Honduran Questions

How dare they!  How could anyone think that the United States be involved in the Honduran coup?  Could it be that the Honduran military is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pentagon?  Could it be that nearly all of the top officers of the Honduran military, including coup leader General Velásquez, were trained at the notorious School of the Americas?

Could it be that the US provides nearly 20% of the entire military budget of the country and nearly all of its arms and equipment? Could it be that the United States continues to have 600+ trainers in Honduras at the Soto Cano Air Base (where many of the coup leaders were stationed)?  Could it be that just a few months ago General Stavridis, head of US Southern Command, declared an “excellent state of cooperation between our two militaries.” Could it be this history-

1903 US Marines intervene in revolution

1907 Marines land during war with Nicaragua

1911 US troops protect “interests” in Honduran civil war overthrowing government. American Lee Christmas becomes Defense Minister

1912 Marines again land to protect US “economic interests”

1919 Marines land during election campaign (the US’ guy would end up winning!)

1924-25 US troops landed twice during election strife (US guy wins again!)

1954 Successful CIA coup to overthrow Guatemalan Guzman organized in Honduras

1965 Honduran dictator supports US invasion of the Dominican Republic

1980′s Honduras is the main staging and training base for the “Contra War” against the neighboring Sandinista government of Nicaragua

This list does not include the dozens and dozens of US interventions against Honduras’ neighbors where, if it were not for the good graces of US imperialism over the years, there would not be the head of a Central American oligarch left on unburdened shoulders.

We will only mention that General Andino controlled Honduras through the 1930s until 1948 with US support and that in 1963 General Arellano overthrew the government and ruled until 1970 also with US support and that in 1972 General Lopez staged another coup and ruled with US support.  We only mention the military regimes of General Melgar Castro (1975-78) and General Garcia (1978-82) all, coincidentally we are sure, supported by the United States.  We only mention the overwhelming economic penetration of the country by US companies whose trade makes up over 70% of the Honduran economy (with a good deal of the rest in the hands of Canadian mining companies).

If the United States is not lying and knew nothing about this coup (impossible to believe) or did not sponsor the coup itself (maybe) then the question is- did they try to stop it?  Was there a wink and a nudge?  Did they give mixed signals?  And if they are opposed to it why don’t they cut off ties with the Honduran military even now?

The Honduran military is a product of the United States; the Honduran oligarchy only exists on the basis of its relationship to US imperialism.  All of the bloody history of the United States in Central America demands that we take nothing the US says for granted.  Even if there is no “direct involvement” this coup was Made in the USA.

A demonstration to protest the coup will take place this Wednesday in Detroit- July 1st  4:30 PM- at Hart Plaza (corner of Woodward and Jefferson).

David Harvey: The Urban Roots of the Fiscal Crisis

Class matters!  Compare this to the “analysis” offered in the mainstream media.  There is no comparison.  In this speech from last month Marxist economist and geographer David Harvey traces the pathways of the current crisis to their sources.  This is well worth the time comrades.

Professional Poison: New Book by Susan Rosenthal

Professional Poison

How Professionals Sabotage Social Movements, and Why Workers Should Lead Our Fight

By Susan Rosenthal

Introduction

Have you lost your job or your home, or do you fear losing
them? Are you drowning in debt? Do you fear for your future and
your children’s future?

This deepening crisis is squeezing millions of people beyond
their ability to cope. Yet policy makers are more concerned with
“restoring profitability” than with helping human beings.

What we need is a groundswell of anger that rejects “business
first” policies. Yet what we have are thousands of organizations
that are too small to make a difference. Why aren’t they bigger?
Why aren’t they united? Where is the mighty roar of protest that
we need?

While the policy-makers and the professionals who created this
crisis have been discredited, most social change organizations are
also led by professionals who think they can manage the system
better. That’s no solution when the problem is the system itself –
a system that puts profits before people.

This pamphlet explains why professionals refuse to challenge
capitalism, how they promote pessimism and passivity, and why
we need workers to lead the fight for a better life and a better
world.

Read on

James Baldwin Speaks

Not only was he one of the finest writers of his day, he was one of the finest orators as well.  To hear him speak!  While the racial reality of the United States has changed significantly since Baldwin spoke, forty-plus years ago now, the reality of alienation at the heart of Baldwin’s critique remains.  And racism remains; now even more leavened by class.  Baldwin’s alienation, his own and his appreciation of it, is heightened by his vast empathy.

Apropos the previous post.  Listen.  Do you hear echoes of your own life?  How much has changed for poor blacks, for the poor in general, for immigrants, for all those on the outside looking in?  The dislocation between the ideal and the reality is, as ever, ever present.  The schism in our society between those that take and those taken from is as great as any time; including the time of chattel.  Are not the truths he tells yet to be recognized?  If we haven’t confronted our racial history, how can we claim to have moved on from it?  I hear a warning still.

Summer in the City

The Rustbelt withers in the heat.  And it has been hot.  Fortunately Michigan rarely has a long string of hot weather and even then it doesn’t last more than a few weeks.  So one just needs to sweat through with the comfort of knowing that it will soon end.  I shouldn’t complain too much; the BBC reports dozens of dead in an Indian heatwave (I shudder at the thought of an Indian heat wave).

A walk at night through the sweltering streets of my small city (which is about as urban as a town this size can be) can be a little hairy.  Add the Michigan recession, which has been twice as long and three times as deep as the national one, and your safety is a real concern.  Folks are out of work, poor and angry.  Some of my neighbors are genuinely hungry and every day I see more people picking up bottles from the streets and garbage cans to collect the deposit (Michigan has a 10 cent return).

Last night I was out walking late.  The sounds of music, drunken this and that and breaking bottles are shouted from street to street.  No one goes to bed early in the heat, it’s too hot.  And no one has a job to get up for anyway.  There are fights and yelling and everyone looks like they’re just back from the war.  Better to stay inside.

The bottom few rungs of the working class ladder have been kicked away making it impossible to get a foot up.  No unions to join, neighborhoods without neighbors and a culture that doesn’t even recognize its poorest; communities without a dollop of glue to hold them together are adrift and enraged.

The left is good at paying attention to organized workers for all of the obvious reasons.  But what about the, increasingly, unorganized?  What about the disorganized?  A whole swathe of the working class that could just barely get by on their minimum wage jobs and a few food stamps can’t anymore.  Without an alternative that speaks to them (and these are MILLIONS of people) they have become only so much human detritus.  The wasted.

These aren’t lumpen (and if they were they exist only to be despised?) they’re poor workers without jobs whose lives are flitted away.  Anger is a powerful tool in the hands of the oppressed, it steels them to confront the enemy and to suffer sacrifice to make change.  Anger without an outlet is simply destructive.  And not creatively destructive either, nihilistically so.

The daily humiliations of poverty inflict all kinds of damage.  Looking at folks waiting in line at the FIA office you wonder who will be the first to crack and jump the line to throttle the petty bureaucrat that denies them petty assistance.  To not be able to take care of yourself and your kids- what an awful condemnation.  It is San Quentin for the soul.

On every porch on my street someone is daydreaming of getting out and it’s not just the heat they want to break away from.  Revolutions are the hope of the ages and the poor can’t afford to not have hope; it’s suicidal.  We haven’t had such hope in generations now.  All of these defeats for all of these years, even to those unconscious of them, “weigh like a nightmare upon the living”.   Shit rolls down hill and we are standing at the bottom watching an avalanche.

Hope.  Not the hope extolled by Obama which is only a marketing ploy, and a base one at that, but the hope that they might have some say over their own lives, control over the destiny of their children.  Lives which are now so definitely not their own, but the property of a capitalist decay.  A decay which is rotting away a whole generation of workers.

This is a warning comrades and friends.  There will be hell to pay.  And it won’t be the capitalists that pay it.

They Were Called “The Band” Because They Were THE Band

King Harvest will surely come.  Indeed.

Mark Twain, Cats and Communism

One of my summer reads is Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson.  The story is quintessential late Twain; brutally ironic social critique.  This is Clemens’ coming fully and finally to terms with the slave system he was born into.  It has been on my list for a while and it’s a thrill to finally get to it.  In the opening pages Twain has this wonderful description of the homes in the story’s fictional Missouri town of Dawson’s Landing:

When there was room on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was there- in sunny weather- stretched at full length, asleep and blissfull, with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose.  Then the house was complete, and its contentment and peace were made manifest to the world by this symbol, whose testimony is infallible.  A home without a cat- and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat- may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

I grew up with cats and know where of Twain speaks.  The furry companions in my life have been amongst the best relationships I’ve had.  Lovers may come and go, but cats keep purring.  When I walk the street and meet a cat I almost always stop for a chat.  With very few exceptions, I’ve never met a cat that I didn’t have a rapport with.  I regard them as damned near perfect creatures.  As Twain’s Dawson’s Landing cat proves the peace of the home, Twain’s love of cats proves his own abundant humanity in my eyes.  Not that it needed much further proof, but as per Twain, this evidence is infallible.

My appreciation, really awe, of the feline  has led to my own particular theories about cats; who likes them and who doesn’t and what that might mean.  There is something about a cat’s make-up that refuses the role of Master.  We talk of a dog’s master, but I’ve never heard one speak of a cat’s master.  They have no master and would resist the imposition of one to their last tuna-tinged breathe.  Twain again (from “The Refuge of the Derelicts”):

That’s the way with a cat, you know — any cat; they don’t give a damn for discipline. And they can’t help it, they’re made so. But it ain’t really insubordination, when you come to look at it right and fair — it’s a word that don’t apply to a cat. A cat ain’t ever anybody’s slave or serf or servant, and can’t be — it ain’t in him to be. And so, he don’t have to obey anybody. He is the only creature in heaven or earth or anywhere that don’t have to obey somebody or other, including the angels. It sets him above the whole ruck, it puts him in a class by himself. He is independent. You understand the size of it? He is the only independent person there is. In heaven or anywhere else. There’s always somebody a king has to obey — a trollop, or a priest, or a ring, or a nation, or a deity or what not — but it ain’t so with a cat. A cat ain’t servant nor slave to anybody at all. He’s got all the independence there is, in Heaven or anywhere else, there ain’t any left over for anybody else. He’s your friend, if you like, but that’s the limit — equal terms, too, be you king or be you cobbler; you can’t play any I’m-better-than-you on a cat — no, sir! Yes, he’s your friend, if you like, but you got to treat him like a gentleman, there ain’t any other terms. The minute you don’t, he pulls freight.

Which brings me to my theory that in the world of Marxism and pets there exists a rift as wide as that separating the Permanent Revolution and Socialism in One Country.  Now this theory is admittedly anecdotal and without a shred of materialism to back it up, but it is my firm belief, after years of observation, that Trotskyists like cats and Maoists like dogs.

This divergence is rooted in the Trot’s insistence on the independence of the class and the Maoist’s advocacy of the cross-class alliance.  A dog’s whole life exists in a cross-class alliance and a dog in its natural state exists in a pack with Alphas, Betas, etc.  It is tantamount to Mao’s 1949  advocacy of a People’s Democratic Dictatorship while a feline knows only the Dictatorship of the Pussycatiat.  Dogs are their Master’s best friend because they are their charge.  If it is love, it is the love of a benefactor.  When you go for a walk you put a dog on a chain.  Try putting a chain on a cat and you’ll assuredly need a band-aid or two.  No, a cat “ain’t servant nor slave to anybody at all”.

Most Trotskyists I know have cats and many of them are named for one fallen hero of the class war or another; Rosa and Karl being amongst the most popular.  Maoists name their dogs after their own heroes.  I remember one member of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade had a dog named Chen Boda. Now don’t get me wrong, I like dogs.  Though on  individual rather than class terms.  It takes time for me to warm to a dog while with a cat it comes naturally and quick.

Yes, there are huge holes in my theory and this is why I have never brought it up at a branch meeting for a vote. For example,  Trotsky had big, scary dogs in Coyoacán and I have never heard word of Trotsky’s cats (though I understand that a number of cats now roam the grounds of Trotsky’s final home).  For a while I confused LT’s guard dogs’ names for the dogs of Robin Masters in Magnum PI;  Zeus and Apollo.  Now I have forgotten their names altogether.  I also knew a professor with a dog named Trotsky, but he was no Trotskyist.  Mao and meow is an alliteration, which though it proves nothing, points to possible problems as well.

What is indisputable is that Lenin was a fan of the pussy cat and both Trotskyists and Maoists claim Lenin as their own.  It is also indisputable that Lenin rejected the Democratic Dictatorship for the Proletarian one.  His appreciation of cats, while this is not proven, may have helped him to this conclusion.  During his final convalescence a little purr ball was often curled up on his lap, giving him great comfort, we are sure, even as both his life and the Proletarian Dictatorship slipped away (Stalin, I am confident, was a dog man).

As with Twain, Lenin’s love of cats is testimony, despite the image of Lenin as an unfeeling, granite-chiseled caricature of a statue, of his immense humanity.  Holes and all I stand by my theory.  A revolutionary without a cat is a sop to the Popular Front.  The working class must, like cats, demand its independence.  Vivè la Felidae!

A Spanish Spectre

The memory of Stalinism in the collective mind is often focused on the gray tower bloc and the gulag, on the cult of personality and the official lie.  Stalinism’s perfidy was not limited, however, to razor wire on the Siberian steppe or to the assassination chamber of a spattered Moscow basement.  On this day in 1937 in the midst of the Spanish Civil War Andrès Nin, a leading member of the Workers Party of Marxist Unity (POUM), was murdered by Stalinists.

Stalinism’s raison d’être, like all bureaucracies, was the defense of itself and the greatest threat to it came from the working class it claimed to lead.  Perhaps nowhere was that threat greater than in the Spain of the 1930s.  Nin was a partisan of workers’ power, of workers’ democracy- ideas fatal to Stalinism.  He was murdered along with thousands of others in the name of “anti-fascist unity”; that is unity between the Stalinists and the ghosts of the liberal Spanish bourgeoisie.  The fascists won and ruled Spain for the next 40 years.  Never forgive, never forget.

Farewell to Andrès Nin by Victor Serge

1921, Moscow.  The echoes of the cannons of Kronstadt are still in people’s spirits.  It’s hard to get used to the first white bread of the NEP.  The great wounded Commune seems to be convalescing.  On beautiful summer nights we stroll among the bustling crowd of the boulevards.  The trees surround us with a shadowy coolness.  All is dark, for there are still no streetlights.  My companion has come from Barcelona, and before that Cairo. Delegate of the CNT to the Communist International.  He is young, slim, with abundant curly hair, laughing eyes circled in gold, a beautifully timbered voice full of laughter and , already, with firmness.  Andres Nin explains to me that he is not at all an anarchist, but rigorously syndicalist.  Nothing utopian about his ideas, only the wish to conquer and organize production.

We meet at the Kremlin congress, in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions. His white shirt, open at the top button, his sharp profile, his cordiality.  We meet during the evening in Juan Maurin’s room at the Lux to talk about art, the Red Army, the Red Terror, organization, to agitate all the great problems.  We feel we are right there, at the heart of the great problems: it’s not words, but lives – and in the first place our own – that we are committing.

1923.  We are sitting at a table at a cafe on the Ring in Vienna.  Andres, after his time in prison in Germany, has taken refuge in Moscow: he is the Secretary of the International of Red Unions.  He is passing through here on a mission.  He brings me sad news.  Lenin is leaving us.  Lenin is perhaps dying.  Lenin knows that he is finished.  There is an atrocious sadness in Lenin’s eyes.  He fears for what will be done after him.  Bukharin goes to see him, in the gardens of Gorky, hidden behind shrubbery so as not to bother him.  Bukharin returns, crushed, saying: “ He is suffering unimaginably, he is fully conscious…”  Sometimes, with a sign, Lenin asks for a newspaper, and spells out its title with his lips…  With Lenin gone, the crisis will begin.  We know well the maladies of the revolution.  We see the shadows rising on the horizon…

1927.  Andres has lined himself up with the opposition.  He is among those who demand the right to think in the Bolshevik Party, the right to write and a capital reform of the regime in order to return to worker’s democracy.  We all feel that outside of this there is no salvation.  Expelled from the party, kept at a distance.  Will we be deported like our friends?  His wife, his two little girls, his work table, his life as a diligent worker, all of this will disappear tomorrow when, escorted by the men of the GPU, he will leave for Kazakhstan.  He doesn’t leave, and this surprises him: it’s because of his great renown overseas.

1931.  The revolution finally causes the crowds of Madrid to rise up.  Andres runs to my home in Leningrad.  We consult with each other.  He laughs like a child.  “Picture this: in Madrid the cops wear capes with red lining.  The third day, they reversed them. This is their way of joining the events.”  “Listen to this, old man: There were thousands of people lined up at the offices of the party of Primo de Rivera.  They had just emergently un-affiliated themselves, get it?  An archbishop un-affiliated himself by telegram.  He’s a gentleman both prudent and in a hurry.”  Andres perfectly understands the comic side of the drama.  Tomorrow he’s going to send a letter to the Central Committee, written in such a way that they’ll have to either throw him in prison or allow him to leave.  If it’s prison that awaits him I’ll do this and that, whatever I can.  If he’s liberated he’ll try to assist me in getting out of my semi-captivity.  I clearly recall a phrase of his:  “In any event, even there I have to be ready for a few years of prison.  It’s going to be damned complicated, the Spanish revolution.”  A short while later I receive from him a card postmarked Riga.

1932.  Olga – his wife – writes me a note from Barcelona in which fear can be sensed.  Reaction seems to have taken the upper hand after the anarchist revolts.  Andres, arrested, was taken to the south, perhaps in order to be deported to Africa.  I warn friends in France, but they never receive my letter. And I’ll never learn anything more about Andres.  At the other end of Europe I am locked up myself.  And I’ll be so for years.

1936, Brussels.  His letters finally each me: hasty, rushed, full of facts and force.  He is at the head of an extreme left worker’s party, made up of former opposition communists resolutely hostile to Stalinist totalitarianism.  He’s carrying on a difficult game, between the anarchists who, not wanting to “do politics” often do so with courage, but badly; the indecisive republicans who deep down are bourgeois; and the growing Stalinist intrigues.  He sees things in a dangerously clear way after his long Russian experience.  During the first months, a consultant to the justice system of the Catalan government, he establishes the revolution in law, simplifying procedures with a rude hand, creating Popular Tribunals.  The Stalinists demand his eviction from power and, since they have very persuasive arguments (in other words, armament) they obtain this…

June 1937.  The 17th bad news arrives.  Andres Nin was arrested yesterday in Barcelona and taken to an unknown destination by Stalinist policemen.  It has been affirmed that he was immediately assassinated.  The government of Valencia knows nothing, and that of Barcelona can do nothing.  Friends take the train and arrive there.  These were French and English Socialists and syndicalists.  The minister of Justice, Mr.Irujo, reassures them.  Nin is alive, everyone is fixated on the horribly scandalous accusations against him. But he’s in a Madrid at a private prison of the Communist Party, from which he must be taken…

And it’s over.  He couldn’t be taken from it.  No one knows what has become of him, what’s become of one of the most ardent tribunes of the Spanish proletariat.  Whether he was embarked for Russia or, as the rumors have it, assassinated in an alleyway, it’s over.  Farewell, my friend.  Your great courageous life is left to us, full of work and action.  Your terrible death is left to us as well.  Like you, we must hold out to the bitter end so that socialism be free.