July 25, 2011
Refugee Blues by W H Auden
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew;
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.
The consul banged the table and said:
'If you've got no passport, you're officially dead';
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.
Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go today, my dear, but where shall we go today?
Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said:
'If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread';
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.
Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying: 'They must die';
We were in his mind, my dear, we were in his mind.
Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.
Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.
Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.
Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors;
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.
Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.
July 21, 2011
BOOK REVIEW. Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History. McKay, Ian. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006. Reviewed by Mauricio Martinez
Source: The Spark (Online Ed)
http://thesparkjournal.blogspot.com/search/label/Book%20Reviews
There’s an old joke (told more or less famously by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek1), that goes something like this: a man thinks he is a grain of seed. He is promptly taken to the mental institution where the doctors eventually convince him that he is not a grain of seed but a man. But, just when he’s apparently cured – convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man—and permitted to leave the hospital, he comes back instantly, trembling with fear: there is a chicken outside and he is afraid the chicken is going to eat him. “Come now,” says the doctor, “you know full well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.” “You and I know that,” the patient says, “but does the chicken know?”
In a psychoanalytic sense, the joke has some instructive value: it’s not enough to convince a patient that a certain delusion is not “real,” or to make them conscious of their delusion; one must tap into the unconscious itself or the patient will never be truly “cured.” We can probe a bit deeper still; one might say that the joke conceals a certain statement on the nature of reality. The patient, who in delusion thinks he is a seed and in the hospital is convinced that in reality he is a man, emerges from the hospital to the “outside” world, and is immediately thrown back into his delusion. Why? When convinced of the “reality” that he is indeed a man and not a seed, the patient had simply swapped one delusion for another. The lesson? Our conception of reality is always framed by certain “fictions” which sustain that reality. Fictions that are, in many ways, just as arbitrary as delusions.
This problem is also illustrative of a central dilemma of contemporary historical inquiry, namely, “Is that the way things really were, or only how we think they were?” Since its beginnings, history has endeavoured to provide the “definitive” record of a certain historical event – the Second World War, the fall of the Roman Empire, and so on. But more recently – especially since the 80s – many historians have rebelled against that view, the most fervent of them embracing the post-modern view that objective reality as such simply does not exist and never has. Left historians as well have had to come to grips with this problem in their own way.
Case in point: Ian McKay’s Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History. As the title suggests, the book is an attempt to “rethink” the history of the Canadian left, to look at it and understand it in a radically new and innovative way. The book is impressive in how it takes this task of “rethinking” to heart. Billed as an introduction to a multi-volume history of the Canadian left (forthcoming), the bulk of its 217 pages is an amalgam of analytical frameworks and conceptual schemas.
McKay begins by proposing that the experience of the left has always been one of “living and reasoning otherwise.” This “otherwise,” McKay argues, following the Polish-born sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, is ultimately a “utopian” project – not fanciful or far-fetched, but rather a vision of the future that radically breaks from the thinking and conditions of the present reality.
McKay then borrows from Marx the concept of the “realm of freedom,” a life unconstrained by necessity (which is in fact less a Marxist concept than an Aristotelian one2; Marx’s innovation was to assert that this realm of freedom was only truly possible through the emancipation of social production), and adds to it Gramsci’s notion of “objective possibility.” In short, the experience of the left is precisely in proposing alternative futures of freedom, of real utopia, and to connect these futures to objective possibilities inherent in the present that point the way towards their realization.
So what is the left, beyond the notions of freedom and possibility that it seeks to realize? McKay cautions us against trying to reduce the left to a core “essence,” which is as fruitless as trying to distil a core “essence” of Marx. There have been many ‘lefts,’ just as there have been many ‘Marxes’: “each period, in complex ways,” McKay writes, “makes its own practice of leftism”; “leftists in each period invent distinctive conceptual systems through which they grasp the world,” and each constructs its own “dialect of the general language of socialism.”3
For each generation, or “cohort,” there are many “paths” to socialism; McKay provides eight: “proletarianization,” or general working-class experience, so-called “diaspora leftisms,” Canada’s various national questions, and movements of gender liberation, spiritual awakening, intellectual inquiry, “global awareness,” and finally, generational concerns, such as those of the generations returning from the First and Second World Wars. McKay’s emphasis on a plurality of “leftisms,” each evolving through different paths, is crucial to McKay’s “strategy of reconnaissance,” a way of looking at left history that avoids the “sectarianism” and “sentimentality” that, McKay argues, have plagued histories of the Canadian left for too long. A reconnaissance approach, McKay argues, avoids partisanship and is geared towards new insights, rather than just reinforcing what we already know and believe.
Using McKay’s approach, the history of the Canadian left emerges as a series of “left formations,” influenced by objective “matrix events,” moments that destabilize the status quo and have ripple-effects within social institutions and popular consciousness. Matrix events (like the Great Depression, for example) are characterized by “moments of refusal” that upset conventional ways of thinking and being; moments of “supersedure,” in which consciousness itself heads forth in radically new directions; and finally, “systemization,” which occurs when society returns to “business as usual.” At this point, left formations tend to retreat into themselves, developing specialized languages and in effect preparing the way for new formations that will recreate the process again on a new political and conceptual terrain.
In response, each formation creates its own conceptual models (i.e. Marxism-Leninism, the Social Gospel, etc.), its own forms of organization (the trade union, the Leninist “party of a new type”), its own forms of education, its own sense of belonging, and so on: its own way of living and thinking “otherwise.” From this understanding of how the left has functioned throughout history, the rest of the book outlines a way in which new models of historical analysis can be formed on McKay’s conceptual basis and generate new knowledge about where the left came from, where it is going, and its relationship to capitalism and the “Liberal Order” that has defined Canada’s consciousness and social institutions throughout its history.
McKay’s book can certainly be lauded for its intent, and it does succeed in breaking with convention and boldly proposing new ways of understanding left history. And most would agree that an understanding of history free from partisanship is a noble aim. And McKay’s “reconnaissance,” given its ostensibly leftist commitment, seems to present itself as more or less politically neutral. But the assertion that such a methodology is free from the sectarianism and sentimentality of previous histories comes across as, in some ways, almost false and self-serving. In his final chapter, “Mapping the Canadian Movement,” McKay takes care to give all of the various “leftisms” (Communists, Social-Democrats, New Leftists, etc.) their due, but does so by tying them to particular historical stages and matrix events: first, the old Socialists (late nineteenth century), then the CPC (1917 – 1945), the CCF-NDP (1945 – 1960s), then the New Left (1960s – 1970s), and ending with the NDP and the global justice movement (1980s to the present day).
McKay ultimately reveals himself as emerging from the tradition of radical democracy, which has gained popularity within the global justice movement and has found its expression within the NDP through the short-lived New Politics Initiative. McKay, consciously or unconsciously, culminates his analysis by describing the new “left formation” of our time as basically his left formation, with each previous one having more or less conveniently departed the historical stage, leaving—at best—residues which will be consciously or unconsciously appropriated by the formations to come.
Much is revealed in McKay’s use of the theories and ideas of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. McKay employs a great number of Gramscian concepts, including “hegemony,” “supersedure,” “historic-bloc,” and “war of position.” McKay cautions against interpreting left history in “tragic” or “ironic” terms, but if there is one thing that is tragic or ironic about left history, it is the fact that Gramsci has become the poster-boy for this new radical democratic current. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri state in a footnote to their famous book Empire (by no means an “orthodox” Marxist work, but one that, if you ask me, has some strong Marxist-Leninist undercurrents):
“Poor Gramsci, communist and militant before all else, tortured and killed by fascism and ultimately by the bosses who financed fascism – poor Gramsci was given the gift of being considered the founder of a strange notion of hegemony that leaves no place for a Marxian politics (See, for example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics [a key text in radical-democratic theory – M.M.]…. We have to defend ourselves against such generous gifts!”4
It is thus telling how McKay adopts Gramsci’s dialectic of “war of position”/ “war of manoeuvre,” tossing out the second in favour of the first. True, dramatic wars of manoeuvre – general strikes, revolts, revolutions – are few and far between in Canada, and gradual, grinding wars of position, leading to more modest structural changes, are more common. But then again, the same goes for most of the world. But it is rather silly to turn vice into virtue and presume – as McKay seems to – that the success of the left, in the past and in the future, should be measured by its ability to penetrate the “crevices of the liberal order,”5 or that “left wing effectiveness in Canada comes down in large part to how skilfully and subtly liberal order is pushed to its definitional limits.”6 Such a one-sided interpretation of Gramsci’s thought leads to an ultimate privileging of reform and glorification of parliamentary opposition, akin to Jack Layton’s 2006 promise that “electing more New Democrats to the house,” would somehow strengthen the left’s position against Harper, or the idea that passing a Private Member’s Bill on the labelling of trans fats is in some way more than a very small part of a wider emancipatory project. (We’re back to the old joke again: “didn’t you know that Gramsci was a revolutionary?” “You and I know that,” the Gramscian says, “but does Gramsci know?”)
But far more than the use of Gramsci, which is not particular to McKay by any means, it is the use of the phrase “Canada’s Left History” that ought to be rendered problematic. McKay admits that left formations usually come with an attendant “internationalist” or “world” outlook, but shouldn’t the historian of Canadian left history have a world outlook as well? For example, shall we view the decline in prominence of the CPC after 1945 as its effective exit from the historical stage, or rather as its effective relegation to a frontier outpost of a global movement that was, in many respects, just gaining steam? Or, for that matter, why is it that the left has never been in power in Canada? McKay suggests that the reasons are intrinsically Canadian: a “Liberal order” that co-opts and digests leftist energies, blunting their revolutionary edge, and smoothing over the contradictions of the capitalist system.
But capitalism, at least since 1492, has always been a world system, and could it not be said that beyond the primary contradiction of capitalism – the intrinsic contest between workers and capitalists – there exists a secondary contradiction, that of imperialism – between imperial countries and colonial or neo-colonial countries, in which all classes in the imperialist countries benefit – that distorts, or better, refracts, the primary one? (“Didn’t you know that Canada’s history has been shaped by imperialism?” “You and I know that, but does Canada know?”)
Again, we are faced with the very contradiction between the subjective position of the historian and the objective “reality” that the historian seeks to describe. McKay’s reconnaissance, which aims to describe events in some ways “as they really are,” in all of their apparent complexity and plurality, removes the subjective element, and as such is ultimately untenable. Like, how, in light of the recent re-founding convention of the Young Communist League last March, are we to interpret the decision to disband the YCL in 1991? Was the decision to disband an example of colossal hubris and even an absurd arrogance (to put it mildly)? Or maybe it was just a “formation” that had had its day and no longer served any historical purpose. (“You and I know that,” the YCLer said, “but does the YCL know?”)
“But, oh,” the reader might object, “you are really just a partisan, sectarian and sentimental!” You bet! And card-carrying! And, in fact, I would rather live in a world full of partisan histories where the CPC is described in vitriolic, dismissive, or otherwise irreverent terms than one that lauds its contributions while at the same time maintains a cynical distance from it as a relic in a museum. A cynical distance that is everywhere in our popular ideology, where nobody believes in Santa Claus yet you would be hard-pressed to find a public place without a Christmas tree in late December. “Yes, it’s a religious ritual, but I don’t really believe in it.” You and I know that, but does Christmas know? One thing about having a partisan viewpoint is that there’s just no denying the ignorance of chickens.
_________________
Notes:
[1] - Slavoj Zizek, in a talk entitled “The Ignorance of the Chicken, or, Who Believes What Today?” April 12, 2006, posted on the Critical Inquiry website, http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/media/zizek.html. I have to thank and credit Dr. Zizek with the inspiration for the tenor of this review.
2 - “Aristotle distinguished three ways of life (bioi [bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation, i.e. the philosopher; bios apolaustikos, the life of art and pleasure; and the bios politikos, the political life – M.M.]) which men might choose freedom, that is, in full independence of the necessities of life and the relationships they originated. This prerequisite of freedom ruled out all ways of life chiefly devoted to keeping one’s self alive – not only labor, which was the way of life of the rule of his master, but also the working life of the free craftsman and the acquisitive life of the merchant.” See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd. ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1958] 1998, 12.
3 - McKay, 35.
4 - Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. New York: Harvard University Press, 2000, 451, ff. 26.
5 - McKay, 79.
6 - McKay 84
July 20, 2011
July 20, German Communists Answer theses of CPUSA's Sam Webb, by Dr. Hans-Peter Brenner writing in the Berlin socialist daily Junge Welt , July 20, 2011
Coping with political defeat, July 20, 2011 by Hans-Peter Brenner
Source: 21stcenturymanifesto
Certain Features of the Historical Development of Marxism is a work of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In it he dealt with the consequences of the defeat of the first Russian revolution of 1905. At that time, many party members (including many recently enrolled intellectuals) left the revolutionary party in droves. Soon after that, the farewell to Marxism, which we too experienced in 1989-1991, became the fashion.
As a reflection of this change there occurred profound disintegration, confusion, shaking and swaying of all sorts – in a word, there appeared a very serious internal crisis of Marxism. The resolute defense against this decay, the determined and persistent struggle for the basics of Marxism, again came on the agenda.
That was Lenin’s diagnosis.
It was — and still is — important for us German Communists to examine what conclusions other Communist parties later drew from the defeat of socialism in Europe and the USSR.
First of all, I think about the leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba, which had already adjusted to this disaster before the shameful end of Mikhail Gorbachev who drove to ruin Soviet socialism, his country, and his party. Cuba — the country and the Communist Party – understood this: the harsh “drought” of the Special Period would govern the 1990s and early 2000s. Without its revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist character, the Communist Party of Cuba would have given up its socialist goal.
Self-awareness or Self-doubt?
I recall one Communist leader, prominent but, unfortunately, less noted in Germany , Alvaro Cunhal (1913-2005), the longtime general secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). At the time of the fascist Salazar dictatorship, Cunhal’s underground struggle, his inspiring and mobilizing role during and after the 1974 victory of the “Carnation Revolution,” as well as his shrewd leadership, are legendary.
The advance of the socialist stage of the revolutionary upheaval in Portugal was stopped by the united and coordinated actions of U.S. imperialism, NATO, the EU, the main European imperialist states, international social democracy, and domestic reaction.
Thanks to his personal resourcefulness, Cunhal embarked upon a strategic retreat. With a party united by a Marxist-Leninist program, he achieved the preservation of the PCP and its mass influence. He developed its clear profile, which it keeps today, as a revolutionary party of the working class, peasants and other working people.
To this day, his conclusions about the character of a Communist Party at the beginning of the 21st century are well worth reading. In his 2001 work, As Seis de Caracteristicas Fundamentais do Partido Comunista (The Six Basic Features of a Communist Party) Cunhal goes into the internal situation of the Communist movement at the beginning of the 21st century. He writes:
The international Communist movement, and the parties from which it is made up, were subject to profound changes as a the result of the collapse of the USSR and other socialist countries and capitalism’s success in its rivalry with socialism. There were parties who denied their militant past, their class nature, the goal of a socialist society, and revolutionary theory. In some cases, they were transformed into system-integrated parties, and they eventually disappeared from the scene.
In 2011 as well, this finding is relevant and correct.
Features of a Communist Party
The Communist movement as a whole – Cunhal went on – has achieved flexibility in its composition and reached new limits. Admittedly, though there is no model of a Communist Party, nonetheless “six basic features can reveal a Communist party, regardless of whether the party bears that name or another.
Briefly, their traits could include:
1. To be a party completely independent of the interests, ideology, pressure and threats of capitalist forces;
2. To be a party of the working class, the working people, in general, the exploited and oppressed;
3. To be a party with a democratic internal life and a unified central leadership;
4. To be a party which is both internationalist and which defends the interests of its country;
5. To be a party that defines its goal as the building of a society which knows neither exploited nor exploiters, a socialist society;
6. To be the bearer of a revolutionary theory, the theory of Marxism-Leninism, which not only makes the explanation of the world possible, but also shows the way to change it.
In its simplicity and plainness, the last point sounds like it is of little interest, just as the other five points appear to include too little that is new. And yet these “self-evident truths” are not self-evident truths – not even for Communists. But more of that later.
Classics Taken at their Word
Cunhal made available to us the following explanation for his six points. It is cited here, in more detail, because of its uniqueness and distinctiveness:
All the slanderous, punishing, anti-Communist campaigns are lies. Marxism-Leninism is a living, anti-dogmatic, dialectical, creative theory, which is further enriched by practice and by its responses to new situations and phenomena, which is its job. It drives the practice of enrichment and development, dynamically and creatively using the lessons of practice.
Marx in Capital and Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto analyzed and defined the basic elements and characteristics of capitalism.
In the second half of the 19th century, however, the development of capitalism underwent an important amendment. Competition led to concentration and monopoly. We owe to Lenin and his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism the definition of capitalism at the end of the 19th century. These theoretical developments are of exceptional value. And the value of research and systematization of theoretical knowledge is rated as high.
In a synthesis of extraordinary clarity and rigor, a famous article by Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism explains it. In the philosophy of dialectical materialism, historical materialism is its application to society. Political economy is the analysis and explanation of capitalism and exploitation, and the theory of surplus value is the cornerstone for understanding exploitation. The theory of socialism is the definition of the new society, the abolition of exploitation of man by man.
During the 20th century and the social transformations accompanying it, much new theoretical thinking was added. However, there also was scattered and contradictory thinking which made it difficult to distinguish what is theoretical development and where it is a question of revisionist deviation from principles. Hence the urgent need for debate without preconceptions and without making truths absolute. It’s not about the search for conclusions deemed to be final, but rather the intensification of joint reflection.” Quoted from: www.kommunisten.ch
Cunhal is now dead six years. His party, the PCP, however, considers him not an idol on a pedestal, a “historical figure” whose thoughts and ideas slowly but gradually have been forgotten. Today, his theoretical and programmatic conclusions determine the path and self-understanding of the PCP. But, unfortunately, it is quite different elsewhere.
On Slippery Ground
The current example of this is the thinking of the chairman of the CPUSA, Sam Webb. Political Affairs, the theoretical organ of his party, published in February this year under the title: “A Party of Socialism in the 21st Century: What It Looks Like, What It Says, and What It Does.” It has now appeared in German on the news portal of the German Communist Party’s website, www.kommunisten.de
Why are Webb’s theses of interest beyond the CPUSA?
For example, why did the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), despite the demands of the controversies and class struggles raging in that country, to which it devotes so much energy and combativeneness, send a really dramatic appeal To the members and cadres of the Communist Party USA! To U.S. militant workers! It was also addressed to all the Communist and Workers’ Parties, “in order to protest against these theses.”
And now, why do German Communists deal with the Webb theses too?
Sam Webb stressed at the beginning of his 29 theses, each different in detail and very different in theoretical significance, that he was on slippery ground. The publisher of the theoretical journal of the CPUSA, Political Affairs, also knew well what he was getting involved with by posting it. The preface that introduces the article makes this clear.
The following article represents only the views of its author. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the official views of any organization or collective…
Apparently, to avoid such criticisms [Editor: criticism of opportunism], Webb emphasized in the introduction that it was a “draft,” an unfinished manuscript, and that “readers will surely note inconsistencies, contradictions, silences and unfinished ideas.”
This is all too ostentatious modesty, and the ensuing fishing for compliments belies the altogether clear and complete implications of the theses.
Communists without Lenin
In the end Sam Webb delivers a very consistent idea, although it is not original. A letter in the German Communist Party weekly Unsere Zeit has already pointed out:
What is so exciting, new and important for us in these theses of Comrade Webb…? I cannot see it. Readers of Marxistische Blaetter already read and evaluated the core of his “Reflections on Socialism” in mid-2008 (In Focus: International Marxism, March 2008). And in our party, since the mid to late 1980s, we have discussed other theories (for example, the reduction of Marxism to a mere method, or the orientation to a “Marxism without Lenin.” Not only did we do this thoroughly, but we developed collective responses crowned with a new party program’. Lothar Geisler, “Theses Not New,” Unsere Zeit, July 1, 2011, p. 12)
In fact, most of the 29 theses do not contain much that is new. Though he writes of merely one in the article mentioned in Marxistische Blaetter from 2008, in its approaches, the quixotic intellectual journey already discernible in 2008 continues, but it now ends as a break with central points of Communist theory — socialism, and the doctrine of the Party. He runs aground on the shoals of a left–pluralist Marxism; or the earlier “Eurocommunism,” or the current democratic socialism of the German Left Party,European Left, respectively.
I mention particularly the rejection of the theory of Marx, Engels and Lenin as a unified, revolutionary theory of the working class.
What is original here is a hitherto less well-known chauvinistic undertone. As noted in his Thesis #2:
As for “Marxism-Leninism,” the term should be retired in favor of simply “Marxism.” For one thing, it has a negative connotation among ordinary Americans, even in left and progressive circles. Depending on whom you ask, it either sounds foreign or dogmatic or undemocratic or all of these together.
Granted, Lenin was no Russian exile finding safety in the U.S., taking out U.S. citizenship, and Americanizing his first or last name – perhaps to Sam Cook or Sam Smith.
But do ordinary Americans deem Karl Marx to be a fellow American?
And does Marxism really sound so terrifically American, that perhaps Sarah Palin herself, the icon of ordinary Americans, understands by Marxism a sweetness and innocence, causing her patriotic sentiment to peal like a church bell?
Webbism?
So the real test awaits Jim and Jane, ordinary Americans.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth comes to my mind, with its sigh, almost a curse:
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But the meaning of Webb’s theses is more than noisy fury.
We long-suffering European Communists are quite accustomed to this counterposing of Marx and Lenin, and the elimination of the latter from what is coyly called “Marxism” or – even more subtly – “scientific socialism.”
A Diminished Picture of History
In the early 1980s, the German Communist Party grappled intensively with a forerunner of today’s “Webbism,” the idea of a Western “plural” Marxism, and a Marxism without Leninism. It arose in the study and seminar rooms of the West Berlin professor Wolfgang Fritz Haug.
At the same time, the highly relevant Marxist journal Argument was being published (compare Marxism. Ideology. Politics. Crisis of Marxism, or Crisis of the Argument? Frankfurt am Main, 1984. Editors: Hans Heinz Holz, Thomas Metscher, Joseph Schleifstein, and Robert Steigerwald.)
The second argument pushed by Webb for the amputation of Marxism-Leninism is even less original. And it is no less wrong. Back then it was also formulated by the Haug school. Allegedly, Marxism-Leninism is not “classical Marxism.”
Sam Webb’s allegation of “simplification” of the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and other early Marxists in the form of “Marxism-Leninism” in the Stalin era is simply wrong.
In the Soviet Communist Party and the Communist International, after the death of Lenin and long before the nonsensical enthronement of Stalin as the “one true disciple of Lenin,” acknowledgement began of Lenin as the third classical author of Marxism.
The careful processing, safeguarding and development of Lenin’s theoretical legacy by many CPSU and Comintern theorists is hidden by the Webb theses in a way that ignores history.
The general assertion that “Soviet scientists under Stalin’s leadership systematized and simplified earlier Marxist writing,” not to mention adapting it to the needs of Soviet state ideology, is nothing more than repetition of the old anti-Soviet slogans.
There were, in the course of seventy years of Soviet party history and scientific history, numerous introductions to the academic and theoretical papers of Marx, Engels and Lenin. They were simplifications, just as in any scientific discipline there is simplification in all introductions, compendia, and so forth. They are merely introductions.
In no way was there systematic falsification of the inheritance. Even in the post-socialist era, the collected works of classical authors have still not finally emerged. This does not change the fact that, in a few texts of Lenin, there also was one or another politically motivated “editorial reworking” or omission, although this was justified and made transparent.
It is not true that Marxism-Leninism was — or is — an impoverished,simplified version of the true Marxism.
Certainly there was and is, in every theory and in all science, phases of greater or lesser creativity and development. And undoubtedly there was and will be future phases, just as in any scientific doctrine, in which revolutionary Marxists/Communists do not evaluate promptly new social and/or natural scientific phenomena. Or they do so too late. Or in a way that is only partly correct. In general, it is the nature of science that it moves in a contradictory manner between faster and slower stages of development.
Webb’s more far-reaching conclusion is that even what he designates as his new “Marxism” is only a “scientific method.”
He thinks his altogether limited and schematic scientific-theoretical view surpasses the comprehensive legacy of the three classic founders of Marxism-Leninism.
A “method” which brings to light no apparent content, is worthless. And in the thesis of Sam Webb, the method goes straight to this “new-old” distinction and the rejection of content.
A German Version of Webb?
After the defeat of real socialism, the Left could not fail to weigh its previous relationship with Lenin and Leninism. The PDS [Party of Democratic Socialism] originating in a Marxist-Leninist party did this too. It broke with its Leninist heritage. In May 1990 at a closed meeting of the former PDS Executive Board, Gregor Gysi spoke about the new theoretical basis of his reform-socialism-turned-political-party. In this context, he explained both the departure from Marxism-Leninism and the move to an “ideologically pluralistic” party in which the Communist component would enjoy only a marginal existence, tolerated and allowed.
Thus far the statements by Sam Webb are nothing new. The same applies to his “new” concepts of organizational theory. They are in theory 27 ideas presented to remodel the party structure into an informal communication network, mainly Internet-based, whose members interact with each other primarily via e-mail.
Abolition of the unity principle and the commitment to the party program and decisions amounts to a vote for the open liquidation of the Communist Party.
Reassuring evidence that the huge distances between widely scattered individual U.S. Communists absolutely requires use of modern means of communication, in this context, is not completely convincing.
It’s clear Webb doesn’t mean to modernize the lines of communication. Such modernization, of course, is useful and necessary.
This is about something entirely different: the liquidation of a strong organizational structure, clear criteria for party membership, a common collectively developed program, binding revolutionary strategy and tactics, and in general decisions grounding the party in the working class, in working people, in the revolutionary youth and among oppressed women, in production enterprises and scientific institutions, and in the intelligentsia worn out by capital.
He also thinks joining this structure existing only in cyberspace should be slapdash – “no more difficult than joining other social organizations.” This is a logical consequence of the destruction of a party once in political struggle against the capitalist system – a party consisting of real, like-minded people coordinated with each other. The party is downgraded to a loose, small electoral force primarily concentrating on the support of the election campaigns of the Democratic Party.
Sam Webb has still provided the remnants of a party. “Teams” will be traveling around as “meet and greet” and support groups.
This is nothing more than window dressing.
Does the U.S. workers’ movement need such a party? I doubt it very much. But it has to decide for itself.
In any case, German Communists do not need it. Nor do we need an “open-ended and interesting” discussion of this plea for the end of Marxism-Leninism and the Communist Party.
We have better and more important things to do.
Dr. Hans-Peter Brenner, a psychologist and psychotherapist, is a member of the national leadership of the German Communist Party (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei, DKP) and co-editor of Marxistische Blaetter. This article appeared July 9, 2011 in Junge Welt, a Marxist daily newspaper published in Berlin.
www.jungewelt.de/2011/07-09/001.php?sstr=HansPeterBrenner
Translated by Bill Miller
Source: 21stcenturymanifesto
Certain Features of the Historical Development of Marxism is a work of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In it he dealt with the consequences of the defeat of the first Russian revolution of 1905. At that time, many party members (including many recently enrolled intellectuals) left the revolutionary party in droves. Soon after that, the farewell to Marxism, which we too experienced in 1989-1991, became the fashion.
As a reflection of this change there occurred profound disintegration, confusion, shaking and swaying of all sorts – in a word, there appeared a very serious internal crisis of Marxism. The resolute defense against this decay, the determined and persistent struggle for the basics of Marxism, again came on the agenda.
That was Lenin’s diagnosis.
It was — and still is — important for us German Communists to examine what conclusions other Communist parties later drew from the defeat of socialism in Europe and the USSR.
First of all, I think about the leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba, which had already adjusted to this disaster before the shameful end of Mikhail Gorbachev who drove to ruin Soviet socialism, his country, and his party. Cuba — the country and the Communist Party – understood this: the harsh “drought” of the Special Period would govern the 1990s and early 2000s. Without its revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist character, the Communist Party of Cuba would have given up its socialist goal.
Self-awareness or Self-doubt?
I recall one Communist leader, prominent but, unfortunately, less noted in Germany , Alvaro Cunhal (1913-2005), the longtime general secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). At the time of the fascist Salazar dictatorship, Cunhal’s underground struggle, his inspiring and mobilizing role during and after the 1974 victory of the “Carnation Revolution,” as well as his shrewd leadership, are legendary.
The advance of the socialist stage of the revolutionary upheaval in Portugal was stopped by the united and coordinated actions of U.S. imperialism, NATO, the EU, the main European imperialist states, international social democracy, and domestic reaction.
Thanks to his personal resourcefulness, Cunhal embarked upon a strategic retreat. With a party united by a Marxist-Leninist program, he achieved the preservation of the PCP and its mass influence. He developed its clear profile, which it keeps today, as a revolutionary party of the working class, peasants and other working people.
To this day, his conclusions about the character of a Communist Party at the beginning of the 21st century are well worth reading. In his 2001 work, As Seis de Caracteristicas Fundamentais do Partido Comunista (The Six Basic Features of a Communist Party) Cunhal goes into the internal situation of the Communist movement at the beginning of the 21st century. He writes:
The international Communist movement, and the parties from which it is made up, were subject to profound changes as a the result of the collapse of the USSR and other socialist countries and capitalism’s success in its rivalry with socialism. There were parties who denied their militant past, their class nature, the goal of a socialist society, and revolutionary theory. In some cases, they were transformed into system-integrated parties, and they eventually disappeared from the scene.
In 2011 as well, this finding is relevant and correct.
Features of a Communist Party
The Communist movement as a whole – Cunhal went on – has achieved flexibility in its composition and reached new limits. Admittedly, though there is no model of a Communist Party, nonetheless “six basic features can reveal a Communist party, regardless of whether the party bears that name or another.
Briefly, their traits could include:
1. To be a party completely independent of the interests, ideology, pressure and threats of capitalist forces;
2. To be a party of the working class, the working people, in general, the exploited and oppressed;
3. To be a party with a democratic internal life and a unified central leadership;
4. To be a party which is both internationalist and which defends the interests of its country;
5. To be a party that defines its goal as the building of a society which knows neither exploited nor exploiters, a socialist society;
6. To be the bearer of a revolutionary theory, the theory of Marxism-Leninism, which not only makes the explanation of the world possible, but also shows the way to change it.
In its simplicity and plainness, the last point sounds like it is of little interest, just as the other five points appear to include too little that is new. And yet these “self-evident truths” are not self-evident truths – not even for Communists. But more of that later.
Classics Taken at their Word
Cunhal made available to us the following explanation for his six points. It is cited here, in more detail, because of its uniqueness and distinctiveness:
All the slanderous, punishing, anti-Communist campaigns are lies. Marxism-Leninism is a living, anti-dogmatic, dialectical, creative theory, which is further enriched by practice and by its responses to new situations and phenomena, which is its job. It drives the practice of enrichment and development, dynamically and creatively using the lessons of practice.
Marx in Capital and Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto analyzed and defined the basic elements and characteristics of capitalism.
In the second half of the 19th century, however, the development of capitalism underwent an important amendment. Competition led to concentration and monopoly. We owe to Lenin and his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism the definition of capitalism at the end of the 19th century. These theoretical developments are of exceptional value. And the value of research and systematization of theoretical knowledge is rated as high.
In a synthesis of extraordinary clarity and rigor, a famous article by Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism explains it. In the philosophy of dialectical materialism, historical materialism is its application to society. Political economy is the analysis and explanation of capitalism and exploitation, and the theory of surplus value is the cornerstone for understanding exploitation. The theory of socialism is the definition of the new society, the abolition of exploitation of man by man.
During the 20th century and the social transformations accompanying it, much new theoretical thinking was added. However, there also was scattered and contradictory thinking which made it difficult to distinguish what is theoretical development and where it is a question of revisionist deviation from principles. Hence the urgent need for debate without preconceptions and without making truths absolute. It’s not about the search for conclusions deemed to be final, but rather the intensification of joint reflection.” Quoted from: www.kommunisten.ch
Cunhal is now dead six years. His party, the PCP, however, considers him not an idol on a pedestal, a “historical figure” whose thoughts and ideas slowly but gradually have been forgotten. Today, his theoretical and programmatic conclusions determine the path and self-understanding of the PCP. But, unfortunately, it is quite different elsewhere.
On Slippery Ground
The current example of this is the thinking of the chairman of the CPUSA, Sam Webb. Political Affairs, the theoretical organ of his party, published in February this year under the title: “A Party of Socialism in the 21st Century: What It Looks Like, What It Says, and What It Does.” It has now appeared in German on the news portal of the German Communist Party’s website, www.kommunisten.de
Why are Webb’s theses of interest beyond the CPUSA?
For example, why did the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), despite the demands of the controversies and class struggles raging in that country, to which it devotes so much energy and combativeneness, send a really dramatic appeal To the members and cadres of the Communist Party USA! To U.S. militant workers! It was also addressed to all the Communist and Workers’ Parties, “in order to protest against these theses.”
And now, why do German Communists deal with the Webb theses too?
Sam Webb stressed at the beginning of his 29 theses, each different in detail and very different in theoretical significance, that he was on slippery ground. The publisher of the theoretical journal of the CPUSA, Political Affairs, also knew well what he was getting involved with by posting it. The preface that introduces the article makes this clear.
The following article represents only the views of its author. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the official views of any organization or collective…
Apparently, to avoid such criticisms [Editor: criticism of opportunism], Webb emphasized in the introduction that it was a “draft,” an unfinished manuscript, and that “readers will surely note inconsistencies, contradictions, silences and unfinished ideas.”
This is all too ostentatious modesty, and the ensuing fishing for compliments belies the altogether clear and complete implications of the theses.
Communists without Lenin
In the end Sam Webb delivers a very consistent idea, although it is not original. A letter in the German Communist Party weekly Unsere Zeit has already pointed out:
What is so exciting, new and important for us in these theses of Comrade Webb…? I cannot see it. Readers of Marxistische Blaetter already read and evaluated the core of his “Reflections on Socialism” in mid-2008 (In Focus: International Marxism, March 2008). And in our party, since the mid to late 1980s, we have discussed other theories (for example, the reduction of Marxism to a mere method, or the orientation to a “Marxism without Lenin.” Not only did we do this thoroughly, but we developed collective responses crowned with a new party program’. Lothar Geisler, “Theses Not New,” Unsere Zeit, July 1, 2011, p. 12)
In fact, most of the 29 theses do not contain much that is new. Though he writes of merely one in the article mentioned in Marxistische Blaetter from 2008, in its approaches, the quixotic intellectual journey already discernible in 2008 continues, but it now ends as a break with central points of Communist theory — socialism, and the doctrine of the Party. He runs aground on the shoals of a left–pluralist Marxism; or the earlier “Eurocommunism,” or the current democratic socialism of the German Left Party,European Left, respectively.
I mention particularly the rejection of the theory of Marx, Engels and Lenin as a unified, revolutionary theory of the working class.
What is original here is a hitherto less well-known chauvinistic undertone. As noted in his Thesis #2:
As for “Marxism-Leninism,” the term should be retired in favor of simply “Marxism.” For one thing, it has a negative connotation among ordinary Americans, even in left and progressive circles. Depending on whom you ask, it either sounds foreign or dogmatic or undemocratic or all of these together.
Granted, Lenin was no Russian exile finding safety in the U.S., taking out U.S. citizenship, and Americanizing his first or last name – perhaps to Sam Cook or Sam Smith.
But do ordinary Americans deem Karl Marx to be a fellow American?
And does Marxism really sound so terrifically American, that perhaps Sarah Palin herself, the icon of ordinary Americans, understands by Marxism a sweetness and innocence, causing her patriotic sentiment to peal like a church bell?
Webbism?
So the real test awaits Jim and Jane, ordinary Americans.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth comes to my mind, with its sigh, almost a curse:
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But the meaning of Webb’s theses is more than noisy fury.
We long-suffering European Communists are quite accustomed to this counterposing of Marx and Lenin, and the elimination of the latter from what is coyly called “Marxism” or – even more subtly – “scientific socialism.”
A Diminished Picture of History
In the early 1980s, the German Communist Party grappled intensively with a forerunner of today’s “Webbism,” the idea of a Western “plural” Marxism, and a Marxism without Leninism. It arose in the study and seminar rooms of the West Berlin professor Wolfgang Fritz Haug.
At the same time, the highly relevant Marxist journal Argument was being published (compare Marxism. Ideology. Politics. Crisis of Marxism, or Crisis of the Argument? Frankfurt am Main, 1984. Editors: Hans Heinz Holz, Thomas Metscher, Joseph Schleifstein, and Robert Steigerwald.)
The second argument pushed by Webb for the amputation of Marxism-Leninism is even less original. And it is no less wrong. Back then it was also formulated by the Haug school. Allegedly, Marxism-Leninism is not “classical Marxism.”
Sam Webb’s allegation of “simplification” of the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and other early Marxists in the form of “Marxism-Leninism” in the Stalin era is simply wrong.
In the Soviet Communist Party and the Communist International, after the death of Lenin and long before the nonsensical enthronement of Stalin as the “one true disciple of Lenin,” acknowledgement began of Lenin as the third classical author of Marxism.
The careful processing, safeguarding and development of Lenin’s theoretical legacy by many CPSU and Comintern theorists is hidden by the Webb theses in a way that ignores history.
The general assertion that “Soviet scientists under Stalin’s leadership systematized and simplified earlier Marxist writing,” not to mention adapting it to the needs of Soviet state ideology, is nothing more than repetition of the old anti-Soviet slogans.
There were, in the course of seventy years of Soviet party history and scientific history, numerous introductions to the academic and theoretical papers of Marx, Engels and Lenin. They were simplifications, just as in any scientific discipline there is simplification in all introductions, compendia, and so forth. They are merely introductions.
In no way was there systematic falsification of the inheritance. Even in the post-socialist era, the collected works of classical authors have still not finally emerged. This does not change the fact that, in a few texts of Lenin, there also was one or another politically motivated “editorial reworking” or omission, although this was justified and made transparent.
It is not true that Marxism-Leninism was — or is — an impoverished,simplified version of the true Marxism.
Certainly there was and is, in every theory and in all science, phases of greater or lesser creativity and development. And undoubtedly there was and will be future phases, just as in any scientific doctrine, in which revolutionary Marxists/Communists do not evaluate promptly new social and/or natural scientific phenomena. Or they do so too late. Or in a way that is only partly correct. In general, it is the nature of science that it moves in a contradictory manner between faster and slower stages of development.
Webb’s more far-reaching conclusion is that even what he designates as his new “Marxism” is only a “scientific method.”
He thinks his altogether limited and schematic scientific-theoretical view surpasses the comprehensive legacy of the three classic founders of Marxism-Leninism.
A “method” which brings to light no apparent content, is worthless. And in the thesis of Sam Webb, the method goes straight to this “new-old” distinction and the rejection of content.
A German Version of Webb?
After the defeat of real socialism, the Left could not fail to weigh its previous relationship with Lenin and Leninism. The PDS [Party of Democratic Socialism] originating in a Marxist-Leninist party did this too. It broke with its Leninist heritage. In May 1990 at a closed meeting of the former PDS Executive Board, Gregor Gysi spoke about the new theoretical basis of his reform-socialism-turned-political-party. In this context, he explained both the departure from Marxism-Leninism and the move to an “ideologically pluralistic” party in which the Communist component would enjoy only a marginal existence, tolerated and allowed.
Thus far the statements by Sam Webb are nothing new. The same applies to his “new” concepts of organizational theory. They are in theory 27 ideas presented to remodel the party structure into an informal communication network, mainly Internet-based, whose members interact with each other primarily via e-mail.
Abolition of the unity principle and the commitment to the party program and decisions amounts to a vote for the open liquidation of the Communist Party.
Reassuring evidence that the huge distances between widely scattered individual U.S. Communists absolutely requires use of modern means of communication, in this context, is not completely convincing.
It’s clear Webb doesn’t mean to modernize the lines of communication. Such modernization, of course, is useful and necessary.
This is about something entirely different: the liquidation of a strong organizational structure, clear criteria for party membership, a common collectively developed program, binding revolutionary strategy and tactics, and in general decisions grounding the party in the working class, in working people, in the revolutionary youth and among oppressed women, in production enterprises and scientific institutions, and in the intelligentsia worn out by capital.
He also thinks joining this structure existing only in cyberspace should be slapdash – “no more difficult than joining other social organizations.” This is a logical consequence of the destruction of a party once in political struggle against the capitalist system – a party consisting of real, like-minded people coordinated with each other. The party is downgraded to a loose, small electoral force primarily concentrating on the support of the election campaigns of the Democratic Party.
Sam Webb has still provided the remnants of a party. “Teams” will be traveling around as “meet and greet” and support groups.
This is nothing more than window dressing.
Does the U.S. workers’ movement need such a party? I doubt it very much. But it has to decide for itself.
In any case, German Communists do not need it. Nor do we need an “open-ended and interesting” discussion of this plea for the end of Marxism-Leninism and the Communist Party.
We have better and more important things to do.
Dr. Hans-Peter Brenner, a psychologist and psychotherapist, is a member of the national leadership of the German Communist Party (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei, DKP) and co-editor of Marxistische Blaetter. This article appeared July 9, 2011 in Junge Welt, a Marxist daily newspaper published in Berlin.
www.jungewelt.de/2011/07-09/001.php?sstr=HansPeterBrenner
Translated by Bill Miller
July 18, 2011
Communist Party of Israel Raising a black flag over the destruction of democracy, 14 July 2011
http://maki.org.il/en/component/content/article/11166-raising-a-black-flag-over-the-destruction-of-democracy
July 8, 2011
The Boycott Law ("The Law for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel through Boycott - 2011"), which has just passed in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament), is an outrageous attempt by the Israeli right to silence every form of criticism of government policy and especially the policy of settlement in the occupied territories. By threatening to impose costly damages on offenders, even without proof of damage, the right wing is attempting to shut out the voices of those who resist the occupation, and call, for instance, for a boycott of consumer products produced in the settlements.
This law joins a full series of other discriminatory and racist laws that have been proposed by Netanyahu's right wing government in recent years - laws that trample upon democracy, but have been approved by the Knesset.
The CPI condemns the "Boycott Law" as a grave assault on the freedom of speech, the freedom of criticism, and the freedom of protest, and calls for the forces who would defend our democratic space to rally together to put a stop to the fascist threat and to put an end to the injustices of the occupation.
Calling for a public campaign in favor of the UN General Assembly's recognition of a Palestinian State in the 1967 borders
The Obama government and European governments are applying pressure on the Palestinian Authority, demanding that it retreat from its appeal to the UN General Assembly - due to convene in September - to recognize a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders. These pressures are in service of the war-mongering policies of settlement and occupation pursued by the Netanyahu government, which are disastrous for both Israelis and Palestinians.
The Central Committee raises an alarm against the catastrophe that the next war will bring upon Israel and the regions' nations. This war is being devised by the Netanyahu government in an attempt to prevent a political settlement, that would involve retreating from all of the occupied territories, and to block the anticipated vote in the General Assembly over the Palestinian issue.
The Central Committee of the CPI stresses that the only steps that can lead to a just and stable peace agreement which can guarantee the security of the two people and their futures are: the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, alongside Israel; the evacuation of all the settlements; dismantling of the separation wall; and a solution of the refugee problem based on UN resolutions.
The CPI congratulates the residents of Bil'in and all those struggling against the separation barrier, for their important victory in removing the fence from part of Bil'in's lands.
The Central Committee calls upon members of the party to enlist in the public campaign, initiated by Hadash, for Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state within the June 4, 1967 lines. We send our blessings to TANDI (Movement of Democratic Women in Israel) and all of the Israeli women, who initiated a similar political action in collaboration with Palestinian women in the occupied territories.
Stop the blood bath in Syria and establish a democratic regime
The CPI's Central Committee reiterates its unambiguous stance against the killings, oppression, and mass persecution of the Syrian people, who are fighting for their freedom, for democracy and for social justice. The popular demands are legitimate and just demands.
We utterly reject any attempt on the part of the United States, Israel, and their allies to intervene in Syria by saying that they are taking the side of the people against the regime. The United States and its allies never intervened anywhere for the interests of the peoples it claimed to defend: it intervened only in the interests of the corporations and in order to establish imperial hegemony.
A regime that kills its own people, who are struggling by peaceful means, cannot be progressive and cannot claim any legitimacy. Our position is clear: we stand alongside the popular movement that is fighting for democracy, social justice and civil liberties, and which rejects any foreign intervention in the Syrian issue or dependency on imperialism, and which struggles against the Israeli occupation.
The voices that issued from the meetings with the Syrian opposition held in Turkey and France, as well as during the visit of the U.S. ambassador in the city of Hama, and which invited foreign powers to intervene, do not reflect the genuine interests of the Syrian people, and are at odds with the spirit of the masses' legitimate demands. We condemn the position voiced by various circles, both within the regime and within the opposition, who are pushing to resolve the question of the Syrian popular demands by means of an understanding with the U.S. and its allies that will create dependence on those foreign powers.
We call for an immediate end to the blood bath in Syria, and for the establishment of a democratic regime that strives for social justice, and that adheres to the principle of Syrian independence, and its national and geographical unity. We reject any attempt to divide the Syrian Arab people on the basis of ethnicity, religion, or any other category.
We place a great deal of faith in the Arab-Syrian people, which carries a proud heritage of resistance to colonialism and occupation, and which fulfills an outstanding role in developing a progressive and enlightened culture. We are convinced that the Syrian people will not allow its wishes and its struggle to be hijacked, and will not allow its country to become a protectorate of the West.
We call upon all the elements of the society and people in Syria to attain full democratization and bring to an immediate end the bloodshed which is being carried out by the regime against the demonstrators who are using peaceful means while struggling for their rights.
Developments in Sudan
South Sudan has declared independence, and we honor the will of the Sudanese people both in the North and in the South. Sudan, as a country containing the sources of the Nile, is one of Africa's most important states. With its land and water resources, the country has untold possibilities for developing a thriving agricultural sector, as well as tremendous potential in terms of natural resources, especially in its southern part. Therefore, Sudan's status is of tremendous economic and strategic importance.
The West, and the United States in particular, is setting its sights on Sudan. The Western powers have worked for many years to keep Sudan divided, by fueling ethnic and geographic strife, while taking advantage of the crimes of the regime in Khartoum, and its denial of the legitimate demands of the Sudanese people in the south.
The division of Sudan was realized in wake of a referendum that took place in the south, whose results were also acceptable to the regime in Khartoum. This division was not a necessary step for solving the question of the south. It was advanced as part of Western intervention and the criminal policies conducted by the government in Kharoum, which ignored the desires of the country's inhabitants.
Rise in the cost of living and erosion of wages
During the past five years, the average real wage has risen by less than 3% while the prices of food have risen by 25%, the prices of fruit and vegetables by 36% and the cost of renting or buying a flat have doubled. The wave of price hikes, which have eroded the purchasing power of working families and senior citizens, is the product of a combination of monopolistic behavior on the part of the large corporations and the privatization policies of the government in support of capital.
The CPI calls upon the Histadrut (Labor Federation) to ensure that the workers receive immediate compensation for the recent price hikes by paying a one-time cost-of-living payment of 10% of the workers' wages.
Solidarity with the strikers
The CPI stands in solidarity with the workers of Haifa Chemicals, who have been on strike for three months now to demand a collective agreement and a fair wage for all the employees of the firm, and to protest against their degraded working conditions; with the doctors, striking to improve their working conditions and to save public medicine; with the nurses, who are implementing sanctions because of the lack of salaried positions and the abandonment of patients in the hospitals; and with all those fighting against factory shutdowns, layoffs, the privatization of government companies; and employment through temporary employment agencies.
An end to home demolitions
A year has gone by since the residents of Al-Araquib, joined by Jews and Arabs, began their resolute and courageous campaign to protect the village and villagers from the repeated demolitions of their meager homes at the hands of state representatives.
The CPI condemns the house demolitions in the Negev, which are an expression of the racist, anti-Arab policies that are attempting to uproot tens of thousands of Bedouin Arabs from their lands and villages.
The CPI's 26 Convention – in December
The Central Committee of the CPI has decided to hold the party's 26th convention on the 8-10th of December 2011, and has asked the relevant party institutions and organizations to begin preparations for the convention.
Decisions of the 14th session of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party of Israel
of the Communist Party of Israel
July 8, 2011
The Boycott Law ("The Law for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel through Boycott - 2011"), which has just passed in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament), is an outrageous attempt by the Israeli right to silence every form of criticism of government policy and especially the policy of settlement in the occupied territories. By threatening to impose costly damages on offenders, even without proof of damage, the right wing is attempting to shut out the voices of those who resist the occupation, and call, for instance, for a boycott of consumer products produced in the settlements.
This law joins a full series of other discriminatory and racist laws that have been proposed by Netanyahu's right wing government in recent years - laws that trample upon democracy, but have been approved by the Knesset.
The CPI condemns the "Boycott Law" as a grave assault on the freedom of speech, the freedom of criticism, and the freedom of protest, and calls for the forces who would defend our democratic space to rally together to put a stop to the fascist threat and to put an end to the injustices of the occupation.
Calling for a public campaign in favor of the UN General Assembly's recognition of a Palestinian State in the 1967 borders
The Obama government and European governments are applying pressure on the Palestinian Authority, demanding that it retreat from its appeal to the UN General Assembly - due to convene in September - to recognize a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders. These pressures are in service of the war-mongering policies of settlement and occupation pursued by the Netanyahu government, which are disastrous for both Israelis and Palestinians.
The Central Committee raises an alarm against the catastrophe that the next war will bring upon Israel and the regions' nations. This war is being devised by the Netanyahu government in an attempt to prevent a political settlement, that would involve retreating from all of the occupied territories, and to block the anticipated vote in the General Assembly over the Palestinian issue.
The Central Committee of the CPI stresses that the only steps that can lead to a just and stable peace agreement which can guarantee the security of the two people and their futures are: the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, alongside Israel; the evacuation of all the settlements; dismantling of the separation wall; and a solution of the refugee problem based on UN resolutions.
The CPI congratulates the residents of Bil'in and all those struggling against the separation barrier, for their important victory in removing the fence from part of Bil'in's lands.
The Central Committee calls upon members of the party to enlist in the public campaign, initiated by Hadash, for Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state within the June 4, 1967 lines. We send our blessings to TANDI (Movement of Democratic Women in Israel) and all of the Israeli women, who initiated a similar political action in collaboration with Palestinian women in the occupied territories.
Stop the blood bath in Syria and establish a democratic regime
The CPI's Central Committee reiterates its unambiguous stance against the killings, oppression, and mass persecution of the Syrian people, who are fighting for their freedom, for democracy and for social justice. The popular demands are legitimate and just demands.
We utterly reject any attempt on the part of the United States, Israel, and their allies to intervene in Syria by saying that they are taking the side of the people against the regime. The United States and its allies never intervened anywhere for the interests of the peoples it claimed to defend: it intervened only in the interests of the corporations and in order to establish imperial hegemony.
A regime that kills its own people, who are struggling by peaceful means, cannot be progressive and cannot claim any legitimacy. Our position is clear: we stand alongside the popular movement that is fighting for democracy, social justice and civil liberties, and which rejects any foreign intervention in the Syrian issue or dependency on imperialism, and which struggles against the Israeli occupation.
The voices that issued from the meetings with the Syrian opposition held in Turkey and France, as well as during the visit of the U.S. ambassador in the city of Hama, and which invited foreign powers to intervene, do not reflect the genuine interests of the Syrian people, and are at odds with the spirit of the masses' legitimate demands. We condemn the position voiced by various circles, both within the regime and within the opposition, who are pushing to resolve the question of the Syrian popular demands by means of an understanding with the U.S. and its allies that will create dependence on those foreign powers.
We call for an immediate end to the blood bath in Syria, and for the establishment of a democratic regime that strives for social justice, and that adheres to the principle of Syrian independence, and its national and geographical unity. We reject any attempt to divide the Syrian Arab people on the basis of ethnicity, religion, or any other category.
We place a great deal of faith in the Arab-Syrian people, which carries a proud heritage of resistance to colonialism and occupation, and which fulfills an outstanding role in developing a progressive and enlightened culture. We are convinced that the Syrian people will not allow its wishes and its struggle to be hijacked, and will not allow its country to become a protectorate of the West.
We call upon all the elements of the society and people in Syria to attain full democratization and bring to an immediate end the bloodshed which is being carried out by the regime against the demonstrators who are using peaceful means while struggling for their rights.
Developments in Sudan
South Sudan has declared independence, and we honor the will of the Sudanese people both in the North and in the South. Sudan, as a country containing the sources of the Nile, is one of Africa's most important states. With its land and water resources, the country has untold possibilities for developing a thriving agricultural sector, as well as tremendous potential in terms of natural resources, especially in its southern part. Therefore, Sudan's status is of tremendous economic and strategic importance.
The West, and the United States in particular, is setting its sights on Sudan. The Western powers have worked for many years to keep Sudan divided, by fueling ethnic and geographic strife, while taking advantage of the crimes of the regime in Khartoum, and its denial of the legitimate demands of the Sudanese people in the south.
The division of Sudan was realized in wake of a referendum that took place in the south, whose results were also acceptable to the regime in Khartoum. This division was not a necessary step for solving the question of the south. It was advanced as part of Western intervention and the criminal policies conducted by the government in Kharoum, which ignored the desires of the country's inhabitants.
Rise in the cost of living and erosion of wages
During the past five years, the average real wage has risen by less than 3% while the prices of food have risen by 25%, the prices of fruit and vegetables by 36% and the cost of renting or buying a flat have doubled. The wave of price hikes, which have eroded the purchasing power of working families and senior citizens, is the product of a combination of monopolistic behavior on the part of the large corporations and the privatization policies of the government in support of capital.
The CPI calls upon the Histadrut (Labor Federation) to ensure that the workers receive immediate compensation for the recent price hikes by paying a one-time cost-of-living payment of 10% of the workers' wages.
Solidarity with the strikers
The CPI stands in solidarity with the workers of Haifa Chemicals, who have been on strike for three months now to demand a collective agreement and a fair wage for all the employees of the firm, and to protest against their degraded working conditions; with the doctors, striking to improve their working conditions and to save public medicine; with the nurses, who are implementing sanctions because of the lack of salaried positions and the abandonment of patients in the hospitals; and with all those fighting against factory shutdowns, layoffs, the privatization of government companies; and employment through temporary employment agencies.
An end to home demolitions
A year has gone by since the residents of Al-Araquib, joined by Jews and Arabs, began their resolute and courageous campaign to protect the village and villagers from the repeated demolitions of their meager homes at the hands of state representatives.
The CPI condemns the house demolitions in the Negev, which are an expression of the racist, anti-Arab policies that are attempting to uproot tens of thousands of Bedouin Arabs from their lands and villages.
The CPI's 26 Convention – in December
The Central Committee of the CPI has decided to hold the party's 26th convention on the 8-10th of December 2011, and has asked the relevant party institutions and organizations to begin preparations for the convention.
July 17, 2011
Nato’s Fascist War in Libya, in Cubadebate,by Fidel Castro Ruz, Mar 29th, 2011
You didn’t have to be clairvoyant to foresee what I wrote with great detail in three Reflection Articles I published on the CubaDebate website between February 21 and March 3: “The NATO Plan Is to Occupy Libya,” “The Cynical Danse Macabre,” and “NATO’s Inevitable War.”
Not even the fascist leaders of Germany and Italy were so blatantly shameless regarding the Spanish Civil War unleashed in 1936, an event that maybe a lot of people have been recalling over these past days.
Almost 75 years to the day have passed since then, but nothing that has happened over the last 75 centuries, or even 75 millenniums of human life on our planet can compare.
Sometimes it seems that those of us who serenely voice our opinions on these issues are exaggerating. I dare say that we have actually been naive to assume that we all should be aware of the deception or colossal ignorance that humanity has been dragged into.
In 1936 there was an intense clash between two systems and ideologies of more or less equal military power.
The arms back then seemed more like toys compared with today’s weapons. Humanity’s survival was not threatened despite the destructive power and the locally lethal force deployed. Entire cities and even nations could have been virtually destroyed. But never was the human race, in its totality, at risk of being exterminated several times over for the stupid and suicidal power developed by modern science and technology.
With these current realities in mind, it is embarrassing to read the continuous news reports on the use of powerful laser-guided rockets with 100% accuracy, fighter-bombers that go twice the speed of sound, potent explosives that blow apart uranium-hardened metals that have an everlasting effect on the inhabitants and their descendants.
Cuba stated its position regarding the internal situation in Libya at the meeting in Geneva. Without hesitating, Cuba defended the idea of a political solution to the conflict in Libya and was categorically opposed to any foreign military intervention.
In a world where the alliance between the United States and the developed capitalist powers of Europe increasingly take hold of the people’s resources and fruits of their labor, any honest citizen, whatever their standpoint to the government, would be opposed to a foreign military intervention in their country.
But most absurd about the current situation is the fact that before the brutal war broke out in Northern Africa, in another region of the world, nearly 10 000 kilometers away, a nuclear accident had occurred in one of the most populated areas of the world following a tsunami caused by a 9.0 earthquake, which has already cost a hard-working nation like Japan nearly 30 000 lives. Such accident would have not occurred 75 years before.
In Haiti, a poor and underdeveloped country, a nearly 7.0 quake according to the Richter scale, caused over 300 000 deaths, countless people wounded and hundreds of thousands harmed.
However, what was terribly tragic in Japan was the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant, whose consequences are still to be assessed.
I will only recall some of the main stories published by the news agencies:
ANSA.- Fukushima 1 nuclear plant is releasing “extremely high and potentially lethal radiations,” said Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the US nuclear entity.
EFE.- The nuclear threat stemming from the serious situation at a Japanese plant, following the earthquake, has triggered security revisions in atomic plants around the world and has made some countries paralyze their plans.
Reuters.- Japan’s devastating earthquake and deepening nuclear crisis could result in losses of up to $200 billion for Japanese economy, but the global impact remains hard to gauge.
EFE.- The deterioration of one reactor after another at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear center continued to feed fears of a pending nuclear disaster as desperate attempts to control a radioactive leak did nothing to provide even a glimmer of hope.
AFP.- Japan´s Emperor Akihito expressed concern about the unpredictable character of the nuclear crisis hitting Japan following the quake and tsunami that killed thousands of people and left 500 000 homeless. New quake reported in the Tokyo area.
There are reports talking about even more concerning issues.
Some refer to the presence of toxic radioactive iodine in Tokyo’s drinking water, which doubles the tolerable amount that can be consumed by the smallest children in the Japanese capital. One of these reports says that the stocks of bottled water are shrinking in Tokyo, a city located in a prefecture at more than 200 kilometers from Fukushima.
This series of circumstances poses a dramatic situation on our world.
I can express freely my views on the war in Libya.
I do not share political or religious views with the leader of that country. I am a Marxist-Leninist and a follower of Marti, as I have already said.
I see Libya as a member of the Non-Aligned Movement and a sovereign State of the nearly 200 members of the United Nations.
Never, a large or small country, in this case with only 5 million inhabitants, was the victim of such a brutal attack by the air force of a militaristic organization with thousands of fighter-bombers, more than 100 submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers, and sufficient arsenal to destroy the planet many times over. Our species had never encountered this situation and there had been nothing similar 75 years ago, when the Nazi bombers attacked targets in Spain.
Now, however, the criminal and discredited NATO will write a ”beautiful” little story about its “humanitarian” bombing.
If Gaddafi honors the traditions of his people and decides to fight to the last breath, as he has promised, together with the Libyans who are facing the worst bombing a country has ever suffered, NATO and its criminal projects will sink into the mire of shame.
The people respect and believe in men who fulfill their duty.
More than 50 years ago, when the United States killed more than a hundred Cubans with the explosion of merchant ship “La Coubre” our people proclaimed ”Patria o Muerte.” (Homeland or Death). They have fulfilled this, and have always been determined to keep their word.
“Anyone who tries to seize Cuba,” said the most glorious fighter in our history-”will only gather the dust of her soil soaked in blood.”
I beg you to excuse the frankness with which I address the issue.
Fidel Castro Ruz
28 March 2011
8:14 p.m.
Not even the fascist leaders of Germany and Italy were so blatantly shameless regarding the Spanish Civil War unleashed in 1936, an event that maybe a lot of people have been recalling over these past days.
Almost 75 years to the day have passed since then, but nothing that has happened over the last 75 centuries, or even 75 millenniums of human life on our planet can compare.
Sometimes it seems that those of us who serenely voice our opinions on these issues are exaggerating. I dare say that we have actually been naive to assume that we all should be aware of the deception or colossal ignorance that humanity has been dragged into.
In 1936 there was an intense clash between two systems and ideologies of more or less equal military power.
The arms back then seemed more like toys compared with today’s weapons. Humanity’s survival was not threatened despite the destructive power and the locally lethal force deployed. Entire cities and even nations could have been virtually destroyed. But never was the human race, in its totality, at risk of being exterminated several times over for the stupid and suicidal power developed by modern science and technology.
With these current realities in mind, it is embarrassing to read the continuous news reports on the use of powerful laser-guided rockets with 100% accuracy, fighter-bombers that go twice the speed of sound, potent explosives that blow apart uranium-hardened metals that have an everlasting effect on the inhabitants and their descendants.
Cuba stated its position regarding the internal situation in Libya at the meeting in Geneva. Without hesitating, Cuba defended the idea of a political solution to the conflict in Libya and was categorically opposed to any foreign military intervention.
In a world where the alliance between the United States and the developed capitalist powers of Europe increasingly take hold of the people’s resources and fruits of their labor, any honest citizen, whatever their standpoint to the government, would be opposed to a foreign military intervention in their country.
But most absurd about the current situation is the fact that before the brutal war broke out in Northern Africa, in another region of the world, nearly 10 000 kilometers away, a nuclear accident had occurred in one of the most populated areas of the world following a tsunami caused by a 9.0 earthquake, which has already cost a hard-working nation like Japan nearly 30 000 lives. Such accident would have not occurred 75 years before.
In Haiti, a poor and underdeveloped country, a nearly 7.0 quake according to the Richter scale, caused over 300 000 deaths, countless people wounded and hundreds of thousands harmed.
However, what was terribly tragic in Japan was the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant, whose consequences are still to be assessed.
I will only recall some of the main stories published by the news agencies:
ANSA.- Fukushima 1 nuclear plant is releasing “extremely high and potentially lethal radiations,” said Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the US nuclear entity.
EFE.- The nuclear threat stemming from the serious situation at a Japanese plant, following the earthquake, has triggered security revisions in atomic plants around the world and has made some countries paralyze their plans.
Reuters.- Japan’s devastating earthquake and deepening nuclear crisis could result in losses of up to $200 billion for Japanese economy, but the global impact remains hard to gauge.
EFE.- The deterioration of one reactor after another at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear center continued to feed fears of a pending nuclear disaster as desperate attempts to control a radioactive leak did nothing to provide even a glimmer of hope.
AFP.- Japan´s Emperor Akihito expressed concern about the unpredictable character of the nuclear crisis hitting Japan following the quake and tsunami that killed thousands of people and left 500 000 homeless. New quake reported in the Tokyo area.
There are reports talking about even more concerning issues.
Some refer to the presence of toxic radioactive iodine in Tokyo’s drinking water, which doubles the tolerable amount that can be consumed by the smallest children in the Japanese capital. One of these reports says that the stocks of bottled water are shrinking in Tokyo, a city located in a prefecture at more than 200 kilometers from Fukushima.
This series of circumstances poses a dramatic situation on our world.
I can express freely my views on the war in Libya.
I do not share political or religious views with the leader of that country. I am a Marxist-Leninist and a follower of Marti, as I have already said.
I see Libya as a member of the Non-Aligned Movement and a sovereign State of the nearly 200 members of the United Nations.
Never, a large or small country, in this case with only 5 million inhabitants, was the victim of such a brutal attack by the air force of a militaristic organization with thousands of fighter-bombers, more than 100 submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers, and sufficient arsenal to destroy the planet many times over. Our species had never encountered this situation and there had been nothing similar 75 years ago, when the Nazi bombers attacked targets in Spain.
Now, however, the criminal and discredited NATO will write a ”beautiful” little story about its “humanitarian” bombing.
If Gaddafi honors the traditions of his people and decides to fight to the last breath, as he has promised, together with the Libyans who are facing the worst bombing a country has ever suffered, NATO and its criminal projects will sink into the mire of shame.
The people respect and believe in men who fulfill their duty.
More than 50 years ago, when the United States killed more than a hundred Cubans with the explosion of merchant ship “La Coubre” our people proclaimed ”Patria o Muerte.” (Homeland or Death). They have fulfilled this, and have always been determined to keep their word.
“Anyone who tries to seize Cuba,” said the most glorious fighter in our history-”will only gather the dust of her soil soaked in blood.”
I beg you to excuse the frankness with which I address the issue.
Fidel Castro Ruz
28 March 2011
8:14 p.m.
July 16, 2011
From "Let the Railsplitter Awake" by Pablo Neruda, 1948
[...]
Let none of this happen. Let the Rail Splitter awake. Let Abe come with axe and his wooden plate to eat with the farmers. Let his head like tree-bark, his eye like those in wooden planks and oak-tree boles, turn to look on the world rising above the foliage higher than the sequoias. Let him buy something in a drugstore let him take a bus to Tampa let him bite into a yellow apple and enter a moviehouse to converse with all the simple people.
Let the Rail Splitter awake
Let Abe come, let his aged yeast rise the green and gold earth of Illinois, let him lift up his axe in his own town against the new slaveholders against the slave-lash against the poisoned printing-press against the bloodied merchandise they want to sell. Let them march singing and smiling the young white, the young Negro against the walls of gold against the manufacturer of hate against the merchant of their blood let them sing, laugh and conquer.
Let the Rail Splitter awake.
Peace for the twilights to come peace for the bridge, peace for the wine, peace for the stanzas which pursue me and in my blood uprise entangling my earlier songs with earth and loves, peace for the city in the morning when bread wakes up, peace for the Mississippi, source of rivers, peace for my brothers' shirt, peace for books like a seal of air, peace for the great kholkoz of Kiev, peace for the ashes for those dead and of these other dead, peace for the grimy iron of Brooklyn, peace for the letter carrier, who from house to house goes like the day, peace for the choreographer who shouts through a funnel to the honeysuckle vine, peace for my own right hand that wants to write only Rosario, peace for the Bolivian, secretive as a lump of tin, peace so that you may marry, peace for all the saw-mills of the Bio-Bio, peace for the torn heart of guerrilla Spain, peace for the little museum in Wyoming where the most lovely thing is a pillow embroidered with a heart, peace for the baker and his loaves, and peace for the flour, peace for all the wheat to be born, for all the love which will seek its tasselled shelter, peace for all those alive: peace for all lands and all waters.
Here I say farewell, I return to my house, in my dreams i return to Patagonia where the wind rattles the barns and the ocean spatters ice. I am nothing more than a poet: I love all of you, I wander about the world I love; in my country they gaol miners and soldiers give orders to judges. Bu tI love even the roots in my small cold country, if I had to die a thousand times over it is there I would die, if I had to be born a thousand times over it is there I would be born near the tall wild pines the tempestuous south wind the new;y-purchased bells. Let none think of me. Let us think of the entire earth and pound the table with love. I don't want blood again to saturate bread, beans, music: I wish they would come with me: the miner, the little girl, the lawyer, the seaman, the doll-maker, to go into a movie and come out to drink the reddest wine. I did not come to solve anything. I came here to sing and for you to sing with me.
--Pablo Neruda From somewhere in the Americas, May 1948 Let the Rail Splitter Awake and other poems New York, International Publishers, 1970 [2001]
July 06, 2011
Slim Evans: Red Labour organizer and leader of the On To Ottawa Trek of 1935, June 16-30, 2011, issue of People's Voice
This year, to mark the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party of Canada's foundation in 1921, People's Voice is printing a series of articles on the party's history and prominent members.
Arthur H. "Slim" Evans is best known as the main organizer and leader of the On To Ottawa Trek of 1935. For his decades of organizing efforts, Slim Evans was repeatedly charged and jailed, but was widely hailed as an outstanding champion of workers' rights.
Born on April 24, 1890 in Toronto, Slim Evans left school at 13 to help support his family. He sold newspapers, drove a team of horses and learned the carpentry trade. Like many others, Evans came west in 1911, working at various jobs on the prairies, before heading to Minneapolis and then Kansas City. There he joined the Industrial Workers of the World, and was sentenced to three years imprisonment for participating in a free speech fight, having read aloud the Declaration of Independence at a rally. "All I did was read it. I was too shy and too nervous at that time to make up any speech of my own," he said later.
Evans was released in 1912 after leading a jail strike of political prisoners. In 1913 he was shot in the leg at the infamous Ludlow Massacre of striking Colorado coal miners. During five years across the western USA, he worked with many labour giants including "Big Bill" Haywood, Frank Little and Joe Hill.
In 1916, Evans returned to Canada, doing farm work, carpentry, and then becoming a miner. He was active in the One Big Union, the Canadian equivalent of the IWW, and volunteered to help organize coal miners in the Drumheller Valley region of Alberta. The Drumheller miners walked out in solidarity with the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. Rejecting the United Mineworkers of America which had failed to help them, the miners also demanded recognition of the OBU. The mineowners, the Alberta government, and the UMWA fought back, and the OBU was defeated after a lengthy battle. Evans was later sentenced to three years in prison, on trumped-up charges of using UMWA funds to fund a wildcat strike without permission. The truth was that he had used union funds to feed striking miners rather than send it as "per capita" to UMWA headquarters.
Evans was released in March 1925, after one year in the Prince Albert Penitentiary. A petition to the Minister of Justice with over 8700 signatures of miners and other supporters from across B.C. and Alberta was the cause of his early release.
By this time, the OBU had nearly disappeared, but Evans remained a prominent labour activist, working at a variety of different jobs. He also built a home for his family, at 17 E. 42 Avenue in Vancouver.
In 1926, Evans joined the Communist Party of Canada. As he said later, "I believe I was a communist right from the first time I started to travel through the country and saw conditions in the various mining camps and the rotten conditions that prevailed there."
The onset of the Great Depression saw conditions become much worse. Millions were jobless and hungry. In 1932 Evans helped organize the BC section of the National Unemployed Workers Association, fighting to win increased rates for relief work. Later that year, he began organizing the coal miners of Princeton into the Mine Workers Union of Canada, an affiliate of the Communist-led Workers Unity League. Police and the Ku Klux Klan cooperated to break the Princeton miners' strike for higher wages, and Evans was imprisoned for 18 months in Oakalla penitentiary. The authorities also evicted his family from the house on 42nd Avenue when they were unable to pay the mortgage. Another huge labour campaign finally won Evans' release in 1934, just as the struggle of the unemployed began to boil over.
Thousands of unemployed men in the "slave camps" run by the federal government joined the WUL-affiliated Relief Camp Workers Union. BC members of the RCWU voted in April 1935 to strike for "work and wages." For two months, the strikers conducted a powerful campaign for their demands in Vancouver, and then voted to take their struggle directly to Ottawa. Riding the freights, they reached Regina, where Prime Minister R.B. "Iron Heel" Bennett invited the union to send a delegation to present their grievances. Slim Evans headed the eight-member delegation, which was subjected to a verbal attack by Bennett. Evans called Bennett a liar, and the delegation headed back to Regina, where a brutal RCMP attack halted the Trek on July 1, 1935.
But stopping the Trek did not change the course of history. The slave camps were soon shut down, Bennett's Tories suffered a massive defeat, and workers began winning gains such as unemployment insurance. Evans and others were charged under Section 98 of the Criminal Code for "membership in an unlawful organization" - the RCWU. But the cases died when the new Liberal government was compelled to repeal Section 98.
Slim Evans continued his labour activities, helping to organize workers at Cominco in Trail, B.C., into Local 480 of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union. In 1937 he led a campaign for medical funds to support the MacKenzie Papineau Battalion fighting for the freedom of Spain. During World War Two, he was a shop steward of the Amalgamated Shipwrights in the Vancouver shipyards.
Tragically, Slim Evans died on February 13, 1944, from injuries after being struck by a car three weeks earlier. He was buried in Ocean View Park cemetery in Burnaby. His place in Canadian history was regained with "Work and Wages," the most complete collection of information on his life, edited by his daughter Jean Evans Sheils and Ben Swankey, published in 1977 by the Trade Union Research Bureau. Anniversary celebrations of the On to Ottawa Trek held in 1985 and later years have also done much to educate new generations of labour activists about the contributions of this remarkable Communist.
(The above article is from the June 16-30, 2011, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)
MARKHAM ONTARIO COUNCIL BANS CRITICISM OF ISRAELI APARTHEID, Special to Peoplesvoice, May 16-31, 2011
Special to PV
http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint79/08%29%20MARKHAM%20COUNCIL.htm
The municipality of Markham, Ontario, northeast of Toronto, has been known for its rapid population growth in recent years. Now, Markham is in the news for another reason. On May 3, a majority of city councillors adopted a motion to censor "Israeli Apartheid Week", an event held this year in 95 cities and more than 75 universities on six continents. This includes three cities in Israel and four cities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Organized every March by students on Canadian campuses, Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) features film screenings and high-profile forums with prominent academics and community leaders. IAW condemns all forms of racism and discrimination, including anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti‑Arab racism, and homophobia. Many Jewish students are involved in organizing IAW.
The Canadian Arab Federation says the May 3 motion "aims to deny Canadian students and academics the rights of freedom of expression and academic freedom, rights that are enjoyed by Israeli students and academics... The motion creates the absurd situation where Canadian students and academics are allowed to freely criticize their own government but are banned from criticizing a foreign government.
"The motion put forward by Councillor (Howard) Shore is one of several attempts currently being undertaken to censor and suppress public debate on this subject in order to shield Israel's actions from scrutiny and criticism. Such actions are an attack on free speech the likes of which we have not seen since the 1950s McCarthy witch hunts."
The CAF points out that Markham councillors ignored a comprehensive study undertaken by Toronto City staff, which determined the phrase "Israeli Apartheid" does not promote hatred or discrimination, and does not violate the Criminal Code or the Ontario Human Rights Code.
Markham City Council also ignored the compelling evidence introduced from the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, the Conference of Southern African Christian Churches, the Association of Civil Rights of Israel and the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, that irrefutably proves Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel are systematically discriminated against and that the situation in the occupied West Bank and Gaza is reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa.
Speakers against the Markham motion represented diverse supporters of free speech and Palestinian rights, including Jews, Christians and Muslims of all ages and gender, and from various backgrounds.
On the surface, the motion is puzzling, since there are no university campuses or IAW events in Markham. But the municipality includes the provincial riding of Thornhill, represented by MPP Peter Thurman - the same MPP who put forward a non-binding motion in the Ontario legislature last year to condemn IAW.
Also, Markham City Council decided recently to send a trade mission to Israel. Rejection of Councillor Shore's motion would have implied that the city condones the labelling of Israel as an Apartheid state, leaving it in the awkward position of doing business with an apartheid regime.
As CAF National President Khaled Mouammar stated, "Regrettably, this politically expedient decision runs counter to the Town of Markham's stated mission to recognize and accept the diversity of its residents, to respect the differences in all peoples and their right to hold different opinions, to promote the value of human rights, and to oppose racism and discrimination."
http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint79/08%29%20MARKHAM%20COUNCIL.htm
The municipality of Markham, Ontario, northeast of Toronto, has been known for its rapid population growth in recent years. Now, Markham is in the news for another reason. On May 3, a majority of city councillors adopted a motion to censor "Israeli Apartheid Week", an event held this year in 95 cities and more than 75 universities on six continents. This includes three cities in Israel and four cities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Organized every March by students on Canadian campuses, Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) features film screenings and high-profile forums with prominent academics and community leaders. IAW condemns all forms of racism and discrimination, including anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti‑Arab racism, and homophobia. Many Jewish students are involved in organizing IAW.
The Canadian Arab Federation says the May 3 motion "aims to deny Canadian students and academics the rights of freedom of expression and academic freedom, rights that are enjoyed by Israeli students and academics... The motion creates the absurd situation where Canadian students and academics are allowed to freely criticize their own government but are banned from criticizing a foreign government.
"The motion put forward by Councillor (Howard) Shore is one of several attempts currently being undertaken to censor and suppress public debate on this subject in order to shield Israel's actions from scrutiny and criticism. Such actions are an attack on free speech the likes of which we have not seen since the 1950s McCarthy witch hunts."
The CAF points out that Markham councillors ignored a comprehensive study undertaken by Toronto City staff, which determined the phrase "Israeli Apartheid" does not promote hatred or discrimination, and does not violate the Criminal Code or the Ontario Human Rights Code.
Markham City Council also ignored the compelling evidence introduced from the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, the Conference of Southern African Christian Churches, the Association of Civil Rights of Israel and the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, that irrefutably proves Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel are systematically discriminated against and that the situation in the occupied West Bank and Gaza is reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa.
Speakers against the Markham motion represented diverse supporters of free speech and Palestinian rights, including Jews, Christians and Muslims of all ages and gender, and from various backgrounds.
On the surface, the motion is puzzling, since there are no university campuses or IAW events in Markham. But the municipality includes the provincial riding of Thornhill, represented by MPP Peter Thurman - the same MPP who put forward a non-binding motion in the Ontario legislature last year to condemn IAW.
Also, Markham City Council decided recently to send a trade mission to Israel. Rejection of Councillor Shore's motion would have implied that the city condones the labelling of Israel as an Apartheid state, leaving it in the awkward position of doing business with an apartheid regime.
As CAF National President Khaled Mouammar stated, "Regrettably, this politically expedient decision runs counter to the Town of Markham's stated mission to recognize and accept the diversity of its residents, to respect the differences in all peoples and their right to hold different opinions, to promote the value of human rights, and to oppose racism and discrimination."
No Anti-Poverty Plan in Ontario NDP Platform, by Donald Hughes June 30, 2011
http://www.mediacoop.ca/blog/donald-hughes/7639
Last weekend, Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath released her party's platform for the coming provincial general election in October. The platform presented accepts neoliberal constraints while failing to address Ontario's poverty crisis.
Horwath's fiscal plan centers on the repeal of recent corporate tax cuts, restoring 2009's 14% general rate. Given that the federal general corporate rate is set to fall to 15% in 2012, the combined rate will be 29%. This would still represent a fall in the general corporate rate of over one-third from the year 2000.
The revenue gained from the corporate tax increase is largely directed towards alternative tax cuts. The four main tax cuts contained in the plan are an investment tax credit, removal of the HST from gasoline, removal of the HST from home heating and a modest small business tax reduction.
The largest area of increased public spending is health care, with a series of small spending initiatives to improve access at emergency rooms and community clinics. This is funded primarily out of unidentified cuts to public services and a promise to reduce the use of consultants and administrators.
Another area of spending is a commitment to meet 50% of transit operating costs province-wide, with a commitment to freeze transit fares. No additional funds are made available for transit infrastructure.
The NDP platform promises to continue to index welfare and disability payments to inflation, and includes a reduction to the disability clawback rate against earned income, but otherwise accounts no money for benefit increases. Likewise, there is no new money for housing initiatives.
The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty has called for an immediate increase in the rates of 55%, or a monthly Ontario Works payment of about $1,000. This move would restore Ontario Works to the level achieved under the last NDP government in the early 1990s.
A coalition of food security campaigners, including The Stop Community Food Centre in Davenport, have called for an immediate $100 increase in Ontario Works payments, to about $700 a month, with an aim towards "Putting Food in the Budget."
The Housing Network of Ontario has focused on promoting a policy centered on a new housing benefit as a short-term measure to alleviate poverty and improve housing access.
The NDP platform contains no specific commitment to expanding child care access in Ontario. Affordable, non-profit child care has been a component of Quebec's limited antipoverty strategy.
Another feature of this year's NDP platform is the absence of a post-secondary education strategy. In recent elections, the NDP often campaigned on promises to freeze or reduce tuition fees. In the current platform there is no significant spending related to education at any level.
Horwath's platform represents a shift to the political right for the NDP. It avoids addressing a large number of issues associated with social-democracy and the labour movement in favour of debt stabilization and generally low taxation. The aim appears to be to accept neoliberal constraints in return for the ability to make minor reforms in government. This strategy has been launched at the expense of many of the NDP's traditional campaign positions.
Last weekend, Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath released her party's platform for the coming provincial general election in October. The platform presented accepts neoliberal constraints while failing to address Ontario's poverty crisis.
Horwath's fiscal plan centers on the repeal of recent corporate tax cuts, restoring 2009's 14% general rate. Given that the federal general corporate rate is set to fall to 15% in 2012, the combined rate will be 29%. This would still represent a fall in the general corporate rate of over one-third from the year 2000.
The revenue gained from the corporate tax increase is largely directed towards alternative tax cuts. The four main tax cuts contained in the plan are an investment tax credit, removal of the HST from gasoline, removal of the HST from home heating and a modest small business tax reduction.
The largest area of increased public spending is health care, with a series of small spending initiatives to improve access at emergency rooms and community clinics. This is funded primarily out of unidentified cuts to public services and a promise to reduce the use of consultants and administrators.
Another area of spending is a commitment to meet 50% of transit operating costs province-wide, with a commitment to freeze transit fares. No additional funds are made available for transit infrastructure.
The NDP platform promises to continue to index welfare and disability payments to inflation, and includes a reduction to the disability clawback rate against earned income, but otherwise accounts no money for benefit increases. Likewise, there is no new money for housing initiatives.
The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty has called for an immediate increase in the rates of 55%, or a monthly Ontario Works payment of about $1,000. This move would restore Ontario Works to the level achieved under the last NDP government in the early 1990s.
A coalition of food security campaigners, including The Stop Community Food Centre in Davenport, have called for an immediate $100 increase in Ontario Works payments, to about $700 a month, with an aim towards "Putting Food in the Budget."
The Housing Network of Ontario has focused on promoting a policy centered on a new housing benefit as a short-term measure to alleviate poverty and improve housing access.
The NDP platform contains no specific commitment to expanding child care access in Ontario. Affordable, non-profit child care has been a component of Quebec's limited antipoverty strategy.
Another feature of this year's NDP platform is the absence of a post-secondary education strategy. In recent elections, the NDP often campaigned on promises to freeze or reduce tuition fees. In the current platform there is no significant spending related to education at any level.
Horwath's platform represents a shift to the political right for the NDP. It avoids addressing a large number of issues associated with social-democracy and the labour movement in favour of debt stabilization and generally low taxation. The aim appears to be to accept neoliberal constraints in return for the ability to make minor reforms in government. This strategy has been launched at the expense of many of the NDP's traditional campaign positions.
July 03, 2011
Greece's self-styled "Socialist" government: Nothing short of disgusting, Morning Star, Sunday 03 July 2011
http://bit.ly/iEcMMg
Greece's self-styled "Socialist" government, which has thrown its own working class to the wolves of imperialism, has demonstrated its non-partisanship by treating the Palestinian people likewise.
George Papandreou's willingness to dance to Israel's tune is nothing short of disgusting.
His government has thrown its weight behind the oppressor and abandoned the oppressed by using the law against the Freedom Flotilla 2 - Stay Human campaigners.
Not that Papandreou's government stands alone. It is backed by the so-called Quartet, fronted by war criminal Tony Blair, which is happy to parrot Tel Aviv's propaganda about Gaza.
The Quartet - the UN, US, EU and Russia - claims to have concerns about difficult conditions facing Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
But it notes "a marked increase in the range and scope of goods and materials" entering Gaza over the past year.
And this group of influential global powers, which has failed to take any action to halt Israel's rapacious colonisation of the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, or to weaken Israel's stranglehold on Gaza open prison, lectures those who wish to deliver aid to use "established channels."
Perhaps they are unaware that Israel's capricious control of the "established channels," otherwise known as the border crossings with Israel and Egypt, is a key factor in the impoverishment of Palestinians in Gaza.
Gazans are not the victims of an uncontrollable force of nature.
They have been "put on a diet," as one cynical Israeli politician put it, as part of a collective punishment, which is illegal under international law.
That punishment is to endure until one Israeli prisoner of war is released, even though it is the Netanyahu government that is frustrating negotiations to free Gilad Shalit.
Who says this? Hamas? No, it is Shalit's family, who regard Netanyahu as the biggest disaster to befall their son and see the prime minister as prepared to see Shalit come home in an Israeli flag-covered coffin.
But as tragic as Shalit's case is, his name is known all over the world.
The thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are, with the exception of prominent activists such as Marwan Barghouti, held hostage in anonymity.
While they languish in foreign jails, their compatriots in Gaza suffer a more insidious imprisonment.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency reported last month that unemployment in Gaza has risen to 45.2 per cent, purchasing power fell by 7.9 per cent in the second half of 2010, marking a cumulative decline of 34.5 per cent since 2006.
Electrical power is subject to continual cuts, 95 per cent of the water supply is unfit for human consumption and shortage of medical supplies has brought the health system to virtual collapse.
Great power complicity with Israel's occupation and expansionism has conspired to deny not only Palestinians' human rights but even their very humanity.
Freedom Flotilla 2 - Stay Human was organised to expose this reality and to bring hope to a victimised population.
It is being scuppered by a government that is bankrupt in more ways than one.
The Palestinians are not alone.
The majority of the world is with them, which is why over 120 countries back UN recognition of their sovereign state, no matter what the rich and powerful pretend.
Once again, our government and all others collaborating with Israel's repression must face protests and be told that their shameful collusion must end.
A line of struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, by Elisseos Vagenas, of the CC of the Communist Party Greec
http://bit.ly/l2yNAk
This article was written during the important (48-hour) nationwide general strike on 28-29 June which has embraced every workplace. The strike demonstrations of All Workers’ Militant Front (PAME) which rallies the trade unions that work on a class oriented basis have been unprecedented.
The demonstrations and the mass rallies of PAME are different from those of the compromised trade union leaderships of the federations of the unions in the private (GSEE) and the public sector (ADEDY). The reason is not only the massive participation of the working people, their militancy and the measures for their protection but also the fact that they do not merely seek to block the new “package” of anti-people measures but to put forward the need to come into full conflict with the EU and capitalist exploitation as a whole.
In contrast with the demonstrations of the so called “indignant citizens“, who shout the so called “neutral” though misleading slogan “thieves, thieves” in front of the parliament, the slogan which is prevalent in the massive demonstrations of PAME is: “No cog can turn without the workers. Worker you can do without the bosses!”
The line of struggle of the communist party and the class oriented labour and trade union movement becomes increasingly important under the current conditions as the Greek people experience the consequences of the capitalist crisis that brings poverty, unemployment and destitution for the working class-popular families and when the government of PASOK along with the EU and the IMF implement a savage anti-people programme aiming at the reduction of the price of the labour force and the increase of the competitiveness and the profitability of the capital.
The KKE stressed from the very first moment that the capitalist crisis, which the Greek people are experiencing, expresses the sharpening of the main contradiction between the social character of production and labour on the one hand and the private capitalist appropriation of its results on the other. In addition, it struggled against the misleading campaign claiming that the government of PASOK was allegedly subservient to the IMF or to foreign powers revealing that the anti-labour memoranda expressed concrete choices of the Greek bourgeoisie concerning alliances that ensured its profitability in these specific conditions.
KKE has refuted the social-democratic and opportunist positions which are spread by the forces of the so-called European Left Party (ELP) as well as by others, positions that attribute the causes of the crisis to the neo-liberal management because they conceal the activity of the laws of the exploitative system; they conceal that the crises break out irrespective of the social-democratic or the liberal management as the sharpening of the contradictions of the system: the anarchy and the unevenness that characterises capitalist production, the over accumulation of capital which was accumulated in the period of economic growth due to the exploitation of the labour force and cannot find a way out that ensures a high rate of profit.
Over the last two years there have been multifaceted class-oriented struggles against the assault of capital, the anti-people policy of the liberal government of ND previously and the social-democratic government of PASOK today which is supported by the other bourgeois political forces and the subjugated leaderships of the government and employer led trade unionism.
More than 20 nationwide general strikes have been successfully organised in the period 2010-2011; likewise a series of strikes in sectors and companies, mass rallies, occupations of public buildings and other buildings as well, massive struggles with the participation of hundreds of thousands of workers and popular forces.
The KKE and PAME, the class oriented labour movement, the militant rallies supported by our party in the movements of the farmers, the self-employed, the women and the youth have played a leading role in these struggles.
The line of struggle of the KKE and the class oriented movement has made a special contribution to the conflict with capital and the anti-people policy as it clarified from the beginning that the crisis, the deficit and the debt are a product of capitalist development, of the strategy that supports the monopoly groups and that the workers are not responsible for it. More and more working people see this fact today when they compare the state debt (350 billions Euro) with the deposits of the Greek capitalists which in Switzerland amount to 600 billions Euro.
More and more working people are abandoning the bourgeois parties (PASOK-ND), open their eyes to the assessments and the proposals of KKE since the communists are proved correct by the developments. The KKE has denounced the government and the EU because they blackmail the people that the government won’t receive the 5th instalment of the loan unless they accept the new anti-labour measures.
The communists in Greece support firmly that it is the plutocracy that must pay for the crisis as it is responsible for it. At the same time, the KKE believes that the struggle for every problem of the people must develop in the direction of organising, concentrating and preparing broad popular and working class forces not only in order to create better conditions for the sale of labour power but also for the overthrow of the exploitative system so as to pave the way for the people’s power and the people's economy, for socialism.
July 01, 2011
A National Exercise in Scare Tactics, Written by Tamar Gozansky, Communist Party of Israel, Friday, 24 June 2011
http://bit.ly/lZWFtt
Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Barak and the remainder of Israel’s cabinet members are running a scare campaign about what, supposedly, will befall Israel if the UN General Assembly votes in September in favor of recognition for a Palestinian State based on the 1967 borders. Foreign Minister Lieberman has even announced that the approval of such a resolution means no less than the annihilation of Israel.
This is why the government has pulled an even more drastic tactic out of its sleeve – a national drill run by the Home Front Command, optimistically labeled “Turning Point 5”. According to the plan, command and field simulation exercises were carried out for a scenario, in which hundreds of ground-to-ground missiles are fired into Israel for a period of one month. The citizens, who according to this scenario will be subject to bombardment by thousands of missiles, were required to drill “entry into protected spaces” after receiving a warning on their cell phone. Two million school children also took part in the drill.
The information publicizing the national drill have stated, that in the framework of the simulation exercise, authorities practice responding to an event in which 400,000 citizens leave their homes because of a missile attack and are transferred to live in army bases and tents in the Negev desert.
Only part of Israeli citizens have cooperated with the guidelines and actually entered a protected space on the day of the drill. But everyone, even those who did not take the exercise seriously, were treated with a fair dose of brainwashing and induced panic: in the next war Israel will be bombarded with thousands missiles that will strew death and destruction. When such a scenario is presented as inevitable, as a natural disaster, as a stroke of fate – so the military and civil establishments would like to hope – few will ask the question: how can such a missile attack be prevented?
Those who do ask will require an answer: perhaps Meir Dagan, former chief of the Mossad, should be listened to and the answer is not a military initiative against Iran? Perhaps the advisable thing to do is to recognize a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders? Perhaps Israel’s militaristic thinking should be replaced by civilian-oriented thinking, and instead of living on the sword, we should begin to think about how we can achieve a life of peace and neighborly relations with the Arab nations?
But the Netanyahu government and the army hope that the voice of the questioners and of those who reject the logic of the scare tactics will be fainter than the incessant grating of the inflammatory fear-mongering sounded through the established media channels.
After five days of a media-saturated national scare campaign about the bombardment by thousands of missiles in the coming war, Netanyahu hopes he will stop being bothered by those who ask him, why he recently stated that the conflict with the Palestinians was insoluble, and that he will not be pestered with demands to present an actual plan for an agreement, so that he can continue to bandy the empty slogan, that “we are in favor of negotiating with the Palestinians over everything”.
George Orwell wrote in “1984” that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” When this reasoning is applied to the Home Front Command drill, we can say that if it is granted that the people in Israel are doomed to be victims of a missile assault, and its freedom is expressed in the certainty of that knowledge, all else follows: the government must be trusted; it is natural for the establishment to root out “traitors”, anyway there is “too much democracy”; and “is this a time to be discussing the price of cottage cheese!?” and so on and so forth.
And thus, the national drill accomplishes its true goal.
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