‘The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION’

Eugene Debs, that greatest son of the middle American west, wrote this in 1907 in celebration of that year’s May Day events. It retains all of its vibrancy and vitality as events breathe new life into the global struggle for emancipation. ‘Revolution’ remains the most heroic word in every language.

‘Today the slaves of all the world are taking a fresh breath in the long and weary march; pausing a moment to clear their lungs and shout for joy; celebrating in festal fellowship their coming Freedom.

All hail the Labor Day of May!

The day of the proletarian protest;

The day of stern resolve;

The day of noble aspiration.

Raise high this day the blood-red Standard of the Revolution!

The banner of the Workingman;

The flag, the only flag, of Freedom.

Slavery, even the most abject—dumb and despairing as it may seem—has yet its inspiration. Crushed it may be, but extinguished never. Chain the slave as you will, O Masters, brutalize him as you may, yet in his soul, though dead, he yearns for freedom still.

The great discovery the modern slaves have made is that they themselves their must achieve. This is the secret of their solidarity; the heart of their hope; the inspiration that nerves them all with sinews of steel.

They are still in bondage, but no longer cower;

No longer grovel in the dust,

But stand erect like men.

Conscious of their growing power the future holds up to them her outstretched hands.

As the slavery of the working class is international, so the movement for its emancipation.

The salutation of slave to slave this day is repeated in every human tongue as it goes ringing round the world.

The many millions are at last awakening. For countless ages they have suffered; drained to the dregs the bitter cup of misery and woe.

At last, at last the historic limitation has been reached, and soon a new sun will light the world.

Red is the life-tide of our common humanity and red our symbol of universal kinship.

Tyrants deny it; fear it; tremble with rage and terror when they behold it.

We reaffirm it and on this day pledge anew our fidelity—come life or death—to the blood-red Banner of the Revolution.

Socialist greetings this day to all our fellow-workers! To the god-like souls in Russia marching grimly, sublimely into the jaws of hell with the Song of the Revolution in their deathrattle; to the Orient, the Occident and all the Isles of the Sea!

VIVA LA REVOLUTION!

The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION.

It thrills and vibrates; cheers and inspires. Tyrants and time-servers fear it, but the oppressed hail it with joy.

The throne trembles when this throbbing word is lisped, but to the hovel it is food for the famishing and hope for the victims of despair.

Let us glorify today the revolutions of the past and hail the Greater Revolution yet to come before Emancipation shall make all the days of the year May Days of peace and plenty for the sons and daughters of toil.

It was with Revolution as his theme that Mark Twain’s soul drank deep from the fount of inspiration. His immortality will rest at last upon this royal tribute to the French Revolution:

“The ever memorable and blessed revolution, which swept a thousand years of villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood—one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two Reigns of Terror, if we would but remember it and consider it: the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death on ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the horrors of the minor Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror, which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over, but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”’

Governor Rustbelt Balances a Budget

No, I’m not getting elected to anything anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t practiced an acceptance speech or two. Here’s a speech I’ve been working on in front of the mirror all morning where I’ve just been elected Governor of some cash-strapped midwestern state.

‘Sisters and brothers, comrades and friends, citizens all:

We are facing tough times. The rich are hoarding their money, the federal government is engaged in war after imperialist war abroad, our infrastructure is collapsing, the right-wing is assaulting the very notion of a society with attacks on every manifestation of collective right, of collective good. For thirty years a racist ‘war on drugs’ has destroyed whole communities of color, placing millions in prison and millions more into a ‘justice system’ where there is no justice and costing us billions of needed dollars. Immigrants are hounded and exploited. Industry has collapsed as the capitalists have packed off to better profit margins elsewhere. Workers are denigrated and blamed for the crisis; solidarity is a dirty word. The last of our unions are under determined assault.

No more!

As of tonight these emergency decrees are in place:

Tonight we begin to tax the rich, and we are going to tax them right out of existence. ‘Oh shit’, I hear as the champagne flutes drop to the carpet and every Mercedes engine in the state starts turning over. But that knock on the door? Those are our Teamster friends arriving at your house for an inventory of your ill-begotten gains, and no, I wouldn’t resist them. Any capitalist attempting to move money or property out of the state will have such properties immediately and unconditionally forfeited. It belongs to the people now. And we know where everything is hidden too, all of those immigrants you’ve hired to clean your lawn and were invisible to you, not even offered a glass of water to, over the years? Yeah, they’re all right here and do they have some stories to tell! In fact, they’ll be the folks sitting in judgment over you at the trials beginning next week. If I were you I’d start practicing your sincerest apologies.

The ‘War on Drugs’ is over. Kaput, finis, done. Instead of spending billions criminalizing poverty we will spend those billions getting people out of poverty. Recreational use of drugs is your business, addictions will be treated as a health issue and the prisons will be immediately be emptied of all drug offenders. To celebrate the end of the war on drugs all next week the Governor’s Mansion will be hosting the Blunt Olympics; come one, come all!

Oh, and private health care, that obscene profiteering over our neighbor’s distress? That’s over too. And here’s the kicker- it saves us money! Public health care which prioritizes healthy living is way less expensive than treating disease and illness after the fact. Instead of pouring billions into the pockets of executives, shareholders and redundant administration those billions will now be used, shocking I know, to help people! Neighborhood clinics will start opening this weekend around the state with the help of our good friends in the Cuban Ministry of Health who will be advising on the transition.

The state’s National Guard now deployed to a half-dozen places around the world in an imperial adventure will be coming home immediately. The daughters and sons of our state will no longer be put in harms way for the Military Industrial Complex (all such industries now being forever banned in the state) or the interests of Empire. Those wishing to volunteer for internationalist missions will be trained and sent to help our brothers and sisters around the globe suffering under the yoke of said Empire. Our first mission will be to Palestine in the campaign against the apartheid wall.

And finally, I, Governor Rustbelt am dissolving the State House and Senate, the office of Governor and the constitution of the state, the whole unnecessary bureaucracy. Every school, neighborhood and workplace will elect delegates to establish a new way of doing things, one designed with the interests of the majority in mind and not the parasitic few. And you Teabaggers shouting right now and getting on your knees to pray to your god for deliverance? Tough shit. Cause trouble and you’re in trouble. You’ve had your way for far too long and look at the mess we’re in.

Just one final thing; at every entrance to the state the banner ‘From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ be hung. OK, that’s about it. This was the first and last address from Governor Rustbelt, we don’t need governors anyway.’

Revolution

Back in the set list, comrades!

Detroit: Photos from an American Citadel Still

Like so many activists of generations past I ended up in Detroit to involve myself in important workers struggles. I didn’t consciously do it and it has only been recently that I have realized the footsteps I followed to the place.  While there are plenty of locally raised Detroit leftists, many of my comrades were and are folks who had been radicalized somewhere else and came to Detroit to put a little theory into practice. From this generation to mine and from the 60s folks who came to Detroit, a citadel of the black and workers (and black workers) movement and of working class culture, often from college campuses to factories or trades. Those comrades followed a generation, some of whom I knew well, now almost entirely passed who came to Detroit radicalized by the struggles of the 1930s. I had been coming to Detroit since the summer of 1990, but it was the Detroit Newspaper strike that began in July, 1995 that drew me there to live.

I lived in Detroit for years, most of the time on Fourth Street just north of Wayne State and working at one of the last grocery stores in the city where I was a union steward. Rosa Parks was a costumer, or Mother Parks as she was called, and I can say I’ve seen the icon buying cereal. Since leaving Detroit for a slightly quieter life (the city was not, in those days before urban farming, generally conducive to healthy living) I have lived in its orbit, politically, socially and culturally. I’ve developed a pretty conflicted, but deeply respectful relationship with the city. Have I got Detroit stories. Loads of them. And the stories I don’t remember are probably better, even if more embarrassing. One thing is for certain; despite claims to the contrary, Detroit is very much alive and always has been, even if often a tough place to live.

One of the people I met pretty early in my Detroit years was Brad Duncan. We met on the steps of Zoots Coffee on Second (anyone who knew Zoots misses it). If I remember correctly we were talking about the Irish hunger strikes before were even introduced. Brad would later become a guide for much of Detroit’s offerings; music, history, food and more. Brad recently moved to the East Coast and the current issue of Critical Moment, an essential Detroit activist publication, carries a photo essay from him called ‘Love Letter from Detroit’. CM describes Brad as ‘a political activist and freelance journalist who was first politicized by the Detroit Newspaper Strike (1995) as a teenager. His radio commentaries on the crossroads of music and radical social change movements can be heard on KBOO (Portland, OR). He lives in Philadelphia, PA and can be reached at Palestinelives@hotmail.com.’

Brad said “I want these photos of Detroit to be the exact opposite of the ‘ruin porn’ image we always see of Detroit.  I don’t think Detroit is pathetic or dead.  For starters, I think Detroit is a city with a rich history of fighting for workers rights, fighting against racism, and creating some of the best music of all time. I was moving out of Detroit after many years and  wanted to capture some of the city’s classic (to me) images.  I wanted to show Detroit to my friends around the world, and to have some images to remind me of the city while I’m away.” Brad sent the Rustbelt a slew of other photos, the slide show below, and promises to answer questions readers might have about them.

We all have sounds we associate with places. One of the sounds I associate with Detroit is Faruq Z. Bey and the Northwoods Improvisers. Readers are requested to listen to the above as an accompaniment to photos. I think they work well together. Whether you know Detroit or not, comrades are sure to enjoy them as much as I have.

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Egypt, the Commune and Coriolanus; Marx and Shakespeare in Historic Times

When great events happen words wombed in dusty classics burst forth with new energy and resume the urgency with which they were written. It is impossible, in the face of history-making, not also to be drawn to history already made. In the Rustbelt’s little world Shakespeare created the words and Marx assembled the script of our human drama. I’ve revisited both since the events in Egypt began forcefully intervening into history sixteen (only sixteen? it seems a year, at least!) days ago.

While it’s impossible not to feel some comparisons with the Commune and Cairo’s Tahrir, I’m not making any analogies (really, I’m not!). All I’m saying is that in times of revolution Marx’s Civil War in France becomes an even more remarkable read, no more so than now. Here’s something that passed my eyes on an early morning bus ride, where nearly every paragraph read before sparkled to life…

‘In their reluctance to continue the civil war opened by Thiers’ burglarious attempt at Montmartre, the Central Committee made themselves, this time, guilty of a decisive mistake in not at once marching upon Versailles, then completely helpless, and this putting an end to the conspiracies of Thiers and his Rurals. Instead of this, the Party of Order was again allowed to try its strength at the ballot box, on the 26th of March, the day of the election of the Commune. Then, in the mairies [city halls] of Paris, they exchanged bland words of conciliation with their too generous conquerors, muttering in their hearts solemn vows to exterminate them in due time.’

Among other overtly political themes, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus holds a cold mirror up to the despot’s visage only to reveal ourselves, or part of ourselves- those dark places where power becomes its own justification, where power panders and we pander power. There is a whole lot in this work, one my father wouldn’t let me watch as a kid because of its incredible, brutal violence, for leftists to ponder. Who could watch the play now and not see a little of Ben Ali or Hosni Mubarek in Caius Martius? Or in the Senators, the ‘people’s tribunes’, Egypt’s pretenders who, in their own power desires, propel themselves on the people’s hunger for justice in rebellion against a master they once served? Again, these are not analogies, just the reiteration that certain struggles of our species are…ongoing.

The above (Act III Scene III) is from an excellent 1984 RSC production with Alan Howard in the lead, it is out there and worth finding. Readers might also be interested in John Filling’s essay The Body, the Belly and Blood in Coriolanus: From Shakespeare to Brecht through Marx.

Ireland: Vote For The United Left Alliance!

Statement from Ireland’s Socialist Democracy on the February 25th elections.

We have been lied to, we have been cheated and we have been treated as fools. We have had our salaries cut, our pension money stolen, our taxes increased and social welfare cut. Our young people are emigrating and hundreds of thousands are unemployed. Social welfare is being slashed and our health and education services are being decimated.

And we are only into the first year of a four year plan to make all these things even worse!

We are being told that we must pay for the economic crisis even though we had nothing to do with creating it. In fact salt is being rubbed into our wounds because all the sacrifices we are being ordered to make are to save those really responsible for the crisis. The money that is taken off us is being handed over to the bankers and developers who created this mess in the first place. The bankers continue to pay themselves bonuses and NAMA hands our money over to property developers to finish their projects.

WHY?

It is not only the bankers who created this mess. The Government encouraged the speculation and wants us to pay to save the banks. The Department of Finance and the Regulator failed to prevent the speculation. Every part of the establishment and the Irish State failed the ordinary people of Ireland.

Those who are supposed to defend us failed us. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions was in partnership with this Government every year Fianna Fail was in power. David Begg, the leader of ICTU, sat on the Board of the Central Bank when it failed to regulate the banks and failed to do anything to prevent the disaster.

The whole elite and their economic system have failed us. Their entire political system is rotten and corrupt and now we are told we must do the bidding of unelected bureaucrats from the European Union and IMF. We don’t just need a change of Government. We need an entirely new State and an entirely new social and economic system.

We need a new Republic, a second Republic, a WORKERS REPUBLIC! We need to return to the promise of James Connolly and the fight for our independence in 1916. It promised that the ownership of Ireland would belong to the people of Ireland and that all the children of Ireland would be cherished equally.

This promise has been betrayed. The economic crisis has torn away the veil of lies from all the main parties who want the ordinary people to pay for this crisis. From Fianna Fail to the leadership of ICTU they differ only over how long they want the cuts to be implemented and what precise cuts we will have to endure.

THE ALTERNATIVE

There is only one group of candidates who oppose all cuts. One group that opposes us paying for the banks mistakes and who oppose sacrificing our futures and that of our children for the EU and IMF. Only the candidates of the United Left Alliance offer this. As supporters of the ULA:

* We are opposed to all cuts. All the main parties say that there is no money but this is not the real problem. All these parties supported borrowing billions to bail out the banks. We never heard any talk of a lack of money then. If they wanted to raise money to defend working people they could propose taxing the rich, the big corporations and use the wealth from the Corrib gas field. Instead they want to protect the big corporations and save the richest in our society such as the bankers and property developers.

* We stand for total repudiation of the debt. We cannot pay it and we will not pay it! We did not borrow this money; the bankers did and Fianna Fail did. At this election we will show what we think of both of them. After the election we should not meekly pay their bills.

The next step in the EU/IMF deal is to restructure the banks but these rotten institutions should not be saved with workers’ money. We need a new bank that not only is funded by working people but is owned and run by them; a workers co-operative designed not to fund property speculation but to fund real economic and social development.

* We stand for complete rejection of the EU and IMF deal. The EU and IMF are ordering the Irish people to bail out British and German bankers who stupidly lent to the Irish banks.

In every country workers are asked to undercut each other’s wages, services and welfare in a race to the bottom from which only the rich can win. We should not compete with other workers. We should unite with them. Our solidarity should be with those facing the same situation as us – not Irish bankers. For this we need a new Europe. A Europe of the workers not a Europe of the bankers.

We have waited a long time for this election. We all want to punish those who have threatened our future but we will be no further forward if we vote for parties which want to continue the same policies as Fianna Fail. These parties have conspired with Fianna Fail to force the Finance Bill through the Dail and impose crippling cuts. After the election they will soon tell you that the Fianna Fail way is the only way.

This is your chance to vote for an alternative. But your vote will not be enough. Just as we cannot rely on the Dail parties during the election we will have to rely on ourselves after it. We must organise in our unions and our communities to defend our livelihoods and give our children a future.

Only ONE group stand opposed to ALL cuts, to paying the debts of the BANKERS and opposing the bullying of the EU and IMF. Vote for and sign up to the United Left Alliance!

This leaflet has been produced by supporters of the United Left Alliance who are members and supporters of Socialist Democracy. You can contact us: Socialist Democracy or contact the United Left Alliance.

Tariq Ali: ‘The Arab Nation Is Awakening’

‘When all the bricklayers, and all the machinists, and all the miners, and blacksmiths, and printers, and hod-carriers, and stevedores, and house-painters, and brakemen, and engineers, and conductors, and factory hands, and horse-car drivers, and all the shop-girls, and all the sewing-women, and all the telegraph operators; in a word all the myriads of toilers in whom is slumbering the reality of that thing which you call Power … when these rise, call the vast spectacle by any deluding name that will please your ear, but the fact remains a Nation has risen.’

Mark Twain

Egypt: Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié ne font que se creuser un tombeau

I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.

- Mark Twain, 1906

When I fell asleep on the last night of December, 2010 I’d no idea that I would awake to a year where, before the first month was out, new references points in the great revolutionary tradition, the one born the moment there was something to revolute against, would be written, and written across an entire region. Regardless of the rest of the year’s events (of those I’m increasingly curious), tonight and tomorrow yet new chapters are bursting forth from the actions of the defenders of the Tahrir, the militants in the Suez, the workers of Alexandria and a hundred more places I don’t know the name of in a thousand different struggles I am not aware of.

2011, a year of revolutions? Not when I went to bed New Years Eve. And today?

There are so many things to say on this situation. I never would have guessed that this year Egypt, of all places, would be a workshop of revolution. We’ll have much to learn from them and their experiences. We can start learning now.

In the midst of these historic events it is difficult to comment; it is hard to take in all that is happening…and things are happening at a furious pace. The illusions of the first days; the invincibility of the police, the capacity of the masses, these were dispelled and shattered gloriously on that bridge across the Nile where on the Day of Rage, and at great cost, the hated police were routed and with them went the people’s fear. Illusions in the unity of the opposition, the possibility of positive foreign intervention and a quick, decisive win have been lost in the last week, by some more than others. Illusions in the Army as neutral arbitrator remain, and that is a dangerous illusion. Between the ranks of conscripts and the high officer corp, for all intents and purposes paid contractors of the United States Defense Department, a chasm of class and interest lie. It is in the opening of that chasm that this revolution will live or die. The illusion in the Army reflects a wider illusion in the unity of  ‘nation’. It is through appeals to this national lie that the Army, now directly, will assume national leadership. A revolution for democracy that ends, positively, in a military government. This is the perfidious price of “national unity”.

If I could indulge a broad comment without sounding like an asshole for doing so as folks every bit the moral equivalent of the Communards are battling mukhabarat thugs for their lives and the future of their revolution, I would say it is that division, between officers and conscripts, that must be appealed to if the army is to be split. To do that the class demands of the demonstrators themselves have to be boldly articulated. In doing so, seeking to split an Army that stands between victory or compromise, a new departure or cooptation. The opposition to Mubarek is united by Mubarek, but for different reasons and with different interests. If unity is essential in overthrowing the figure of Mubarek , or even his NDP regime (without the Army?), such unity is deadly to the aspirations of the millions of poor and working class Egyptians who have broken with fear and chose to intervene, in their masses, in their own destiny in the making of a post-Mubarek Egypt.

A unity of all the ‘popular’ forces is in reality unity under ruling forces; and there is no doubt that a good deal of the economic élite and eager middle class want to see the back of Mubarek; he has become bad for business. No, any future for Egypt must confront the class conflict raging in that country head on. Most importantly for the workers. Are they to throw out a Ferdinand Marcos and get a (at best!) Corozan Aquino…massive austerity to pay back creditors (read US banks) and achieve a wealth disparity (and a healthy growth rate) worse than under Marcos? Any unity on deciding the fate of the nation after Mubarek is a unity based on a ‘national’ lie and should be resisted if  ‘democracy’ (whatever that is) is going to mean anything for working class people.

Getting rid of this regime is a lifetime opportunity to remake Egyptian society. Freedom for Egypt means things like freedom from the imperialist system; the IMF, the World Bank, the logic of the market and the curse of capital. Freedom from the Empire means freedom from the United States and its imposed order; from the Camp David Accords to MacDonalds, from the daily humiliations a dependent nation suffers at the hand of its ‘ally’. What is a democracy when the most defining relationship a citizen has is through their role in the economy and yet it is precisely there that ‘democracy’ is off limits? The quest for democracy need not stop at the voting booth, but in all manner of institutions and organization. The neighborhood committees and strike networks offer ground gained already with which to experiment.  And most central to the possibility of a radical new departure: a democratic control over the economy. Democracy is no empty vessel in a society riven by antagonism and class conflict, but one determined by the class in whose interest it is exercised.

We are living in exciting times, momentous ones. Every bit of me wants to be on that square tonight, facing down reaction and preparing to march on the Palace tomorrow. The actions this last week have an enormous emotional impact, as I am sure readers who’ve been watching know. I feel guilty for not being there and jealous too. Genuine revolutions, and I believe that is just what we are witnessing, come around on time scales that count by generations. Let’s not take them or their tasks lightly. As a risen people make history this week, they are prying open possibilities that were supposed to be impossible. Revolution, a utopian impracticality (to say the least) in most times becomes the only practical thing to do at certain times. The overthrow of the Mubarek regime, and with him the policies which discredited him, is now a practical necessity in the life of the Egyptian, dare I say Arab, Nation.

This slogan was wheat pasted all over the Left Bank in those heady days of Paris, May 68. Those moments with millions on the street, a revolution in the air and when everything seemed possible. That slogan was:

Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié ne font que se creuser un tombeau.

Those who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves.

The revolution in ’68 touched the halfway mark, perhaps. But no further. There are many kinds of graves in life, and in the life of politics even more. The graves waiting for the Cairo communards are much different from the ones faced by France’s failed 68ers. Another generation in the darkness. Or compromises, made in the midst of great possibility, that damn the task of another revolution to another generation.

Long Live The Egyptian Revolution! Forward!