Richard Fidler: Quebec left debates perspectives in Canada’s federal election

by Richard Fidler

in: 

Life on the Left

September 13, 2015

Canada’s current federal election campaign is now at the half-way point in the lead-up to October 19. The three major parties are polling almost equally, with the ruling Conservative vote dropping steadily while the opposition New Democrats (NDP) and Liberals are virtually tied overall at just over 30%. This means the NDP has not significantly increased its support from the previous election in 2011, while the Liberals under Justin Trudeau have staged a remarkable recovery from their 19% in 2011. In Quebec, the NDP polls far ahead of the other parties and even beyond its 43% support in 2011, but it is lagging behind the Liberals in most of the rest of Canada (ROC).

It is a depressing campaign, with little discussion of major issues in the corporate media. No party is offering a real alternative on such key issues as climate change, increasing neoliberal austerity, Canada’s increasing militarization, etc.

As the Official Opposition in the last Parliament, the NDP was well poised for further advances this year. But its campaign, built entirely around the image of party leader Thomas Mulcair, is pathetically devoid of proposals that could inspire enthusiastic support in an electorate that by all accounts is overwhelmingly eager for “change.”

Incredibly, the party brass market Mulcair as a leader with “experience” in government — as a cabinet minister in the right-wing and federalist government headed by Jean Charest in Quebec, which Mulcair left only in 2008. And then there are his past statements on the record in support of Margaret Thatcher. And now his inability to explain how an NDP government would abolish the Senate — which would of course require not just consent of all the provinces but a major amendment to the Constitution, something the NDP fears to do because it would once again put the “Quebec question” front and centre in Canadian politics. And so on and on....

What can the left do? Nowhere is this a more acute question than in Quebec where the largely pro-sovereignty left recognizes the need to engage with federal politics but is divided between the Bloc Québécois (BQ), which campaigns for independence as a Quebec-only federal party, and the federalist NDP, which currently holds most of the province’s seats and is once again polling far ahead of the other parties including the BQ.
As a member of a collective (the Collectif d’analyse politique, or CAP) associated with the semi-annual journal Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme, I was asked, along with a few others, to summarize my perspectives on the election in no more than 500 words for the September issue of our members-only bulletin, Les nouvelles des NCS. The five contributions published therein offer a glimpse of some of the ways in which these issues are being addressed in the Quebec left. The CAP will be discussing the election at its next meeting. Here is a summary of four contributions followed by an English version of mine.

Aurélie Lanctôt is a law student at McGill University, a graduate in journalism from the Université du Québec, and a blogger at Ricochet and Voir, among other sites.
She focuses on the incoherencies in the NDP campaign, noting how Mulcair’s previous right-wing positions conflict with the party’s proposals ($15 minimum wage, child care program, etc.), and emphasizes in particular his promise of a balanced budget beginning with his government’s first term in office. “Thomas Mulcair seems more determined to fight the Right’s mockery than he is about the legitimate concerns coming from his left, the NDP membership and potential sympathizers of the party.... By clinging to the goal of a balanced budget, despite everything, isn’t Mulcair revealing that he has not completely abandoned his past political beliefs?”

Michel Roche is a professor of political science at the University of Quebec Chicoutimi campus and author of (inter alia) a stimulating essay, La gauche et l’Indépendance du Québec.
He argues that more harm than good may result if Quebec progressives support the NDP in order to defeat Harper. He advocates a vote for the BQ, notwithstanding its “pro-free trade discourse.” By supporting Quebec independence, the BQ alone signifies a “rupture” with the existing constitutional status quo, upheld by the NDP as well as the other parties. The Quebec independence movement, which he thinks is experiencing a revival under the new Parti Québécois leader Pierre-Karl Péladeau, scares the ruling class much more than the prospect of “an NDP government unable to renounce tar sands operations and their transmission to the East.” Furthermore, another defeat of the BQ would “discourage the living forces of the independentist movement and fuel the federalist offensive of Quebec’s Liberal government....”

Francine Pelletier, a bilingual journalist in print, TV and digital media, was a co-founder of the feminist magazine La Vie en rose. She blogs at L’actualité en petites bouchées.
Pelletier acknowledges that the Bloc Québécois has never been so loudly independentist, but also, she notes, never more inclined to forget its left-wing roots. A vote for the Bloc “is to subject all the issues in this election campaign — and they are many, from the environment to democracy itself — to the sole hypothesis, still far off, of Quebec’s independence.” The most discouraging feature of the current debate, she says, is the tendency of many Québécois to blame Harper on “Canadians” and leave it to them to defeat his government. She calls for a vote for “the candidate most likely to defeat the Conservatives,” which in Quebec excludes the Bloc.
André Frappier is a former president of the Montréal local of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), a leader of Québec solidaire, and a writer in Canadian Dimension, Presse-toi à gauche, and other publications.

BQ leader Gilles Duceppe, says Frappier, “puts Liberals and New Democrats on the same footing” and calls on them to settle the fate of the Harper Tories in the rest of Canada “while he will take care of Quebec’s interests.” The BQ thereby “erects a wall between the social forces in Quebec and in Canada, preventing the establishment of the relations of mutual support and understanding that we need.
“As for the NDP, it is a social-democratic party originating in the Canadian trade-union movement, with all the deformations that represents, but it is at this point the only [political] tool not belonging to sectors of big business.... The left should use it to go further and work to build a real progressive, pan-Canadian political alternative that will uphold Quebec sovereignty.”
And here is an English version of my modest contribution to this debate — like the other participants, limited to 500 words and thus focused on what I consider the main considerations. I follow it with reference to some of my past articles on the evolution of the NDP historically and in recent years.

* * *

What options for ecosocialists in Canada’s federal election?

At stake in this election is the fate of the Harper government, the most reactionary government since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Only two opposition parties can realistically hope to replace the Conservatives: the New Democratic Party and the Liberals. Both are neoliberal, with no substantial programmatic differences.
The Liberals, with a long record of serving Canadian capitalism as the country’s traditional governing party, but sensing the public mood for “change,” are attempting to outflank the NDP on its left — proposing major public infrastructure projects and acknowledging the need for deficit budgets to confront the impending global recession.
NDP leader Thomas Mulcair is attempting to prove his party’s reliability to a ruling class still distrustful of the NDP’s historic origins in and surviving links to a section of organized labour, mainly in English Canada. He is stressing his commitment to a balanced budget from the outset, an implicit acknowledgement that an NDP government would not implement major social reforms other than (possibly) its promise of a “national” childcare program.
There are differences between the Liberals and NDP in some other areas. For example, the NDP to its credit has opposed anti-democratic legislation like Bill C-51, which the Liberals supported.
However, beholden to the needs of finance capital, neither party can be trusted to implement any real program of progressive reform, still less challenge the hydrocarbon-based economic model underlying capitalist development in recent decades.
What, then, are the options for ecosocialists in Canada and Quebec?
The Harper government must be defeated. Although neither the NDP nor the Liberals offer a break with neoliberalism, there is a political rationale for calling for an NDP vote, both in Quebec and the ROC.
A Liberal government would simply replace one traditional capitalist party with another. The election of an NDP government, on the other hand, while not a paradigm shift, would disrupt the established order, politically destabilizing it at the level of government holding decisive powers in the Canadian state.
It could open space for popular movements to mobilize and open an improved perspective for exploring and possibly creating a new pan-Canadian left force.
The Bloc Québécois offers a false choice between Quebec independence and the defeat of Harper. The BQ cannot defeat Harper, and independence will be won in Quebec, not Ottawa. The success of the Quebec sovereigntist movement is a precondition to implementing a progressive anticapitalist agenda in Quebec and would pose the possibility of reconfiguring the Canadian state, either without Quebec or in a new, democratic and plurinational federation including not only Quebec but the First Nations.
The power of the Quebec independence movement has already forced the NDP to acknowledge formally Quebec’s right of self-determination, through its Sherbrooke Declaration and its draft bill in the last Parliament that would recognize as legitimate a 50% plus one vote for independence. That alone demarks it from the Liberals on a key fault line in the politics and structure of the Canadian capitalist state. If the NDP is elected to government, the left must hold it to that position.
Richard Fidler

Saudi Prince: "I Side with Israel – Not the Palestinians", Oct 28, 2015

photo: Saudi prince al-Waleed bin Talal

Taking into account regional upheaval and changes throughout the Middle East, billionaire Saudi prince al-Waleed bin Talal says his country should work with Israel to contend with the Iranian threat. Significantly, and rare for a Saudi to admit in public, he emphasized that if the Palestinians launch another uprising, he will side with Israel.

link: http://unitedwithisrael.org/saudi-prince-i-side-with-israel-and-not-palestinians/

Saudi prince al-Waleed bin Talal has stated that in the event of another Palestinian Intifada (uprising) against Israel he would side with the Jewish State, saying that “Saudi Arabia has reached a political maturity to constitute a durable alliance with the Jewish nation.”

“I will side with the Jewish nation and its democratic aspirations in case of outbreak of a Palestinian Intifada and I shall exert all my influence to break any ominous Arab initiatives set to condemn Tel Aviv, because I deem the Arab-Israeli entente and future friendship necessary to impede the Iranian dangerous encroachment,” Al Qabas quotes the Saudi media tycoon as saying.

The Saudi Prince and entrepreneur posited that his country must reconsider its regional commitments and devise a new strategy to combat Iran’s increasing influence in Gulf States by forging a defense pact with Tel Aviv to deter any possible Iranian moves in the light of unfolding developments in the Syria and Moscow’s military intervention, the Kuwaiti Al Qabas daily reports according to AWD News.

“The whole Middle-East dispute is tantamount to matter of life and death for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from my vantage point ,and I know that Iranians seek to unseat the Saudi regime by playing the Palestinian card , hence to foil their plots Saudi Arabia and Israel must bolster their relations and form a united front to stymie Tehran’s ambitious agenda,” Kuwaiti News Agency (KUNA) quoted Prince al-Waleed as saying on Tuesday , adding that Riyadh and Tel Aviv must achieve a modus vivendi, for Saudi policy in regard to Arab-Israeli crisis is no longer acceptable.

Iran seeks to buttress its presence in the Mediterranean by supporting the Assad regime in Syria, added Prince al-Waleed, but to the chagrin of Riyadh and its sister Gulf sheikhdoms, Putin’s Russia has become a real co-belligerent force in Syrian 4-year-old civil war by attacking CIA-trained Islamist rebels. Here surfaces the paramount importance of Saudi-Israeli nexus to frustrate the Russia-Iran-Hezbollah axis.

There have been several reports over the past years of secret Saudi-Israel relations, and specifically on military and intelligence issues. The recent nuclear deal with Iran has led Saudi officials and leaders to voice support of regional cooperation with Israel.

______________________________

By: United with Israel Staff

Why Donald? Why Bernie? by ZZ, Oct 28, 2015

source: http://zzs-blg.blogspot.ca/2015/10/why-donald-why-bernie.html

“People on the left believe that systems are corrupt. People on the right tend to believe that the system (at least as they understand its design) is just fine, and it's individual people who are too corrupt or too weak to propel it towards its full greatness. Thus partisans of the right lean more toward a version of Thomas Carlyle's view that history is about great men (and now women, too), which elevates biography to the level of supreme importance, while partisans of the left care less about the outsider's life story than his criticism of power and how he will challenge it. These differing conceptions dictate how the candidates present themselves and even how they would govern, should one of them become president.” Michael Tomasky, Very Improbable Candidates, New York Review of Books, 11-05-15.

******************************************

In his recent article, Michael Tomasky explores the questions challenging most of the mainstream political commentators: What explains the dramatic ascendancy of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in their respective primary campaigns? What accounts for poll numbers far exceeding rivals expected to cruise through the primary season?

For my part, I argue, as I have in the past, that both parties are so thoroughly owned by corporations and the wealthy that the chances of a real oppositional movement emerging from within the Democratic Party and through the two-party electoral process are slim-to-none. The chances of a renegade Republican emerging are somewhat greater, but still slight. A far more reliable indicator of primary prospects can be found in counting the campaign contributions and gauging the sentiments of the corporate-friendly party leaders. To steal a movie catch-phrase, the key is to follow the money. After all, the fuel for winning national political office is cash, and more and more decisively with every election cycle. Thus, victory is decided by those who have it. I stand by my projections: thoroughly corporate-friendly candidates will emerge in the end, as they have in the past.

In the case of Bernie Sanders, Tomasky would agree that Sanders’ chances are slim: “Then, on March 1, comes Super Tuesday, which consists mostly of southern states... Barring unusual circumstances, it's difficult to see how Sanders could amass the delegates needed to win the nomination.”

But what does stand behind the Sanders/Trump phenomena? What accounts for the unexpected success of Sanders’ economic populism and Trump's re-visioning of Know-Nothing philosophy?

Clearly longer term trends are at play. Opinion polls show that the public's sentiment that "things are going in the right direction" has been steadily and persistently trending downward since 1998. Similarly, approval rates for Congress have shown a dramatic decline since 2005. Not surprisingly, confidence in key economic institutions like banks has also collapsed.

More recently, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows sharp shifts in political ideology within and a stark polarization between the political parties. At the high water of Reaganism (1990), only 39 per cent of Democrats described themselves as somewhat liberal or very liberal, with a strong majority falling into the former category. Some will remember that the word “liberal” became an epithet during that era of high-Reaganism.

Today (2015), 55% of Democrats see themselves as somewhat liberal or very liberal, with the split nearly 50/50 between the two categories. Clearly, liberalism-- whatever the word now means to respondents-- has regained currency within the Democratic Party.

Similarly, the percentage of self-described Republicans embracing the conservative label has risen from 48% to 61% in 25 years. As with the Democrats, the more staunch (in this case, very conservative) sentiment has grown more dramatically, increasing from 12% to 28% of Republicans since 1990.

These numbers go a long way toward showing an increasing divide between the two parties. But even more significantly, they show an increasing desire on the part of the rank-and-file to reshape the respective parties in a more ideological direction. Dissatisfaction with the direction of the country and its institutions has generated both a rightward (in the Republican Party) and leftward (in the Democratic Party) drift, a drift spawned by a distrust of the ideas and candidates offered by the parties' mainstreams.

Given that third parties have not yet stepped up to absorb this dissatisfaction (opinion polls strongly suggest that the electorate would welcome third parties), voters are expressing their unhappiness by supporting candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump (and other outliers).

For the Republican corporate puppet-masters, Trump presents a real problem. The unhinged insurgency represented by Trump threatens to derail, or at least move to a siding, the deeply embedded, core Republican agenda of unfettered markets, a shriveled public sector, no taxes, and corporate welfare. In its place, Trump offers rabid racism, nativism, and cultural war based on the foggy notion of a lost “America.” Republican leaders know this is a formula for defeat. They are struggling to snatch the nomination away and hand it to a reliable corporate Republican. Jeb Bush was their choice, though he has gained no traction despite an enormous war chest. I trust they'll figure it out.

The leftward pressure felt by the Democratic Party's bigwigs has been historically less of a problem. They have managed voter dissatisfaction by feigning left and driving right. They have endured primary insurgencies (Jackson, Dean, in recent years) knowing full well that the game was rigged by money and superdelegates (approaching 20% of those voting at the convention). They also mastered the tactic of embracing vague leftist postures in electoral campaigns, which are quickly discarded after victory (Obama). These tactics will likely serve them well with the Sanders insurgency.

Nonetheless, the Sanders campaign offers valuable and important lessons for the US left. Running almost exclusively on the issue of economic inequality, Sanders challenges the concept of “liberalism” fostered by the liberal media and Democratic Party elites. Over many years, “liberalism” has come to be associated with “social liberalism”: life-style issues, identity, and tolerance-- all worthy values, but more urgent to those enjoying economic security. “New Deal liberalism,” based on collective prosperity, economic equality, and community benefits, has largely been driven from the political landscape. Contemporary liberalism has been shaped into NPR (National Public Radio) liberalism, a liberalism that assiduously avoids any but the most innocuous critique of the capitalist system, but sincerely wants everyone to find happiness.

But Sanders has touched a popular nerve. He recognizes this as a Piketty-moment, with millions of people left on the outside looking in after the 2008-2009 economic collapse (and the continuing crisis). Millions are disgusted with the poverty and desperation of so many serving as a backdrop to the vulgarities of extreme wealth.

A Pew Social Trends poll shows this change dramatically: between 2009 and 2011-- a span of a mere 2 years-- 19% more respondents in the samples reported “strong” or “very strong” conflicts between the rich and poor. Fully two-thirds of respondents in 2011 reported “strong” or “very strong” conflict. As Pew's Rich Morin reports, “... the issue of class conflict has captured a growing share of the national consciousness.”

Surprisingly, a majority of Republicans share this view with nearly three-fourths of Democrats. Independents trail only slightly, with 68% reporting strong or greater perceived class conflict.

Not surprisingly, Blacks and Hispanics recognized the class conflict in great numbers before and after the twenty-first century Great Crash. Whites, however, showed the greatest jump in recognition of the class divide-- from 43% to 65%. Nearly one-in-four whites in the US were jarred by the effects of a capitalist crisis and its impact on them, their families, and their friends into seeing class antagonism where they never saw it before.

Of several potential “social conflicts in society,” the Pew study shows that the rich/poor divide is perceived as the most acute, well more than conflict between whites and Blacks.

This is the fertile soil for Sanders’ economic-equality campaign. This is the growing class divide fueling Sanders' candidacy.

Another Pew poll shows the willingness of US citizens to find solutions to the growing inequality by redistributing wealth. In a study of attitudes towards the US tax system, respondents placed their feeling that corporations and the wealthy fail to pay their fair share well ahead of their other tax concerns. When asked what bothers them “some” or “a lot” about the current tax system, fully 82% felt bothered that corporations were not paying their fair share and 79% felt the same way about the wealthy paying their fair share. Our friends and neighbors are unquestionably friendly towards taxing corporations and the rich, another chord that Sanders has struck.

It should be obvious from polling results and the Sanders campaign that US political and economic attitudes have shifted substantially in a direction that is potentially favorable to the left. But it should be just as obvious that this opportunity has been willfully squandered by the Democratic Party. In fact, apart from Sanders, the Democratic leadership has shown no interest-- apart from moral suasion and empty rhetoric-- in making the US a more egalitarian society, in taking sides in the class conflict.

On the other hand the independent left-- independent of the two parties-- has a great opportunity to embrace and develop the economic issues that Sanders has touched upon. Tomasky writes in the quote above of a left that “...believe[s] that systems are corrupt...”, that will criticize “power” and “challenge it.” Too much of our left has yet to recognize that the two-party system is among the corrupt systems. Too few of our comrades have drawn the conclusion that the two-party system is an oppressive “power” deserving of criticism and challenge... and not a democratic institution.

Regardless of the success or lasting impact of the Sanders candidacy, the US left must seize the opportunity offered by the rapidly shifting attitudes of the US people. Organizing and educating to focus mass dissatisfaction against oppressive systems and institutions-- especially capitalism-- is the next step.

Zoltan Zigedy

After the reawakening of South African student activism, where to next? October 26, 2015

source: Africa is a country

link: http://africasacountry.com/2015/10/after-the-reawakening-of-south-african-student-activism-where-to-next/

Image Credit: Nicholas Rawhani

2015 has been the year for student activism in South Africa. These spaces have been reignited with a new sense of struggle, morphing and changing, exposing fault lines and new possibilities, and pulling the rest of South Africa along with them as they go.

This is a powerful time for South Africans. Across the board people are thinking society and resistance anew. The debates which unfold on social media are opening up new spaces to understand and challenge the operation of power in post-apartheid South Africa. The students demonstrate energized resistance to the forms of injustice they and others feel. They also represent a site of deeper intellectual engagement with present conditions of oppression and possibilities for resistance, and they are pushing the rest of society to do the same.

Until recently university student activism in South Africa was something that belonged to history. Students of the 1980s often juxtaposed their own memories of campus politicization with the student apathy of the post-apartheid period. This apathy broke loudly in March of this year as students across the county spoke out about the continued institutional racism they experienced demanding the removal of statues which symbolized the colonial past #RhodesMustFall. Last week students rose up once more, this time contesting the rise of student fees and inflated cost of higher education #FeesMustFall.

Thus far the protest against fee increases has galvanized an important unity among South African citizens who feel comfortable to get behind a movement articulated against government policy. However unity and equality are not equivalent and if unity trumps equality then it serves hegemonic ends. South African disgruntlement is complicated. It comes from many different sides and holds different interests. By comparison #RhodesMustFall has not received the same unified support as #FeesMustFall which indicates some of the broader fault lines that underpin the present unity. #RhodesMustFall challenges whiteness in South Africa, it calls into question continued institutional, symbolic and material racial privilege and this is uncomfortable for white South Africans. In theory most South Africans want racial unity. However the response to #RhodesMustFall demonstrates that when it comes down to dismantling the forms of inequality inherited from the past, the division in interests emerges. This pushes us to ask a more difficult ethical question: Are South Africans able to maintain their desire for unity in struggle when their own race, class or gender privilege is challenged for the greater cause of justice and equality?

As the student movements develop and deepen, South Africans will be challenged to work out where they stand in the unity/equality equation. Different struggles also hold different interests and these don’t easily align with one another. In developing the ideological muscle of the student movement, they will be challenged to hold different forms of injustice and inequality in their analysis- against government injustice, class inequality, patriarchy and racial oppression – at the same time. What will this look like? How will it rub? How will they knit unity and equality together in order to not hail some struggles and demonize others? Can the students and their supporters remain strong in their stand against injustice even when some forms of challenge are in direct confrontation with their own class, race or gender privilege in society?

In answering these questions, it may be useful to dust off some of the old debates that revolutionary theorists were thinking through during the anti-apartheid struggle. During this time similar questions were being worked out around the relationship between race domination and class domination. At the time the movement’s stance on this was articulated in the two stage theory of national revolution. This theory asserted that first a democratic society would be created to get rid of race inequality and then the class struggle would be waged.

In a sense the first stage was brought about during the transition to democracy. However, as these current student struggles highlight, neither race nor class based oppression was defeated. With the transition, this broader ideological dialogue was replaced with a depoliticized from of reconciliation race politics, which largely ignored questions of power and injustice on both counts. The new student movement opens up a space to rethink old ideological debates, which can in turn offer a more complex understanding of South African society and our present predicament. History has shown that a two-stage approach which puts one form of struggle before another can be easily co-opted. It is at the point of the rub (between race, class and gender politics) that the difficult issues present themselves. The key ways in which power creeps in under the guise of unity is exposed precisely in paying attention to the rub. As South African citizens get behind the challenges posed by the students, this presents an emerging potential to articulate new understandings of society. Hopefully this will be one which thinks through rather than silences the rub, and which aims not only for unity and reconciliation but also for justice and equality.

What was Straight Left? An introduction by Lawrence Parker, Oct 27, 15

Last week it was announced that Guardian journalist Seamus Milne was to become Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s new Director of Communications. A number of media reports remarked that Milne was once attached to the Communist Party factional journal Straight Left. However few, particularly in the mainstream media, know much about the Straight Left faction or its role in the final years of the Communist Party of Great Britain. I asked Lawrence Parker, an expert on the hardline oppositional and anti-revisionist groups that emerged from the CPGB, to write a little introduction to those unfamiliar with the history of the Straight Left faction.

https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2015/10/27/what-was-straight-left-an-introduction-by-lawrence-parker/

Origins

Straight Left’s origins lie in the left pro-Soviet oppositions that emerged in the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1960s. In this period, a definite ‘party within a party’ emerged, with figures such as Sid French, district secretary of Surrey CPGB, becoming key leaders. The general critique that emerged from this faction was a concern over the CPGB leadership distancing itself from the Soviet Union (such as around the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968) and other ‘socialist’ countries; a preference for a more ‘workerist’ identity (for example, the faction would have been happy with the CPGB’s paper remaining as the Daily Worker in 1966) and a concentration on workplaces/trade unions; and a sense that the party was squandering its resources in futile election contests and alienating the left of the Labour Party, with whom it was meant to be developing a close relationship on the British road to socialism (BRS), the CPGB programme. However, a significant part of the faction felt that the BRS was ‘reformist’ and ‘revisionist’ in all its guises from 1951, counter-posing a revolutionary path to the parliamentary road to socialism envisaged in the CPGB’s existing programme. This stance was clouded in ambiguity in many sections of the CPGB’s left, with the default position usually being expressed in a preference for the 1951 version of the BRS overseen by Stalin, as opposed to later versions modified by a ‘revisionist’ CPGB leadership.[i] This opposition suffered a major split in the run-up to the CPGB’s 1977 congress, with Sid French taking away 700 or so supporters to form the New Communist Party (after French realised that the CPGB’s leadership was intent on a reorganisation of his Surrey district, which would have deprived him of his organisational bridgehead). The rump left opposition in the CPGB coalesced around Fergus Nicholson (other key figures were John Foster, Brian Filling, Nick Wright, Susan Michie, Pat Turnbull and Andrew Murray) who had been the CPGB’s student organiser until 1974. The Straight Left newspaper was launched in 1979, with a theoretical magazine, Communist, also appearing. Membership figures are impossible to guess. However, judging from the Communist, the faction did have a wide national infrastructure beyond London through the 1980s and was certainly on a par with, if not in some places more deeper rooted than, the other oppositional stream around the Morning Star (see below).

Factions and fictions

The Straight Left group provoked a lot of enmity from its factional rivals in the CPGB. Thus, Mike Hicks, who was involved in the Communist Campaign Group (CCG), set up after the rebellion of Morning Star supporters against the CPGB leadership in the mid-1980s, and later the first general secretary of the 1988 Communist Party of Britain split (both criticised and opposed by the Straight Left faction), said in the late 1990s: “Straight Left was neither straight nor left.”[ii] Similarly, a CCG document complained: “The individuals grouped around Straight Left have their own newspaper, their own organisation, and their own objectives.”[iii] I have been told anecdotally by CPGB activists of the time that Straight Left was thought to have three circles: an inner ‘Leninist’ core; a broader circle of sympathisers in the CPGB; and the ‘softer’ Labourite and trade unionists grouped around the Straight Left newspaper (non-CPGB trade unionists such as Alan Sapper and Labour MPs such as Joan Maynard were on its advisory board). Certainly, the majority of the content of the newspaper was hewn from the same, dry ‘labour movement’ template used by the Morning Star, with little indication that it was the work of communists, apart from its commentary on the Soviet Union and other international matters. (The Communist journal, obviously aimed at CPGB sympathisers, was much more orthodox and harder Marxist-Leninist in tone, with a lot of very interesting commentary on inner-party CPGB matters.) So, Straight Left was a faction and did indulge in political camouflage but in this it was merely of its time. For example, the CCG’s disavowal of Straight Left’s factionalism was merely an attempt to throw people off the scent from the CCG’s own factionalism (the CCG unconvincingly complained it wasn’t a faction at all; just a group that wanted to follow the CPGB’s rules — which fooled nobody). The CPGB was riddled with factions in the 1980s (and throughout the post-war period), not least those grouped around Marxism Today and the party machine. Similarly, on Straight Left’s broad left camouflage in its newspaper and other forums, this was the modus operandi of nearly the whole far left, from the Morning Star to various Trotskyist groups i.e. communists clothing their politics in everything from trade unionism to feminism and concealing their true aims in the pursuit of mass influence. Again, in hindsight, Straight Left doesn’t strike one as very exceptional in this regard. In retrospect, the enmity aimed at it on these counts stands revealed as the product of mere factional rivalry.

However, another area of criticism aimed at Straight Left may have more mileage in terms of a lasting judgement. The group was deemed by its CPGB factional rivals (both in the CCG and the small group around The Leninist) to have a ‘heads down’ approach to CPGB work. In the words of the CCG such an approach “counsels caution and compliance with the authority of the [CPGB’s] Executive Committee. It says that if there is disagreement and dissatisfaction with the Eurocommunists [the faction then dominating the party’s leadership], then opposition must be expressed and conducted via the normal party channels. That is to say, we must try at successive congresses to defeat and remove the Eurocommunists.”[iv] This led to notorious moves such as Straight Leftists walking out with the CPGB leader Gordon McLennan when he closed down a London District Congress in November 1984 that threatened to become a point of opposition to the party leadership. Mike Hicks, in the chair of this meeting, later contemptuously observed that Straight Left “ended up selling Marxism Today [CPGB theoretical journal much despised by the party’s left in the 1980s for its Eurocommunist proclivities] instead of the Morning Star because the executive told them to”.[v] However, what this Straight Left strategy of avoiding open conflict eventually led to, in the context of a CPGB that was being set on a liquidationist course, was it being left somewhat high and dry. Straight Left had built a considerable base in London by the end of the 1980s “by showing a willingness to take on responsibilities at a time when few candidates were to be found”.[vi] This was to be a very hollow victory indeed given that the CPGB was soon to pass into oblivion and the succession of congresses to win was coming to an end.

Labour pains

In terms of the Labour Party, Straight Left took the BRS injunction of developing an alliance with Labour to effect radical changes to its logical conclusion by arguing that the CPGB should affiliate to the Labour Party and, more controversially for both the left and right of the CPGB, that the party should end its independent electoral work. Thus a typical article in Communist argued: “… it is difficult to see there being much movement against the exclusion of communist trades unionists from the Labour Party until our electoral strategy is based on non-sectarian principles and imbued with a thoroughly consistent and positive attitude to the Labour Party.”[vii] Thus Straight Left picked up clearly on the attitude of the pro-Soviet CPGB opposition of the 1960s, which consistently drew attention to the political impact of declining electoral votes on the avowed Labour-Communist strategy of the party. However, this opened up Straight Left to jibes of ‘liquidationism’ from both left and right in the CPGB[viii] and, in retrospect, isolated the group further.

Men of steel
The Straight Left group, again showing its origins in the CPGB’s pro-Soviet left of the 1960s, took an extremely uncritical view of the Soviet Union and other ‘socialist’ nations, and viewed the actions of the CPGB as a ‘national’ sin against the ‘internationalist’ probity of the Soviet Union’s camp. Straight Left publications were filled with reprints from Soviet agencies such as Novosti and other press agencies from the Eastern Bloc. Thus, an article in Communist argued:

Democracy for the working class has at all times been infinitely greater in the Soviet Union than in Britain. Political power in the Soviet Union is exercised for the working class and not against it. Concretely the Soviet citizen has human rights we are denied. He works for himself, collectively; and he is not unemployed.

Neither did this stance seemingly allow criticism of even the most crisis-stricken and sickly military dictatorships of countries such as Poland in the early 1980s. Straight Leftist Charlie Woods, complaining bitterly of CPGB criticisms of the Polish regime in 1983, said: “After all, how would our [CPGB] leadership take it if the over two-million-strong Polish United Workers Party took time off from trying to solve the problems of socialism to remonstrate with our 16,000-member party’s failure to achieve it at all.”[ix] The implication of this little homily being, of course, that those British communists really shouldn’t venture to criticise their Polish brethren at all. Fergus Nicholson used the pseudonym ‘Harry Steel’ when writing in Straight Left (Harry after Harry Pollitt, the CPGB’s most-revered general secretary; and Steel after Joseph Stalin the so-called ‘man of steel’). The attitude that the faction took to the Soviet Union shows that this was no idle affectation.

The Straight Left journal existed until the early 1990s, but many of its followers ended up joining the Communist Party of Britain, which was set up from the CCG in 1988. Unlike The Leninist faction, which became the new CPGB in the late 1990s, the Straight Left faction faded into obscurity after the breakup of the original Communist Party of Great Britain.

*****************************

Lawrence Parker is the author of the book, The Kick Inside: Revolutionary Opposition in the CPGB, 1945-1991. He has also contributed a chapter on anti-revisionism inside the CPGB in the 1950s and 1960s for our edited collection, Against the Grain: The British Far Left from 1956.

———————————————————–

[i] It was difficult for a generally Stalin-supporting left in the CPGB to discard the legacy of the 1951 version of the BRS, particularly after John Gollan had helpfully pointed out that Stalin oversaw its incarnation. See John Gollan ‘Which road?’ Marxism Today July 1964. For a clear example of this ambiguity being shown to the BRS, see the contribution of Fergus Nicholson to the CPGB’s 1977 pre-congress debate in Comment 1 October 1977.

[ii] Francis Beckett Enemy within: the rise and fall of the British Communist Party London, 1998 p234. The accession of a group of ex-Straight Leftists (including Andrew Murray and Nick Wright, who had split from Straight Left to form Communist Liaison in the early 1990s) into the ranks of the Communist Party of Britain, contributed to a bitter faction fight in the organisation, in which Hicks was eventually deposed as general secretary and a strike by Morning Star staff.

[iii] Communist Campaign Group The crisis in the Communist Party and the way forward (no date but circa 1985)

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Beckett op cit

[vi] Willie Thompson The good old cause: British communism 1920-1991 London, 1992 p205

[vii] ‘40th congress of the Communist Party’ Communist September 1987

[viii] For the right wing of the CPGB, see Dave Cook in the pre-congress discussion of 1981; and for the left, Alan Stevens in the same context. Both in Comment 17 October 1981.


[ix] Charlie Woods The crisis in our Communist Party: cause, effect and cure 1983. Woods was a miner and party veteran from County Durham who was expelled for writing this pamphlet although he was very much viewed as a ‘fall guy’, with Fergus Nicholson or Brian Topping thought of as the more likely authors.

China warns U.S. of "eventualities" in South China Sea: English.news.cn, 10-27-15

BEIJING, Oct. 27 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese navy has warned that further forays by the U.S. naval vessel into the waters claimed by China in the South China Sea may "trigger eventualities."

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-10/27/c_134756068.htm

Chinese navy spokesperson Liang Yang made the comment following a U.S. warship's entering waters near the Nansha Islands on Tuesday.

The Chinese navy monitored, tracked and issued warnings to the USS Lassen, according to Liang, who said China's reaction is necessary, legitimate and professional.

"China's sovereignty over the Nansha Islands and their adjacent waters is irrefutable," he said. "The Chinese navy will resolutely perform duties and missions to unswervingly safeguard national sovereignty, maritime rights and interests, and peace and stability in the South China Sea."

The spokesperson said the navy will closely monitor the situation in and above the sea for goings-on that may jeopardize China's national security.

Ottawa Mayor nixes Anti-Communism memorial: 'Tribute to Liberty' sponsoring group gets told, 26 Oct 15

It’s “highly unlikely” the Memorial to the Victims of Communism will ever be built on the proposed site near the Supreme Court of Canada now that the federal Liberals have swept to power, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson bluntly told the memorial’s backers when he met with them last week.

by Matthew Pearson, 26 Oct 15 Source: http://bit.ly/208P8Po

Watson has been an outspoken critic of the proposed monument’s location on Wellington Street and said Ludwik Klimkowski and Anna Dombrovska — officials from Tribute to Liberty, the charity behind the controversial memorial — clearly knew where he stood when the three met Friday in the mayor’s boardroom.

“I told them in very blunt terms that this project should be put on hold,” Watson said Monday in an interview with the Citizen. “We should have a proper consultation with the broader public, not just inside government, and seek greater consensus on where the monument should be placed.”

“I said, ‘I think you’re going to have to take a little water with your wine and come back with a scaled-back version at a different location that is more acceptable to the community.'”

The mayor says he noted there is virtually no public support for the site in question, and that those expressing concerns have ranged from Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin to members of Parliament and city councillors to renowned architects and community activists.

“I told them that continuing (to push) this site made them tone-deaf,” Watson said, adding there is some consensus that the Garden of the Provinces would be a more appropriate site. But even that location, west of the Supreme Court, would require the monument to be scaled back dramatically, he said.

The mayor says he questioned Klimkowski and Dombrovska on the funding arrangement for the monument, which he characterized as “very mysterious.”

Telling the public how much the project will cost and who is funding it would go a long way to ease the public’s concerns, Watson said.

Despite the presence of eight million people in Canada with links to former or current communist regimes around the world, Tribute to Liberty has struggled to raise its $1.26-million share of the memorial’s $5.5-million cost.

Documents released to the Citizen under access to information in August showed the federal government will pay $4.2 million of the cost — far more than the $3 million it had previously disclosed.

Watson says he also criticized the group for its poor record of public consultation. “I wasn’t being rude but I told them, ‘This is a case study in how not to get the community onside,'” the mayor said.

“You’re taking what should be a positive event, namely the unveiling of a new monument, and turning it into a very negative event because of the process, or lack of process, you followed to get us here.”

Watson said he wasn’t sure if the pair were listening to him at first, but by the end of the meeting they appeared to understand that it’s “highly unlikely” the monument will be built at the current proposed location, especially considering the opposition of newly elected Ottawa Centre MP Catherine McKenna. (Watson was quick to note that McKenna’s predecessor, Paul Dewar, was also outspoken in his opposition to the proposed location.)

Had the Conservatives been re-elected with a majority last week, Watson said the project “would have gone ahead full steam,” so the Liberal victory brought with it a huge sense of relief with regards to this project.

“This will basically put the brakes on this site,” he said.

The mayor’s version of last Friday’s meeting is somewhat at odds with a post on Tribute to Liberty’s Facebook page, where Klimkowski called the meeting with Watson “very productive” and said the two sides “exchanged ideas and discussed steps of further co-operation.”

Contacted late Monday afternoon, Klimkowski told the Citizen that McLachlin’s opposition to the memorial “was about this horrific image of the victims of Katyn Forest (massacre). So I was kind of disappointed that (Watson) used her as one of the opponents of the memorial and its location when in fact it wasn’t her intention.”

Klimkowski also pointed out that the most recent plans for the memorial is smaller than the first design, and would “preserve a nice, decent park in the middle of this beautiful city of ours,” adding that, “this is no longer about the legacy of Stephen Harper, as some of the opponents suggested. It is really about hard-working fellow Canadians who want to say thank you to Canada and Canadians.”

Canadian Heritage, which is overseeing the project, would only say that “an update on this memorial project will be provided in due course.”

— With files from Don Butler

mpearson@ottawacitizen.com

Why they Fight: A Pro-Assad Militia Leader Explains (Video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL9EbC-4QF0

In this excerpt from "Inside Assad's Syria" -- FRONTLINE correspondent Martin Smith's surreal journey inside government-controlled areas of the war-torn country -- Smith sits down for lunch with the commander of a pro-government militia, who explains why he fights for President Assad and secular Syria.

Uri Avnery: Weep, Beloved Country, gush shalom, 24/10/15

SOMETIMES, A small incident can pierce the darkness and reveal a frightening picture.
This happened last Sunday in Beersheba, the capital of the Negev.

link: http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1445619822/
Haftom Zarhim, a 29 year old refugee from Eritrea 

The picture was frightening indeed.

THE INCIDENT started as a routine attack, one of many we have become used to in recent weeks. Some call it "the Third Intifada", some speak of a "Terror Wave", some are satisfied with "Escalation".

It is a new stage in the old conflict. Its symbol is the knife-wielding lone Palestinian individual – either from East Jerusalem, the West Bank or Israel proper.

It is not connected with any of the Palestinian parties. Before the deed, the attacker had no known connection with any militant group. He or she is completely unknown to the Israeli Security Service. Hence it is impossible to prevent such actions.

One morning the future shahid wakes up, feels that the time has come, takes a large kitchen knife, goes to a Jewish neighborhood and stabs the nearest Israeli Jew, preferably a soldier, but when there are no soldiers around – any Jewish civilian, man, woman or even child.

The attacker knows well that they will probably be killed on the spot. They want to become a shahid – a martyr, literally "witness to the faith".

In earlier intifadas, the attackers were generally members of organizations or cells. These cells were invariably infiltrated by paid traitors, and almost all perpetrators were caught, sooner or later. Many such acts were prevented.

The present outbreak is different. Since they are carried out by lone individuals, no spies are aware of them. The acts cannot be stopped in advance. They can occur anywhere, anyplace – In Jerusalem, in the other occupied territories, in the heart of Israel proper. 
Any Israeli, anywhere, can be knifed.
To get the whole picture, one must add to this the stone-throwing groups of Palestinian youngsters and children along the highways. The groups form suddenly, spontaneously, generally composed of local teenagers, and throw stones and firebombs at passing cars – first making sure that they are Jewish Israeli. Often they are joined by mere children, who are eager to prove their courage and devotion to Allah. One caught was 13 years old.

Stone-throwing incidents sometimes lead to the death of drivers, who lose control of their cars. The army responds with teargas, rubber-coated steel bullets (which cause acute pain but rarely kill) and live ammunition.

THE OUTBREAK - which does not yet have a definite name – started several weeks ago in East Jerusalem. As usual, one may add.

The center of the Arab Old City is the holy place called by the Jews "the Temple Mount" and by the Arabs "Haram al-Sharif" – the Holy Shrine. It is where the ancient Jewish temples once stood.

After the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans some 1945 years ago, the place was desecrated by the Christians who turned it into a dunghill. When it was conquered by the Muslims in 635, the humane Khalif Omar ordered it cleaned. Two holy Muslim buildings were erected – the beautiful Dome of the Rock, with its conspicuous golden dome, and the even holier al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest mosque in Islam.

If one wants to cause trouble, this is the place to start. The cry that al- Aqsa is in danger arouses every Palestinian, and every Muslim around the world. It excites moderately religious Muslims (as most Arabs are) as well as religious fanatics. It is a call to arms, to self-sacrifice.
This has happened several times in the past. 
The terrible "events" of 1929, in which the ancient Jewish community in Hebron was massacred, were started by a Jewish provocation at the Western Wall, part of the wall that encloses the Mount. The second intifada broke out because Ariel Sharon led a provocative demonstration on the Mount, with the express permission of the then Labor Party Prime Minister, Ehud Barak.

The present trouble started with visits by Jewish extreme right-wing leaders, including a minister and members of the Knesset, to the Temple Mount. This in itself is not forbidden. (Except by Orthodox Jewish law, because ordinary Jews are not allowed to tread were once the Holy of Holies was located.) The mount is a paramount tourist attraction.

To regulate things, something called the Status Quo is in place. When the Israeli army occupied East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-day war, it was decided that the Temple Mount enclosure, though now under Israeli rule, would be run by Muslims under Jordanian jurisdiction. (Why Jordanian? Because Israel did not agree to Palestinian jurisdiction.) Jews were allowed to enter the enclosure, but not to pray there.

Binyamin Netanyahu maintains that the Status Quo was not broken. But lately groups of fanatical right-wing Israelis have entered the enclosure, protected by the Israeli police, and prayed. For the Muslims, that was a breach of the status.

Moreover, much publicity has been given to Jewish groups who are preparing to rebuild the Jewish Temple after destroying the Muslim shrines. The clothes and instruments prescribed by the Bible are being prepared by fanatics.

In normal times, at a normal place, this could be settled peacefully. But not on the Temple Mount, and not now, with Jewish settlers starting to secure footholds in the Arab villages surrounding the Shrines. All over the occupied territories and among the Arab citizens of Israel the cry went up: the Holy Places are in danger. The Israeli leaders shouted back that this was all a pack of lies.

Young Palestinians took up the knives and started stabbing Israelis, knowing full well that they would probably be shot dead on the spot. Israeli leaders called upon Jewish citizens to bear arms at all times and shoot at once when they see an attack. There are now several such incidents every day. Altogether, this month eight Jews have been killed, together with 18 suspects and 20 other Palestinians.

This, then, is the background of the Beersheba outrage.

IT HAPPENED in the central bus station of the desert capital, a town of about 250,000 Jews, mostly of Oriental background, surrounded by numerous Bedouin townships and encampments.
Three persons figure in the incident.
The first was a 19 year old soldier, Omri Levi. He got down from a bus and entered the large station building, when he was killed by an Arab attacker, who grabbed his weapon. We know very little about the soldier, just a nice-looking 19 year-old.

The second person was the attacker, 21 year old Muhammad al-Okbi. Surprisingly, he was a Bedouin from the surroundings with no security-risk past. Surprising, because many Bedouins volunteer for the Israeli army, serve in the Police or study at Beersheba University. This does not prevent the Israeli government trying to grab the land of the tribes and re-settle them in crowded little townships.

Nobody knows why this boy of the desert decided, on waking up that day, to become a Shahid and go on a rampage. His extended family seems as perplexed as everyone else. It seems that he had become very religious and was reacting to the al- Aqsa incidents. Also, like all Bedouins in the Negev, he was certainly upset by the government's efforts to dispossess them.

So he shot at the bystanders – either with a pistol in his possession or with the weapon he had grabbed from the soldier. After reading tens of thousands of words, I am still not quite sure.

BUT THE person who drew the most attention was neither the soldier nor the assailant, but the third victim.

His name was Haftom Zarhim, a 29 year old refugee from Eritrea - one of 50,000 or so Africans who illegally crossed the border into the Negev. He was completely innocent. He just happened to enter the building behind the assailant, and some bystanders mistook him for an accomplice. He did not look Jewish.

He was shot and wounded. While lying on the floor, bleeding and helpless, the mob surrounded him, kicking him from all sides, several kicking his head. He arrived dead at the hospital. The entire scene was gleefully photographed by a bystander with his smartphone and shown on all TV news programs.

There is no way around it: this was an incident of vicious racism, pure and simple. The barbaric treatment of wounded Palestinian assailants by an excited mob can somehow be understood – not excused, not condoned, but at least understood. We have a conflict that has already lasted more than 130 years, on both sides several generations have been brought up in mutual hatred.

But asylum seekers? They are almost universally hated. Why? Only because they are foreigners, non-Jews. Even the color of their skins cannot provide a full explanation – after all we now have quite a number of dark-skinned Ethiopian Jews, who are accepted as "ours".

The gruesome lynching of the dying Haftom was totally ugly, totally detestable. It could lead one to despair of Israel – If it were not for one anonymous middle-aged bystander, who returned to the scene two days later, retelling the story on TV, admitting that he could not sleep since then - and weeping.

SID RYAN: SPECIAL OP-ED, "NDP LOST ELECTION BY VEERING TO THE RIGHT", Sun, Oct 25, 2015

Photo: New Democratic Party leader Tom Mulcair waves at the end of his concession speech after Canada's federal election in Montreal, Quebec, October 19, 2015. REUTERS/Mathieu Belanger





http://www.torontosun.com/2015/10/25/ndp-lost-election-by-veering-to-the-right

There were many factors that played into Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s unexpected majority government.

But in the opinion of this lifelong union activist and former NDP candidate, neither the much-maligned niqab, nor cynical strategic voting, played as much of a role in the NDP reversal of fortune as the decision to abandon its social democratic roots.

When the NDP holds a post mortem on the 2015 federal election, it can mark Tom Mulcair’s Aug. 25 visit to a small factory in London, Ontario as the day its promising lead in the polls took a nose-dive.

On that fateful day, Mulcair shocked his political base by announcing the NDP would deliver four years of balanced budgets, despite record low borrowing rates and growing evidence that Canada was slipping into another recession.

The Liberals pounced on this announcement, accusing the NDP of adopting a “Stephen Harper budget” that would inevitably lead to “severe austerity” measures.

Trudeau countered with an ambitious proposal to run an annual deficit of under $10 billion over three years to finance a multi-billion dollar public infrastructure investment program that would create thousands of jobs.

By thumbing his nose at the neo-liberal fiscal orthodoxy that has gripped this nation for two decades, Trudeau boxed the NDP into the same fiscal corner as the most unpopular prime minister in living memory.

Trudeau outflanked Mulcair just as Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne had done in last year’s Ontario election, when she masqueraded as more left than Andrea Horwath’s NDP.

Fool me once, as the saying goes.

It was a masterful play that came at a time when the polls were reporting that 70% of Canadians were looking for change and many were considering the NDP.

This NDP budgetary misstep also revealed an inherent contradiction in Mulcair’s plan that undermined other popular planks in the NDP platform.

In particular, it gave rise to closer inspection of the crown jewel of the NDP platform – a $15-per-day universal childcare program.

What became apparent was that the protracted eight-year roll out for these one million childcare spaces was a direct result of Mulcair’s self-imposed fiscal constraints and his reticence to increase taxes on the wealthy.

In essence, the message to voters was one of fiscal conservatism over progressive public policy.

Suddenly, the Liberals, not the NDP, were able to present themselves as the agents of “real change”.

Many NDP members are asking themselves why their party tried to win government by accepting the campaign strategy of its opponents, rather than seeking to redefine politics.

Early in the marathon election campaign, Conservative-weary voters proved they were ready for some risk taking.

Early polls rewarded the NDP for adopting a principled opposition to Bill C51, committing to a $15 federal minimum wage and calling for the abolition of the Senate.

It was not the time to quit while they were ahead, or to be coy about their core values as social democrats, not when most voters were looking for bold change.

South of the border, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is making headlines and inspiring a generation with a bold critique of capitalism.

Across the pond, the moribund U.K. Labour Party has been reinvigorated with the election of Jeremy Corbyn and his unapologetic advocacy for a “return to the welfare state.”

New Democrats would be wise to wrap themselves in their social democratic values, rather than going to such great pains to disguise them.

This election served as a stark reminder that the NDP path to electoral success is inextricably tied to the courage of the party’s convictions.

*******************************************

— Sid Ryan is president of the Ontario Federation of Labour

Bernie Sanders A Progressive or a Radical? by Mike Davis

Last night, Bernie Sanders showed the promise — and limits — of his economic populism.
source: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/hillary-clinton-bernie-democratic-presidential-debate/
by Mike Davis

Immediately after the Democratic presidential debate last night, Van Jones offered two astute observations: “class won,” as did Black Lives Matter. The former, of course, was the triumph of the Sanders campaign (although it was actually former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb who inaugurated the debate’s discursive revolution by beginning with “working people” rather than “middle class”) while the latter is a tribute to the thousands who have so doggedly stayed in the streets and rudely interrupted political business as usual.

Angry passion and insubordination joined together can succeed as can Old Testament wrath in the case of our guy from Vermont. For the first time since the election of Ronald Reagan, the continuous Republican rightward shift has not been mirrored by a Democratic accommodation to its premises.

Sanders — can we actually be so hopeful? — has drawn a line in the sand on economic inequality that people under thirty seem to overwhelmingly support and which may yet subtract many black and Latino voters from the Hillary column.

And no one since Upton Sinclair has framed “democratic socialism” — as the restoration of the working class’s “fair share” in the national income — in such a commonsensical and compelling way. Likewise, his crusade for free public higher education is a radical “transitional demand” with more resonance among youth and young adults than any other proposal yet presented.

But the limitations of Sanderism are also clear. Economic inequality is not mollified by publicly subsidized economic opportunity, a more level playing field for family-owned business, or higher taxes. For socialists the central question is always the private ownership of the large-scale means of production and the democratization of economic power.

Although Sanders would break up the biggest banks, he apparently would not publicly own them or operate them as public utilities. Likewise with pharmaceutical corporations. The failure to raise the property question was also the Achilles’ heel of the Occupy movement, of which Sanders has become the national candidate.

If one wants to map the genealogy of the “1 percent versus the 99 percent,” it descends not only from William Jennings Bryan and the People’s Party but especially from the Progressive Republicans who supported the New Deal’s brief offensive against corporate power, like the great George Norris of Nebraska.

Eugene Debs — see any of his speeches — talked about inequality always in the context of ownership and decision-making, of expropriating the power of plutocrats, not just taxing them. Sanders, like the Progressives, wants to break up the trusts and support small business, not democratize and take possession of them. (Unions, incidentally, did not get a soundbite the entire evening.)

On international affairs, Sanders was frankly a complete disappointment, as evinced in his boilerplate support for “intervening in Syria only as part of a coalition with the Arab states.” Which means? Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, the murderous military regime in Egypt . . . who else could he be talking about?

He had a brilliant opportunity to support the Kurds and denounce the massacre in Turkey, but apparently this is off limits in a campaign focused almost exclusively on economic justice in the homeland. Likewise, he deliberately avoided the chances to dissent from Clinton and Webb’s provocative remarks about confronting Russia and China.

Sander is a great economist populist, but not an anti-imperialist. However, in my view, this is only a more urgent reason to become involved in the Sanders campaign and criticize it from the inside, as supporters.

The case for treating climate change like a war Oct 25, 2015

The case for treating climate change like a war Oct 25, 2015


link:  http://bit.ly/205YlYQ

They are still crunching the numbers, but according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2015 is on track to be the hottest year ever recorded.

Venkatesh Rao says we need to look at historical examples if we want a fighting chance against global warming. He argues piecemeal strategies won't work on climate -- we need to emulate the government-led effort that won World War II.

Rao is the founder of the blog ribbonfarm.com and an independent researcher, author, and management consultant based in Seattle.



Why should we look back to World War II to figure out how to tackle climate change?

The thing about climate change is it's a problem of such unprecedented magnitude that our everyday institutions of peacetime -- democratic institutions -- there's a good chance they won't be up to the task. So you have to look back in history and look for similarly large-scale efforts of coordinating across the globe. And if you look at all the precedents of technological change and social coordination, World War II and the mobilization effort stands out as pretty much the most appropriate precedent for thinking about what we're trying to do with climate change here now.

You say in your piece in The Atlantic that we need a technocratic revolution to fight climate change. Why do you think a successful fight against climate change should be led by public institutions rather than the free market or even local communities? 

So, this is...probably the most contentious part of the climate change debates. My fundamental bias is towards trying to solve problems with free market institutions and the private sector as much as possible. But there's an issue of how much those mechanisms can do and how much they're appropriate for... Climate change requires a whole suite of energy technologies, a whole suite of chemistry-related technologies for carbon-reclamation, lots of things. And this means you're talking a portfolio approach, and whenever you're talking portfolios, somebody has to manage the portfolio.

What's wrong with treating climate change as a local problem with local solutions?

If you talk to libertarians, who tend to be the most strident skeptics on the economic level - to them, the best solutions are always small and local with a lot of individual autonomy. On one hand, they're right about a lot of things, that institutions that are larger than local tend to be prone to corruption and so forth. But on the other hand, you have to deal with the physics of the situation. This is fundamentally not a local problem. You've got the atmosphere, which is a completely connected body of gas that envelops the planet. You've got the oceans...that are all completely connected, so acidification in one part of the ocean will get carried by currents and mixing to the rest of the planet. So all those are global problems, and without a certain amount of global coordination, you're going to have a tragedy of the commons.

It's easy to see how people can unite behind a government when the enemy is a force of evil, like Nazi Germany. But how do you convince people to place that same level of trust in government when the enemy is so diffuse, like it would be if we were dealing with environmental problems?

The simple answer there is we don't know...But if you look around, alright, what's a similarly powerful narrative that can motivate people to work on large-scale social problems, as opposed to large-scale military problems...one of them is just a simple appeal to the parental instinct. And to the extent that you recognize future generations are going to be living and facing the consequences of these problems, the narrative can be a powerful one.

Robert Parry: Hillary Clinton’s Failed Libya ‘Doctrine’ Oct 22, 2015

From the Archive: As the long-running Benghazi investigation returns to center stage with another round of Hillary Clinton’s testimony, the former Secretary of State’s larger failure remains obscured – how she once envisioned the bloody Libyan “regime change” as the start of a “Clinton Doctrine,” as Robert Parry reported last July.


By Robert Parry (Originally published on July 1, 2015)
http://bit.ly/1R6bJpL


Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fancied the violent 2011 “regime change” in Libya such a triumph that her aides discussed labeling it the start of a “Clinton Doctrine,” according to released emails that urged her to claim credit when longtime Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was deposed. And Clinton did celebrate when Gaddafi was captured and murdered.

“We came; we saw; he died,” Clinton exulted in a TV interview after receiving word of Gaddafi’s death on Oct. 20, 2011, though it is not clear how much she knew about the grisly details, such as Gaddafi being sodomized with a knife before his execution.

Since then, the cascading Libyan chaos has turned the “regime change” from a positive notch on Clinton’s belt and into a black mark on her record. That violence has included the terrorist slaying of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. diplomatic personnel in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, and jihadist killings across northern Africa, including the Islamic State’s decapitation of a group of Coptic Christians last February.

It turns out that Gaddafi’s warning about the need to crush Islamic terrorism in Libya’s east was well-founded although the Obama administration cited it as the pretext to justify its “humanitarian intervention” against Gaddafi. The vacuum created by the U.S.-led destruction of Gaddafi and his army drew in even more terrorists and extremists, forcing the United States and Western nations to abandon their embassies in Tripoli a year ago.

One could argue that those who devised and implemented the disastrous Libyan “regime change” – the likes of Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power – should be almost disqualified from playing any future role in U.S. foreign policy. Instead, Clinton is the Democratic frontrunner to succeed Barack Obama as President and Power was promoted from Obama’s White House staff to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations — where she is at the center of other dangerous U.S. initiatives in seeking “regime change” in Syria and pulling off “regime change” in Ukraine.

In fairness, however, it should be noted that it has been the pattern in Official Washington over the past few decades for hawkish “regime change” advocates to fail upwards. With only a few exceptions, the government architects and the media promoters of the catastrophic Iraq War have escaped meaningful accountability and continue to be leading voices in setting U.S. foreign policy.

A Dubious Validation

In August 2011, Secretary of State Clinton saw the Libyan “regime change” as a resounding validation of her foreign policy credentials, according to the emails released in June and described at the end of a New York Times article by Michael S. Schmidt.

According to one email chain, her longtime friend and personal adviser Sidney Blumenthal praised the military success of the bombing campaign to destroy Gaddafi’s army and hailed the dictator’s impending ouster.

“First, brava! This is a historic moment and you will be credited for realizing it,” Blumenthal wrote on Aug. 22, 2011. “When Qaddafi himself is finally removed, you should of course make a public statement before the cameras wherever you are, even in the driveway of your vacation home. … You must go on camera. You must establish yourself in the historical record at this moment. … The most important phrase is: ‘successful strategy.’”

Clinton forwarded Blumenthal’s advice to Jake Sullivan, a close State Department aide. “Pls read below,” she wrote. “Sid makes a good case for what I should say, but it’s premised on being said after Q[addafi] goes, which will make it more dramatic. That’s my hesitancy, since I’m not sure how many chances I’ll get.”

Sullivan responded, saying “it might make sense for you to do an op-ed to run right after he falls, making this point. … You can reinforce the op-ed in all your appearances, but it makes sense to lay down something definitive, almost like the Clinton Doctrine.”

However, when Gaddafi abandoned Tripoli that day, President Obama seized the moment to make a triumphant announcement. Clinton’s opportunity to highlight her joy at the Libyan “regime change” had to wait until Oct. 20, 2011, when Gaddafi was captured, tortured and murdered.

In a TV interview, Clinton celebrated the news when it appeared on her cell phone and even paraphrased Julius Caesar’s famous line after Roman forces achieved a resounding victory in 46 B.C. and he declared, “veni, vidi, vici” – “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Clinton’s reprise of Caesar’s boast went: “We came; we saw; he died.” She then laughed and clapped her hands.

Presumably, the “Clinton Doctrine” would have been a policy of “liberal interventionism” to achieve “regime change” in countries where there is some crisis in which the leader seeks to put down an internal security threat and where the United States objects to the action.

Of course, the Clinton Doctrine would be selective. It would not apply to brutal security crackdowns by U.S.-favored governments, say, Israel attacking Gaza or the Kiev regime in Ukraine slaughtering ethnic Russians in the east. But it’s likely, given the continuing bloodshed in Libya, that Hillary Clinton won’t be touting the “Clinton Doctrine” in her presidential campaign.

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Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s