Opening Day

Baseball started here today on a cold and wet day. Spring is still only a promise. Our Tigers fell in 11 innings to the Kansas City Royals. An embarrassing start, but only the first game. We are to do without two star closers; Zumaya and Fernando Rodney are out on medical further weakening the weakest spot of the Tigers–relief pitching.

The best news of the day was the reaction of DC fans to Bush throwing out the first pitch against Atlanta. A chorus of boos that lasted for two minutes. The announcers of course can’t mention the obvious adding to the farce. Watch and enjoy.

Reactions to Obama’s Race Speech

Obama’s speech has led to a lot of discussion, not enough and certainly not on the level that is necessary. I want to highlight some of that discussion here. I am sure that a lot of readers have seen the speech, if not it is easy to find. We have a strict policy here at The Rustbelt Radical about not linking to liberals or Democrats. They get enough press.

I am more interested in reading what radicals, Marxists and activists have to say. Especially black Marxists, radicals and activists. Some of the folks below may lean liberal, but their contributions are referenced by the left. In no particular order here are just a few links to the discussion. If folks have more please send them in and I’ll keep this page updated. The coming April editions of various publications will be carrying reactions as well.

Various: The Black Commentator Editorial Board on Obama’s Race Speech The Black Commentator

Paul Street: The Pale Reflection: Barack Obama, MLK and the Meaning of the Black Revolution Black Agenda Report

Paul Street: The Audacity of Reaction Znet

Socialist Worker Editorial: The New Debate About Racism Socialist Worker (US)

James B. Cannon: Obama’s Pastor Was Right Solidarity Webzine

Various: Open Letter to Senator Barack Obama from Sociologists and Scholars Regarding Philadelphia Speech on Racism Znet

Manning Marable Barack Obama’s Problem–And Ours Along the Color Line Znet

John V. Walsh: A Touch of Bigotry Counterpunch

Dan La Botz: New Challenges for Obama, the Democrats and the Left Counterpunch

Cat Woods: A Letter to Mom on Obama Counterpunch

Workers World Editorial: Race, Class and Obama’s Speech Workers World

Harold and the Junta

This week saw demonstrations in Argentina to mark the 32 anniversary of the military coup on March 24, 1976. Many thousands “disappeared”; meaning they were kidnapped, tortured, killed and then dumped by the military. Many are at the bottom of the South Atlantic, their bones mingling with the dead of the Belgrano, where their bodies were thrown overboard erasing their fate. Countless revolutionaries, activists and trade unionists died in this dirty “Dirty War”.

Harold Pinter’s 2006 Nobel Laureate speech placing US imperialism on the level of other modern barbarisms deserves to be seen and read. It is a speech that will live on long after Pinter as will much of his work. He is a fearless artist and human being

His work has taken me places few authors have. Opening up Pinter can be a bit like staring at the bottom of mug just drained of mushroom tea: Where will I be in a few minutes? What doors will I be asked to walk through? How scary might it be? Is there an exit? And before you know it, you’re in it.

Here then is Pinter’s “Don’t Believe Them.” It is dedicated to the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Pinter gives voice, righteous and defiant, to the dead. In only one short minute it demands attention.

Don’t believe them.

Marx, Ecology and Revolution

I scored at the local used bookstore this weekend finding a $3 paperback of John Bellamy Foster’s Ecology Against Capitalism. Mine was lent out a couple of years ago and I can’t remember to who so if you have it and your reading this it’s yours to give to someone else. Spread the wealth. This interview with Monthly Review editor and author of Marx’s Ecology John Bellamy Foster is from the British paper Weekly Worker. Usually that paper is little more than a left wing tattle rag; for a while it was all Tommy Sheridan all the time at the WW, but on occasion they have something of interest. Foster is not a member of the eccentric, even by British standards, group that puts out Weekly Worker; the Communist Party of Great Britain.

The interview is an excellent introduction into Foster’s insights and a great refutation of the burgeoning, and entirely reactionary, ideology of the “Green Market” that is now on offer from bourgeois politicians and liberal, even radical, intellectuals. It is heartening to see Marxists rediscover the rich ecological critique inherent in Marx’s critique of capitalism. It certainly deserves to be a cornerstone on which future struggles will be based.

Some Marxists met in Paris last October to form an international ecosocialist network. Foster is not a part of that network, though his work has done much to inspire it as it has inspired a whole host of new scholarship and activism. Marx’s Ecology is a revelation of scholarship on Marx as well as Engels and their arrival at an ecological context for for the social crisis. The relationship between alienated nature and alienated labor is one of the most profound understandings of our condition in modern capitalism.

Like all species we live in a relationship with our environment, we co-evolve as societies as well. The whole history of agriculture and production is, unconscious, testimony to this fact. A direct relationship with nature is what we evolved in, it is what made us human. It’s damned capitalism, taught us to be the natural state of things, that is the aberration. It sounds so obvious and simplistic and yet the web of obfuscations society has built up over the generations has hidden even the most common truths from us.

A comment on MR. I wish Foster as well as Monthly Review would be more honest and openly contribute Trotsky and the Trotskyists in their understanding of the history of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. In this article and more so in others Foster deals at some length with the Stalinist degeneration and its contribution to the sad state of Marxism over the years. It is intellectually dishonest to critique Stalinism, it’s roots and its effects and not write about the critique or the role played by Trotsky. One doesn’t have to be a Trotskyist to tell the truth about history.

Trotsky’s critique, which Foster and MR borrow liberally from, as well as his role as revolutionary informs the whole of Marxism in the 20th Century. A student’s paper in college couldn’t get away with ignoring Trotsky when talking about the revolution or Stalinism. The problem is not unique to Foster of course, but Foster’s well earned respect as a scholar throws these omissions into high relief.

Foster is rightly celebrated for his contributions to our understanding of the roots of the global ecological catastrophe as well as the way out of that crisis. This interview is an excellent introduction into his thinking, as well as the thinking of many Marxists and ecosocialists. The ecosocialist movement is all the more welcome given the advent of the Green Technologies and Green Markets frauds. Gore et al say the world is ending and then encourage you to buy different light bulbs (made by the ecowarriors at General Electric). Our solution is to tackle the root of the problem, the system of commodity production, and is therefore a much more cogent and realistic alternative than the feel-good suicide of moderated consumption offered by liberal environmentalists.

Aside: For some reason Obama supporters have spammed this site. If it were just one I wouldn’t have noticed. I wonder if other left blogs are being spammed? Thanks to all that have surfed by in the first two weeks of the blog. I’ve gotten great feedback and hope that readers are patient as the blog finds its legs. I hope to have a couple of new regular or semi-regular features soon. My favorite search so far to land on the blog; “thatcher hate marx”. I am not sure what they were after; if their hate was directed at Thatcher or Marx. Our hatred here at The Rustbelt Radical for Thatcher has only deepened with the years. I am sure that she’ll be reviled by people for generations. It seems though that history and biology will combine to cheat us all by giving the old woman a natural death. There is just no justice under capitalism.

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Interview with John Bellamy Foster

The question of how Marxists relate to environmental issues - as Marxists rather than as born-again greens - is clearly a controversial one.

The answer to your question is complicated. There definitely is a danger in the sense that at least some of the views of the Greens - as a party-movement - are hardly progressive. There are some definite reactionary views mixed in there. So Marxists have to address them critically, like anything else.

More…..

Recession Notes

I spent a good of yesterday at one of my least favorite places in Michigan. I think the ninth floor of Detroit’s downtown lockup would be my first pick. Imagine Midnight Express without the good food. No, this was the newly remodeled Department of Health and Human Services here in town. In Michigan, as in much of the Midwest, we have been in the recession that has just begun in the rest of the country for years and I found myself at the DHHS getting on the Bridge Card.

Not all states allow single men to get food assistance, but Michigan’s tanked economy means that 1.2 million people in the state now get some food assistance, including me, and they may go to release the aid twice a month to meet the need. The problem is that the average monthly aid is about $88, which is only a couple of bags of food at the grocery these days. Ten days into the month and people are without again. It also means that people don’t buy fresh food, so they can hoard nonperishables items for lean times.

As a long time grocery worker in a working class city I can attest that the first week of the month is crazy busy and workers in the first week are pushed hard and have no flexibility only to see hours cut later in the month. The government figures on $1.05 a meal for recipients. You try that at home. You ending up eating a starch base like rice, potatoes or pasta with protein and vegetables acting as condiments. If you’re creative you can make it work, but no one should have to.

Sitting in the waiting room with me were a couple of guys who have been living along the Huron River which runs through town. The melting snow has flooded the bottom and they’ve had to move to a dump site about a half mile away. Only in their twenties, one guy got denied benefits because of a simple possession charge. The other one couldn’t get on until he had new ID, costing about ten dollars….which he will probably spend on food…or booze. They don’t make it easy.

I arrived as early as possible thinking I’d get the jump. There were already dozens of folks filling out forms. And this is just one day in a week. After two hours in the waiting room reading MLK’s Stride Toward Freedom for class and trying to block the noises from the kid’s play room. As the room filled to standing room only I got called in.

I had been here many times before and usually the case worker is as stressed out as I am over the ordeal. Not this time! I got a smiling face and a sympathetic ear. She even helped me make sure that I got all that was coming to me. I wonder if that smile and sympathy would wane by the end of her day. Mine would. Empathy must be the most human of feelings, I know it’s the one I most value, and she had it in spades. I won’t mention her name but want to thank her for her help, and salute her for her optimism in the face of such daily humiliations suffered by working class people.

Antidote to Current Obamania

Obama’s speech has been all over the place. It certainly deserves a througoing critique. I’ve thought about writing a long piece on it and may yet, but I needed a little antidote from the liberal fawning over Obama in the press first. There are several excellent conversations going on in the left and among black radicals. I hope to post some of the more trenchant comments soon.

In the meantime, as a contribution to Obama relief I want to draw readers attention to someone who couldn’t be more different than Obama and his lawyerly gravitas. This hour long interview with the late Robert F. Williams done in the 70’s in Tanzania. I had never seen it before a comrade turned me on to it a few weeks ago. I have been interested in Williams for many years so it was like gold. No Luddite I, thank you digital encoding.

He ended is eventful days in Idlewild, Michigan west of here in the old black resort town. His wife Mabel Williams, with her absolute grace, is still active in the freedom struggle and a political presence in Michigan. Williams is one of those remarkable figures in United States history that couldn’t have come from anywhere but here, so a product of a racial culture dominated by white supremacy. Williams is part of a tradition of black resistance going back centuries. His Negroes With Guns was recently re-realsed and a few years ago PBS did a competent, if a little shallow, documentary. Here he gives some of his views in exile.