Glen Ford: Black Delusion in the Age of Obama

Valentine’s Day: Send Love (And Solidarity) To Haiti

200 years ago Haiti made a pact with freedom, giving the world a shining example in history’s most successful slave rebellion…and has been forced to pay for it by imperialism ever since.  The recent earthquake has exposed the unnatural fault line of wealth in the world as surely as it has exposed those ones natural to the earth.  Throughout centuries of imperial blockade, intervention and occupation, oligarchic misrule and a police state to protect the poverty that helped to build empires, the Haitian people have continued to struggle for their dignity and for their freedom.  This Valentine’s Day we propose to express our anger and our empathy, our solidarity with the people of Haiti who have given so much inspiration to the world.  This Valentine’s Day we will say: Haiti, We Love You!

In what is becoming a Detroit leftist tradition 1812 Church Street will once again open its doors for a benefit party.  This time donations will be taken for the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund which works through Haitian trade unions and social movements rather than through the parasitical Assistance Industrial Complex which would perpetuate Haitian dependence.  This will be the fourth live music fundraiser party to happen at 1812 Church St. and we thank Brad and Tiffany for opening their home on a cold winter night.  If past benefits are any indication, and they are, you’ll not want to miss this one.

The previous benefits’ musical offerings have spanned Avant-Jazz to the varieties of Folk.  The May Day party promoting the upcoming US Social Forum in Detroit turned into a super-session of Michigan’s great experimental jazz players including Skeeter Shelton, Mike Carey, and Kenn Thomas.  Also supported were Iraq Veterans Against the War and a benefit for the Palestine Office of Dearborn in response to last year’s Israeli assault on Gaza.

These events have included people from nearly every social justice group; from the anti-war movement to the labor movement, from the anarchist and socialist left, form Palestinian activists to urban farmers.  But make no mistake, just because it’s a benefit doesn’t mean it’s not a party.  Included in the fun will be music lovers and friends from the Detroit area, friends of friends, fellow travelers, and, again, music lovers.  Like any left-wing social gathering worth its salt a real mix of generations and backgrounds show up.  The guarantee is that you will hear great music (the stellar line-up below), meet new friends, and get to listen in on conversations that might reference Gamelan music ensembles, Hegel’s Logic and George Habash all in one sentence.  And we will be raising money and raising awareness.

Mark your calendars for Saturday, February 13th.  The open house begins at eight and goes late.  Music will probably start around 8:30ish and will  go ’til the wee hours.  There will be a keg of  beer, but friends should consider bringing drinks and/or a dish to share or bread to break.  The line up:

A very special reunion of The Immigrant Suns!  Formed in Detroit in the early 1990’s, The Immigrant Suns took their inventive and infectious mix of Eastern European folk styles and adventurous musical sensibilities on the road and across the country for over a decade before retiring. Trailblazers of unconventional folk and a riotous live act; we’re as excited as you are to see The Immigrant Suns play again.  The real deal, folks!
Lac La Belle lend their gifted hands again.  With stunning début CD out now this band knows 1812 Church St. well.  They have said that the space has some of the best acoustics for their performances, but we say they are the ones giving the space the best sounds.

Behind The Times are a brand new Bluegrass band from Down River, but with members you might recognize from other bands such as Catfish Mafia and The Cass Avenue Ramblers.

Here’s the vitals: “We ♥ Haiti”  Saturday February 13th, 8pm at Brad and Tiffany’s: 1812 Church #2, Upstairs in Detroit’s Corktown, just east of Rosa Parks.  For more info call Brad (734) 748 6350  or email: palestinelives@hotmail.com.  facebook page.  See you there!

Ernest Mandel: A Life For The Revolution

More of the late Ernest Mandel.  When we, as Marxists, critique our past as we must do, we sometimes fail to place the past firmly in its time.  The point of looking at the past is not, as an example, to say that the Bolsheviks “should not” have banned factions, but to ask why the Bolsheviks banned factions.  The elements of the 20th century experience still reflected in the Marxist movement that we rightly wish to shed, as well as those we’d be stupid to abandon, came about in reaction to concrete realities, real events.  Ernest Mandel was a participant in many of those events and an astute observer of those realities.  As such his life is a wonderful guide into that time’s maddening complexities.

A revolution in retreat is a terribly disconcerting and confusing experience.  That Mandel and Trotskyists defended Marxism and the perspective of workers self emancipation in the midst of great reversals speaks to their Marxism as much as to their courage.  I can’t imagine Marxism surviving as something recognizable as an emancipatory movement without their struggle.  However, and we imagine Mandel would agree with this, Marxism defined by its defense against those whose distortions claim to speak in its name can’t help but also, in its way, distort Marxism.  It’s one of those awful contradictions of history: the defense of Marxism necessarily limits it.

Our wish to reclaim Marxism from the perfidy of the past and redefine it in terms of today will be defined by other experiences, not unrelated, to those faced by earlier generations.  While we come to terms with the past in order to face the future we do a disservice to that project if we reject the mistakes without absorbing the lessons.  It is so easy to throw stones at the past without learning a thing but the ability to be self-righteous.  We had much to learn from Mandel when he was alive and we still do.  This film has been around the net for a while, but only recently have I discovered it in English.  The rest of the film can be found here.

Do It To Julia!

Sorry for the extremely light blogging as of late, ’tis the way it goes sometimes.  This week blew.  Fun with new (to me) wordpress application.

Flame On The Snow: Victor Serge

Flame on the Snow (1920/1921) by Victor Serge

Snow and night. Burdens weigh. You stumble in the deep and deceitful whiteness of the snow. Around, men walk heavily, carrying rifles. The White Finns show hostility in their faces, closed, hard, heavy. They keep silent. The barrels of their guns seem attracted to the ground. A small bridge, sentry box, in the dark another man presses his two hands on his rifle. A bonnet of astrakhan tops a grey, pale coat and the thin face of a peasant. We greeted him without emphasis, tightened hearts, low voices, in spite of the exaltation: “Hello brother!” I do not see the eyes in the great shadows of the face turned towards me. The man asks gently: “Do you have white bread?” He takes the tendered round loaf. “Golodno?” You are hungry? – “Yes. It is nothing”, he answers only to the gate of immense Russia, our brother, the Red soldier, upright in the cold, the night, the hunger – and alone.

One is hungry, but it is nothing …

The white night with distant bursts of shell, abrupt passages by the empty streets, the roughcast trucks of bayonets. Hands grow numb on the rifle. But this midnight with its infinite pallor, this silence, this waiting become a singular peace. You feel almost liberated. Free, simple, calm, although it arrives.

Crosses of rifles stand in front of closed doors. Our steps sound in the mildness of unknown homes. Faces of anxiety, lamps suddenly lit among the grey half-light. Papers which you decipher badly in front of the window, the frightened eyes that you explore in an acute and sad glance, “Are you lying?”

Return. Tire. The rifle weighs. It is necessary. It is necessary. It is necessary. We will make the new life.

The crowd – this resolute crowd gathered in the vast quadrangular room, with white columns, the Tauride Palace, this drawn-up crowd, tender, vehement, willingly applauding the orator:

The man with his back arched, a high thick mane of greying hair. The energetic face of an intellectual, stressed voice, categorical gesture which proclaims the determination of the crowd to overcome. It proclaims terror.

The song of the crowd.

Young women – no preoccupation with elegance or prettiness, but what valour! – in short hair, their busts clasped by leather clothing or a military blouse; workers, soldiers, peasants, sailors, the crowd singing the Internationale after the Farewell to the Dead.

This crowd wants to live, to make life. But how many of those who are there have already been killed?

This immense white city, all in silence. Because the sledges do not make noise on snow. The steps do not resonate. A great pale light on all things. Broad, between its pink granite quays, the Neva solid under snow. Far away, the gold arrow of Peter-and-Paul.

The poor tattered people, many teenagers, some children all bearing rifles, with the straps often replaced by string. The hands numb with cold of these poor people. Their grey wretched crossing of the Liteyni prospect, in a determined step. At the end of a bayonet a red flag: Workers’ battalion from Narva district.

In a noisy barrack room – the walls showing Marx and Lenin framed with red ribbons – this avid group around us, the firm and defying face of the agitator, the pince-nez with gold mounting, these child-like and serious eyes, the comically round nose of the small comrade in leather jacket, the neat moustache of the Cossack – their hurried questions – “Demobilisation? … the working-class of France? … is the revolution growing? …” Anger, distress, revolt against having to answer these men, this woman: No, you are alone.

This face without apparent beauty, the vast face, these unpleasant white metal glasses behind which there was always the same serious glance, inattentive, a little distant, very attractive, something understanding and soft … Our labour until dawn. At dawn, seated on the edge of a window, above the deserted place (the formidable granite mass of St. Isaac’s, the enormous gold dome: cold rectangular palaces, and worked on its base this thin bronze rider from another time …) our search, our thought, our cold reasoning. (“… impossible that we would hold out for more than six months, unless …”) which made us smile us all the same, full of an unlimited confidence

This crowd in snow, under the midday sun, following coffins covered with branches of fir trees. Red ribbons, flags. A gold ray is posed on the arrow of the Admiralty. Songs – the song which soars. There are prayers and sobs in this farewell from a living crowd to a crowd of the dead. Here they sleep, behind a granite rampart, those hung, shot, whose throats were cut, those that died of typhus, who all, gave freely and with their souls. Died for the revolution. So often these funerals on the Field of Mars …

Four thousand soldiers, peasants from Viazma, Ryazan, Tver, Orel, Viatka, Perm – Russians, Tartars, Kirghises, Tcherkesses – four thousand soldiers nourished on dry herrings – hard like stone, that made the gums bleed – fed on four hundred grams of black bread per day, dressed in this icy winter with the old coats of the great war, beating their hands like children and laughing and houting and humming. The room, made from the velvet blue-gold of the imperial theatre vibrates suddenly with this clear human joy, because a sovereign artist sang.

Six hours of voyage by a frozen north wind, along Neva. Stiff, we heat ourselves in turns in the boiler room. And here in the Scandinavian cold landscape the dead carcass of an old castle: the Schüsselburg. And here, in its cottage, the coffin holding the large lengthened body of the anarchist Justin Jouk, the great face of Justin Jouk.

How they have great faces, those of us that are dead!

The Silver Wood, one June morning; the river caressing and murmuring between the meadows and the wood. A dome of a church – in blue or silver, I no longer know – emerging with the sun. Light in all things, fair light of Russia; and the houses of children, peaceful in the tepid warmth of June, in the greenery, in the murmur of water, in waiting for the future. Thin, long camp beds. Along the walls running with tar, the coloured drawings of the young girls; all this clear country of children so close to our town caught up in civil war

A young girl – seven years old – with very large black eyes, encased in a fine, small Kalmuk face, a small refined spirit, precocious, sensitive, encased in a thin body, slowly debilitated by the hunger: Tatiane, the daughter of an aristocrat, whom you fondly call Tania, Tanioucha, Taniouchetchka. She says:

“Since you are a Bolshevik, answer me! Why was Lavr Andreievitch shot?”

I am a Bolshevik, little Tania, and I do not know why Lavr Andreievitch was shot.

A street corner, the blackening mud of the thaw, a child who sells matches: stolen matches, the prize of speculation. A well-dressed passer-by, in military clothing, booted. The child follows with anger in its eyes: Bourgeois!

And the immense dead factory, scrap in the walkways, rusted benches, formidable squatted machines, oiled, inactive, the halls with windows whose panes have been broken. There will remain soon only the metal casings drawn up on the ruins of a city … The immense dead factory, thirty thousand workers in 1914, four and a half thousand present today. Others: dead, returned to the ground, they died the best, or soldiers.

But near the home of the porter, this negligible small garden cultivated with such an amount of care; and in the immense dead factory, a buzzing hall where seventy men tortured by hunger get on with rebuilding an engine.

The city. The streets narrow, dark. The streets in a state of siege which ended at eight, before nightfall. Far and wide, men with rifles, standing.

City, night, snow. In the homes, twinkling gleams of light. At the bottom of the cold rooms, an old man shrivelled in his fur-lined coat, his hands frozen, reads by the gleam of a candle:

The Mysticism of Vladimir Soloviev, and in the dark of the room, a teenager rolled in a soldier’s coat who shivers and thinks of great things, the electrification of the Urals.

The countryside. You can walk there for hours through fields or woods without hearing a voice of man, without seeing a cottage; but you cannot be there for a long time on the road without seeing, surrounded by birches a green chapel with a small triangular pediment, and a pinnacle of blue Byzantine – or of another colour, always bright, clear, radiant colour.

Space – the fields where the train goes during the so-long hours, the fields with their sparse villages: some grey thatched roofs, the fields with their remote churches whose gold cross always light up as the sun sets, and the woods of birch, white slenderness, the silver plated slenderness of the birch trees,

(that our ancient storytellers compared to virgins … )

Again the city, the old Fabergé store, goods from Paris, objets d’art (the sign is faded). Three balls divide the large window, scraps of paper (leaves torn from an accounts book, numbered 124), “3rd Office of Supply. This 24 February, one dry herring pound at cart B.” – From the windows of the old hotel Regina, poor, sickly soldiers look out. – Here: Aline Fashions, in large scripted gold letters. Below: Headquarters of the special battalion of Kazan sector – Cafe Empire. No, “Club of the 14th State Print works”. In the entrance, Karl Marx, framed with red ribbons. The ribbons are bleached; the portrait loses its colour.

By the street bordered with churches, palaces – where our clubs stand – ransacked stores, theatres, libraries, public buildings, the book centre, the military academy (a bank previously) by the street which goes from the Admiralty, built by Peter the Great, to the statue of Tsar Alexander, so heavy on his heavy bronze horse that he must be contemplating already with his overwhelming weight the fall of his empire.

By this street, the Mongolian riders pass singing. Red ribbons on the handle of their sabres, at the front the red star with five branches.

(You spoke, o poet, so much love for the things of Europe: “Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, Asians …”)

On the handle of their sabres, red ribbons.

Morning, spring, the desire to smile. People, in the square, read the paper which has just been posted. Why this word The Truth, this word of few syllable, is it so hard, sharp, curt, in all languages: Pravda, Wahrheit, Truth, Verdad? – a scrap of paper flapping in the wind.

“33: Nikitor Arkadievitch Ijine, 33 years old, speculator. 34: Denskaya Elena Dmitrievna, 24 years old, dressmaker, spy. 35: Vassili Vassilievitch Onéguine, 42 years old, officer, aristocrat, proven counter-revolutionary … 58: Abram Abramovitch, 30 years old, civil servant, member of the Communist Party, convicted of corruption …” shot.

Sixty! says a young voice. They read abstractly, without ceasing to smile. He is twenty years old, an aspiring Red; she, nineteen, militant in charge with of Dynamo factory. Which one will be killed beneath Kronstadt?

“Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars No XXX. Suppression of rent …”

“Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars No XXX. Suppression of private property in furniture …”

“Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars No XXX. Suppression of illiteracy …”

“Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars No XXX. Creation of the autonomous Tartar Republic.”

“Decree …”

One reads standing, in the street, in the snow. The cold grips, you hear gun-fire.

She came often about midnight, after a telephone call (“do you have tea?”). She shook her fair ashy hair. Her eyes had a good serious smile. She said:

“You understand, the regional devolution of the metal industry … Because the Higher Council of the Economy and the Trade Union …”, or:

“Bogdanov’s theses, from a rigorously Marxist a point of view …”, or

“The sub-section of the organisation of the Committee of the 2nd Sector decided …”

She lit a cigarette. Her lips had the pink colour of a ripe fruit.

Contempt for words – for the old words. Contempt for the ideas which mislead. Contempt for the hypocritical and cruel West which invented Parliaments, the public press, the asphyxiating gases, the prison system, after-dinner literature. Contempt for all that vegetates in satisfaction with these things.

Hatred for the formidable machine used to crush the weak – all disarmed humanity – for the vice of Law, Police, Clergy, Schools, Armies, Factories, Penal Colonies. Hatred for those who need that system, the rich, class hatred.

The will to undergo everything, to suffer everything, achieve everything in order to finish. Inexorable will. The will to live finally according to the new law, equal work, or to die showing the way. The willingness to plough up the ground and its souls so well that the earth shall be new tomorrow.

Consciousness that the present hardly exists; and that it is necessary to give everything, at this hour, to the future so that there may be a present. Consciousness that all of us are nothing if we are not with our class, its humanity rising. Consciousness that work ahead does not have limits, that it requires a million arms and brains, that it is the only justification of our lives. Consciousness that a world collapses and that you can live only while giving yourself to the world which waits to be born.

Petrograd-Moscow, 1920-21

Mumia On Haiti

Notes: The Guerilla, Haiti and Massachusetts

I’ve never been an Ernestophile; not that I dismissed Che or didn’t find him intriguing in his way, but he never caught my imagination the way some other revolutionaries, including Cuban revolutionaries, have.  I didn’t come to Che by Stephen Soderbergh as eagerly as others.  After a non-release theatrically in the United States and a question mark over its release on disc, the film was picked up by the venerable folks at Criterion for DVD distribution and is now available.  I watched the whole thing in a single sitting this week, a worthy film experience.

I wish I had seen it on the big screen (it played locally for only a day or two).  It’s so visually rich.  It reminded me a little of Terrence Mallick  (who was originally interested in doing the project) in its pacing and feel.  It could have gone in a biographical direction (yaaawwwnn), but chose instead to focus on Che the guerilla, to the exclusion of much else.  That focus is what made this film possible, based as it is on Che’s own diaries.  The sobriety of the film is to be found in those diaries.

I have some quibbles, the editing is clunky at times, but the film was much better and different from the expectations I had for it.  Demián Bichir as Fidel is fantastic.  The final days of the Bolivian column are as painful to watch as the scenes of Santa Clara are invigorating.  I’d say more, but all of those scenes are still tumbling around in me and haven’t yet found form.  I look forward to seeing it again.  A terrific film.

Haiti is now a wholly owned subsidiary of America Inc.  Bottled water will soon be followed by Pepsico water bottling plants to ship the stuff out of Haiti.  Progress.  With imperialism every helping hand has its price.

The Democrats deserved to lose in Massachusetts.  Yes, I wish they had lost to one of our team and yes I think Brown is bad news, but let no progressive dare lay his win at the feet of the left.  The Dems lost this all on their own.  With two center-right parties (well one center-right and the other right-center-right) governing, the best we can hope for is gridlock to limit the damage.

And don’t bring up health care either.  Obama’s bill is so bad that it would be better to fail than to codify the health insurance racket in the name of reform.  Far from blocking the right the Dems, more often than not, facilitate their return.  Massachusetts being only exhibit #12315 in the prosecution’s brief.

If Obama goes the way of Jimmy Carter then I wonder who Reagan will be?  Guaranteed that the next election will see the “progressives” anoint another savior in the Democratic Party and again try to corral the movements into the cul-de-sac to “block the right”.  Desperately seeking cover for the cover they are giving these are the same “progressives” who are now counting on the defeat to be a “wake-up call” which moves Obama to the left.  Fool me once shame on you…

Shouldn’t the Senate be forcibly abolished anyway?  It’s an old boys club that ensures the elite get their way every time; undemocratic (even by the limited norms of bourgeois politics) in form and essence.  Upper chamber?  All that “separation of powers” bs is just a bureaucratic shell game.  The dealer always wins.

Gotta Gettaway

Turn up those little speakers to maximum comrades.  SLF, the best punk band ever?  I know, their politics are a little mushy, but they, as they say, rock with the best hooks in the business.