, environmentalists, Aboriginal peoples, anti-imperialist and anti-racism groups, youth & students, women’s, GLBT and equality activists, and other social movements.

A massive outpouring of opposition to the reactionary agenda of the imperialist world order is the worst nightmare for Harper, Obama, Cameron, Merkel, Sarkozy, Berlusconi and co. That is why the G20 organizers have unleashed a campaign of intimidation and fear-mongering to keep working people away from the streets, especially for the big rally on Saturday.

The best response or antidote to this anti-democratic campaign is for all of us – each one of us individually and collectively – to redouble our efforts to bring as many people as possible out for the big march and rally this Saturday!

The Communist Party of Canada , the Young Communist League, and all of our friends and comrades will be marching together in a contingent during the march and we cordially invite you to join and march with us! We will be assembling at 12:30 p.m. on the south side of Queen’s Park, close to College St where University Ave. turns into an oval road (see photo).

Bring your friends, family, neighbours and co-workers; your flags, placards (although we will have some on hand as well!) and noisemakers. See you there!

A Word About Tactics

As many of you have already heard, some groups have announced their intention to join the “People First!” march, but will attempt to split the march on route, taking some participants directly to the security perimeter, and possible confrontation with the police.

Even if well-intended, this is a wrong and divisive tactic in our opinion. The main political value and impact of the “People First!” action is to demonstrate the ‘all-in unity’ of the labour and people’s movements, notwithstanding whatever differences around specific policies our tactics exist within our ranks. To attempt to divide the people’s forces during this critical action would create confusion and acrimony, would send the wrong message, and would play into the hands of those who stand to benefit from such an overt display of division within the ranks of the labour/people’s resistance to the G20. For this reason, the Communist Party will abide by the route approved by the “People First!” organizers.

All Out for the “People First!” March and Rally!

See you Saturday!!!

The facts of Marxist thought remain

2010-06-12T21:05:00.001-05:00

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/90461

The facts of Marxist thought remain

Monday 17 May 2010

Jean Turner

Two works vital for understanding the development of the human race and the origin of life on Earth were published in the mid-19th century - The Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1848 and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859.

Both works were ground-breaking in that, by empirical methods, they produced a scientific analysis that refuted previous religious and philosophical concepts of the world in which we live.

They linked the dialectics of nature - representing the continual struggle of all species on Earth for survival and development - with historical and dialectical materialism, which sees the human race developing from primitive tribal societies, holding land in common ownership, to class societies in which the struggles of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter, result in new social organisations and formations. These have had a lasting effect on subsequent international events and universal education.

Because of the challenge to orthodox religion and politics which these works represent, they are still under attack from fundamentalists and the ruling capitalist class. But more than 160 years have passed without any serious refutation of the scientific facts which these publications contain.

In our epoch, the rise of a capitalist class owning advanced industrial machinery, manufacturing solely for profit and seeking control of resources, including human resources, throughout the world, has produced a form of slavery, wage slavery, which has displaced the peasantry and the craft guilds responsible for small scale production and led to the creation of a class of industrial workers - men, women and children - driven to the expanding cities by a lack of land and poverty.

Thus a new class, the proletariat, has been formed. To this new class Marx and Engels attribute the historical role of combining its forces to replace the capitalist system with a new form of society; one in which the mass of the people - workers by hand and brain, men and women - develop alternative means of production for use and not for profit, and create new forms of social organisation to suit their needs, including the necessity to preserve the ecology and sustainable balance of the Earth on which they, the majority of the human race, live. Marx and Engels called this communism.

The first attempt in the history of the world to form such a society took place in Russia in 1917, paradoxically a backward, semi-feudal country with only a small proletariat but a large peasantry demanding land.

Lenin understood the implications of the Communist Manifesto and combined with it a study of the new form of capitalism - finance-capital or "imperialism" - which produced nothing, but sought to control the world simply by the export of money.

His party, the Bolsheviks, took advantage of the chaos and misery brought about by the imperialist first world war and led the Russian people to overthrow both feudalism and capitalism in one fell swoop. Their slogan was "Bread, land and peace."

Despite every attempt to undermine the victory of the Bolsheviks, by isolation, starvation and direct intervention by 14 countries in support of the White counter-revolutionary forces, the first socialist state in the world was formed - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Marx and Engels had envisaged that the most advanced proletariat would create this new society, which they called the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the lot fell to a vast country with only a small manufacturing base.

Isolated in a hostile world, Joseph Stalin, who became leader after the death of Lenin, pursued the line that socialism could be built in one country.

This was a new idea in the development of communist ideology. Socialism, which is public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, was always seen as an interim phase before stateless, classless communism.

Pursuing the necessity to rapidly develop industry and agriculture - sometimes with harsh effects on individuals and communities - a powerful state arose which was able to withstand the onslaught of fascism from 1941 in a way that no other country in mainland Europe could.

The Soviet Union was largely responsible for the defeat of nazi Germany in World War II, but suffered terrible losses in terms of people and infrastructure. It rebuilt itself and took on a powerful role in world politics.

The demise in 1991 of this first socialist state - a bulwark against imperialism but driven to compete with it in the real world of armaments and capitalist consumerism - has affected peace and stability throughout the world.

However, the Soviet Union created an example for revolutionary forces everywhere, one which must be studied and understood, criticised and improved upon but respected and admired for its truly great achievements.

At this time, when all the peoples of the former Soviet Union and Europe have been celebrating the 65th anniversary of the defeat of the racist, sexist, genocidal ideology of fascism, we in Britain must examine our own weaknesses.

Lenin once famously wrote that "one step forward, two steps back" happens in the history of nations and in the development of parties. This is the nature of dialectics.

Juggling with arrangements among bourgeois parties as to who will rule the country, all of them solely representing the interests of international finance capital, will not solve the problems of the working class.

As was described in the Communist Manifesto, capitalism, at various times, alienates not only the working class, which consists of the majority of people, but also the petty bourgeoisie - the small business people and small farmers - and at times even sections of the bourgeoisie and state machine. This is the case in Britain now.

The danger lies in where this discontent will be led. It is the duty of Communists and all progressive people to ensure that - through socialist leadership and constant resistance to pressure to solve capitalism's problems by impoverishing and destroying the power of the working class and its organisations - this discontent does not lead to fascism, as it did in pre-war Germany.

Defeating a new generation of fascists is a political priority and the price of this is eternal vigilance.

Finally, we must end imperialism's mad rush to war to control the resources it needs for its continued existence. These wars are not supported by the majority of people and their connection with environmental damage to the fragile ecology of the planet is now being understood.

A nation which expends so much of its budget on weapons of mass destruction is not only causing untold suffering and destruction throughout the world, but is also destroying the social welfare on which its masses depend.

It is time to return to the vision of a better world as described in the Communist Manifesto and to charge the human race - a very recent late-comer to the amazing, beautiful Earth depicted by Darwin in The Origin of Species - with preserving it from mindless, careless destruction.

I should like to end with one thought. There are voices which wish to erase the name of Communism in favour of some alternative which is considered to be more palatable to the public.

To be a Communist is to carry a heavy responsibility. It is to constantly apply Marxist-Leninist theory to every current situation and to act as the heart, mind and advanced leader of the masses.

At the same time, one must never divorce oneself from grass roots and popular life in all its cultural diversity. Marx and Engels led a rich cultural life while remaining close to the trade unions and all political movements which represented the working class, the struggle for women's rights and national sovereignty.

They never divorced theory from practice, nor encouraged dogmatism. Communists in many places in the world are struggling, suffering and dying for their convictions. I salute them and wish them every success. They represent the best and highest aspirations of the human race for peace, justice, equality and a good and happy life.

Jean Turner is honorary secretary of the Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies. This is an edited version of her speech at the Annual Karl Marx Oration at Highgate cemetery.

Great socialist’s birth commemorated in London

LONDON - Recently, on a rainy day in London, a group of people assembled at Highgate cemetery at Karl Marx' gravesite to commemorate the 192^nd anniversary of his birth. It was also a commemoration of the 65^th anniversary of the people's victory over fascism. Present were representatives and Communist Party members from around the world. Among them were Cuba, Cyprus, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, UK and USA.

A number of years ago a BBC poll conducted in the UK found that a majority of Britons think that Marx was the "greatest philosopher" of all time.

Gerrard Sables, Secretary North Devon branch, CPB, and recent candidate for parliament in Britain told the World after the event, "For me Marx's message is still true. Workers of all countries unite! The first and most essential job we as communists have is persuading our fellow workers that we as workers do not have the same interests as big capitalists and that for a few people to insist on their 'right' to be fabulously wealthy is bad for humanity."

An excellent oration was delivered by Jean Turner, Honorary Secretary, Society for Cooperation in Russian and Soviet Studies. The text of the speech can be found here. [speech is above]

Turner maintains that Marx and Engels recognized the formation of the working class and " To this new class Marx and Engels attribute the historical role of combining its forces to replace the capitalist system with a new form of society; one in which the mass of the people... create new forms of social organization to suit their needs, including the necessity to preserve the ecology and sustainable balance of the earth on which they, the majority of the human race, live. Marx and Engels called this communism."

She talked of the danger of fascism and maintains, "Defeating a new generation of fascists is a political priority and the price of this is eternal vigilance."

She told the World, "We need to lift our spirits and see our goal, as Marx and Engels did. It is easy to get bogged down in the disappointments and setbacks of the present political situation."

Christine Lindey, Art Critic, Morning Star, commented about Ms. Turner's remarks, "For myself I was impressed by the clarity of her thinking and her use of jargon-free language with which to explain complex ideas. She took an overview of history and linked the achievements of the past to the current situation."

A number of wreaths were placed at Marx' headstone after the oration,. Representatives from many countries including Greece, Iran, Iraq, UK, and Venezuela placed wreaths and it was moving to watch them.

The commemoration was concluded by singing the Internationale in many different languages. Robert Griffiths, Secretary General, Communist Party Britain, encouraged the "cacophony" of different voices and languages to express the power of this great working-class song.

London was alive with activism and protests were everywhere drawing attention to the devastating wars. Banners calling for the return of the British troops alive were visible by the Parliament and other government buildings. I visited the pub where Lenin first met Stalin which is right next door to the Marx Memorial Library. The Marx Memorial Library houses the tiny room where Lenin worked while he lived in London. It was truly inspiring to be present in this city with such a great working-class history.

Alan L. Maki

58891 County Road 13

Warroad, Minnesota 56763

Phone: 218-386-2432

Cell Phone: 651-587-5541

E-mail: amaki000@centurytel.net

Please check out my blog: http://thepodunkblog.blogspot.com/

A message from Greece...

2010-05-22T11:00:00.000-05:00

Note: This is the link to PAME, the All Workers’ Militant Front, as mentioned below.:

http://www.pamehellas.gr/main.php?lang=2

Communist Party of Greece - [13.05.2010] Message to the National Committee of CP, USA

Communist Party USA,
National Committee,
New York
Athens, Thursday, 13 May 2010

Dear comrades

We would like to thank you for the information regarding your 29th party convention and to extend our greetings to the delegates. Our parties have met in the past in common struggles for workers’ rights, in the struggle against anti-communism, for the defense of socialism and the Soviet Union, for the unity of the communist movement on the basis of our revolutionary principles and traditions.

We are following as closely as we can the developments in the USA, the escalation of the aggression of US imperialism which lately has become quite obvious. The US is striving to respond to the trend of losing ground within the framework of the imperialist system by inciting regional tensions and conflicts, so that it can take advantage of its political and military supremacy in order to safeguard its interests and maintain its spheres of influence.

In Greece, the working class and the popular strata are facing a barbaric attack, on the pretext of the economic crisis; an attack which has been jointly unleashed by the social democratic PASOK government, the EU and the IMF, with the assistance of the conservative ND party and the open support of the nationalist LAOS party.

The remarkable resistance presented by the labor and popular movement is spearheaded by KKE which continually strives to reveal the real cause of the crisis, the sharpening of the basic contradictions of capitalism. Without the consistent exposure of the compromised and discredited in the eyes of the workers trade union leaderships of GSEE and ADEDY (the national confederations of the private and public sector respectively), without the decisive contribution of PAME (All Workers’ Militant Front), the national trade union front comprised of class oriented Federations, trade unions, labor centers and trade unionists, the labor movement in our country would have been disarmed, unprepared, and unable to fight back.

KKE calls upon the working class, the self-employed, the poor farmers, and the youth to engage in even stronger, more massive and organized actions in order to stave off the onslaught and pave the way for a different path of development. There can be no way other than the nationalization of the monopolies. The working class must take possession of the concentrated means of production and mobilize them with central planning and popular participation. This presupposes a struggle aiming for people’s power, for socialism-communism.

The fightback against anti-communism, the adamant defense of the historical contribution of the Soviet Union and socialist construction in the 20th century, of the identity and revolutionary traditions of the communist movement, take on particular importance today.

As long as the crisis of the international communist movement persists, as long as the situation does not improve and retreats from ideological and theoretical principles are not resolutely confronted, as long as the front against opportunist views that hinder the formation of a single revolutionary strategy against imperialism does not become strengthened, the situation will harbor the danger of an even greater backslide.

The existence of strong Communist Parties steadfast to the principles of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism, with a revolutionary program for the overthrow of the rule of monopolies, for building socialism - communism, is the foremost demand of our times.

We look forward to learning the conclusions and the resolutions of your convention.

With comradely greetings

The Central Committee of KKE

e-mail: cpg@int.kke.gr

Distributed courtesy of:

Alan L. Maki
Co-Chair,
Lake-of-the-Woods Club

58891 County Road 13
Warroad, Minnesota 56763

Phone: 218-386-2432
Cell Phone: 651-587-5541

E-mail: amaki000@centurytel.net

Please check out my blog: http://thepodunkblog.blogspot.com/

A Moral Vest

2010-03-19T09:32:00.000-05:00

Alan, thanks so much for these words of encouragement. The internet is slow and expensive so while my articles are being printed elsewhere I cannot even open my own website at juneterpstra.com but I will keep trying. Here is my second article from Cuba.

I have some wonderful photos but will not be able to upload until next week when I am home.

In solidarity, June

3/19/10

A Moral Vest

By June C. Terpstra, Ph.D.

In the film, Fidel, The Untold Story, there is an interview with Fidel Castro where he says he does not need a Kevlar vest to protect him from countless assassination attempts because he wears a moral vest. I am back in Havana, Cuba today after visiting a natural medicine clinic in Santa Clara, Cuba; an agricultural cooperative in Matanzas, Cuba; a teacher training arts school in Matanzas; and ELAM, the incredible Latin American Medical School that trains and sends doctors to work all over the world. With each program or institution visited I wonder what it would be like to live in a country with values of social justice instead of values of profit and plunder. There are countless examples of those who wear a moral vest here in Cuba.

It is most certainly not easy for the Cubans to live their principles in the face of so much oppression from the USA. Their daily lives are restricted from the moment they wake till they sleep at night and not by the government. Running water, flushing toilets, toiletries, access to oil to run a tractor or a car, obtaining the parts to fix a car, obtaining medicines; these and more are scarce and make life difficult. It is interesting to me that while their form of socialism is so hated by USA elites it is based in hard work and contributions to the country; they are rewarded for the level of their commitment to social justice and the sharing of resources. This is not allowed under capitalism.

The homes and apartments in which Cubans live, whether they are allotted cars, their jobs are all based on education, level of commitment and hard work as evidenced in their contributions at work and in their communities. People from the USA have difficulty grasping the concept of a life where one does not pay rent or a mortgage or a car payment or for health care or school. Members of this delegation from the USA continue to ask questions about shareholders; how much cars cost; where the stores are located; and, how much oppression people here are facing without any real understanding of the fundamental changes this government is attempting to establish and manifest.

In the Cuban medical schools they are taught both traditional and natural medicine. These doctors are known and trusted around the world because they have been taught to care about the patient and not view them as a client to be charged money for profit. Just recently seven American women doctors trained in Cuba returned to work with the medical brigade in Haiti. All of the training done in Cuba is framed within the commitment to serve communities in need. On the contrary, the people of the USA are programmed to think hate of medicine not for healing rather as a mechanism to maintain disease to keep a drug and surgical industry as a profitable way to make money.

On the farms in Cuba the land is given to those who apply and they are allowed to live on the land and work for 90 days before they make their commitment and a cooperative board accepts them as a member of the cooperative association. Women and all races in Cuba have access to these opportunities and many incentives are provided because developing a self-sustaining Cuba has been critical since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Once one is a member they contribute to both their own sustenance and receive the resources and benefits of their hard work. Women and all races are present at every level of labor and leadership.

Education, intellectual life, and culture is highly respected and valued in Cuba. They have established a teacher training program for artists in music, literature, theater, dance and painting, and sculpture. The students pay nothing for this specialized education but they must make a commitment to teach at the end of their training. There is no job insecurity in Cuba; the teachers of the arts will always have jobs! On the contrary, in the USA, the arts programs are always the first to be cut and many schools no longer have these programs for all the students nor are they offered on a daily basis. Which country is really a country of wealth?

Every place I have visited and talked with the people they express their commitment and passion for their culture and society. This is not my experience in the USA where the focus is rarely on producing art for the people. Producing art is for money and fame. Where ego is de-emphasized here; narcissism is encouraged in the West. Where good behavior is encouraged here, ugly and violent behavior is glorified in the USA. Where the women’s federations set up programs to counsel all family members in domestic crisis and teach them to live in ways that benefit the family; the USA model is to disconnect and provide a band-aid in the form of a shelter.

I am not telling you things are perfect here in Cuba. They are not. Most certainly, the effects of the embargo have been devastating. The effects of colonial racism and sexism have their own unique manifestations here as Cuban socialism attempts to rid itself of these internalized oppressions. However, the real Cuban people; not the ones who are sitting in Miami plotting the destruction of their own people out of their own greed and selfishness; the real Cuban people wear a moral vest and the examples they set for their children in the schools and hospitals and their daily life are visible to those of us to whom they open their doors.

Frank Lumpkin, African-American steel worker, long time Communist fighter and a working class hero

2010-03-16T23:32:00.001-05:00

Frank Lumpkin, African-American steel worker, long time Communist fighter and a working class hero, passed away March 1 at the age of 93. In this era of economic crisis, exploitation and war, proletarians in the Twin Cities can draw inspiration from yesteryear’s fightback. Lumpkin's battle against mill closings and his national solution, "the public takeover of the closed plants to provide the jobs and make the steel that the country needs," is a rousing answer to the pending closure of St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant. Frank's serious reading of Marxist texts is a lesson for today's activists.

Beatrice Lumpkin’s Always Bring a Crowd!: The Story of Frank Lumpkin is a handbook for action.

This Black proletarian, master tactician and long-time member of the Communist Party, was honored by PBS, called a "History Maker" by an African-American site and commemorated with the words "Fought for Rights of Workers at Wisconsin Steel" in the Chicago Tribune. In Minnesota, the Gus Hall Action Club dedicated a recent blog post to Frank Lumpkin and the Thoughts from Podunk blog promotes the book

Always Bring a Crowd!

Brother Lumpkin’s battles against the closing of Chicago’s Wisconsin Steel are epic. The plant gates slammed shut in 1980 and the 3500 proletarians were forced to "live a nightmare. Suddenly, workers were out on the street, left with nothing: no jobs, no pensions, no sick pay, no supplementary unemployment benefits, not even pay for the last three weeks they worked." Frank, with 30 years in the mill, fought back! He organized the Wisconsin Steel workers to struggle for the plant’s reopening and their benefits. Lumpkin forged the Save Our Jobs committee and, under his leadership, it "became a crusade that never quit" until victory was won. Comrade Frank was a militant and hardened Marxist-Leninist. (Information and quotes from Always Bring a Crowd!: The Story of Frank Lumpkin by his wife Beatrice)

Chicago public TV station WTTW’s commemorative video about Frank Lumpkin

is excellent:

http://video.wmht.org/video/1436362722/

A superb excerpt from Beatrice Lumpkin’s Always Bring a Crowd!: The Story of Frank Lumpkin about Communists, rank-and file workers’ activity and the forging of Save Our Jobs:

1980: "The plant’s closed. Don’t come in tomorrow. Maybe never."

"Nobody knew what to do. What could you do without an organization? Frank Lumpkin had read about the ’Save Jobs’ committees at the Youngstown, Ohio and Detroit Dodge-Main plants in the rank and file paper, Labor Today, and in the Communist Peoples Daily World. These papers were urging workers to fight plant closings. Frank realized that Wisconsin Steel workers had allies and did not have to fight alone. Fred Gaboury, then editor of Labor Today and a trusted friend (and Communist Party cadre -M.W.), encouraged Frank to take the first step: ’Get a committee going To Save Jobs and start a petition to Congress to reopen the plant.’ Frank thought that was good advice as far as it went. But how could you do that when the in-house union refused to move? He decided to talk it over with some friends from the mill.

"Frank invited some Wisconsin Steel workers to a meeting in his basement. Some he had met during years of African-American rank-and-file groups in the mill such as ’Self-Help’ and ’Getting It Together.’ If ever self-help was needed, that was the time. The meeting was open to any idea for action. The unanimous decision was to organize a ’Wisconsin Steel Workers Save Our Jobs Committee.’ Their first action was to petition the President of the United States, asking him to reopen the mill.

"’Fight or Die’ was the call Frank sent out to his fellow workers. And for 17 years he led the unemployed Wisconsin Steel workers, working without pay, using his house as the first headquarters and his own money when necessary for organizing expenses. No one who knew him would call him a saint, as R.C. Longworth had suggested in the Chicago Tribune financial section. However, it was true that Lumpkin’s dedication was based on his love for working people. Lumpkin’s staying power was strengthened by the belief that workers could change the system if they organized. He often said, ’the system’s got to go.’ He thought it was wrong to allow a few capitalists to close Chicago’s steel mills and ruin the lives of 30, 000 steel workers’ families. His ultimate solution was socialism - production for the good of people, not profits for a few.

"Under Lumpkin’s leadership, Save Our Jobs became a crusade that never quit. The Wisconsin Steel workers took the Save Our Jobs name because their first goal was to reopen the mill. The second goal, which as the years passed became primary, was to get their unpaid benefits. (The WTTW video focused on the fight for the stolen money - M.W.)

"The committee went into action immediately. They circulated their petition to the President and Congress asking them to reopen Wisconsin Steel. The petition let the world know that Wisconsin Steel workers would fight for their jobs. At churches, taverns, beauty shops and grocery stores, wherever steel workers and their families gathered, there was someone collecting signatures to reopen the mill. In a few days, over 4000 steel workers and friends had signed the petition. With thousands in support, Save Our Jobs (SOJ) planned a mass delegation to take the petitions to the state legislature in Springfield, and to Congress in Washington, DC.

"The idea of mass action began to catch on! The in-house union had not organized a labor action in over 30 years. Inside the mill, the rank and file knew how to slow down or ’work to rule’ to make the company live up to the contract. But they had never carried picket signs or demonstrated with other steel workers. After the mill closed, Save Our Jobs members became the most experienced demonstrators in the Chicago area." (Beatrice Lumpkin, Always Bring a Crowd!: The Story of Frank Lumpkin)

Frank Lumpkin, African-American steel worker, long time Communist fighter and a proletarian hero, passed away March 1 at the age of 93. Circulate the tribute

video. Call on May Day books to carry

Beatrice Lumpkin’s Always Bring a Crowd!: The Story of Frank Lumpkin. Check out the Lumpkin's organization, the Communist Party. "If you can't find a leader, be a leader," Brother Frank once said. And his militant statement from decades back is our battle cry: Fight or Die!

Michael Wood, Gus Hall Action Club, http://gushallactionclub.blogspot.com

http://video. wmht.org/ video/1436362722 /

A word about TV station WTTW’s commemorative video about Frank Lumpkin, African-American steel worker, long time Communist fighter, proletarian hero:

"Lumpkin got another chance to speak for himself in Ten Good Lives, a prize winning TV documentary produced by Jay Shefsky for WTTW, ’Chicago’s Window to the World.’ Lumpkin took viewers for a walk through the closed mill while he told the story of the steel workers’ fight to survive. The documentary was based on a sculpture exhibit, on permanent display at De Paul University’s Monsignor Egan Center. The exhibit includes a bronze bust of Frank in hard hat and working clothes. (This is featured about 4 minutes into the tribute piece. -M.W.) Margot MacMahon, the sculptor, titled the collection, ’Plain hard working, ’ an apt description of Lumpkin. However, his love of useful work is just a part of his love and confidence in working people. That may be the magnet that attracts working people to him, the confidence that together they can win." (Beatrice Lumpkin,Always Bring a Crowd!: The Story of Frank Lumpkin)

(Frank Lumpkin:"My whole life has been around the Communist Party. Everything good that has happened to me has been through the Party. Nothing can make me deny it.")

Brother Lumpkin and Save Our Jobs’ first protest can inspire proletarians in the Twin Cities:

"On April 22, 1980, the bankruptcy court was hearing the Wisconsin Steel case again. Save Our Jobs held its first demonstration. They came with picket signs to make the workers’ plight known. But no one made a move to raise a sign and begin the picket. Except for Frank, these workers had never, ever held a picket sign in their hand. Then the news media showed up, including a television crew. Frank knew he had to do something. He picked up a sign and began to walk alone. One or two joined him, while the rest stood and watched. As the television camera began to film, one by one other Wisconsin Steel workers picked up signs. They took their first, hesitant steps and then seemed to gain confidence. All they were asking for was what they had already worked for - payment of wages, supplementary unemployment benefits, medical insurance and pensions. Above all, they called for the reopening of their plant. ’For us, this picket line was historic, ’ Frank said later, ’We Wisconsin Steel workers are joining with other working people to fight for our rights.’" (Beatrice Lumpkin, Always Bring a Crowd!: The Story of Frank Lumpkin)

Michael Wood

Setting the record straight

2010-01-20T14:26:00.001-06:00

A response to Sam Webb, National Chair, Communist Party USA:

Sam Webb wrote this in the "new" on-line People's World--- my response follows:

Setting the record straight

January 20 2010

By: Sam Webb

It is said by some on the left that the Communist Party USA has no differences with President Obama. Just to set the record straight: we do and we express them. For example, we opposed the nearly unconditional Wall Street bailouts and deployment of more troops to Afghanistan. We argued for a bigger stimulus package. And we said the president should push the envelope more; otherwise he runs the danger of the extreme right turning the popular discontent over the economic crisis against him, the Democratic Party, and the people's movement that supports his agenda. Isn't this what we saw in Tuesday's election in Massachusetts, where a right-winger was elected to the Senate?

But in expressing our differences with the president, communists go to great lengths to state them in a constructive and unifying way. We don't do it to score points or demonstrate our "militancy." We don't lose sight of the class nature of this struggle.

The main organizations of the working class and people are not always in sync with the president on every issue either. But they don't turn their differences into an unbridgeable divide between them and him. In fact, they consider him a friend and are mindful of the unrelenting attack, steeped in racism and other forms of division, coming from right-wing extremists, against our nation's first African American president - something that was so evident in the Senate election in Massachusetts.

The left has something to learn from the approach of these people's organizations. We are too comfortable in our role as an exceedingly small, but "principled and militant" grouping in U.S. politics. Such a posture, which could easily gain greater currency in the aftermath of Tuesday's election, may feel satisfying, but it won't help us evolve into a political player that exercises a major influence on U.S. politics nor get us a flea hop closer to socialism.

In my view, the president has made mistakes, particularly his handling of the financial, jobs and health care crises, but he isn't the main obstacle to social change; he is not the "enemy," or even an "enemy." President Obama is a reformer, not a socialist reformer, not a radical reformer, and not even a consistent anti-corporate reformer, but a reformer nonetheless whose agenda creates space for the broader people's movement to deepen and extend the reform process in a non-revolutionary period.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson were Democratic Party regulars, but, with the help of a popular and sustained insurgency, both of them stepped outside of their comfort zone and morphed into change-makers, thus opening up space for substantive reform - Roosevelt with the New Deal and Johnson with civil and voting rights, Medicare, federal aid for education and the "War on Poverty." Unfortunately, Johnson's mistaken decision to escalate the war in Vietnam stained, perhaps irreparably, his presidency and historical legacy.

Barack Obama in my opinion has the same potential to "grow on the job" and enact reforms that measurably improve the lives of the American people and reframe our nation's place in the world. Right-wing extremists and powerful sections of capital feel much the same. Hence, the formidable opposition striving to sabotage, block or contain even the tiniest reforms by any means necessary. To make matters much more difficult, the broad coalition supporting reform is not yet of sufficient size, strength and understanding to consistently elect people's candidates as well as guarantee passage of the president's reform agenda - let alone radical reforms such as sustainable and just economic development, a national "profit-free" health service, a massive full employment program with affirmative action and living wage guarantees, fully funded, integrated, quality public education from child care to college, and a new foreign policy that accents peace, cooperation, equitable relations and a commitment to end global poverty.

Until that movement is at such a level, it is premature to say what the political limits of this president are, or, to put it differently, smugly dismiss him as simply another Clintonian Democrat. When our movement reaches the level of the popular upsurges of the 1930s and '60s, we will be in a better position to say where he fits on the political spectrum and whether his views are elastic enough to accommodate more deep-going changes.

Don't think we will succeed if the Obama presidency fails. If it fails, we will once again be fighting an uphill, defensive struggle as we were in the Bush and Reagan years, or worse. Witness the election of Republican Scott Brown to the Senate.

There will inevitably be differences and tensions with this White House as we go forward. In most instances, the differences will pivot around the pace and depth of reform; in some instances, such as the decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, the differences are more fundamental.

The role of the left is to help navigate these differences, while at the same time infusing energy and clarity and sustaining the strategic unity of the people's movement against the main enemy - right-wing extremism and powerful sections of big capital. This admittedly is a difficult needle to thread, but, as we know from the experience of the 1930s and '60s, it was done then. And there is no reason to think that it can't be done now. In doing so, the left of our time will move into the center of U.S politics.

My response:

Obviously Sam Webb hasn't an inkling of how to "thread a needle" much less initiate a develop struggles intended to solve the problems of working people.

What a crock.

You have the unmitigated gall to call enforcement of affirmative action "radical" when it has been in force for forty years! Only to be abandoned by Barack Obama, his Administration and the Democrats.

Barack Obama is no friend of working people; Obama is doing a con job for Wall Street.

None of this is "radical:"

"...let alone radical reforms such as sustainable and just economic development, a national "profit-free" health service, a massive full employment program with affirmative action and living wage guarantees, fully funded, integrated, quality public education from child care to college, and a new foreign policy that accents peace, cooperation, equitable relations and a commitment to end global poverty."

We already have three "profit-free health services" in this country:

1. Veterans Administration
2. Indian Health Service
3. National Public Health Service

It is only a matter of expanding these three health services which Barack Obama and the Democrats have left underfunded to have more funds to fight his dirty imperialist wars.

What is "radical" about living wages?!

There is nothing "radical" about a commitment to end global poverty;" the leaders of the entire world signed onto the Millennium Statement to do just this.

As far as peace... no one wants these dirty imperialist wars.

By making the claim that these things are "radical" you aren't even defending the democracy you claim you are protecting in "fighting the ultra-right."

By calling these things "radical" you have provided nothing for people to unite around for change.

The worst part of all, you confuse for the working class friend and foe. Wall Street is our enemy and Barack Obama represents Wall Street--- he always has and always will... unless of course you have reason to believe the words he wrote in Foreign Affairs Magazine are not his own.

You come to Bemidji, Minnesota and tell Native American Indians that their just demands for jobs through the enforcement of affirmative action at living wages is "radical" and you will find the only ones agreeing with you are the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party's 8 candidates for governor with two exceptions, including former United States Senator Mark Dayton telling you that you are full of it, along with State Representative Tom Rukavina. You will find the racist Bemidji City Planner, a Democrat--- Rita Albrecht, who refused to implement affirmative action in the planning, construction, staffing and maintenance of this massive one-hundred-million dollar plus public works project, in complete agreement with you.

That you cannot distinguish between the huge gap between the so-called labor "leaders" who have betrayed the workers they are paid to represent and what the rank-and-file of these unions want is pathetic.

If Obama "succeeds" in carrying out Wall Street's agenda working people are going to be in one hell of a worse mess than we are already in.

Obama is no kind of "reformer" no matter how far you try to stretch the definition of this word--- there isn't a dictionary of any kind on the face of this earth that stretches the meaning of "reform" as far as you do: "reform" means to make things better... there is no way you can claim that Obama, the Democrats, or the small handful of over-paid union leaders covering his worthless political butt are making anything, in any way, better for the working class... your support for "the best deal that could be had in health insurance reform" is a major "wage cut" for the working class in case you haven't figured out that taxes on workers' health benefits is a wage cut and one more attempt to place the burden for these problems on the backs of working people continuing to drive down the overall standard of living of the working class.

You built yourself nice million dollar glass offices but you haven't allocated one single penny to develop the kind of nation-wide fight-back required... and now we know why; you think what people need and want is "radical" when it is nothing more than what is required for basic social and economic justice.

Go ahead and make all the stupid posts you want to about me on the Internet... the fact remains you don't even dare to stand at a mine, mill or plant gate and distribute your stupid ideas.

Alan L. Maki
Co-Chair,
Lake-of-the-Woods Communist Club

Webb has failed to point out what kind of massive movements it took to win the reforms of the 1930's, and he fails to note that Lyndon Johnson made some very significant reforms--- only because America's major cities--- and many smaller ones--- were, quite literally, BURNING.

Communist Party vice chairman speaks at MU

2009-11-13T22:20:00.000-06:00

This is the "Letter to the Editor" I submitted in response to this article:

Regarding your article, "Communist Party vice chairman speaks at MU."

Jarvis Tyner stated:

"He's only the beginning,I think he's a transitional president. I think somebody else is going to come in and take it even further."

Tyner only speaks for a very few Communists in stating this.

Such thinking is very dangerous because it leads people to think that Obama is some kind of friend of working people when he is nothing of the sort. Barack Obama's agenda is now very clear; his main priority is Wall Street profits; working people pay the bill and suffer... this is "the new normal"--- Wall Street made this mess and the coupon clippers brought in Barack Obama to help them profit some more from solving their problems on the back of the working class.

The Associated Press pointed out in an article, "Obama wants domestic spending cuts in next budget." These cuts are sure to hurt working people on the bottom the worst.

The article continues:

"The flow of red ink has been increased by war spending for Iraq and Afghanistan, recession-fighting stimulus and bank bailout spending and by reduced tax revenues from high unemployment and reduced personal and business income."

Obama can create all the "green" jobs he wants to but if those jobs continue paying working people nothing but poverty wages the economic mess our country is in is going to worsen.

Obama has even refused to enforce longstanding affirmative action policies leaving people of color and women who are already suffering horrible poverty to fend for themselves.

Obama is not a liberal, nor is he progressive; he is no friend of working people... he has refused to provide the change people thought they were voting for.

Barack Obama has shown himself to be nothing other than a slick talking insurance salesman.

Sounds to me like Jarvis Tyner is a member of the Democratic Party out on the stump campaigning for Barack Obama's second term when he should be leading the struggles for peace and for improving the lives of working people.

Tyner should be holding Obama accountable by telling him:

No peace; no votes.
No single-payer universal health care; no votes.
No living wage jobs; no votes.

Alan L. Maki
Another long-time Communist
58891 County Road 13
Warroad, Minnesota 56763
218-386-2432

Communist Party vice chairman speaks at MU

http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2009/11/13/jarvis-tyner-speech/

Friday, November 13, 2009

COLUMBIA — Jarvis Tyner, executive vice chairman of the Communist Party USA, spoke at MU on Thursday and said the election of President Barack Obama opens the door for the left wing, which he feels has allowed itself to be pushed to the sidelines and overcome with progress-impeding cynicism, to mobilize.

"He's only the beginning," Tyner said. "I think he's a transitional president. I think somebody else is going to come in and take it even further."

Tyner spoke to an audience of about 70 people at MU's Ellis Auditorium. He focused on the transitional phase he feels the United States is in because of Obama's election.
Although the president is neither a communist nor socialist, his administration marks the country's movement away from the right-wing governments that have been dominant in the U.S. since the Reagan administration, Tyner said.

He said that while the Democratic Party is not without blame, the Republican leadership has been the source of the nation's problems that include an increase in poverty, a ruined economy, the continuation of global warming, impeded scientific research and the destruction of public schools by No Child Left Behind.

Tyner said he and his party are not completely satisfied with the work Obama has done since taking office, listing the need to withdraw troops more quickly from Iraq, for initiatives to end nuclear weapons and to re-establish trading relations with Cuba.

However, Tyner praised the public option in the recently passed House health care bill, saying Americans need to put massive pressure on the Senate to pass the legislation with the option intact. He also felt there should be public options for the auto and housing industries and for student loans.

A Communist Party USA member for more than 50 years, Tyner joined the party as a young worker in Philadelphia. He was the party's vice presidential nominee in1972 and 1976. Also a founding member of the Black Radical Congress, Tyner has fought for racial justice and workers' rights since the 1960s when he became active in the Civil Rights and Labor movements.

He said the next step for the Communist Party USA is to move more into the mainstream.

"We're not ready to run for president, but we are ready to run for City Council, school boards. And we're going to do that more," Tyner said.

MU senior Alaina Boyett, who attended the event, said she was already familiar with much of the material Tyner discussed because of a Marxism class she's enrolled in. She liked that he made a point to separate the Communist Party and ideals from what she felt they are associated with in the mass media.

"I thought he was fair in his criticism of Obama and the right-wing talking heads," Boyett said.

MU's Karl Marx Reading Group, which meets to discuss communist texts and how their arguments apply to political action today, organized the event because members were interested in hosting a speaker. Leadership in St. Louis suggested Tyner.

"I thought Jarvis would be a good spokesman for what we're all about because he's been fighting for social justice for so long and a party member for so long," said Jack Buthod, the group's president.

Buthod, who joined the group as a sophomore, said it has been around for a few years but wanted to bring a guest speaker in to draw attention and generate new membership. Although he identifies himself as a Marxist, he said not everyone in the group does.

"I'd say it's definitely a mix. There's multiple communists in the group, but there's also people more interested in talking about the ideas from different perspectives," he said.

A group of seven MU students set up a mock-gulag in Speakers Circle on Thursday evening as a reaction to the Tyner event, a demonstration referencing the Soviet labor camps used to imprison political dissenters as well as criminals.Gulags were at their most prominent during Joseph Stalin's reign. One protester dressed up as a Soviet guard and held three others captive in a white metal canopy surrounded by barbed wire. Others handed out flyers and spoke to passersby.

One protester held a cardboard sign that said, "This is the Communism Jarvis Tyner is promoting."

The group hoped the demonstration's proximity to Ellis Auditorium would attract the attention of attendees of Tyner's speech and lead them to come ask questions, although they said they were protesting communism in general and not Tyner specifically.

MU senior Eric Hobbs, who played the role of guard dressed in a forest green button-down shirt and trousers and a Soviet-style hat with earflaps, decided to protest when he saw a flier for Tyner's speech on campus Monday.

"I thought communism's message was going to be spread, and I thought it would be good to spread the message communism isn't that good," Hobbs said, who believes the governing philosophy leads to government abuse of power and oppression.

"The main goal of the protest is to most importantly remind people of the damage of communism, what can happen when the government has too much power," Hobbs said, giving the examples of the Soviet Union and Communist China.

MU sophomore Megan Roberts organized the mock-gulag, modeling the demonstration after one at Washington University in St. Louis, which students held Monday to commemorate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Roberts, who was out of town Thursday night, said she anticipated that Tyner would either talk about the evils of capitalism or the glories of communism and wanted the protest to remind attendees, as well as Tyner himself, of the oppression and deaths caused by the philosophy.

"Communism is a very idealistic thing, and I think people lose sight of its evils and what it's done to humanity," Roberts said.

This is the "Letter to the Editor" I submitted in response to this article:

Regarding your article, "Communist Party vice chairman speaks at MU."

Jarvis Tyner stated:

"He's only the beginning,I think he's a transitional president. I think somebody else is going to come in and take it even further."

Tyner only speaks for a very few Communists in stating this.

Such thinking is very dangerous because it leads people to think that Obama is some kind of friend of working people when he is nothing of the sort. Barack Obama's agenda is now very clear; his main priority is Wall Street profits; working people pay the bill and suffer... this is "the new normal"--- Wall Street made this mess and the coupon clippers brought in Barack Obama to help them profit some more from solving their problems on the back of the working class.

The Associated Press pointed out in an article, "Obama wants domestic spending cuts in next budget." These cuts are sure to hurt working people on the bottom the worst.

The article continues:

"The flow of red ink has been increased by war spending for Iraq and Afghanistan, recession-fighting stimulus and bank bailout spending and by reduced tax revenues from high unemployment and reduced personal and business income."

Obama can create all the "green" jobs he wants to but if those jobs continue paying working people nothing but poverty wages the economic mess our country is in is going to worsen.

Obama has even refused to enforce longstanding affirmative action policies leaving people of color and women who are already suffering horrible poverty to fend for themselves.

Obama is not a liberal, nor is he progressive; he is no friend of working people... he has refused to provide the change people thought they were voting for.

Barack Obama has shown himself to be nothing other than a slick talking insurance salesman.

Sounds to me like Jarvis Tyner is a member of the Democratic Party out on the stump campaigning for Barack Obama's second term when he should be leading the struggles for peace and for improving the lives of working people.

Tyner should be holding Obama accountable by telling him:

No peace; no votes.
No single-payer universal health care; no votes.
No living wage jobs; no votes.

Alan L. Maki
Another long-time Communist
58891 County Road 13
Warroad, Minnesota 56763
218-386-2432

Is The Global Recession Over?

2009-06-25T12:46:00.000-05:00

This is a very interesting and important question being posed here. The same question is being posed in a variety of publications ranging from conservative to the left.

Here we get an interesting take from one of the largest, most powerful and influential communist parties in the world.

However, noticeably absent is any reference to what these huge debts being incurred in the name of "economic stimulus" are really doing to nations and people.

This accumulation of debt may be having some short-term results as far as alleviating the problems associated with the collapsing capitalist economy which is certain to negatively impact all the countries the United States is trying to use to shore up its own economy.

But, there can only be one consequence of this huge accumulating debt aimed at trying to save the capitalist system, not just from complete collapse, but saving the system itself... we are already well into a full-blown depression.

What is the consequence of all this debt that is not considered in this article? Poverty. Massive poverty will be the result of these huge accumulations of debt. Masses of people who have never experienced poverty will be experiencing poverty and everything that goes with such poverty.

One need only examine what the western imperialist governments and their bankers did to socialist Poland to figure this out.

Debt equals poverty... massive debt equals massive poverty.

Recession, depression or whatever happens with the capitalist economy this massive, massive, massive debt is going to result in the most devastating and massive world-wide poverty the human race has ever experienced.

Something to think about and ponder as you gather around the dinner table... you might also contemplate how much longer you will have food to put on the dinner table for your family...

The leading capitalists, headed by Wall Street, are taking advantage of this depression as capitalists always do--- using this economic depression to drive down that standards of living of working people across the globe.

It is no wonder so many working people are turning to Karl Marx for answers... one only has to read the very short Chapter 26 from Volume One of Marx' "Capital" to understand what is taking place in the world today... if you have never read or studied Karl Marx before, I would urge you to get to your nearest public library and check out Volume One of "Capital" and give it a good, thorough read because what the bankers did to Poland they are now doing to the entire world... the United States included.

Alan L. Maki

People's Democracy

(Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vol. XXXIII

No. 25

June 21, 2009

Is The Global Recession Over?

C P Chandrasekhar

FINANCE ministers of the G8, meeting at Lecce in Italy during the latter part of week ending June 14, were cautiously optimistic. The final communiqué noted that in the aftermath of efforts at financial stabilisation and fiscal stimulation “there are signs of stabilisation in our economies, including a recovery of stock markets, a decline in interest rate spreads, (and) improved business and consumer confidence”. But, the ministers cautioned “the situation remains uncertain and significant risks remain to economic and financial stability”.

There were two elements of the communiqué that pointed to a compromise between the differing perceptions of the US and UK, on the one hand, and Germany and France, on the other, regarding the principal problems and tasks at hand. The first of these elements was the reference to the persistence of “significant risks” which was not there in the original draft of the communiqué, and was ostensibly inserted by those countries (UK and US) who feel that it is not yet time to decide that the recovery is here and the stimulus provided thus far has been adequate. Moreover, the mention of “encouraging figures in the manufacturing sector” that figured in the draft was dropped, since it went against the evidence that industrial production in the eurozone area had fallen by 21 per cent in April, relative to the corresponding month of the previous year.

LEADING POWERS DIFFER ON EMPHASIS

The second element of the communiqué of interest is that it pushes for going beyond thinking of recovery and formulating national level “exit strategies” “for unwinding the extraordinary policy measures taken to respond to the crisis.” The reference here is to the huge budget deficits and high levels of public debt that many countries, especially the US, have accumulated in the wake of the bail-outs and the stimulus packages they have put in place. Though the US and UK have played down this aspect of the discussions, there is clearly a difference in emphasis among the leading powers on where the world economy stands and what is the immediate priority in terms of action.

The difference hinges, quite clearly, on the extent to which different sections believe that the worst is over. The reason for uncertainty regarding a potential recovery is that the figures are yet to point to a definitive revival. As of May 2009, nearly two years since the financial crisis broke and a year-and-a-half after the onset of the global recession, the economic scenario remains uncertain, if not bleak. The rate of unemployment in the US, which stood at less than 5 per cent in the first quarter of 2008, had risen to 8.1 per cent in the first quarter of 2009 and is estimated to have touched 9.4 per cent in May 2009—its highest rate for the last 26 years. This possibly explains US pessimism. It is true that the unemployment rate in the European Union had also risen from 6.8 to 8.1 per cent between the first quarters of 2008 and 2009. But the higher base level may be making the problem appear less alarming to ruling governments there than in the US, influencing their perceptions.

Output growth too gives no cause for optimism. Quarter-on-quarter growth rates of US GDP (as measured relative to the corresponding quarter of the previous year) had declined sharply in the last quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009 across the G7. This decline was even sharper in the UK and the EU, than the US). The crisis had clearly not gone away by the beginning of April, despite signs of recovery in the stock market. The disconcerting element is that this situation prevails despite huge infusion of funds by G7 governments. According to one estimate, the US Federal Reserve had by April 2009 offered about $12.7 trillion in guarantees and commitments to the US financial sector, and spent a little over $4 trillion in combating the crisis. As a result the federal deficit has risen to more than 12 per cent of GDP, frightening fiscal conservatives who predict the onset of stagflation. The big thrust seems to be over and the recovery is still not in sight. What it has possibly done, and even that is not certain, is prevent the recession from turning into a depression.

OPTIMISM BASED ON STILL TENUOUS EVIDENCE

Despite this evidence relating to the period till the last full quarter for which numbers are available, speculation that the downturn has bottomed out and the developed world is on the verge of recovery proliferates. This optimism is based on still tenuous evidence, including evidence that the rate of decline of economies is slowing. The most important of these is that the monthly decline in employment in the US is down sharply. In May 2009 nonfarm payroll employment fell by 345,000, which is around half the average monthly decline over the previous six months and well below the close to 750,000 fall in January this year. Associated with this fall in monthly employment declines is a fall in new unemployment claims. Economist Robert Gordon of Northwestern University in the US, a respected analyst of growth and productivity trends in the US, has found that past recessions came to an end four to six weeks after new unemployment claims peaked, which they have now done. So he conjectures that the business cycle will find its trough in May or June (Financial Times, June 3, 2009). While these developments are reassuring, we should view them in the light of the fact that the unemployment rate is at record levels and new unemployment claims are still above the figures they touched in the worst months of the last recession.

A second cause for optimism is that US producers may be reaching the phase of their inventory cycle where an increase in production is inevitable. By April, wholesale inventories had fallen for the eighth month running as firms cut back production to clear the excess inventories generated by falling demand. Having made those adjustments, it is argued, firms are now in a position where they would have to step up production, especially if demand begins to stabilise. In other words, the argument is that since things are so bad, they can only get better. But the figures do not support even this position. Thus, after seven months of decline, inventories in April fell 1.4 per cent relative to the year before and 6.4 per cent relative to the corresponding month of the previous year. That was because sales fell by 0.4 per cent in April, led by automobiles and parts. Sales of durable goods too were down 1.9 per cent during the month and 23.4 per cent over the year.

The third potential cause for comfort is the sign that relative to previous months the decline in production is slowing. The available evidence shows that the decline in GDP relative to the immediately preceding quarter, which was rising till the first quarter of 2009, seems to have bottomed out in the US and to a lesser extent in the EU. What is more, this trend seems to be reflected even in the month-on-month annual growth rates of industrial production, with the rate of decline in April 2009 relative to the corresponding month of the previous year showing signs of reversing its hitherto continuous increase in the US, UK and EU.

While this third factor may be adequate reason for optimism for some, there are two reasons why we should not read too much into this data. To start with, even if the downturn is touching bottom in terms of the stabilisation of the rate of decline, the decline could persist and the economy could “bounce along the bottom” as some analysts reportedly speculate. That is, there is no “statistical” reason why a stable rate of decline should automatically lead to lower rates of decline and positive rates of growth in the coming months or quarters.

Further, it is unclear whether there would be adequate alternative stimuli to sustain the recovery when the effects of the already implemented fiscal stimulus wane. Governments could hold back on providing any fresh stimulus because of arguments of the kind espoused by conservative economists, representatives of the financial sector and even some European governments, which emphasise the dangers of inflation. If that happens, recovery would depend on the return of the consumer to the market.

But here too the prognosis is not all too happy. Fears generated by the recession and rising unemployment and the increased desire to save to make up for the decline in the values of accumulated housing and financial assets is encouraging savings even in the US. According to a recent estimated of the Federal Reserve, the net worth of US households had fallen 2.5 per cent or by $1,300 billion in just the first three months of 2009. This comes on top of the 18 per cent fall in the previous year which was the worst since the Fed began estimating household wealth in 1946.The net result is that household savings rates in the US are rising and consumer spending was falling in March and April this year.

In the event many still remain sceptical. The Financial Times quotes Martin Feldstein as saying that “it is possible but unlikely” that the recession is over. “I think it is a more likely scenario that we are seeing the favourable effects of the fiscal stimulus,” he reportedly said. “That, for a while, will offset the general diminished trend we have seen over the past two quarters, but it is a one-shot thing.” Put otherwise, there could be more bad news ahead.

MAY DAY BRINGS THOUGHTS OF SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVES

2009-05-03T11:10:00.001-05:00

Friday, May 1, 2009

Harry Targ

Sketching Today’s Global Political Economy

During the latest phase of monopoly and finance capital (1945- to the present) enormous changes occurred in the global political economy. First, the United States emerged as a superpower and in an effort to crush the threat of socialism around the world committed itself to constructing a “permanent war economy.” This permanent war economy would create the military capacity to destroy alternatives to global capitalism, stimulate and maintain a high growth manufacturing economy, justify an anti-communist crusade to crush the left in the United States, and co-opt and/or repress working class demands for change. In addition, the permanent war economy would occasion the perpetuation of racism and patriarchy in public and private life.

As the years passed corporate rates of profit began to decline as a result of rising competition among capitalist states, over-production and under-consumption, an increasing fiscal crisis of the capitalist state, and rising prices of core natural resources (particularly oil). With a growing crisis, global corporate and finance capital shifted from investments in production of goods and services to financial speculation. Thus capitalist investment steadily shifted to financialization, or the investment in paper-stocks, bonds, private equity and hedge funds and other forms of speculative investment. Financial speculation was encouraged by state tax policies, “free trade” agreements, an expanded international system of indebtedness, and increased reliance on consumer debt.

Multinational corporations which continued to produce goods and services sought to overcome declining profit rates. This, they concluded, could only be achieved by reducing the costs of labor. To overcome the demand for higher real wages, health and other benefits, and worker rights, manufacturing facilities were moved from core capitalist states to poor countries where lower wages were paid. Thus, in wealthier countries millions of relatively high paying jobs were lost while production of goods increasingly moved to sweatshops in poor countries. Wealthy capitalist states experienced deindustrialization .

Finally, assisted by technological advances, from computers to new forms of shipping, financial speculation and deindustrialization fueled the full flowering of globalization, or the radically increased patterns of cross border interactions- economic, political, and cultural. Globalization began to transform the world into one integrated global political economy.

In short, we may speak of a four-fold set of parallel political and economic developments that have occurred since the end of World War II, in which the United States has played a leading role: creating a permanent war economy, financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization.

Should We Be Thinking About Socialism Today?

A rich and vital set of images of a socialist future comes down to us from the utopians, anarchists, and Marxists, the martyrs of the first May Day, and the variety of experiments with socialism attempted in Asia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Extracting from the multiple reasons why individuals and movements chose socialism one reason stands out; that is, that capitalism historically is and has been a cruel and inhumane system, a system borne and fueled by slavery, genocide, super exploitation of workers, tactics of division based on race and gender, and an almost total disregard for the natural environment that sustains life. Building a permanent war economy, financialization, deindustrialization , and globalization are merely extensions of the cruel and heartless pursuit of profit which has been the fundamental driving force of the capitalist mode of production.

Drawing on the history and the images of a better future coupled with the brutality of the capitalist era, we might conceive of a 21st century socialist future that has four main dimensions.

First, we need to create institutions that are created and staffed by the working classes and serve the interests of the working classes. While scholars and activists may disagree about what “class” means in today’s complicated world, it is clear that the vast majority of humankind do not own or control the means of production, nor do they usually have an instrumental place in political institutions. Therefore, socialism involves, in the Marxist sense, the creation of a workers’ state and since most of us are workers (more than 90 percent of the US population for example), a state must be established that represents and serves the interests of the many, not the few.

Second, our vision of socialism is a society in which the working classes fully participate in the institutions that shape their lives and in the creation of the policies that these institutions develop to serve the needs of all the people.

Third, socialism also implies the creation of public policies that sustain life. Socialism in this sense is about good jobs, incomes that provide for human needs, access to health care for all, adequate housing and transportation, a livable environment, and an end to discrimination and war.

Fourth, socialism is also about the creation of institutions and policies that maximize human potential. A socialist society provides the intellectual tools to stimulate creativity, celebrate diversity, and facilitate writing poetry, singing and dancing, basking in nature’s glow, and living, working, and loving with others in humanly sustainable communities.

Today we remain terribly far from any of these dimensions of socialism. But paradoxically, humankind at this point in time has the technological tools to build a mass movement to create a socialist future. We can communicate instantaneously with peoples all over the world. We can access information about the world that challenges the narrow ruling class media frames about the human condition. We have in the face of brutal war, environmental devastation, enduring racism, super exploitation of workers everywhere mass movements of workers, women, people of color, indigenous people, and youth who are demanding changes. Increasingly public discourse is based upon the realization that our future will bring either extinction or survival. Socialism, although it is not labeled as such, represents human survival.

Where do we who believe that socialism offers the best hope for survival stand at this critical juncture? We are weak. Many of us are older. Some of us have remained mired in old formulas about change. Nevertheless we can make a contribution to building a socialist future. In fact we have a critical role to play.

We must articulate systematic understandings of the global political economy and where it came from: permanent war, financialization, deindustrialization , and globalization. We need to articulate what impacts these processes have had on class, race, gender, and the environment. In other words, we need to convince activists that almost all things wrong with the world are connected and are intimately tied to the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production.

We need to take our place in political struggles that demand an expanded role for workers in political institutions. We need to insist that the working classes participate in all political decisions.

We need to work on campaigns that could sustain life: jobs, living wages, single payer health care, climate change etc. Our contribution can include making connections between the variety of single issues, insisting that participants in mass movements take cognizance of and work on the other single issues that constitute the mosaic of problems that require transformation. We must remember that in the end the basic policies that sustain life require building socialism. Most struggles, such as those to achieve living wages or a single payer health care system for example, plant the seeds for building a broader socialist society. We can incorporate our socialist vision in our debates about single issues: if we demand a living wage, why not talk about equality for example?

We need to rearticulate our belief that human beings have a vast potential for good, for creativity, and given a just society, we all could move away from classism, racism, and sexism. We could pursue our talents and interests in the context of a sharing and cooperative society.

By working for institutional incorporation (empowerment) and life-sustaining and enhancing policies we will be planting the seeds for a socialist society.

“In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.
For the union makes us strong”

From “Solidarity Forever,” Ralph Chaplin lyrics, 1915.

Some May Day thoughts about the class struggle and working class struggles, history and the Communist Party

2009-05-01T00:26:00.002-05:00

Canadian Dimension posted this article as a link on their May Day calendar page… while I wrote the “comment” following this book review several months ago, there is a lot of relevant stuff in it and I guess because May Day has brought more attention to this article I started getting a few calls about what I wrote.

People are kind of intrigued by my comment pointing out that the Communist Manifesto was written with the intent of developing Communist Party organizations which would seem to be a no-brainer; but, apparently that has been lost on some people in the left looking for excuses to create all kinds of left/communist/socialist organizations except for the Communist Party with the thinking that you can just kind of pretend you can ignore history and facts.

I also dealt with “20th century socialism” a little.

My comment begins quite a ways down.

I am working on producing something about how to start a Communist/Marxist/Socialist club… I have posted bits and pieces on a few list serves to get some feed-back and ideas… if you have any thoughts pass them on and I will include them.

Alan L. Maki

North Winnipeg’s Seal of Identity
http://canadiandimension.com/articles/1716/

Leo Panitch | January 7th 2009 | 1

A Glowing Dream: A Memoir
by Roland Penner
J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing, 2007

“The place of childhood provides the seal of identity.” This epigram opens the first chapter of Roland Penner’s memoir, Growing Up ‘Red’ in Winnipeg’s North End. It holds true even for those of us who grew up only “pink” — i.e. whose parents were CCFers rather than Communists, and who as a result never set foot in the Ukrainian Labour Temple at Pritchard and McGregor. Just how much Winnipeg’s working-class political culture sealed our identities was brought home to me last year when I sent my brother an article that touched on the strike at the Hurtig Fur Company in the early 1930s — during the course of which my father, while on the picket line, had his head split open by a scab. My brother, who was born in 1934, responded: “You know, when I was a little boy I used to get confused about whether the really bad guy’s name was Hurtig or Hitler.”

To be sure, the industrial side of Winnipeg’s history of class conflict makes very little appearance in this memoir — apart from a few sentences that recall Roland standing as a teenager “on the bald prairie with the temperature at about wind chill -50°F, handing out union leaflets” as part of an organizing drive at a plant on the outskirts of Transcona. This is hardly surprising, since the Penner family was preeminent for its involvement on the political side of the labour movement — so much so that on one memorable May Day, after some five thousand paraded along Portage Avenue and Main Street to end up at Market Square in front of the old City Hall, the three speakers who addressed them were Penner’s politically passionate and fiery mother, Rose; his eleven-year-old “child orator” brother, Norman; and, of course, his venerable father, Jacob, the famous Communist alderman for Ward Three. (Jacob Penner was “almost always dressed in a conservatively cut three-piece wool suit, a shirt with a stiff celluloid collar, a firmly knotted woolen tie, a carefully blocked and immaculately clean fedora, and sometimes, over his shoes, spats.”)

The story told here of the Penner family is a fascinating one, from its origins among downwardly mobile Mennonite ancestors who once owned an estate on the west bank of the Dniepr River to Jacob’s “form of marriage without clergy” to a Jewish orphan from Odessa, Rose Shapak. One of the most revealing aspects of north Winnipeg’s ethnic culture is uncovered here, as Jacob the Red, before his election as alderman in 1934 at the age of 54, moves from job to job for some two decades, including as a candy salesman with the help of Rose’s connection to the well-off Galpern family. Just as class conflict tore the Jewish community apart in a strike like the one at Hurtig’s, so did family ties often transcend the sharpest of differences in the class politics of Winnipeg’s North End.

The family anecdotes in this book are so profuse that many of the best are found in the footnotes. One of Rose’s nephews goes to the U.S.S.R. in 1933 and gets swept away five years later in Stalin’s murder machine. One of Jake’s brothers-in-law returns home after a visit to Germany in 1936, and becomes a supporter of the Winnipeg Nazi Party. Shortly after Jake is sent off to an internment camp as a Communist in 1940, sixteen-year-old Roland and his twin sister Ruthie are home alone listening to “Saturday Afternoon at the Met” (while Rose is in Ottawa heading up a delegation of wives petitioning for improvements in the camp’s conditions), and the RCMP come barging in waving a search warrant. As one Mountie moves to turn off the radio, Ruthie screams at him: “In this house no one turns off the opera!”

Indeed, so plentiful are Penner’s family anecdotes that one terrific example, which he told when Norman was honoured at a banquet at the University of Manitoba some two decades ago, is left out of this book. As I recall it (and have often retold it), when Norman marched into the principal’s office of his grade school to complain that the phys-ed instructor was picking on him because he was a Communist, the principal sternly and accusingly said (so everyone in the outer office could hear): “You’re a Communist?!” And then, after closing the door, he whispered, “So am I.”

Penner’s admiration for his parents’ Communist politics is palpable, and he explicitly contrasts this with the way other “red diaper babies” like Jim Laxer and Stan Gray have written disparagingly of their parents’ politics. Quoting Laxer to the effect that truth was “a very slippery commodity” in his home, Roland proudly writes: “That was not our experience…. We asked many questions and Dad and our mother told us what they sincerely believed to be true.” His father remains his “primary inspiration” — a man who “fought for the rights of others at great cost to himself” — and this is why his parents commitment to the “Glowing Dream” forms the title of his memoir. Yet, one might have wished that Roland had offered a more sober reflection on his father’s generation of Canadian Communists, not only with regard to what they knew or didn’t know about Stalin’s crimes in the U.S.S.R. or to the limitations of “democratic centralist” life inside the party, but also to the reformist strategy it pursued in the public arena.

Thus, we learn that Jacob Penner left the Socialist Party of Canada in 1911 because he felt it was too oriented toward raising class consciousness through Marxist education alone. He devoted himself to a life of “unceasing struggle for [the] daily needs and pressing problems” of working people in the belief that this practical activity would raise their consciousness as “the essential feature in the development of a socialist revolution.” Yet, when he died in 1965, aged 85 (having only retired as alderman three years earlier), the Winnipeg Free Press made a point of saying that he was a “political curiosity” who drew much of his support from people “who cared nothing for politics but who admired his efficiency and ability and who believed that he worked for the underdog.” Penner quotes this approvingly, without raising the question of how far this achievement nevertheless stood from the development of the class consciousness needed for supporting socialist revolution, which had been Jake’s original purpose. Would more attention to creative Marxist education have produced a better result? This memoir doesn’t go there, perhaps because Roland, from the time of his own engagement in student politics at the University of Manitoba in the late 1940s, adopted a stance “quite in keeping with my father’s approach to political activity on an issue-by-issue basis.” This approach did not mean that he often lost his bearings on the Left of the political spectrum — far from it. But as the main part of the memoir turns to cover Roland’s own adult political life, this “issue-by-issue” approach is visible all along the way: from his slow drift away from the CP (rather than exiting in flames as his brother did in 1957); to his joining Joe Zuken’s law firm; to his foundational role in the establishment of legal aid in Manitoba; to his almost happenstance decision to join the NDP; to what he calls his “life in government” as attorney general of Manitoba.

The limits of this approach came to a head with his role in the Meech Lake Accord, which he still sees as “a reasonable compromise” on the grounds that, while he agrees with those critics who said that “the separatists would always ask for more,” if the Accord had passed it would have ensured that “their call to break up the country [would have] fallen on less fertile ground.” This is pretty conventional stuff. He reserves his real ire, moreover, for the left critics of the Accord, especially those “many women … influenced by flamboyant statements … by Judy Rebick and the National Action Committee,” who saw the deal as concocted by “men in suits” with the aim of using Quebec’s recognition as a distinct society to override the Charter’s equality provisions (“This is, in my view, nonsense.”) and undermine federal social programs (the likelihood of which he sees as “essentially nil”).

Penner’s decision to side with the pragmatic men in suits against the socialist feminists during the Meech Lake controversy in 1987 was presaged by the controversy over the stand he took in 1983 over the newly opened Morgentaler abortion clinic in Winnipeg. In justifying why as attorney general he could not “authorize a blanket stay of proceedings” with respect to criminal charges against Morgentaler, Penner clearly sees himself as properly following the advice Justice Samuel Freedman gave him when he invited Penner to lunch after his appointment: the Attorney General “must not be political.” But if Penner now admits that his Morgentaler moment “still comes back to haunt me from time to time,” this may be because he knows very well (as he puts it in the memoir in relation to his discussion of the task force on legal aid in the 1970s) that “the legal system itself is so much the product of the establishment it serves that it cannot be turned into the front line for law reform and even more obviously for social transformation.” It most certainly can’t if attorneys general act as if their roles are non-political.

It is impossible to do full justice to Penner’s memoir without going even further over the word limit CD’s editors have allotted me. Suffice to say that this review touches upon only a few aspects of the rich and varied life recounted in this book. I especially enjoyed making the connection between Penner’s many entrepreneurial activities during his Communist boyhood in the 1930s with his “life as an impressario,” when he ran the Co-op Bookstore in the late 1950s and was responsible for bringing Pete Seeger and Odetta, among many others, to sing before Winnipeg audiences.

For me, at least, this enjoyable read was enhanced by being able to catch Penner out on such errors as telling us that Lenin “famously said that communism equals socialism plus electric power” (he actually said “soviets and electric power”). Or the misnumbering of the Chapter Two endnotes, so that the citation for the homage Penner pays to the great Fritz Hansen, the American running back who led the Blue Bombers to their first Grey Cup in 1935, amusingly offers sources to the On to Ottawa Trek of that year. The only unfortunate result of this misnumbering is that we never learn who actually coined that wise phrase: “The place of childhood provides the seal of identity.”

Tags: culture, labour, marxism, panitch, reviews, roland penner, winnipeg.

This article appeared in the January/February 2009 issue of Canadian Dimension magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW to get a refreshing and provocative alternative delivered to your door 6 times a year for up to 50% off the newsstand price.

1 comments
· Leo Panitch’s review of “A Glowing Dream: A Memoir” itself is food for thought, dialogue, discussion and debate as much as is Roland Penner’s excellent book, which I would strongly recommend to every worker to read and study.

Panitch finds problems with Jacob Penner’s approach towards politics and assumes that Marxist education was not simultaneously taking place with the excellent work Jacob Penner did in serving working people on the Winnipeg City Council.

Having personally known many of those in Jacob Penner’s Communist Party circle, I know that this contention simply is not accurate.

And I believe that where Panitch is inaccurate here is the very crux of what is missing in working class struggles in Canada and the United States today, which is holding back the struggle of the working class for real power: social, political and economic; the struggle for socialism—the only alternative to this failed capitalist system.

What Panitch fails to understand is the way the Communist Party works in a collective way… while Panitch’s contention that Jacob Penner paid too little attention to Marxist education of the working class—a very dubious contention at best seeing as how Jacob Penner was the longest serving Communist elected public official in Canada, and perhaps the world—it is hard to believe that Panitch’s assessment is accurate that there was a lack of socialist/Marxist education taking place. How a Communist repeatedly gets elected and re-elected when there is a powerful corrupt web of capitalism spun all around him creating such a hostile environment would then have to be explained… an explanation Leo Panitch never broaches… not everything he hasn’t broached can be explained away as not being provided more space by Canadian Dimension since Panitch has had ample opportunity to do this elsewhere; and he has not.

Panitch forgets, or intentionally omits, the role of the Communist Party Club. Jacob Penner always “had his back covered” by a very powerful Communist movement consisting of very important Communist Party clubs in Manitoba which were more than a little responsible for his repeated re-election campaigns because of the “collective” way these Communist Party clubs operate as the “think-tanks” and “action centers” of the working class and people’s movements constantly stressing that all the various movements for democracy, peace, social and economic justice and for socialism need to work together in unity.

I have noticed that failure to understand the all-important role of Communist parties by Panitch in many of his other writings, too; which boils down to not understanding the very important and significant role these Communist Party Clubs play in winning the day to day struggles working people are constantly embroiled in as a matter to survive the obstacles and problems created by a capitalist social, economic and political system.

Like in this current book review, Panitch even writes about the Communist Manifesto but fails to understand that Marx and Engels in writing this brief pamphlet did so with the intent of encouraging workers to build Communist Parties to advance their demands for reforms AND winning social, economic and political power.

There is all kinds of ample evidence that Jacob Penner and his comrades and friends understood very well “What needs to be done?” And they did what needed to be done—on all fronts, from education to activism.

The real questions Leo Panitch might want to ponder is why Jacob Penner and the Communist Party in Winnipeg did so well while in most other places in North America the working class movement did not fare as well?

A big part of the answer to this question lies in attacks on the Communist Party by the government (which Jacob Penner and the Winnipeg Communists and their friends and allies so successfully fought back) and the attacks on the Communist Party from the right and ultra-left in the working class movement (again, attacks which Jacob Penner and the Winnipeg communists struggled against so successfully).

And Joe Zuken’s campaigns successfully built on all of this.

How and why this powerful Communist movement in Winnipeg lost momentum and suffered losses should be the topic of a forum with the proceedings published in another book… it would be very interesting to see if Leo Panitch’s ideas as to his “critique” (or not so thinly veiled attack on the role and objectives of Communist Parties) hold any water when placed side-by-side with the Communist perspective in all of this.

I really think we need to be asking what has held back the working class movements from achieving what Jacob Penner and his comrades and friends achieved not finding excuses to write them off because in these troubled times, there is not only a Canadian dimension to what these working class Communist Party activists achieved, there is something for all working class activists from throughout North America and the rest of the world to learn from… I find it rather ironic that many people who adhere and cling to Leo Panitch’s perspective regarding the Soviet Union and other socialist countries who found their own way to power and to hold on to that power which they so despise, now like to take cheap pot shots at the very man and the Communist Party he was a member of which climbed towards working class power so successfully in the electoral arena.

Which, also, begs the question: If Canada and the U.S.A. were the bastions of democracy capitalist politicians claim them to be; why then has the policy towards allowing Communists to freely participate in the political lives of these two countries been so restricted—and, I think I am being very charitable in using the term “restricted” when political suppression and repression are more appropriate.

If Leo Panitch would like to participate in an organized dialogue on this question concerning the legacy of the role of the Communist Party clubs I would be happy to participate, too.

Jacob Penner and Winnipeg Communists are not the only example of the success of Communist Party Clubs and how they combined electoral work with other facets of class struggle work—merely the best; an example which many working class activists today have a right to know about… just as working class activists today have a right to know about how Communists like Lyle Dotzert led the struggle to organize Ford in Windsor and his comrades like Phil Raymond, Nadia Barkan, Bob Travis, Bud Simons and Wyndham Mortimer across the river—south of the border—led the struggles to organize the Big Three and then elected the legendary working class activist and leader Coleman Young to public office… in order to know and understand this aspect of the working class struggle and history might make the difference as to whether the working class wins or loses the looming class conflict ahead.

The working class made numerous advances with Communist Parties in the lead… an historic fact that no amount of twisting and misinformation can erase—obscure, yes—but not erase because history is what it is.

Communists have made plenty of mistakes just like anyone else; but, the so-called errors attributed to us here simply are not correct.

There is this “movement” on the part of a section of the North American left which seeks to want to put everything from 20th Century Communism and socialism behind us as if it was all misguided and bad when nothing could be further from the truth.

Roland Penner’s excellent book provides us with aspects of working class history some people would rather just forget… just like they would like to forget Jacob Penner, Lyle Dotzert, Phil Raymond, Nadia Barkan (in Nadia’s case, the “historians” even give her the wrong name!)... but, forgetting primary aspects of history is not the same as these struggles and their leaders—with the Communist Parties at the forefront—being forgotten… or intentionally maligned as Leo Panitch does, and continues doing.

Recently Howard Zinn engaged in similar distortion on Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” when he stated:

“No, I was really gratified when Obama called for “Let’s tax the rich more, and let’s tax the poor and middle class less.” And they said, “That’s socialism.” And I thought, “Whoa! I’m happy to hear that. Finally, socialism is getting a good name.” You know, socialism has been given bad names, you know, Stalin and all those socialists, so-called socialists. They weren’t really socialist, but, you know, they called themselves socialist. But they weren’t really, you see. And so, socialism got a bad name. It used to have a really good name. Here in the United States, the beginning of the twentieth century, before there was a Soviet Union to spoil it, you see, socialism had a good name. Millions of people in the United States read socialist newspapers. They elected socialist members of Congress and socialist members of state legislatures. You know, there were like fourteen socialist chapters in Oklahoma. Really. I mean, you know, socialism—who stood for socialism? Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, Upton Sinclair. Yeah, socialism had a good name. It needs to be restored.”

Well Zinn—the great historian—apparently never heard of Jacob Penner, Willian Z. Foster, Paul Robeson Lyle Dotzert, Wyndham Mortimer, Phil Raymond or Nadia Barkan.

And Sam Webb, the revisionist “leader” of the CPUSA goes even further than Panitch or Zinn in saying he wants nothing at all to do with 20th Century socialism.

I find it very strange that all these attacks of a similar nature come at a time when the working class needs stronger Communist Parties than ever before… and slanting history to suit one’s own biased perspectives will not aid in building a winning working class fight-back as this rotten capitalist system collapses by the day from the time the bell rings on Wall Street until another plant is shut down, both throwing workers out into the streets as if they are merely disposable items like dirty baby diapers.

Alan L. Maki
Secretary/Treasurer
Minnesota/Dakotas District, CPUSA

#1. Posted by Alan L. Maki on January 13th 2009 at 10:30pm

Alan L. Maki

58891 County Road 13

Warroad, Minnesota 56763

Phone: 218-386-2432

Cell phone: 651-587-5541

E-mail: amaki000@centurytel.net

Check out my blog:

Thoughts From Podunk

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Global steel industry awaits auto turnaround as layoffs on the Iron Range mount and MN DFL twiddles thumbs

2009-04-12T19:55:00.000-05:00

Statement of the Iron Range Club of the Communist Party, USA

Barack Obama in an Easter Sunday holiday message had the nerve to lie to the American people about the nature of the economic depression we are in. Obama said he sees "glimmers of hope."

We ask: Where are the "glimmers of hope?"

Obama has not been to the Iron Range.

We ask: Where's the change?

Here on the Iron Range there are no "glimmers of hope;" only the despair that accompanies growing growing joblessness and dire poverty making the Iron Range, what Alan Maki has referred to "the Appalachia of the North with the same pits, pollution and poverty."

The economic situation and social conditions are worsening by the day on the Iron Range as working class families are now experiencing dire economic straits our grand parents tell us they have not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930's.

We and our grand parents were assured such conditions would never come about again.

We were told that Karl Marx was wrong. We were told that the capitalist system could be managed by flaky, weirdos like John Maynard Keynes and Alan Greenspan.

This generation was assured by the best paid economists Wall Street could buy that this generation would never live through an economic depression where the capitalist system collapses.

Yet, today, all economic indicators--- contrary to Barack Obama seeing "glimmers of hope," are pointing to the worst depression ever along with all the misery for working people such a catastrophe will most certainly entail as this "ball continues to drop" if we don't push back against Wall Street, and push back hard.

Larry Summers, Director of the National Economic Council--- Barack Obama's chief economic adviser--- describes the economy like a "ball dropping from the table that has not stopped falling."

Something is terribly wrong with this entire scenario. We are being played for suckers and fools as if we do not have the brains or capacity to reason and think.

Vice-president Joe Biden stated months ago that he and Obama are trying to "dropkick the ball." Here we are, months later, with Larry Summers telling us "the ball is still dropping" and hasn't even touched the ground yet.

Key to Obama's lies is that he continues to state economic troubles were caused by the "crisis in the housing market." This is an outright lie. The housing market, sabotaged by a bunch of greedy crooks not of which one has been prosecuted to date as millions of people lose their homes, is part of the problem; part of the problem contributing to the main problem. But not the primary source of the problem that Barack Obama and his over-paid economic advisers are well aware of but refuse to acknowledge because to do so would expose the capitalist system for what it has become: rotten to the core.

The present crises the capitalist economic system is experiencing is the direct result of the corporate assault on the standard-of-living of the working class that has been well underway in this country for over thirty years, and Wall Street has intensified this assault on the working class over the last eight years of Republican domination over our lives while Democrats sat back like cowards and did nothing.

The problem is one from which the capitalist economic system cannot escape:

Workers not being paid enough to purchase back what they have produced. Most working people in the United States have been receiving poverty wages; unable to purchase even the minimal basic necessities required to live decent lives.

Capitalist exploitation is THE PROBLEM. Capitalists stealing the wealth created by the working class is the source of this economic mess.

Common sense tells us that if the wealth created by the many is being constantly stolen by the rich few there is going to be severe economic problems down the road; we are now at the end of that road.

High-paid corrupt union leaders like Leo Gerard, Ron Gettelfinger and John Sweeney have worked in cahoots with big-business in forcing concession after concession from the very workers whose dues are paying their big fat salaries when they should have been putting the unions' resources into organizing the unorganized. Instead, they plowed union dues into supporting Barack Obama and the Democrats who are now kicking workers in the head while down on the ground.

How else can one explain taking away the homes of working people who are jobless and going hungry?

A moratorium on all foreclosures and evictions should have been and still is the NUMBER ONE requirement needed by hard-hit workers. This is so basic to common human decency we Communists should not even have to be stating this.

Minnesota Senator David Tomassoni could not even get the vote of one single Democrat in support of "the Minnesota People's Bailout." And the United Steel Workers and United Auto Workers unions are pumping money into getting these servants of the Chamber of Commerce, the mining, auto, banking and power industries elected!

If Senator Tomassoni and any other DFL'ers who consider themselves "progressive" don't see the need to leave the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party after this (first it was betrayal and sell-out on saving the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant) now these same rotten Democrats have defeated "the Minnesota People's Bailout" which would have halted foreclosures and evictions so widespread across the Iron Range and the rest of the state and the entire country.

Now these same Democrats are kicking the living daylights out of the working class at every opportunity; not missing an opportunity to kick workers in the head. Case in point: the auto workers; and miners right here on the Iron Range.

No two unions did more to help elect Barack Obama and the Democrats than the United Steel Workers union (USW) and the United Auto Workers union (UAW).

Steel workers and auto workers are now getting kicked in the head by Barack Obama and the Democrats without any help from the Republicans.

What does this tell us about the two-party system?

It should tell us what Communist Party leaders William Z. Foster and Gus Hall said over and over again:

Labor needs its own political party.

The time has come for working people to get up off the ground and fight back.

Since the labor "leadership" is not willing to fight back; the rank-and-file is going to have to stand up and slug it out with these corrupt and wholly incompetent labor leaders, the Democratic Party and Wall Street.

Military recruiters are not shy about walking into our public schools trying convince our children to go fight Barack Obama's dirty imperialist wars.

A third of the ore that has been taken from the ground on the Range has gone into wars and militarism as our children die in these senseless wars that Barack Obama said were "stupid" when he wanted our votes.

Barack Obama and the Democrats are not as eager to solve our problems as they are to ship our kids off to war.

In fact, to a large extent the social and economic problems we are experiencing are directly related to these dirty imperialist wars.

As Alan Maki has pointed out, we need "800 public health care centers spread out across the United States instead of over 800 U.S. military bases dotting the globe."

On this Easter Sunday, we on the Iron Range don't see Barack Obama's "glimmers of hope."

The steel and auto industries need to be nationalized and brought under public ownership and the democratic control of the people.

We will not get a "people's bailout" until we organize some kind of "people's lobby" as part of a "massive people's front" in the struggle for an end to foreclosures and evictions and a legislated minimum wage that is a real living wage directly based upon and tied to all cost-of-living factors.

Polls now show the American people have completely lost confidence in capitalism.

The same polls demonstrate that the time is now to place socialism on the table; socialism is the only way working people are ever going to get out of this economic mess.

The time has come for working people to create a people's political party to challenge the monopolies for power, and put us on the high road to peace and jobs through socialism.

We ask Barack Obama and the lying, warmongering Democrats: Where's the change?

As the article below points out, the steel and auto industries are the key to any healthy economy.

We ask: Does anyone see any indication of these two industries ever recovering again under capitalism?

China bailed is out and saved thousands of jobs for us here on the Iron Range.

Now that Chinese "leaders" have betrayed their people like union "leaders" here and jumped in bed with Wall Street after having been sold a bill of goods by Alan Greenspan, the CATO Institute and the Heritage Foundation that capitalist markets could provide a "quick fix" to their problems there is no place else for us to look other than to our own strength which comes through our own working class unity in getting out from under this mess.

Make no mistake, this economic mess was made by Wall Street capitalists in their never-ending drive for profits; there is no reason for the working class to have to shoulder the burden by way of being driven into poverty to get these vultures and parasites out of this mess that they created.

The corporate CEO's and bankers who created this mess are walking away with multi-million dollar "unemployment checks"--- our tax-dollars; and Barack Obama and the Democrats who expect our votes can't even come up with unemployment checks for workers from time of unemployment until time of re-employment as part of a "people's bailout." This is a disgrace.

We ask: Where's the change?

Since working people are called upon to solve the problems we had no part in creating, we need to resolve these problems in a way that benefits the working class by improving the lives of working class families and not Wall Street pigs gorging themselves at the public trough provided courtesy of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party at our expense.

Again, we ask Barack Obama and the Democrats: Where's the change?

In response to those still saying: "Give Obama a chance;" we say:

Join the Communist Party.

Join the fight for peace and jobs through socialism.

Iron Range Club, CPUSA

Global steel industry awaits auto turnaround

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090412/bs_wl_afp/commoditiesmetalssteelsector

PARIS (AFP) – Steel is on edge and the global industry is cutting back hard, hanging on for either a budget blast from China, new credit for vast Middle Eastern building schemes or resurrection of the US auto industry.

Demand has dwindled and steelmakers, notably the giant of them all, ArcelorMittal, are damping down surplus furnace capacity while waiting for credit to flow, construction cranes to turn and factories to roll.

A decision by ArcelorMittal last week to pursue temporary production cutbacks, slashing European output by more than half from the end of April according to a union source, dramatises the extraordinary ride and role of steel in the last few years.

In just months the global industry has gone from a boom driven largely by China, emerging markets and a property extravaganza in the Middle East to a narrow line between excess capacity and the costs of waiting for recovery.

"Over the past six months, demand for steel has dropped dramatically and, as a result, producers have been cutting production," analysts at Barclays Capital said in a study last week.

In another report, Morgan Stanley predicted "the current demand shock to lead to excess steel capacity."

Consequently, the bank said, steel plants should operate at rates below 75 percent of capacity until 2012.

"The steel market is not very different from base metals as a whole, but steel has reacted more rapidly and dramatically since September," said commodities analyst Perrine Faye of London-based FastMarkets.

She said the future of the steel industry depended on three factors -- the impact of Chinese economic stimulus efforts, a pick-up in the Middle East construction sector and a revival of the once mighty US auto industry.

"Chinese imports and exports are at a standstill. Everyone is waiting for the Chinese stimulus package to see if it will revive demand."

The Chinese government last month announced a four-trillion-yuan (580-billion-dollar) package of measures that it said could contribute 1.5 to 1.9 percent to the country's economic growth.

Industry experts have meanwhile spoken optimistically of China's prospects.

Thomas Albanese, chief executive at steel maker Rio Tinto, said earlier this year that the company foresaw "a short, sharp slowdown in China, with demand rebounding over the course of 2009, as the fundamentals of Chinese economic growth remain sound."

Analysts have said steel inventories are falling in China in anticipation of projects expected to emerge from the country's huge stimulus package.

"It is encouraging that the inventory of steel products, especially long products, which are mostly used in construction projects, have started to fall (since the end of March), likely suggesting that end-demand is gathering momentum," Frank Gong, a Hong Kong-based economist for JPMorgan, wrote in a research note.

On-the-ground evidence suggested that the Chinese industry had been re-stocking in the first two months of the year, followed by a pause in March before major infrastructure projects were expected to start in the second quarter, Gong wrote.

In the Middle East, according to Faye, the big problem is a shortage of credit, notably for real estate developers and builders.

Construction planners had "counted on a higher price for oil and on credit to finance their huge projects."

In addition, demand for such facilities, especially in the Gulf, has died.

"They were hoping that Americans and Europeans would buy apartments. But property prices have collapsed in the Middle East as well."

In the United Arab Emirates more than half the building projects, worth 582 billion dollars or 45 per cent of the total value of the construction sector, have been put on hold, a study by Dubai-based market research group Proleads found in February.

In Dubai, one of the states of the UAE, prices in the real estate sector have slumped by an average of 25 percent from their peak in September after rallying 79 percent in the 18 months to July 2008, according to Morgan Stanley.

Faye said the fate of the steel sector was in addition tied to that of the struggling US auto industry, once a thriving steel market but one in which two of its giant players, General Motors and Chrysler, are staring at bankruptcy.

The two companies are currently limping along thanks to billions of dollars in government aid.

"We are waiting to see if the auto sector in the US will get out of the crisis intact," she said.

Poll: Just 53% Favor Capitalism Over Socialism

2009-04-11T14:57:00.001-05:00

This poll (see article below) is very important because it demonstrates there is a very large existing and even greater potential base for socialist activities ranging from initiating “socialist study/action clubs” of one kind or another to creating voting constituencies capable of determining the outcomes of elections to the possibility of electing socialists to public office to creating a widespread dialogue capable of setting our country on the road to socialism.

With capitalism in deep crises and no end in sight, we are living in a “Marxist moment” and as socialists we have a responsibility to take full advantage of capitalism being on the skids to oblivion while dragging all of humanity down the rough, bumpy road to perdition… now is the time like never before to start encouraging a we make a “left turn.”

This poll sheds a new light on the needed urgency to take advantage of the “moment” to advance a socialist agenda which includes real solutions to the problems of working people and the racially and nationally oppressed peoples who for the most part are working class and are suffering the greatest brunt of this crisis.

This proves that “socialism is on the table;” not withstanding objections from the pseudo socialists who project socialism for consideration in the far distant future, or those who think that socialist ideas should be limited to discussions among those in the “ivory towers.”

Socialism is a working class idea that workers need to be talking about where they live, work, recreate and go to school.

One only has use the imagination to figure out how powerful a force might be developed should an organized campaign for socialism combined with socialist oriented alternatives together with a socialist critique of the Obama/Wall Street agenda.

After years of lie after lie about socialism coming from the business, schools and the mainstream media, that there remains this kind of support for socialism proves we have been way too timid in advocating the socialist.

Now, more than ever, we need to find creative ways to get socialist ideas into the hands of working people.

I find it interesting that the number of people who describe themselves as “Democrats” are for socialism when the Democratic Party is an anti-socialist, pro-capitalist party. This must cause the leaders and Democratic Party hacks reason to be worried should a socialist/socialist oriented, non-sectarian political party with a sensible program calling for radical reforms with an anti-capitalist, pro-socialist agenda entering the political scene as an alternative to the two-party trap.

Keep in mind that where there might be three, four or five candidates in a race such as in many areas of Minneapolis; a socialist could win with 15% to 20% of the vote. In other areas, 15% to 20% of the vote would make socialist candidates “deal makers” to be contended with when it comes to struggling and fighting for reforms.

The time has come for the Obama/Wall Street agenda to be critiqued and challenged by socialists.

With a well-organized campaign networked in states like North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio socialism can make a big impact and become an integral part of the political process. People need to put their heads together to figure out how this can be done… most important is to ignore that part of the sectarian left and those who try to manipulate and control, while taking a campaign for socialism and radical reforms directly into the workplaces, schools and working class communities.

Obviously socialist ideas are more established and supported than what many on the left have thought.

Once people start thinking more deeply about capitalism vs. socialism after reading socialist ideas there shouldn’t be a problem with getting a solid one-third of the population talking knowledgeably about the need for socialism.

I would encourage the widespread distribution of Albert Einstein’s important essay:

Why Socialism?

http://socialismtheoryandpractice.blogspot.com/2009/04/why-socialism.html

We need to boldly proclaim that capitalism is the bankers’ system and socialism is the workers’ system… people and Mother Nature before corporate profits.

Is there some kind of socialist study/action club in your community? If not, now is the time to initiate one.

Alan L. Maki

04.09.09 - 12:01 PM

Poll: Just 53% Favor Capitalism Over Socialism

by Craig Brown

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2009/04/09

Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better.

Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided. Thirty-somethings are a bit more supportive of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and 26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better.

Investors by a 5-to-1 margin choose capitalism. As for those who do not invest, 40% say capitalism is better while 25% prefer socialism.

There is a partisan gap as well. Republicans - by an 11-to-1 margin - favor capitalism. Democrats are much more closely divided: Just 39% say capitalism is better while 30% prefer socialism. As for those not affiliated with either major political party, 48% say capitalism is best, and 21% opt for socialism.

The question posed by Rasmussen Reports did not define either capitalism or socialism

It is interesting to compare the new results to an earlier survey in which 70% of Americans prefer a free-market economy. The fact that a "free-market economy" attracts substantially more support than "capitalism" may suggest some skepticism about whether capitalism in the United States today relies on free markets.

Other survey data supports that notion. Rather than seeing large corporations as committed to free markets, two-out-of-three Americans believe that big government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.

Fifteen percent (15%) of Americans say they prefer a government-managed economy, similar to the 20% support for socialism. Just 14% believe the federal government would do a better job running auto companies, and even fewer believe government would do a better job running financial firms.

Most Americans today hold views that can generally be defined as populist while only seven percent (7%) share the elitist views of the Political Class.

Alan L. Maki

58891 County Road 13

Warroad, Minnesota 56763

Phone: 218-386-2432

Cell phone: 651-587-5541

E-mail: amaki000@centurytel.net

Check out my blog:

Thoughts From Podunk

http://thepodunkblog.blogspot.com/

Why Socialism?

2009-04-03T09:47:00.002-05:00

Why Socialism?

by Albert Einstein

[This essay was originally published in May 1949.]

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has—as is well known—been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called "the predatory phase" of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.

Second, socialism is directed towards a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and—if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous—are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.

Innumerable voices have been asserting for some time now that human society is passing through a crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It is characteristic of such a situation that individuals feel indifferent or even hostile toward the group, small or large, to which they belong. In order to illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal experience. I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war, which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a supra-national organization would offer protection from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly, said to me: "Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?"

I am sure that as little as a century ago no one would have so lightly made a statement of this kind. It is the statement of a man who has striven in vain to attain an equilibrium within himself and has more or less lost hope of succeeding. It is the expression of a painful solitude and isolation from which so many people are suffering in these days. What is the cause? Is there a way out?

It is easy to raise such questions, but difficult to answer them with any degree of assurance. I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these varied, frequently conflicting, strivings accounts for the special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society. It is quite possible that the relative strength of these two drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior. The abstract concept "society" means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is "society" which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word “society.”

It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished—just as in the case of ants and bees. However, while the whole life process of ants and bees is fixed down to the smallest detail by rigid, hereditary instincts, the social pattern and interrelationships of human beings are very variable and susceptible to change. Memory, the capacity to make new combinations, the gift of oral communication have made possible developments among human being which are not dictated by biological necessities. Such developments manifest themselves in traditions, institutions, and organizations; in literature; in scientific and engineering accomplishments; in works of art. This explains how it happens that, in a certain sense, man can influence his life through his own conduct, and that in this process conscious thinking and wanting can play a part.

Man acquires at birth, through heredity, a biological constitution which we must consider fixed and unalterable, including the natural urges which are characteristic of the human species. In addition, during his lifetime, he acquires a cultural constitution which he adopts from society through communication and through many other types of influences. It is this cultural constitution which, with the passage of time, is subject to change and which determines to a very large extent the relationship between the individual and society. Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.

If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions which we are unable to modify. As mentioned before, the biological nature of man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to change. Furthermore, technological and demographic developments of the last few centuries have created conditions which are here to stay. In relatively densely settled populations with the goods which are indispensable to their continued existence, an extreme division of labor and a highly-centralized productive apparatus are absolutely necessary. The time—which, looking back, seems so idyllic—is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production—although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the “free labor contract” for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from “pure” capitalism.

Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers' goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.

An Open Letter to President Barack Obama from Sidney J. Gluck

2009-03-31T12:40:00.001-05:00

Attached is an open letter to President Barack Obama.

I don't know whether you agree with my point of view or not; but I am functioning out of the feeling that the negative aspects of capitalism are becoming obvious to people all around the world regardless of class positions, that understanding its avaricious nature brings them closer to Marx's analysis of the system which all of you can read his seminal word on "Capital." Chapter 26 which deals with the law of capitalist accumulation will give you the prototype of which the USA's capitalism is the arch example of its worst (together with the British who started out but are following along with the USA).

Globalization is a mess and everyone knows that the USA has created more poverty with its capital investments than existed before the global expansion. We know that formal colonial countries are seeing through this domination and are moving in directions which reject the control of foreign capital in their own developments. WE ARE LIVING IN A CENTURY OF EPOCHAL CHANGE. Our hope is that the change which is now developing in the form of a bipolar economic structure will continue to redevelop economies technologically and sustainably. We hope too that the ultimate resolution of differences between the double-structured world economic system will not be resolved by warfare. That is the most important struggle we must be involved with. A peaceful acceptance of epochal change and the survival of all in a better world.

Sincerely,

Sidney J. Gluck

Dear President Obama,

The world economic crisis sparked by the financial sector of our country has put the capitalist system on a defensive more openly than any other time in history. I am one of many who strongly supported your candidacy based on your vocalization of much of what we felt had to be changed in our country to make it more livable for those of us who produce the wealth and intellectual atmosphere.

You are facing the sharpest attack from the ranks of the Republican Party. We all admire your diplomatic ability to deal with those who disagree with you; but, the time has come when you must take an ideological position in order to clarify the issues involved in building a new type of economic structure in the country. This means that the dominance of the financial institutions in the political decisions affecting the majority must be defended openly against misrepresentations and manipulations which we all now know come from the unsupported defense of government that gives primacy to capital accumulation whether it be finance capital or industrial capital.

You do not have to embrace socialism. That is not the ideological position that put you in power. You were put in the White House with a promise to govern in the name of the working majority. True, you would like to have support from all sections of political and economic forces, but YOU WILL NOT GET IT.

If you continue to move along supporting the program of the financial circles in our country, your presidency is DOOMED. Listen to the needs of the majority and cater to it.

You can announce openly that you are not for socialism but you are for correcting the ills of the capitalist system and to relinquish domination of other countries allowing them to move independently as their people desire.

The Republican Party is pressing for the continuation of the kind of economic distortions that has dragged the world down. Openly facing this fact will help you reshape our country’s goals.

We are in an epoch of change. We must remove barriers and encourage each nation to resolve their day to day problems created by greed and distorted wealth accumulation. It does not make you a socialist to talk for Main Street but they need a spokesman in high places that will act for them.

You are in an enviable yet complicated position. Exposing the negative effect of unregulated finance capital which dominates humanity today would memorialize you for the next thousand years. The Bush Administration preempted the first move to deal with the economic crisis by bailing out the perpetrators who squandered every cent in bonuses and bashes. You are now faced with additional steps to bail out the industrial capitalists who have the responsibility of reshaping these enterprises into a new technological and green economy whose purpose is to raise the living standards of all.

The fulfillment of your promises requires that you take an ideological position. You will go down in history as having broken the racial barrier but it will end at that if you continue to be consumed by the economic crisis. OUR SYSTEM NEEDS CHANGE. Do what you can within that system. This means openly opposing the Republican Party’s program already on the road to capturing the presidency and congress in 2010 before they bring us further down. Don’t let them bully you with the “socialist” label.

The ball is in your court to change the situation. In your most diplomatic way you must take an ideological position to correct the problems of the system as you promised and restore true democracy which favors the needs of the majority.

Sincerely,

Sidney J. Gluck

Obama's No Socialist. I Should Know.

2009-03-30T07:25:00.003-05:00

This question that keeps popping up about Barack Obama being a socialist is very interesting and it is a question that Barack Obama should answer for himself.

I disagree with many positions of the Socialist Party and often wonder if the Socialist Party understands what socialism is all about; but, I don't say "Billy Wharton's No Socialist. I Should Know." Because Billy Wharton can speak for himself.

Fox News called out Sam Webb, the nominal head be default of the Communist Party USA, to make the exact same assertion about Barack Obama... and Webb dutifully said the same thing for Rupert Murdoch who supported Obama--- that Obama is no socialist.

Since Sam Webb claims he wants no association with "20th Century socialism," I can assume that Sam Webb is no socialist, either; and that he wouldn't know a socialist if he met one... so, he couldn't possibly know whether or not Barack Obama is a socialist. Why the heck is Webb even speaking for Obama? Could it be that Webb and Obama really do share a common ideology?

So, how would Webb or Wharton know if Barack Obama was a socialist or not--- either an open socialist or a closet socialist... after all, the socialist New Party did endorse Barack Obama when he ran for public office in Illinois... and, Barack Obama came to a New Party meeting to personally accept the endorsement--- there are even pictures of this... we all remember the billboards along our highways put up by the John Birch Society--- Martin Luther King sitting next to the communist with a big red circle around him.

And many members of the Socialist Party did endorse, and vote for, Obama over their own candidate.

And the National Board of the Communist Party USA, Chaired by Sam Webb, did--- unfortunately--- endorse Barack Obama... they even turned out en masse clapping and cheering for Obama's inauguration ceremony; perhaps invited by Obama himself?

Obviously we can carry this question of "is, or isn't, Obama a socialist" to the absurd extremes, which the right-wing has, and is, doing.

We all know that the real reason this question has even arisen is due to anti-communist "red-baiting." Red-baiting is a favorite past time of the over-paid pea-brained, capitalist sooth-Sayers when they aren't busy creating their next big lie explaining to us how great capitalism is.

The so-called "leaders" of the Communist Party USA even claim that John Maynard Keynes was "a great socialist economist."

Now, are we all going to start asking, again, "Is Obama a socialist" because he supports a bastardized neo-liberal Keynesian approach to economics?

There is good reason to suspect that Barack Obama has a very good grasp of what socialism is because he had one the very best teachers, Frank Marshall Davis--- who I am sure schooled the young Barack Obama well in Marxist-Leninist ideology. But, does this mean Barack Obama is a socialist?

In fact, just about every graduate from Harvard University's School of Business receives the best Marxist education money can buy... how many of the graduates are communists or socialists? If we are lucky, maybe a handful.

I have met socialists and communists who had less of an understanding about what socialism is than Barack Obama--- Sam Webb is one such person; that he would be stupid enough to go on national television and answer a question meant for Barack Obama, a question only Barack Obama should be asked--- without himself knowing what socialism is--- proves my point. Talk about the stupid trying to lead a dumb donkey!

Actually, Obama demonstrated a pretty good grasp of socialist thinking, and practice, when he asked in response to the taunts from the right-wing something to the effect: "Am I a socialist now because I might have shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a kid in grade school?"

I kind of doubt Barack Obama ever shared anything with anyone seeing as how he is nothing but a self-serving, self-promoting opportunist politician who only cares about himself to the exclusion of everyone else.

I have known a number of socialists and communists just like him... so, I think he just might be some kind of socialist or communist... but, I'm not about to call him "comrade." If he had been a communist or socialist before, "sell out" would be the more appropriate word now.

Is Obama a socialist or communist? Let this dumb donkey Obama answer this stupid question himself.

Socialists and communists shouldn't be concerned with this question in the least... what we should be concerned about is stopping the three wars raging in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and halting all further support and financial assistance to the Israeli killing machine and slashing the senseless military budget so we can solve the real problems people are experiencing.

I haven't seen Sam Webb or Billy Wharton addressing the problems of working people here in Minnesota, or anyplace else for that matter... they have been silent on the closing of the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant as two-thousand jobs are about to be flushed down the Mississippi and chopped up like suckers passing through the turbines of the hydro-dam which has powered this plant for over 80 years--- compliments of tax-payers.

Where is the call by Webb or Billy Bob Wharton for public ownership of this plant?

What the heck, they were even silent when their support was needed for SF 607, a piece of legislation brought forward by a few progressive Minnesota state legislators... and, then, where do "Communist" Sam Webb and "Socialist" Billy Wharton stand on a "people's bailout;" we didn't see hide nor hair of them when the same Minnesota state legislators brought forward the Minnesota People's Bailout to try to protect workers like the Ford workers losing their jobs.

Two-million casino workers employed in the Indian Gaming Industry at over 350 casino/resort/hotel/motel/restaurant/theme parks spread out across the country using "Compacts" to establish right-to-work for less without any rights colonies sending these two-million workers to jobs in smoke-filled places of employment without any rights under state or federal labor laws... the most Draconian working conditions in the world where these two-million workers are directly under the thumbs of outright gangsters and mobsters who bust into the homes of workers and beat them with baseball bats and steel pipes until their heads swell to the size of a basketball--- not a peep from Sam Webb or Billy Wharton.

Sam Webb and Billy Bob Wharton both can wax as eloquently as John Sweeney--- that Methodist preacher passing himself off as a labor leader--- about the Employee Free Choice Act; but, none of them have the courage to stand up and call for repealing the repressive "At-will hiring; at-will firing" legislation on the books in twenty-eight states--- in fact, none of them are even aware that this Draconian legislation is the major impediment to union organizing in the United States today; a hurdle not even the Employee Free Choice Act will be able to jump.

The real question here is not about whether Barack Obama is a socialist or communist.

The real question here isn't even whether or not Sam Webb and Billy Wharton are Communists and Socialists, respectively--- because we know Billy Wharton doesn't want to be called a Communist and Sam Webb has already stated he wants it known that he completely disassociates himself from 20th Century socialism.

The one and only issue involved in this question being asked as far as if Barack Obama is a socialist or communist is this:

Is the American working class going to tell these anti-communists to take their red-baiting and shove it where the sun doesn't shine?

All I got to say is that if with capitalism on the skids to oblivion dragging the rest of us along with it down the road to perdition; if the working class in the United States doesn't give red-baiting the boot and get up to speed real quick-like about what socialism is all about, we are in for some very rough times.

We might all be socialists now, but, are we all prepared to struggle for socialism to save out butts?

A little suggestion for Sam Webb, Billy Wharton and Barack Obama: If American workers start learning about the socialist alternative to capitalism from real communists like Marx, Engels, Lenin, William Z. Foster, James W. Ford, Earl Browder, Wyndham Mortimer, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Paul Robeson, Gus Hall, W.E.B. DuBois and Henry Winston, they might want to begin looking to see where they can find a safe haven because there are going to be some mighty angry workers in the good old U.S.A. And if I were them I would forget about those sandy beaches in the Cayman Islands.

It is nice that "Communist" Sam Webb and "Socialist" Billy Bob Wharton are sparring with Rupert Murdoch's boys; but, they might want to consider taking part in the real class struggle on the side of the working class against Barack Obama and his Wall Street crowd who are laughing like hell all the way to their banks in the Cayman Islands to deposit our tax-dollars and the profits they extract from our hides.

And while we are talking about what makes a socialist or communist we should consider where people stand in regard to imperialism.

Imperialism, U.S. imperialism in particular, is taking a heavy toll on working people, and humanity in general.

There are the obvious victims dying and wounded in these dirty imperialist wars.

Rather than acknowledging that "we are all socialists now," with so few people understanding what socialism is... maybe we should consider that most of us are all "victims of imperialism now" because the United States has over 800 military bases on foreign soil dotting the globe when we should have 800 public health care centers spread out across the United States providing free health care for all.

I think if we can get up to speed with a quick lesson on imperialism, we will be ready for "Socialism 101" in short order.

Alan L. Maki

Obama's No Socialist. I Should Know.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/13/AR2009031301899.html

By Billy Wharton
Sunday, March 15, 2009; Page B01

It took a massive global financial crisis, a failed military adventure and a popular repudiation of the Republican Party to make my national television debut possible. After 15 years of socialist political organizing -- everything from licking envelopes and handing out leaflets to the more romantic task of speaking at street demonstrations -- I found myself in the midtown Manhattan studio of the Fox Business Network on a cold February evening. Who ever thought that being the editor of the Socialist magazine, circulation 3,000, would launch me on a cable news career?

Obama's No Socialist. I Should Know.

The media whirlwind began in October with a call from a New York Times writer. He wanted a tour of the Socialist Party USA's national office. Although he was more interested in how much paper we used in our "socialist cubby hole" than in our politics, our media profile exploded. Next up, a pleasant interview by Swedish National Radio. Then Brian Moore, our 2008 presidential candidate, sparred with Stephen Colbert. Even the Wall Street Journal wanted a socialist to quote after the first bailout bill failed last fall. Traffic to our Web site multiplied, e-mail inquiries increased and meetings with potential recruits to the Socialist Party yielded more new members than ever before. Socialism -- an idea with a long history -- suddenly seemed to have a bright future in 21st-century America.

Whom did we have to thank for this moment in the spotlight? Oddly enough, Republican politicians such as Mike Huckabee and John McCain had become our most effective promoters. During his campaign, the ever-desperate McCain, his hard-charging running mate Sarah Palin and even a plumber named Joe lined up to call Barack Obama a "socialist." Last month, Huckabee even exclaimed that, "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics may be dead, but the Union of American Socialist Republics is being born."

We appreciated the newfound attention. But we also cringed as the debate took on the hysterical tone of a farcical McCarthyism. The question "Is Obama a socialist?" spread rapidly through a network of rightwing blogs, conservative television outlets and alarmist radio talk shows and quickly moved into the mainstream. "We Are All Socialists Now," declared a Newsweek cover last month. A New York Times reporter recently pinned Obama down with the question, "Are you a socialist, as some people have suggested?" The normally unflappable politician stumbled through a response so unconvincing that it required a follow-up call in which Obama claimed impeccable free market credentials.

All this speculation over whether our current president is a socialist led me into the sea of business suits, BlackBerrys and self-promoters in the studio at Fox Business News. I quickly realized that the antagonistic anchor David Asman had little interest in exploring socialist ideas on bank nationalization. For Asman, nationalization was merely a code word for socialism. Using logic borrowed from the 1964 thriller "The Manchurian Candidate," he portrayed Obama as a secret socialist, so far undercover that not even he understood that his policies were de facto socialist. I was merely a cudgel to be wielded against the president -- a physical embodiment of guilt by association.

The funny thing is, of course, that socialists know that Barack Obama is not one of us. Not only is he not a socialist, he may in fact not even be a liberal. Socialists understand him more as a hedge-fund Democrat -- one of a generation of neoliberal politicians firmly committed to free-market policies.

The first clear indication that Obama is not, in fact, a socialist, is the way his administration is avoiding structural changes to the financial system. Nationalization is simply not in the playbook of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his team. They favor costly, temporary measures that can easily be dismantled should the economy stabilize. Socialists support nationalization and see it as a means of creating a banking system that acts like a highly regulated public utility. The banks would then cease to be sinkholes for public funds or financial versions of casinos and would become essential to reenergizing productive sectors of the economy.

The same holds true for health care. A national health insurance system as embodied in the single-payer health plan reintroduced in legislation this year by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), makes perfect sense to us. That bill would provide comprehensive coverage, offer a full range of choice of doctors and services and eliminate the primary cause of personal bankruptcy -- health-care bills. Obama's plan would do the opposite. By mandating that every person be insured, ObamaCare would give private health insurance companies license to systematically underinsure policyholders while cashing in on the moral currency of universal coverage. If Obama is a socialist, then on health care, he's doing a fairly good job of concealing it.

Issues of war and peace further weaken the commander in chief's socialist credentials. Obama announced that all U.S. combat brigades will be removed from Iraq by August 2010, but he still intends to leave as many as 50,000 troops in Iraq and wishes to expand the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A socialist foreign policy would call for the immediate removal of all troops. It would seek to follow the proposal made recently by an Afghan parliamentarian, which called for the United States to send 30,000 scholars or engineers instead of more fighting forces.

Yet the president remains "the world's best salesman of socialism," according to Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina. DeMint encouraged supporters "to take to the streets to stop America's slide into socialism." Despite the fact that billions of dollars of public wealth are being transferred to private corporations, Huckabee still felt confident in proposing that "Lenin and Stalin would love" Obama's bank bailout plan.

Huckabee is clearly no socialist scholar, and I doubt that any of Obama's policies will someday appear in the annals of socialist history. The president has, however, been assigned the unenviable task of salvaging a capitalist system intent on devouring itself. The question is whether he can do so without addressing the deep inequalities that have become fundamental features of American society. So, President Obama, what I want to know is this: Can you lend legitimacy to a society in which 5 percent of the population controls 85 percent of the wealth? Can you sell a health-care reform package that will only end up enriching a private health insurance industry? Will you continue to favor military spending over infrastructure development and social services?

My guess is that the president will avoid these questions, further confirming that he is not a socialist except, perhaps, in the imaginations of an odd assortment of conservatives. Yet as the unemployment lines grow longer, the food pantries emptier and health care scarcer, socialism may be poised for a comeback in America. The doors of our "socialist cubby-hole" are open to anyone, including Obama. I encourage him to stop by for one of our monthly membership meetings. Be sure to arrive early to get a seat -- we're more popular than ever lately.

billyspnyc@yahoo.com

My response to "The Nation Magazine" forum on reimagining socialism

2009-03-28T16:24:00.004-05:00

We see what a Nation Forum on “Reimagining Socialism” consists of (See blog below); the same dishonesty in intellectualism with which The Nation has become associated with for many years now under the Editorship of Katrina vanden Heuvel whose “socialist credentials” consist of an anti-communist resume of unending attacks on real socialism where it existed--- most notably in the Soviet Union and the East European people’s socialist democracies now under the thumb of gangster capitalism, and unending attacks on Communist Parties without explaining how it is possible to organize socialist movements and how workers can come to power without Communist Parties.

One characteristic each and everyone of these essays is short of is specific solutions to our common problems.

Is it not strange that the views of working class Communists--- Marxists-Leninists--- would not be invited or tolerated in such a forum on socialism? Certainly Communists have demonstrated a right to be heard based upon our activities.

None-the-less, this Forum on socialism is very interesting, useful and informative--- as well as being welcome--- because it demonstrates very clearly the bankruptcy of these well-heeled, muddle-headed, middle class intellectual socialists who supported Barack Obama--- first making the ridiculous claim that he was a “progressive” which provided Obama to get through the primaries [actually they did such a good job with Obama many of us were left scratching our heads wondering if he wasn't some kind of closet socialist or even a Communist); then they proclaimed to the world, “No, no; Obama is no socialist like us, to help Obama get past the vicious red-baiting of John McCain and the Rush Limbaugh's of the world; and they now are making the claim that Obama is a “centrist leaning to the left” and that there is something “progressive” to be found in each of his actions even when every single one of his most important acts has been to further drive down the standard of living of the working class while pushing up the cost-of-living factors combining to make life miserable for working people in a way none of these well-heeled, muddle-headed, middle class intellectual socialist dreamers of utopias could ever comprehend or understand no matter how much they erroneously claim to understand “The Open Marxism” of Antonio Gramsci,” who, with Palmiro Togliatti developed our modern day understanding that Communist Party Clubs are the back-bone, strength, brain and action centers capable of bringing about socialism when these Clubs form a mighty and powerful network comprising the Communist Party giving leadership to working class struggles for reform which constantly advance the need for the socialist alternative to capitalism, without which socialism has never been achieved and without which socialism will never be achieved in the United States or anyplace else… and it was Lenin and his comrades in arms who pioneered the way to power based upon what they learned from studying about capitalism from Karl Marx and the failure of the French communards during their short-lived but heroic stand we know as the Paris Commune.

French communards who were murdered fighting for the rights of working people.

Not to mention that the defeat of fascism was largely accomplished due to the leadership of Joseph Stalin who had to act quickly to feed and educate a starving and mostly illiterate nation, adequately house an impoverished nation while building up its industrial might while the most advanced imperialist countries not only sat back hoping that the new socialist society and government would collapse, but was doing all in their power to try to cripple all efforts by the Soviet people to create a better life than what they inherited by a bunch of arrogant, backwards, mean, selfish and cruel czars who lived off the blood and sweat of the people who wallowed in poverty under a government whose policies were formulated under terms known as “benign neglect.”

Antonio Gramsci, worker, Italian Communist Party organizer, thinker, theorist, philosopher, writer, activist, elected politician and victim of brutal fascist political repression.

Some of the socialists can even wax eloquent about the "Communist Manifesto" but they fail to comprehend--- or possibly in quaintly, caffelatte-liberal fashion ignore the fact--- that the reason Marx and Engels wrote and distributed the "Communist Manifesto" was to help build Communist organizations, i.e. Communist Parties in every country consisting of networks of Communist Party Clubs in working class communities and where people worked and recreated--- something the "red" Finns did quite well in communities in many states across America.

What our middle class socialist friends fail to understand, is that the "Communist Manifesto" packaged with the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides us with a very powerful educational action packet.

And the closest any of these muddle-headed middle class intellectuals can come to bringing themselves to acknowledge the contributions of Communists in building socialism as an alternative to this capitalist system which is rotten to the core, presently on the skids to oblivion, dragging along the working class down the short, bumpy road to perdition is the mention of Lenin’s famous question without acknowledging his name: “What is to be done?”

“What is to be done?,” a question none of these self-proclaimed, muddle-headed middle class intellectual socialists has attempted to even remotely articulate an answer to.

We working class Communists are not afraid to stand our views up against these faux socialists and bring forward real solutions to this current capitalist economic mess now unfolding before us on a global scale which threatens to engulf us all even deeper in wars, poverty, misery and despair all of which has roots in the capitalist system which is based upon the exploitation of labor where there are only two sources of wealth: labor and Mother Nature; capitalists rob the first and rape the latter which is where all of our modern day problems arise.

From reading these essays one would not imagine there are problems involving trying to save jobs by saving factories and entire industries because these “socialists” have never called for the public ownership of a specific factory as a means to saving jobs… nor a comment from any of these “green” socialists as to what should be done to save the jobs of two-thousand workers employed at one of the greenest and largest mass production plants in the world of which a hydro-dam is situated adjacent to it on the Mighty Mississippi River located in the midst of a quaint neighborhood that built up around the plant as workers struggled for their rights to work in a safe and healthy work environment--- a working class struggle which has created one of the greenest communities in North America or, for that matter, anyplace else in the world… and not a single one of these muddle-headed, middle class intellectuals who first posed as progressives supporting Barack Obama now claiming to speak for socialists and socialism who acknowledge they have no political base or political home other than their ivory tower surroundings from which to test their socialist perspectives on us don’t even question that Communists have been left out of this forum on socialism and they completely ignore the very specific problems of working people and the working class as they drone on and on about the need to begin building the movement for socialism behind struggles for reforms.

It boggles my mind that these socialists have the audacity and arrogance to write about working people losing their jobs when they cannot even muster engaging in dialog about saving closing plants as in the auto industry… common sense, never mind socialist understanding which is assumed to contain a modicum of common sense, dictates that you cannot save the jobs of workers whose plants are being literally demolished by capitalists who are so mean and vicious that they will blow up a plant and demolish it just to evade competition from the public sector.

We do not hear from these socialists any suggestions about bringing the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant and the hydro-dam that has powered the operation for decades compliments of local, state and federal tax-payers who have pretty much subsidized the entire operation including a thirty-million dollar high technology-learning center which is part of the public school system.

One can only “imagine” the kind of movement which might emerge should these socialists The Nation magazine has enlisted to bring us this forum on “reimagining socialism,” should these same writers spend a little time talking to workers at the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant and other closing plants and mines and mills about their futures’ before sitting down at their keyboards to write these kinds of frivolous essays when working people require so much more.

Are there no workers who are competent writers The Nation could have recruited for its “reimagining socialism” forum?

We do not hear the thoughts of these socialist writers about making the minimum wage a real living wage, constantly updated through appropriate legislation based upon real cost-of-living factors; why not?

We do not hear from any of these muddle-headed, middle class, intellectual, socialists the need to forge a massive united peace movement which begins to really educate the American people to the real nature of imperialism--- the highest and last stage of capitalism in its most decadent form--- by suggesting that instead of 800 U.S. military bases on foreign soil, what we really need is 800 public health care centers spread out across the United States providing free universal access to comprehensive, all-inclusive health care to the American people.

Most of these writers deny that socialism is on the table right now as we are living in what can only be described as the greatest “Marxist moment” in all of human history.

Three wars rage on while many of these “socialists” accept Obama’s concept of “peace” to be the successful imperialist occupation of Iraq where the oil flows to the west as the profits surge into the pockets of the seven thieves comprising the global capitalist oil industry.

Each of these “socialists” talk about how ‘climate change” is one of the greatest dangers we as human beings and our living environment face; but, none of these muddle-headed middle class intellectual socialists will stand with the workers of the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant struggling to save their jobs and a model of green manufacturing.

All were fully aware of the legislation being put forward by a handful of Minnesota State Legislators to save the plant… none struck a key on their computer keyboards as legislation was defeated by the political allies of Barack Obama in the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party--- which derives part of its name from the most advanced political party independent from capital created by progressive, socialists and communists which ruled Minnesota politics for two decades submersed in the day-to-day struggles of working people for a better life… not even a mention from these “socialist” writers in The Nation magazine’s Forum On Socialism about the base and foundation we have from what remains of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party… a foundation of progressive and liberal thought that even this Republican Governor and one of the most well oiled and financed Republican machines has not been able to break through and crush.

One has to ask the question of these well-heeled, muddle-headed, middle class, intellectual socialists: What planet are you living on and writing from that you cannot answer even the most basic questions concerning “What Is To Be Done?” when it comes to addressing the specific problems of everyday life working people are experiencing?

Why no mention here from these socialists of the immediate need for a “people’s bailout?” No mention of the “Minnesota People’s Bailout” brought forward by the same small group of progressive Minnesota State Legislators who tried desperately to save the St. Paul Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant and hydro-dam in trying to save two-thousand good-paying union jobs providing these workers with decent work and a decent life. The “Minnesota People’s Bailout” could easily be used as a template by other state legislatures and the United States Congress to, as Minnesota State Senator David Tomassoni has said: “We need to work our way out of this economic mess not try to buy our way out;” a direct challenge to Barack Obama’s pro-profit, pro-Wall Street, anti-people agenda.

To hear it from these well-heeled, muddle-headed, middle class, intellectual socialists, there are no Wall Street coupon clippers nor capitalist sooth-Sayers… there is only the “high road” to socialism working with friendly capitalists or the “low road” to socialism forced on us by the merchants of death and destruction… according to them, the first road places socialism someplace in the distant future; the latter road may kill us all before we can get there… great excuses for well-heeled, middle class intellectuals to evade the here and now… especially when socialism is so abhorrent to Barack Obama he runs from it like he ran after getting the socialist oriented New Party endorsement in Chicago and ran for the door before saying “thanks;” staying just long enough to, reluctantly, get his picture taken.

It would be nice if just once The Nation magazine and its editor posing as a great defender of “class-less democracy” could see its way to allowing a Communist to venture an opinion on this question of “reimagining socialism” because such an opinion might put a little “zip” and “gusto” into the discussion of these well-heeled, latte-loving, muddle-headed, middle class intellectual socialists whose only value for an expensively bound Communist Manifesto is as an ornament on their ebony coffee tables with ivory drawer handles; intellectuals who fail to bring even the “love me, love me; I’m a liberal” enthusiasm for socialism into this discussion much less bringing forward the needed ideas working people need to become engaged in the struggle for real power… social, political and economic power.

It is almost like these writers are more afraid of socialism than they are of capitalism… they can afford to place socialism on the back-burner for another day waiting for working people to buy their coffee-table books. Working people cannot afford the luxury of such intellectualism as they struggle daily just for survival. Working people cannot afford the luxury of putting off the struggle for socialism because the struggle for socialism is now, more than ever, part of the struggle for survival.

Anyways, read what these writers in The Nation have to say… then read my blog for a working class Communist perspective on what socialist activists are doing as these middle class intellectuals, long divorced from any struggles, are writing about… some of the writings contain some good thoughts we can make use of.

Reading the views of others always helps us strengthen our own ideas about what the politics and economics of livelihood is really all about; real socialism.

To the extent that these essays in The Nation magazine contribute to a wider dialog, discussion and debate about the socialist alternative to capitalism they are most welcome and useful and the writers should be thanked for this; but that is about all… with a couple notable exceptions.

I do find it interesting that The Nation magazine would deny its readers voices from those with a political perspective who organized and led the struggles for the New Deal reforms through building the very powerful “People’s Front” while educating working people and so many people from all walks of life about the socialist alternative to capitalism.

From these writers we read their joke about the socialist economist concerning recession; but, from these socialist writers there is not the acknowledgment we are living in the midst of a full-fledged capitalist economic depression.

I find it rather ironic that these writers in "The Nation Magazine Forum on Reimagining Socialism all seem to think that socialism is not on the table today as if by some kind of pious proclamation they have the right to take it off the table.

Because none of these writers, by virtue of their middle class status, is suffering the brunt of the attacks on the working class creating a crises of everyday living for so many working people they have no sense of urgency to solve any of the myriad of problems working people are just expected to endure. In taking socialism off the table they don't even have the plain old common decency to address the need for specific reforms to alleviate the problems working people are experiencing.

For these middle class intellectuals every demand that working people make for reforms is always too much when they say that things have to be accomplished "incrementally." Socialism is too big of a leap but so is a living minimum wage based upon real cost of living factors is too much at one time.

These muddle-headed middle class intellectual socialists remain quiet as their Democratic Party friends bring forward the idea that a 70 cent increase in the minimum wage should be delayed in this time of crisis for restaurant workers because the bosses would suffer!

To the way of thinking of these muddle-headed middle class intellectuals working people will have to patiently "wait their turn" for Barack Obama's second term.

I am wondering if these middle class intellectual socialists who like to hold up Antonio Gramsci in opposition to Lenin think that Gramsci would set aside this Marxist moment by saying socialism is not on the table?

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090323/ali

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090330/davis

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090330/duggan

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090323/ehrenreich_fletcher

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090323/foster

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090330/henwood

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090323/mckibben

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090323/parenti

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090323/pollin

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090330/prashad

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090323/solnit

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090323/wallerstein

Build a Communist Party Club in your neighborhood, school or workplace today so we can bring real socialist perspectives into the public square for dialog, discussion and debate.

Yours in the struggle,

Alan L. Maki

58891 County Road 13

Warroad, Minnesota 56763

Phone: 218-386-2432

Cell phone: 651-587-5541

E-mail: amaki000@centurytel.net

Check out my blog:

Thoughts From Podunk

http://thepodunkblog.blogspot.com/

Rising to the Occasion Reimagining Socialism: A Nation Forum

2009-03-24T17:37:00.002-05:00

The Nation.

Socialism's all the rage. "We Are All Socialists Now," Newsweek declares. As the right wing tells it, we're already living in the U.S.S.A. But what do self-identified socialists (and their progressive friends) have to say about capitalism's current troubles? We've asked them, and you can read their spirited replies in the forum that follows this essay. --The Editors

Rising to the Occasion
Reimagining Socialism: A Nation Forum
By Barbara Ehrenreich & Bill Fletcher Jr.

This article appeared in the March 23, 2009 edition of The Nation.

If you haven't heard socialists doing much crowing over the fall of capitalism, it isn't just because there aren't enough of us to make an audible crowing sound. We, as much as anyone on Wall Street in, say, 2006, appreciate the resilience of American capitalism--its ability to regroup and find fresh avenues for growth, as it did after the depressions of 1877, 1893 and the 1930s. In fact, The Communist Manifesto can be read not only as an indictment of capitalism but as a breathless paean to its dynamism. And we all know the joke about the Marxist economist who successfully predicted eleven out of the last three recessions.

But this time the patient may not get up from the table, no matter how many times the electroshock paddles of "stimulus" are applied. We seem to have entered the death spiral where rising unemployment leads to reduced consumption and hence to greater unemployment. Any schadenfreude we might be tempted to feel as executives lose their corporate jets and the erstwhile Masters of the Universe wipe egg from their faces is quickly dashed by the ever more vivid suffering around us. Food pantries and shelters can no longer keep up with the demand; millions face old age without pensions and with their savings gutted; we personally are consumed with anxiety about the future that awaits our children and grandchildren.

Besides, it wasn't supposed to happen this way. There was supposed to be a revolution, remember? The socialist idea, prediction, faith or whatever was that capitalism would fall when people got tired of trying to live on the crumbs that fall from the chins of the rich and rose up in some fashion--preferably inclusively, democratically and nonviolently--and seized the wealth for themselves. Such a seizure would have looked nothing like "nationalization" as currently discussed, in which public wealth flows into the private sector with little or no change in the elites that control it or in the way the control is exercised. Our expectation as socialists was that the huge amount of organizing required for revolutionary change would create an infrastructure for governance, built out of--among other puzzle pieces--unions, community organizations, advocacy groups and new organizations of the unemployed and nouveau poor.

It was also supposed to be a simple matter for the masses to take over or "seize" the physical infrastructure of industrial capitalism--the "means of production"--and start putting it to work for the common good. But much of the means of production has fled overseas--to China, for example, that bastion of authoritarian capitalism. When we look around our increasingly shuttered landscape and survey the ruins of finance capitalism, we see bank upon bank, realty and mortgage companies, title companies, insurance companies, credit-rating agencies and call centers, but not enough enterprises making anything we could actually use, like food or pharmaceuticals. In recent years, capitalism has become increasingly and almost mystically abstract. Outside manufacturing and the service sector, fewer and fewer people could explain to their children what they did for a living. The brightest students went into finance, not physics. The biggest urban buildings housed cubicles and computer screens, not assembly lines, laboratories, studios or classrooms. Even our flagship industry, manufacturing autos, would require major retooling to make something we could use--not more cars, let alone more SUVs, but more windmills, buses and trains.

What is most galling, from a socialist perspective, is the dawning notion that capitalism may be leaving us with less than it found on this planet, about 400 years ago, when the capitalist mode of production began to take off. Marx imagined that industrial capitalism had potentially solved the age-old problem of scarcity and that there was plenty to go around if only it was equitably distributed. But industrial capitalism--with some help from industrial communism--has brought about a level of environmental destruction that threatens our species along with countless others. The climate is warming, the oil supply is peaking, the deserts are advancing and the seas are rising and contain fewer and fewer fish for us to eat. You don't have to be a freaky doomster to see that extinction may be what's next on the agenda.

In this situation, with both long-term biological and day-to-day economic survival in doubt, the only relevant question is: do we have a plan, people? Can we see our way out of this and into a just, democratic, sustainable (add your own favorite adjectives) future?

Let's just put it right out on the table: we don't. At least we don't have some blueprint on how to organize society ready to whip out of our pockets. Lest this sound negligent on our part, we should explain that socialism was an idea about how to rearrange ownership and distribution and, to an extent, governance. It assumed that there was a lot worth owning and distributing; it did not imagine having to come up with an entirely new and environmentally sustainable way of life. Furthermore, the history of socialism has been disfigured by too many cadres who had a perfect plan, if only they could win the next debate, carry out a coup or get enough people to fall into line behind them.

But we do understand--and this is one of the things that make us "socialists"--that the absence of a plan, or at least some sort of deliberative process for figuring out what to do, is no longer an option. The great promise of capitalism, as first suggested by Adam Smith and recently enshrined in "market fundamentalism," was that we didn't have to figure anything out, because the market would take care of everything for us. Instead of promoting self-reliance, this version of free enterprise fostered passivity in the face of that inscrutable deity, the Market. Deregulate, let wages fall to their "natural" level, turn what remains of government into an endless source of bounty for contractors--whee! Well, that hasn't worked, and the core idea of socialism still stands: that people can get together and figure out how to solve their problems, or at least a lot of their problems, collectively. That we--not the market or the capitalists or some elite group of über-planners--have to control our own destiny.

We admit: we don't even have a plan for the deliberative process that we know has to replace the anarchic madness of capitalism. Yes, we have some notion of how it should work, based on our experiences with the civil rights movement, the women's movement and the labor movement, as well as with countless cooperative enterprises. This notion centers on what we still call "participatory democracy," in which all voices are heard and all people equally respected. But we have no precise models of participatory democracy on the scale that is currently called for, involving hundreds of millions, and potentially billions, of participants at a time.

What might this look like? There are some intriguing models to study, like the Brazilian Workers Party's famous experiments in developing a participatory budget in Porto Alegre. Z Magazine founder Michael Albert developed a detailed approach to mass-based planning that he calls participatory economics, or "parecon," and one of us (Fletcher, in his book Solidarity Divided, written with Fernando Gapasin) has proposed a locally based network of people's assemblies. But all this is experimental, and we realize that any system for mass democratic planning will be messy. It will stumble; it will be wrong sometimes; and there will be a lot of running back to the drawing board.

But as socialists we know the spirit in which this great project of collective salvation must be undertaken, and that spirit is solidarity. An antique notion until very recently, it flickered into life again in the symbolism and energy of the Obama campaign. The Yes We Can! chant was the slogan of the United Farm Workers movement and went on to be adopted by various unions and community-based organizations to emphasize what large numbers of people can accomplish through collective action. Even Obama's relatively anodyne calls for a new commitment to volunteerism and community service seem to have inspired a spirit of "giving back." If the idea of democratic planning, of controlling our destiny, is the intellectual content of socialism, then solidarity is its emotional energy source--the moral understanding and the searing conviction that, however overwhelming the challenges, we are in this together.

Solidarity, though, is an empty sentiment without organization--ways of thinking and working together, and of connecting the social movements that are battling injustice every day. We see a tremendous opportunity in the bleak fact that millions of Americans have been rendered redundant by the capitalist economy and are free to dedicate their considerable talents to creating a more just and sustainable alternative. But if we are serious about collective survival in the face of our multiple crises, we have to build organizations, including explicitly socialist ones, that can mobilize this talent, develop leadership and advance local struggles. And we have to be serious, because the capitalist elites who have run things so far have forfeited all trust or even respect, and we--progressives of all stripes--are now the only grown-ups around.

Other Contributions to the Forum

(Note: The links to these essays are in blog above.)

Immanuel Wallerstein, "Follow Brazil's Example"

Bill McKibben, "Together, We Save the Planet"

Rebecca Solnit, "The Revolution Has Already Occurred"

Tariq Ali, "Capitalism's Deadly Logic"

Robert Pollin, "Be Utopian: Demand the Realistic"

John Bellamy Foster, "Economy, Ecology, Empire"

Christian Parenti, "Limits and Horizons"

Doug Henwood, "A Post-Capitalist Future is Possible"

Mike Davis, "The Necessary Eloquence of Protest"

Lisa Duggan, "Imagine Otherwise"

Vijay Prashad, "The Dragons, Their Dragoons"

Kim Moody, "Socialists Need to Be Where the Struggle Is "

Wen Jiabao: The crisis has not yet hit the bottom, and it is hard to predict what other problems there will be down the path

2009-02-03T08:34:00.013-06:00

"The crisis has not yet hit the bottom, and it is hard to predict what other problems there will be down the path,” Wen Jiabao

I suppose one should consider Wen Jiabao carrying around a copy of Adam Smith's book, "Theory of Moral Sentiments," an improvement over carrying around Mao's "Little Red Book;" however, Adam Smith certainly does not explain capitalist economic depressions nor what comes after capitalism.

I do find it an interesting technique Wen Jiabao is using to throw talk about "moral sentiments" in the face of capitalists... however, we really need to be asking why he isn't also following up with an even stronger dose of Marxism.

Morality has never been a very powerful influence on capitalists in spite of all their studies of Adam Smith... we have seen capitalist "morality" in play in Gaza in recent days. We witnessed capitalist "morality" in what came with Hurricane Katrina.

One must suspect that Barack Obama in his studies at Harvard was likely to have very thoroughly studied Adan Smith's, "Theory of Moral Sentiments;" yet, Obama remained silent as the Israeli killing machine slaughtered hundreds in a shocking, modern day pogrom.

Wen Jiaboa is preaching to the capitalist hypocrites like those who used to wave Mao's "Little Red Book" of quotations in the fight against imperialism. All Wen Jiaboa has to do is add a few quotes from the Bible to make his dog-and-pony show complete and he will have an act fit to star in the center ring under the Big Top in the capitalist circus. Perhaps some clown will even toss a shoe at Wen Jiaboa's head to bring the act to conclusion before a gaggle of clowns comes in to allow him to leave the center ring to get us ready for the main act--- Barack Obama.

This is a very interesting comment coming from Wen Jiabao, the Chinese leader who is supposed to be a Communist.

This comment causes one to wonder if Wen Jiabao has ever studied Marxism because he demonstrates very little grasp of the capitalist economy in making this statement... and he demonstrates an even shallower understanding of Marxism in saying, in this interview, that he "thought things were beginning to turn around."

Wen Jiabao only would have to read basic Marxist texts like "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" to understand the capitalist economy is coming crashing down in a depression which should enable Wen Jiabao to conclude that China will have to find solutions to its problems in expanding socialist democracy and the socialist economy rather then by collaborating with the imperialists.

Very troubling is Wen Jiabao's remark: "I want to make clear here that I will be most sincere in all my answers, but I may not tell you everything.

"May not tell you everything," is a very disconcerting comment coming from one who lays claim to being a Communist leader.

Why would any Communist refuse to tell working people in China or any place else in the world what he or she fully understands and knows?

Communists have never withheld the truth from working people... only the faux--- fake Communists, the revisionists and sellouts--- who find protection in cuddling up to capitalist politicians like Barack Obama and the Wall Street crowd pulling Obama's strings, rather than throwing in their lot with the working class proceed in such a dishonest manner.

In fact, it is relatively easy for any working class woman or man to figure out what is going on and just how desperate the situation is; a situation which a leader of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board has described as, "Not your garden variety recession."

In fact, to begin to understand what is going on with the capitalist economy we have to understand that this is not merely a "global economic downturn;" but, rather, a global capitalist economic depression of immense proportions from which capitalism is never going to "recover."

All the facts are there for Wen Jiabao, or anyone else to see, if they are open-minded enough to try to understand what is happening.

It will be virtually impossible for anyone to understand what is going on with the capitalist economy without turning to Marxism for answers simply because Karl Marx and Frederick Engels made the most exhaustive study of the capitalist economy.

One does not have to be a Communist to read and study what the Marxists have to say about economics; however, solving the problems capitalism has created is another matter.

The capitalists have reaped the profits and left the working class with poverty and problems... huge problems; the closer we examine the problems the reality is the larger the problems become.

Make no mistake, capitalism is on the skids to oblivion and humanity is now well along down the road to perdition.

Frederick Engels, Karl Marx' friend, colleague and comrade had this to say which very clearly defines what is happening to the capitalist economy today:

From: Frederick Engels's--- Socialism: Utopian and Scientific/ (part of his /Anti-Dühring/), is a description of the crisis of capitalism that seems uncannily appropriate to today.

* * *

Commerce is at a standstill, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again. Little by little the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit and speculation, which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began--in the ditch of a crisis. And so over and over again. We have now, since the year 1825, gone through this five times, and at the present moment (1877) we are going through it for the sixth time.... The fact that the socialised organisation of production within the factory has developed so far that it has become incompatible with the anarchy of production in society, which exists side by side with and dominates it, is brought home to the capitalists themselves by the violent concentration of capital that occurs during crises, through the ruin of many large, and a still greater number of small, capitalists. The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces, its own creations. It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of subsistence, available labourers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance. But "abundance becomes the source of distress and want" (Fourier), because it is the very thing that prevents the transformation of the means of production and subsistence into capital. For in capitalistic society the means of production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means of exploiting human labour power.

Frederick Engels's---
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific/
part of his...
Anti Dühring/
New York: International Publishers, 1935, pages 64-65

Perhaps Wen Jiabao doesn't feel comfortable citing Frederick Engels for fear of offending his new found capitalist friends... however, if anyone believes this is not what is happening with the capitalist economy they should step forward with their reasons... Wen Jiabao failing to point this out is not helping anyone except a small grouping of capitalist who continue to cling to power simply because so many working people do not understand what Engels was writing about.

The problems are too big and far to complex for capitalism to resolve.

Hurricane Katrina exposed this; even though there are many who would like to dump all blame on George Bush.For sure George Bush was a big part of the problem; but, what hurricane Katrina and the aftermath demonstrated is that capitalism is simply not able to solve big problems in a way that is good for most of the people--- people who happen to be, in the majority, working people who are suffering. Katrina created the damage, but, Mother Nature was assisted in her rage by a very corrupt government which had abandoned taking care of public infrastructure as capitalists stole the wealth created by workers, thus preventing proper maintenance of dikes and canals, etc. And after the damage was done, there have been no resources to repair the damage and restore the community because capitalists are hoarding the wealth--- funds which should be available to rebuild after such a natural disaster.

Whether in the aftermath of Katrina or the many other problems now being experienced by people across the globe we are all confronted with a common problem: The tremendous wealth working people have created now belongs to the capitalist exploiters and we are confronted with the very problem Frederick Engels describes above which Wen Jiabao either is not familiar with like so many other people, or, this is one of those things he chooses not to talk about.

This is a very important interview; what is sad is that working people have to read between the lines and try to figure out what Wen Jiabao did not tell... fortunately, we can study Marxism for ourselves to learn what Wen Jiabao has apparently promised his new found capitalist friends he would not tell working people.

This is a very interesting article from the Financial Times and a very informative interview. I would encourage everyone to read, and re-read the article and interview.

I would suggest that in reading the article and interview that you repeatedly ask yourself: What is going to happen to the lives of working people on the way down to "the bottom;" and, do we really want to find out what is waiting for us "at the bottom?"

I do not use the word "perdition" loosely.

Make no mistake, capitalism is on the skids to oblivion and we are well down the capitalist road to perdition.

Wen Jiabao in stating, "it is hard to predict what other problems there will be down the path" would have been more accurate--- and honest--- in stating something like: try to imagine the problems before us on the capitalist path; whatever problems you might imagine, the problems are going to be much worse.

Alan L. Maki

[Note: The Full Transcript of the interview with Wen Jiabao from the Financial Times of London upon which the story below is based can be found at the end of this story.]

Downturn causes 20 million job losses in China

By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing and Geoff Dyer in London

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/19c25aea-f0f5-11dd-8790-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

Published: February 2 2009

More than 20 million rural migrant workers in China have lost their jobs and returned to their home villages or towns as a result of the global economic crisis, government figures revealed on Monday.

By the start of the Chinese new year festival on January 25, 15.3 per cent of China’s 130m migrant workers had lost their jobs and left coastal manufacturing centres to return home, said officials quoting a survey from the agriculture ministry.

The job losses were a direct result of the global economic crisis and its impact on export-oriented manufacturers, said Chen Xiwen, director of the Office of Central Rural Work Leading Group. He warned that the flood of unemployed migrants would pose challenges to social stability in the countryside.

The figure of 20 million unemployed migrants does not include those who have stayed in cities to look for work after being made redundant and is substantially higher than the figure of 12 million that Wen Jiabao, premier, gave to the Financial Times in an interview on Sunday. Speaking on a visit to the UK on Monday, Mr Wen said there had been signs at the end of last year the Chinese economy might be starting to recover.

In a speech at Cambridge University later, he warned that the global economy could face further problems. “The crisis has not yet hit the bottom, and it is hard to predict what other problems there will be down the path,” he said. Governments should avoid any policies that allowed them to “progress at the expense of others”, he added.

Mr Wen’s speech was interrupted by a protester who called him a “dictator” and threw a shoe at the stage – an act reminiscent of the Iraqi journalist who threw shoes at George W. Bush, former US president, at a press conference in Baghdad last year. Police said they had arrested the man.

Production in China’s manufacturing sector declined for the sixth successive month in January, according to Hong Kong brokerage CLSA, which said on Monday that its purchasing managers’ index hit 42.2, up marginally from December but well below the no-change mark of 50.

This is the Full Transcript of the interview the story above with Wen Jiabao is based on.

Published: February 2 2009 10:51 | Last updated: February 2 2009 10:51

The interview was conducted by Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times

Wen Jiabao: I want to make clear here that I will be most sincere in all my answers, but I may not tell you everything.

Lionel Barber: Premier, when you were in Davos this week, and everybody was talking about how to restore confidence, there was also some talk about shooting bankers; that certainly will not restore confidence. What can China do today, in this global financial crisis, to restore confidence?

WJ: Yes, indeed, I attended the Davos WEF Annual Meeting, and paid a visit to the European countries. I want to call this trip a journey of confidence. I have brought with me confidence in tiding over the difficulties caused by the financial crisis. I have brought with me the confidence that China will work closely with the European countries to push forward our strategic partnership. And I have brought with me the confidence that China will work with the international community to get through the difficult times together.

I’m confident that the Chinese economy will be able to get through the difficult times caused by the financial crisis. This confidence has been based on a scientific approach, as well as the realities in today’s world, as well as in China. The source of my confidence is based on the correct judgment we have made of the current situation.

I feel confident, because over the past 30 years of reform and opening up, China has put in place a solid, material and technical foundation, and we have now in place good institutions and mechanisms.

I’m confident because China has a stable financial system. And also because China has a big market potential and a large room for manoeuvre.

Most importantly, my confidence is based on the decisive and firm decisions that the Chinese government has adopted. We took these decisions with great intensity and at a proper pace.

I think I have given you a sketch of what the Chinese government has done, and if you are interested in any details, I’m ready to answer any question.

LB: Is this stimulus package big enough? Or do you believe further measures will be needed?

WJ: In meeting the financial crisis, it is imperative that governments must adopt a big enough package plan to stimulate the economic development. Such a plan must be comprehensive and complete. It must target both the root causes and symptoms of the issues, and also take into account both immediate difficulties and long term development.

Our package plan has five key components.

Number one: we want to stimulate greater domestic demand that will be mainly supported by massive government spending.

Number two: we are making adjustment to, and revitalising ten key industries.

Number three: we will take steps to advance technical upgrading.

Number four: we aim to put in place a fairly comprehensive safety net.

And number five: we aim to preserve financial stability to support economic development.

Do you want me to cite some figures, or statistics of that?

We have an investment programme worth Rmb4 trillion within two years to stimulate domestic demand, especially consumer demand.

We will spend Rmb600bn on scientific and technical innovation and technical upgrading.

We will make an investment of Rmb850bn for the improvement of medical and health care system.

The financial crisis has not yet hit the bottom, and we will continue to follow very closely the development of the situation.

We may take further new timely and decisive measures…

All these measures have to be taken pre-emptively before an economic recession, so as to maximise the desirable effect, otherwise our efforts will be wasted.

LB: Did you see, as many economists in Asia witnessed, a very sharp decline in GDP in the fourth quarter in China, like falling off a cliff?

WJ: China’s GDP was at 9 per cent as a whole last year, but in the fourth quarter of 2008 we also had a big decline and it fell to 6.8 per cent. As a result of the international financial crisis, we are seeing the diminishing external demand.

Our businesses are now experiencing difficulties. We now have over capacity in some industries and also rising unemployment. Our economy is under increased downward pressure and all this means that we are now facing great difficulties. Maybe you will ask how come you still feel confident under such circumstances.

LB: How can you be so confident that you can magically hit that 8 per cent figure? And how can you stop all those statistical experts saying.

WJ: Well, I think this is dependent on four factors. First, we must ensure that all policy measures we have adopted are the right ones as well as the effective ones. So far all these policy measures we have adopted are aimed at stimulating the real economy and also stimulating spending.

Well, actually the major impact of the financial crisis on the Chinese economy has been on its real economy. Secondly, one must act fast. We started to take action from July last year and we started to adopt massive steps from October last year.

During last December the central government took the decision of making an investment of Rmb100bn and I can tell you now that this investment has been put in place in terms of real funds and on what projects the money will be spent. Before the Spring Festival we also made available another investment of Rmb130bn and the funds were disbursed to the necessary projects.

Thirdly, we must take forceful steps. Under special circumstances; necessary and extraordinary measures are required. We should not be restricted by conventions.

Success or failure depends on the pace and intensity of those measures. Fourth, we must make sure that these measures are effective ones.

Around the end of last year and early this year we took steps to make the household appliances, agricultural machinery, as well as automobiles more available to the rural areas of China.

From the beginning of January this year we started to undertake the transformation of the value added tax in China, which saved businesses in China Rmb120bn. All these measures have already been implemented.

LB: Consumer spending, Premier Wen, is crucial. Do you agree with the proposition that consumer spending is patriotic?

WJ: We would not put it as simply as that. I think that is a view that is maybe held by some media people or by some individuals.

But we do believe that consumer spending is vital in boosting economic development. I don’t think we can know how much a consumer will spend eventually, and whether he wants to spend is not dependant on what kind of slogan we have.

But it is really dependant on how much money he has in his pocket and whether we have those marketable products available. We have actually taken some steps to address this issue. At the beginning of this year we gave lump sum subsidies to 74 million people.

On average each will have Rmb100 to Rmb150. For the fifth time we have raised the pension benefits for enterprise retirees by 10 per cent and each one will have Rmb110. We have also increased the basic cost of living for people living in difficult circumstances and increased the special assistance and allowances for the groups who are entitled to them. We have also taken another step that is very difficult.

That is we have increased the wages for the 12m middle and primary school teachers who are in the compulsory education period in the Chinese educational system. We want to bring the wage level of those teachers up to the same level as the public servants.

I think people will be ready to spend when they have the money. We also took the policy that from January 20 2009 to December 31st 2009 there will be a policy of halving the purchasing tax of vehicles of 1.6 litre engines or below, and on the first day the policy was introduced it gave such a strong boost to the sales of automobiles on the Chinese market that even the inventories were all gone.

LB: Before I turn to the international aspects of this crisis I have one small question regarding rural China. You visited over 2,000 Chinese counties I understand? What specific measures are you taking to assure social stability as unemployment rises and many, many people are returning to the land? And within that question, one last question on the Agricultural Bank of China. Are you planning to use $800bn to recapitalise it.

Translator: The Agricultural Bank of China?

WJ: When I was Vice Premier of the State Council rural affairs in China were already a part of my portfolio, and since I became the Premier of the State Council I have always put rural affairs at the forefront of the government agenda in relation to the development of the Chinese economy.

As you said, the financial crisis has caused some bankruptcies of businesses and also made the migrant workers return to the countryside. In total we have about 12m migrant workers who have returned to the rural areas.

Some western countries may wonder whether this will be a source of social instability. Well, I want to tell you that in China we have altogether about 200m migrant workers working in the urban areas, and the population of migrant workers searching jobs across provinces is about 120m.

As I said, about 12m migrant workers have chosen to return to the countryside because of the financial crisis. As this is a floating population, it is easy to understand that they will come to cities when there are job opportunities there and they will choose to return to the countryside when there aren’t.

When they have returned to the countryside you can see that, for most of them, they still have their piece of land in the rural areas. I think land provides the most important safeguard for the lives of those farmers in China.

We should thank those Chinese migrant workers because they made an enormous contribution to China’s modernisation drive and, in times of this financial crisis, they have also become a big reservoir of the labour force.

With regard to the Agricultural Bank of China, this is the last bank among the five major commercial banks in China which is undertaking reform.

I want to point out one thing here, that it is largely because we started the reform in China’s banking sector about 10 years ago that now we have seen the Chinese major banks are now in a fairly healthy condition in terms of the quality and scale of their assets, the profitability of those banks, the proportion of NPLs (non-performing loans), as well as the flow of capital in those banks. We took these measures, including the reducing of non-performing loans in the banks, improving the corporate governance structure in the banks, as well as making them shareholding companies.

There are four key priorities in our reform with regard to the ABC. One is that we must ensure this reform will serve the purpose of agricultural development. Secondly, we must take continued measures to dispose of those non-performing assets. Number three, the government will take steps to inject capital into the bank. Fourthly, we will undertake the reform of putting in place a corporate governance structure. Our decision on this recapitalisation is about US$30bn

LB: You’ve outlined some important measures that China has taken to stimulate its economy but the world expects so much of China, and America in particular. This past year there was more pressure on China regarding the renminbi and the Treasury secretary referred to China “manipulating” its currency. Have you received assurances from President Obama that America will be more accommodating, and what do you say to those charges that you are manipulating your own money?

WJ: To allege that China is manipulating its currency exchange rate is completely unfounded. From the second half of 2005 we have started to conduct the reform in China’s exchange rate regime. With more than three years of the reform, the renminbi has appreciated by 21 per cent in actual terms against the US dollar and 12 per cent against the Euro.

Now we have in place a market based managed floating exchange rate regime with a reference to a basket of currencies. This regime is consistent with China’s actual conditions and meets China’s actual needs. I want to make very clear here that it’s to maintain the basic stability of the Chinese renminbi on a reasonable and balanced level.

It’s not only in the interests of China but also the world economy. It is in the interests of the efforts of the international community in overcoming the financial crisis. Many people have not come to see this point. If we have drastic fluctuations in the renminbi exchange rate it will only be a big disaster

LB: If I understand you, Premier Wen, you are supporting what the Chinese authorities said 10 years ago with the ruling out of a depreciation of renminbi?

WJ: I think I have made my point very clear. That is, we practise a managed floating exchange rate regime and we preserve the basic stability of the exchange rate on a reasonable and balanced level.

LB: Everybody understands that the current financial crisis was manufactured, if you like, in America. It originated in America. There were many mistakes made in terms of managing risk and regulation but what do you say to those who believe that a part of the problem is the imbalance in the world economy, with China’s $2 trillion of reserves?

WJ: I think such a view is ridiculous. I think the reason for this financial crisis is the imbalance of some economies themselves. They have for a long time had double deficits and they keep up a high level of consumption on the basis of mass borrowing.

In those economies the financial institutions have not been put under effective regulation and the financial institutions have reaped massive profits with a very high leverage ratio.

Once such a bubble bursts, the whole world has been exposed to a big disaster. China is a very big developing country, with 1.3bn population.

The per capita GDP of China is only 1/16th of that of the UK. We do need a large pool of financial resources to achieve economic development and improve the people’s livelihood.

I think that it is confusing right and wrong when people who have been overspending blame those who lent them the money. In Chinese there is actually a proverb expressing this kind of situation which proves the character in the Chinese novel, Journey to the West, Zhu Ba Jie.

The proverb means to blame those who have actually done you a favour for your own wrongdoing. Well, when I shared this view of mine with the business leaders at Davos, they agreed with me on this.

LB: Premier, you're still going to buy US Treasury bonds, I hope.

WJ: Well, this is indeed a very sensitive issue. We do have very big foreign exchange reserves, and these reserves must be well run. Buying foreign Treasury bonds is one way of running these massive reserves. But as to whether we will continue to buy the Treasury bonds, and how many we are going to buy, I think we need to take into consideration China's own needs, and also the need that we must maintain the safety and the good value of our foreign exchange reserves.

We want to see the turnaround, or the recovery of the US economy. We believe that to maintain a stable international financial market is in the interests of shoring up market confidence, overcoming the financial crisis, and facilitating early recovery of the international markets.

LB: Would China be prepared to support the calls in some quarters for some of the reserves to be recycled through the IMF in return for the necessary award of greater votes for China in the IMF to help to manage this global financial crisis?

WJ: We believe it is imperative that we should first undertake reform in international financial institutions, including the IMF. And through the reform, we should increase the voting share, the representation, and the say of developing countries. At the same time, the oversight of how the capital at international financial institutions is used should be strengthened.

LB: I asked the question because for 30 years some people have said capitalism will save China, and now maybe people are saying China must save capitalism.

WJ: Well, I don’t see it this way. I still have a very clear mind on this particular point. China remains a big developing country with a 1.3bn population. We do face arduous tasks, and our way ahead will be a long one.

If you have seen the Chinese cities in the coastal areas, maybe you don't see much a difference between those cities and London, but if you have ever been to China's rural areas, particularly the western areas of China, you will see a big gap.

I firmly believe that running our own affairs well is the biggest contribution to entire mankind. I think there are three must-dos. First, we must address both the symptoms and root causes of the problem. One should not only tend to the head when the head aches, or tend to the foot when the foot hurts. We must enhance cooperation rather than enter into a confrontational relationship. We must run our own affairs well respectively, instead of shifting troubles to others.

LB: Premier Wen, did President Obama offer some assurances in this respect?

WJ: It has not been long since the inaugural speech of President Obama. We have been following closely the statements made by the new US administration. We look forward to early contacts with the new US government, and we believe that to maintain cooperation between China and the United States serves world peace, stability and prosperity.

LB: With respect, Premier Wen, just to press you, so it's not correct - some reports have said that President Obama has given a personal message reassuring China that the renminbi and other matters will not be used in an aggressive way; that America will be more accommodating? There's no personal message?

WJ: In his telephone conversation with President Hu Jintao the day before yesterday, he expressed his readiness to enhance cooperation with China. Yet, at the same time, we do see there are different voices within the United States itself. I hope the FT can convey a message from me to the US side. We want to enhance cooperation with the United States to meet the financial crisis together as that represents the larger interest, and it serves the fundamental interests of both countries.

LB: Yes, the problem may be even more in Congress than in the administration. So do you have a message for Congress?

WJ: We don't comment on the system of the United States. I think the US government has a decisive role to play in making the right decisions. The US government should view its relations with China from a long-term and strategic perspective, and under the current circumstances, the priority of the two countries should be working together to fight the financial crisis and promote the constructive and cooperative relations between China and the United States.

LB: Just to return to the reserves very quickly. Did I understand that the Chinese government may use some of the reserves for spending programmes at home to stimulate the economy?

WJ: Foreign exchanges reserves reflect the economic strength of a country. We are now studying how we can make the best use of the foreign exchange reserves in China. On this particular topic, you are all experts. And for banks, I think foreign exchange reserves are liabilities of the central bank, and if a government wants to make use of the foreign exchange reserves, it has to issue government bonds to buy the foreign exchange reserves.

We are now having discussions about how to make rational and effective use of the Chinese foreign exchange reserves to serve the purpose of economic development in China. Last year, we issued Rmb1.5 trillion of government bonds in purchasing US$200bn of foreign exchange reserves to inject capital into the China Investment Corporation.

Foreign exchange must be spent overseas, and it will be spent mainly on foreign trade and investment. Therefore, we want to use foreign exchange to buy the much-needed technology equipment and products. That is a quite technical issue.

LB: The world expects so much from China. China is taking very important steps to increase research and technology on renewable energy. But later this year, there will be a summit in Copenhagen on climate change. Is China ready to sign a treaty to cap carbon emissions?

WJ: I had a thorough discussion about this issue with President Barroso of the European Commission in Brussels the day before yesterday. The Chinese position on this issue is as follows.

Number one, China supports the Copenhagen conference. It supports all measures which are playing their roles in meeting the challenge of climate change, and we support the development of a green economy. We are of the view that to develop a green economy is probably another area in the economy as we meet the international financial crisis.

Number two, the Chinese government gives top priority to meeting the challenge of climate change. We have established a national leadership group on tackling climate change, and I'm head of the group.

We have formulated a national programme on coping with climate change, and this is not only the first programme of its kind for China, but also the first one of its kind among all developing countries.

In China's 11th five-year plan, we have set ourselves obligatory targets in saving energy and reducing pollution. The target requires us that we must reduce the per unit GDP energy consumption by 4 per cent every year, and in total by 20 per cent in five years.

We failed to meet the targets in the first two years of the five-year period, and we succeeded in meeting the target in 2008. We will continue to make efforts on this front and set targets for ourselves. I think this can be seen as a way that China is holding itself accountable to the relevant targets.

Number three, it's difficult for China to take quantified emission reduction quotas at the Copenhagen conference, because this country is still at an early stage of development. Europe started its industrialisation several hundred years ago, but for China, it has only been dozens of years.

China has a 1.3bn population, and in terms of per capita greenhouse gas emission, we are certainly not the biggest one, yet we are still very active and positive about our cooperation with Europe in terms of saving energy, reducing pollution, developing a low carbon economy, and developing those environmentally friendly technologies.

LB: Premier Wen, I've been told if I ask a political question, I have to be very careful.

WJ: Ask any question you want.

LB: I have to be careful, because [according to the saying in] Mandarin, I will get hat, shoes and gloves. But looking to the future, could you imagine there being direct elections to the National People's Congress, say, in ten years?

WJ: Well, actually, I think economic life and political life are not separable from each other. Let me address this political question from you from an economic perspective. We are undertaking both economic restructuring and political restructuring, and both are very important.

Without the successful political restructuring, one can't ensure success in our economic restructuring. The goal in our political restructuring endeavour is to promote socialist democracy, and better ensure people's rights to democratic election, democratic decision making, democratic management, and democratic supervision.

The society that we desire is one of equity and justice, is one in which people can achieve all round development in a free and equal environment. That is also why I like Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments very much.

In 1776, Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of the Nations. And in the same historical period, he wrote the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Adam Smith made excellent arguments in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. He said in the book to the effect that if fruits of a society’s economic development can not be shared by all, it is morally unsound and risky, as it is bound to jeopardize social stability .If the wealth of a society is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people, then this is against the popular will, and the society is bound to be unstable.

Like truth is the primary virtue in thinking, I have always believed that justice and equity are the primary virtue in the socialist system. In the eyes of the West it seems that the Chinese are afraid of democracy or elections. Actually, this is not true.

As I told the press during the press conference of the NPC session early last year, I said that only when people trust you, will they support you in your office. Now we have direct elections at village level and also direct elections of People’s Deputies at township level. At the same time, I have always believed that if the people have the ability to run the village affairs well they are capable of running the township affairs and the county affairs and then running the provincial affairs. In this entire process we should take a step by step approach in the light of China’s own conditions and to develop a democracy with Chinese features.

LB: So there’s a bit more room for democracy and a bit more room for dissent as part of a democracy?

WJ: Well, I don’t think a government should feel afraid of its own people. I think it should create opportunities for the people to better hold the government accountable.

LB: Premier Wen, I realise we’re running short of time. I had my own quote from the Theory of Moral Sentiments.

WJ: Well, I think for quite some time this book has not attracted due attention or attention that it deserves. I think it is as important as The Wealth of Nations. He made a reference to the invisible hand only on two occasions in these books. One, he refers to the market; the other, he talks about the morality. And please go ahead with your quote.

LB: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others and render their happiness necessary to it, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

WJ: I think this is very well said, and I have been reading the book and this book I carried with me in my suitcase on the trip.

LB: Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to the Financial Times. It’s been very enlightening.

WJ: Thank you.