Latest Release: Friday, March 25, 2005

How the Democratic Party Creates Conservatism

M. Junaid Alam

The blurring of political distinctions between America's two major political parties, achieved through Democratic acquiescence to Republican ideas on every major national question, has prompted some progressives to conclude that Democrats and Republicans are now essentially identical. This conflation is a dangerous error: it is too kind an evaluation of the Democratic Party. For to view Democrats as mere Republican clones is to discount the far more pernicious role they play in encouraging a politically conservative framework that traps and demoralizes many Americans into adopting right-wing positions in the first place.

If Democrats simply paralleled Republicans, they would be politically redundant. But the Democrats are not duplicative - they are duplicitous. Peddling slightly less reactionary programs and packaging them in more appealing rhetoric, they soften up, placate and paralyze possible popular opposition to right-wing attacks. This creates the groundwork for future assaults by the Right. The Republican agenda, ugly, brutal, and brazen as it is, could not possibly pierce the public on its own - but the sordid record of Democratic appeasement has locked, loaded, and enabled right-wing advances.

How does this happen?

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Latest Release: Sunday, February 20, 2005

Answering the Question of Democracy

Steven Schoofs

Observing the human suffering that is taking place on a daily base in Iraq, one is left with the nagging question: in the name of what? Luckily, there is the Bush-Blair tandem which constantly reminds us that the ultimate goal of the Anglo-American enterprise is to achieve democracy in Iraq. We are told that the hardship and suffering imposed on the people of Iraq contributes to the creation of a democratic Iraq. Thus, the same Iraqis that are now being killed, maimed, tortured and harassed will one day enter the promised lands of democracy.

While we have made our way into the 21st century, democracy has come to be seen as a universal value without a real ideological alternative. Since democracy is seen as a 'good thing', there seems to exist a widespread belief that democracy should be universalised at all costs. One of the results of this belief is that we are witnessing democracy being put in place in Iraq 'through the barrel of the gun' and 'on the points of bayonets'.

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Latest Release: Monday, February 07, 2005

Building an Anti-Capitalist Organization and an Anti-Capitalist Front

Joaquin Cienfuegos

As we build a movement for radical change the question is always posed, what should be the "dividing line" or what should people unite under. Generally the idea for mass organizations or organizations as a whole is to have the largest numbers out there in a rally or protest. The argument is made that in order to build the Anti-War Movement or the Anti-Globalization movement we can't and we shouldn't call out Capitalism as the root cause or we shouldn't be upfront about the economic infrastructure of power. The idea put forward is that we should be first anti-war or anti-corporate and then anti-capitalist, meaning first win people to resistance of what the ruling class is carrying out, and then take on the power structure which carries out the injustices in the first place.

I want to put these questions out there not to be sectarian, but to increase unity on a correct basis in building a revolutionary movement, which is much needed today.

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Latest Release: Monday, February 07, 2005

Contours of Conservative Hypocrisy: Part Two

M. Junaid Alam

In this ongoing series aimed at dissecting right-wing terminology, we take a look at two crucial and oft-employed codewords of the Right: personal responsibility and reverse racism.

Personal responsibility:

A key component of the Right's supposed notion of "rugged individualism" is the insistence that the plight of any individual in society is mainly, if not solely, the result of some flaw in that individual's personality or behavior. Sniggering contempt is displayed for anyone who tries to highlight the flaws of the actual social system in which the individual lives. Anyone who can't find employment or fails to advance in some field, for instance, need only hang his head at his own stupidity, weakness, or whatever other personal shortcoming; all other actors and agents on the social scene are absolved of responsibility.

But this ethic is applied with extreme selectiveness: poor people, minorities, oppressed groups, and the working-class are sternly instructed to adhere to this protocol, but the business elite and their government friends are neatly exempted.

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Latest Release: Monday, January 17, 2005

Contours of Conservative Hypocrisy: Part One

M. Junaid Alam

It is not controversial to assert that the values, ideals, and opinions held by people on social and political matters vary in accordance with their place on the political spectrum. What if, however, it was posited that on one end of this spectrum, politics consists not only of pursuing stated aims, but also of crafting codewords and rhetoric to lure in others who would not otherwise be interested in those aims? Judging from the output of its vast array of columnists, pundits, and intellectuals, the modern American Right perfectly fits this description.

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Latest Release: Friday, December 17, 2004

Frame It! Creating Progressive Frameworks

Igor Volsky

Speaking with Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press, incoming Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid conceded that with just 45 seats in the Senate (including independent James Jeffords of Vermont) his party will "have to work toward the middle."

But if progressives learned anything from the 2004 Election, it's that to move towards the middle would "alienate their base and� activate the other side's models in the swing voters, thus helping the other side."

In the quote above, cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff was referring to the two separate world models that distinguish conservatives from progressives.

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Latest Release: Thursday, December 09, 2004

Elections as Ideology

Asad Haider

The elections are over, and it is time to move on to the many pressing issues humanity faces these days; but it is always important that we learn from our setbacks and mistakes. I attended a "town hall meeting" of local liberals and was utterly astounded by their unwillingness to accept the impotence of electoral politics and the Democratic party. There was much self-congratulation for fruitless voter registration drives, and plans were made for electing Democrats in the next elections. Unmentioned were issues of central importance like the occupation of Iraq, "moral values" and job loss, much less the issues that do not receive attention in the mainstream media...

The liberal might look at this state of affairs and lament that the system isn't working. The radical, however, would say that the system is working very well; that the system of electoral politics is designed to suppress real political discourse. The critique of ideology advanced within the Marxist tradition is one useful tool to understand the way in which elections reinforce the status quo.[3] The reasons for John Kerry's loss are complex; but one major reason is the inability of American liberals and even sectors of the left to see outside of the ideology of elections.

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Last Release: Saturday, June 06, 2004

Reflections on Resistance

Macdonald Stainsby

I had a dream last night that involved an event I went to in November of 1999. The Communist Party of Canada had their annual dinner in honor of the Russian Revolution, "Great October" off the tongues of these folks. In my awakening life, there would be two things that I'd recount if asked about this evening. One of them was a moment of what was overall a pretty ordinary speech, a moment which recalled pride where there has been none for so long. In reference to the defeat of the USSR in the Cold War, people usually cringe, cower, shrink or simply shrug their shoulders when speaking of socialism and of an end to capitalism. But instead of adopting any such change in posture, this speaker simply listed the acts of imperialism since the defeat of the Soviet state. This speech was made before the turn of the Millennium and just a couple of weeks before the definitive arrive of so-called "anti-globalization" at the Battle of Seattle.

The list of imperialism's misdeeds since then and after 9-11 have only grown so much longer, starker and more ominous that his final comments still resonate: "The time has come for us to stop apologizing".

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Last Release: Saturday, May 22, 2004

A Marxist Critique of 'Third World Postmodernism': Part Two

Keith Rosenthal

For Maoists, the goal for Third World peoples was the struggle for national liberation. The consolidation of the nation's own state-its own autonomous space-was seen as a way in which the capitalists of a given Third World country would be able to compete on the global market with the much more powerful advanced capitalist economies of the First World. By centralizing the nation's wealth and capital, and by using the state as a means with which to arbitrate trade deals between international capital and one's own market, it was hoped that one could improve the living standards of ones own country, as well as accumulate capital for the nation's capitalist elite.

The nation-state, then, would be the (rather Hegelian) cross-class expression of the collective will of the "civil society". As the epoch of post-war national liberation began to wane, and newly-independent countries became integrated into the world market, two dramatic things happened: the masses and middle-class intellectuals of those countries became increasingly disillusioned with the promises of 'modern state-hood'; and the capitalist classes within those countries began to use the state more and more to further their own economic interests (as well as the interests of international capital) against their own people. This process was repeated in India, Vietnam, Cuba, throughout Africa, and Latin America.

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Last Release: Sunday, May 14, 2004

A Marxist Critique of 'Third World Postmodernism': Part One

Keith Rosenthal

...it is quite infantile to completely write-off the struggles of workers against global capitalism as, at best, irrelevant. Esteva and Prakash write, "Strikes and struggles like those of the French workers, however, are only brakes designed to slow down the pace of transformation or to reduce the damage of the 'Global Project'. They are not challenging the project itself, or its foundations, but, instead, the way in which it is being implemented or its unequal benefits and impacts." ¹⁵ Later, the two neo-postmodernists go on to say that workers' resistance actually buttress the capitalist state by putting demands upon it, thereby strengthening its "centrality" to the lives of workers. ¹⁶ As if indigenous peoples demanding "autonomous recognition" from the state does not ask something of it; as if demanding better sanitation, health, education, jobs (as the Zapatistas initially did) from the state could be anything more than brakes on the 'Global Project'; as if carving out "postmodern spaces" while explicitly refusing to do a thing about the real, military, economic, and political power of global capitalism will accomplish anything but complicity to its continuation.

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Last Release: Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Is Ignorance Our Answer?

Macdonald Stainsby

After the demise of the Ba'athist Republican Guard in the streets of Baghdad came a fog in the air over the marches in the streets of the imperialist world, particularly in North America. While many of us have indeed pointed directly at the existence of a decline in enthusiasm for an anti-war movement, we have yet to spend time discussing what it is that feels different about where we are now. Worse, to avoid becoming fully demobilized-- an obviously healthy desire-- we have decided not to speak about that which we have no answer for. But these questions need to be taken up, not in the empty theorizing disconnected from practice that has characterized the flip-side of 'movement building' in the past, but in an entirely different manner. While we do this, it is important to keep an old Chinese saying on the tip of our tongues: "Those who think something cannot be done should never stand in the way of those actually doing it."

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Last Release: Wednesday, March 03, 2004

Democracy on the Floor

Shemon Salam

This article is not about names, academia, or famous people. This article is simply about a dream that we had all agreed to fight for, but now that dream is faltering. I have woken up from my sleep, away from fantasyland where I thought solidarity and integrity were the glue between reality and fantasy. This article is about a dream that once was and now is being slowly buried in the shadows of academia, stardom, and activist personalities.

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