After technical problems took Left Spot blog offline for a few months, we're now back on line!

Thanks to those who emailed to find out what was wrong. It's good to know there are people reading this and using the documents stored here.

It's very important to understand that all movements for social change will be at very least monitored by the powers that be, and will very often be infiltrated. We must study cases like this that come to light carefully, to better understand the workings of counterinsurgency, and to think carefully about implications for how movements and organizations should be built to protect the movement and individuals involved from being harassed, disrupted and even destroyed.

This video gives a good and inspiring overview of the workers' successful occupation of their factory at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago.

For those who haven't heard, a group of about 260 mostly Latino workers in Chicago occupied their factory (Republic Windows) last Friday, in one of the most inspiring actions in the US labor movement in quite a long time.

There has been excellent coverage in Fight Back Newspaper.

Check out links to most of Fight Back's coverage here:

Support Republic Window occupation: All out for Dec. 10 protest at Bank of America

By Staff

Posted December 10, 2008

Milwaukee SDS Shows support for working class heroes, backs Republic Window occupation

By Daniel Ginsberg-Jaeckle

Posted December 10, 2008

Editorial: Victory to the Republic Window and Door Workers!

By Fight Back! Editors

Posted December 9, 2008

Chicago workers occupy factory

Photo from inside the Republic Windwos Plant occupation by Stephanie Weiner

Posted December 8, 2008

North Carolina: Solidarity with Chicago plant occupation

By Josh Sykes Posted December 8, 2008

Chicago factory occupation: Workers say "Fight back!" Posted December 8, 2008

Support Grows for Republic Windows Occupation

By Stephanie Weiner Posted December 7, 2008

Chicago: Leader of union occupying factory speaks out Posted December 7, 2008

Video of rally in support of Republic Windows plant occupation

Posted December 6, 2008

Chicago: Workers occupy plant

By Stephanie Weiner Posted December 6, 2008

Left Spot is sorry to have been rather, shall we say, sparse with the postings lately. We hope to be back very soon with some new stuff. Stay tuned...

In the meantime, get ready for Festivus:

The following document from Freedom Road Socialist Organization takes on some important questions raised about revolutionary strategy and tactics that were brought up around the Republican National Convention protests in September. Specifically it engages the question of why developing more militant protest tactics is correct and important, and calls out the Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative for their criticisms of the anarchists and others who engaged in more militant protest tactics at the RNC.

www.frso.org/about/statements/2008/frso-lessons-from-rnc.htm

Lessons From the RNC:
Mass Mobilization and Militant Actions Advance the Struggle

by Freedom Road Socialist Organization

The Republican National Convention brought many of the biggest war-makers to Minnesota. The people's movements from across the U.S. responded by organizing four days of demonstrations against the RNC. Freedom Road Socialist Organization prioritized organizing against the RNC and helped build multiple days of protest including the mass anti-war march of 30-35,000 people on September 1st and the “No Peace for the Warmakers” militant march turned civil disobedience on September 4th.

We saw the RNC as a chance to unite the anti war movement under the slogan “U.S. out of Iraq Now” and to build a broad united front against the Republican agenda. By any standard the powerful protests that rocked St. Paul were a blow against the rulers of this county.

For progressive and revolutionary organizations the RNC served as a sort of test. Many, from a variety of political trends - ranging from Marxist-Leninists to anarchists - passed this test with banners raised and flying colors. They stepped up to the plate, organizing a historic response to the Republican agenda of war, racism, and reaction.

However Socialist Alternative, a Trotskyist organization which is based in Washington state and the Twin Cities, took a different approach to the RNC. Their approach did not prioritize building for a large national demonstration or for militant action. In their summation of the RNC in their newspaper, entitled, Protests and Police Repression Mark the Republican National Convention - Thousands Take to the Streets Against War and the Right Wing Agenda they claim to have made the most of historic events which they in fact did little or nothing to contribute to. They also focus their summation on attacking the anarchist oriented RNC Welcoming Committee for their blockade strategy and on criticizing militant action in general.

We in FRSO generally don’t spend a lot of time criticizing other organizations but sometimes it has to be done - the RNC was a very important event for our movement locally and nationally, so there is a need to respond to Socialist Alternative’s criticisms of militant action at the RNC.

Are the Masses Ready for Militancy?

Leading up to the RNC our analysis was that the anti-war movement needed more militant actions in addition to legal demonstrations to further develop the anti-war movement.

On September 4th, over 2,000 people came to the Anti-War Committee's No Peace for the War -Makers demonstration and over 1000 took to the streets to march to the Xcel Center despite the refusal of a militarized police force to allow them to go more than a block from the state capitol. 396 people were arrested for "illegal assembly" after marching and holding the streets for more than three hours in defiance of the huge and intimidating riot police presence and their repeated orders to disperse. Every local TV station that covered John McCain's acceptance speech at the RNC also covered the anti-war movement's counter message outside the Xcel Center. The majority of protesters at the demonstration were young people many of whom had not been to protests before.

All in all, the September 4 march was a powerful experience that was invigorating and motivating. This demonstration has inspired both the local and national anti-war movement, and has led to even more people being willing to consider doing civil disobedience and direct action against the war in Iraq. We see this as a success and a real accomplishment.

However, Socialist Alternative's assessment was the opposite. They argued against militant action on the ground and actively discouraged people from participating in the demonstration on September 4th. In fact they echoed the city government and waged a mini campaign to create a climate of fear about the protest.

In their summation article, they claimed that people are not yet ready for mass militant action, stating "While there are thousands of activists, particularly among the youth, who understand the illegitimacy of the RNC – and of the entire capitalist system for that matter – socialists must argue against moods of impatience. We will not be able to successfully take on and defeat the capitalist system and its state forces until the majority of the working class supports this effort, and is organized to carry it forward. For anti-capitalist activists today, our main task is not to substitute ourselves for the lack of sufficient forces, nor is it to try and artificially “spark” wider layers into action."

Socialist Alternative's approach is that we should wait until a critical mass of people is ready to stand up before taking any action outside the highly constricted bounds of legally permitted protests. This approach is mechanical, creating an artificial separation on the spectrum of protest tactics. It is a rightist error. There is in fact a dialectical relationship between legal and advanced tactics as the movements grow. Many people are ready to take direct action now and their actions can inspire others. This is not a call for adventurist actions – it is a recognition that increasing the level of militancy of the movement is a good thing. It gives people more advanced experience in confronting the powers that be, it can raise the political costs of the ruling class’s wars, and has the potential to inspire broader layers of people to move forward.

It is simply not logical to argue that people will somehow be ready to take more militant actions at some undetermined point in the future if they have never taken them, led them, or seen others use militant tactics.

Socialist Alternative wrongly thinks that demonstrations like September 4th alienate the working class, but in reality a new generation of activists and older activists who have not been active since the wars in Central America were inspired by this demonstration. Broad numbers of people who saw it on the news sympathized with the protesters and were shocked at the riot police’s use of teargas and mass arrests. Socialist Alternative fails to recognize that a future militant mass movement will grow out of today’s relatively smaller actions where we gain experience confronting the enemy. Besides, 818 people being arrested over four days at the RNC is not a small, isolated group of people.

Instead of helping to broadly build the overall RNC protest movement, Socialist Alternative choose to put most of their efforts into organizing a student walkout demonstration of about 200 people on September 4. This small action began before the Anti-War Committee demonstration. While it was supposed to originally end at the AWC demonstration, Socialist Alternative instead changed their plans and decided to march to a peace picnic on the other side of St. Paul so that their supporters would not have the opportunity to participate in or to be exposed to militant action. Although Socialist Alternative claims that they support revolution, they apparently want nothing to do with anyone taking any political action outside of the laws established by the very two-party system they claim to oppose. We think Socialist Alternative made a mistake in disassociating from the No Peace for the Warmakers march on Day 4 of the RNC and instead leading a smaller, much less significant march at a different time of the day.

Criticizing the RNC Welcoming Committee While the State Attacks Them

Though most of the end of Socialist Alternative’s summation article discusses the negatives of militant action in general, they have very specific criticisms of the RNC Welcoming Committee (WC). Although they claim to support the members of the Welcoming Committee who are up on terrorism charges and possibly face more than seven years in jail, they use their website and newspaper to denounce their work and to further the criticisms against the Welcoming Committee in one of their darkest hours.

Socialist Alternatives article says, "While Socialist Alternative completely opposes the police repression against them, we do not agree with the politics and methods used by the Welcoming Committee. Rather than focusing on bringing fresh layers of workers and youth into political action, virtually all the mobilizing material produced by the Welcoming Committee was aimed at a very narrow layer of already convinced anarchists and anti-capitalists. They put forward the perspective that this narrow activist layer was a sufficient social base to organize mass blockades to shut down the RNC. However, the blockades tactic appears to have attracted relatively small numbers and caused only minor disruptions for RNC delegates."

Unfortunately, Socialist Alternative 's decision to air their grievances with the Welcoming Committee's strategy only serves the interests of the government who every day attempts to isolate the RNC 8 from the community support they so vitally need to defeat the incredibly serious and outrageous charges against them. We think Socialist Alternative’s attempt to portray the WC as isolated at the moment they most deeply need support is unprincipled and shows that Socialist Alternative does not understand true solidarity. While FRSO did not choose to use the blockade strategy that the Welcoming Committee did, we believe like Mao said, “it’s right to rebel against reactionaries.” We think that militant action is positive and creates more space for a broader resistance movement to develop out of the current protest movements. We support not only the RNC 8 but their use of the blockade strategy and their mobilization of militant activists from around the country to come to the RNC.

Socialist Alternative makes it seem like there’s something wrong with the WC having decided to specifically mobilize anarchists to come to the Twin Cities to disrupt the RNC. There is a substantial scene of young anarchists around the country – the WC did a good thing by focusing that scene’s energy on disrupting the biggest warmakers on the planet.

The RNC Welcoming Committee was an important part of the broad movement that was built against the RNC. We believe that the events on September 1-4 as a whole will move the movement forward politically and that this is because of - not despite - the militant actions organized by groups like the RNC Welcoming Committee and the Anti-War Committee.

Trotskyism = Idealism

Socialist Alternative’s errors are rooted in a wrong ideological and political line. Trotskyism, unlike Marxism-Leninism, supports an idealist (as opposed to materialist) view of revolution and the world. Socialist Alternative does not correctly analyze the events surrounding the RNC because they are not looking at the situation with an eye to what is possible and where we can realistically go. Rather than concretely analyzing the objective and subjective conditions and the balance of forces to figure out what to do, they rely on unchanging formulas to respond to any situation that comes up, like in this case saying that no one should do any unpermitted protest activities until the majority of workers support that. But how will we ever build support among workers for a more militant movement if nobody ever starts to take more militant actions that will become a social question that is debated and struggled about?

Marxism isn’t about repeating pat formulaic approaches. Marxists need to learn the art and science of analyzing concrete conditions in their particularity and figuring out how to move things forward from there step-by-step. This applies in the day-to-day struggle right now. And it will be vital in making a revolution in the U.S.

Trotskyists of the Socialist Alternative type try to substitute reality for their “good ideas,” and if reality does not conform to their good ideas, then they get mad at reality and retreat off to “peace picnics.”

They want perfect revolutions, revolutions that are led by folks that happen to think like them, to fall from the sky. They think they can wait until that perfect moment to suddenly flip a magic switch and encourage their supporters to rebel when they have not built the capacity to do so over time in the mass struggle. No revolution has been built through that manner. It’s no surprise that no Trotskyist group has led a revolution anywhere on the planet in Trotskyism’s nearly 100 years of existence. Revolutions are built through struggle and in taking the movement forward step-by-step -- not just talking the talk for a long time and then suddenly jumping to the revolution.

Socialist Alternative’s idealist conception of revolution even causes them to refuse to support or defend any force fighting for national liberation internationally or any revolution actually happening in the world. FRSO sees it as our internationalist duty to support all forces fighting against U.S. imperialism. This includes the heroic fighters landing real blows against U.S. imperialism’s plans for domination around the world, such as the Iraqi resistance, the Palestinian resistance (including the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine), and the Colombian rebels, such as the FARC-EP).

This approach is the opposite of Socialist Alternative, which often denounces the socialist countries and movements that are fighting for national liberation and socialism.

As revolutionaries in the U.S. we see it as important to support and to study and learn from those whose struggles against U.S. imperialism are more advanced than the struggle here. FRSO also supports the countries that have actually made socialist revolutions such as Cuba, Vietnam, China and Democratic Korea. We also support countries and movements that are moving in the direction of socialism such as in Venezuela and Nepal. We see any nail in the coffin of imperialism as being a struggle we can unite with and learn from.

Marxist-Leninists in the U.S. have a responsibility to support revolutionary movements around the world, while we do the work step-by-step to build a movement for revolutionary change here in the U.S. We can not afford to adopt the silly and sectarian approach of Socialist Alternative. We need to stand in solidarity with all who are fighting imperialism, be it at home or abroad. “Criticizing” anarchists who are facing prison for making contributions to the people struggle is not the right thing to do. Standing on the side and criticizing the building of a more militant movement is not the right thing to do either.

The following was a contribution from Kosta Harlan, Students for a Democratic Society, at a program on the Iraq war organized by the People’s Organization for Progress in Newark, NJ on October 18. The program was titled “Which way to peace in Iraq?”

Is Bush on the path to victory in Iraq?

In a word: no. That’s simple enough. The whole world can see the occupation’s days are numbered. But it’s not enough to know the government’s cause is unjust or that the occupation is failing. We need to understand why. Click here to read more...

There is a new book that I would like to call people's attention to. Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents From the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners is the book on political prisoners and prisoners of war in the U.S., and the movements fighting for their freedom.

It is expensive, but it's like a reference book with such a wealth of material it's amazing. Here I'll include the table of contents and the introduction by Matt Meyer, which are reprinted from the kersplebedeb site where you can order the book.

Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents From the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners
Edited by Matt Meyer
Foreword by Adolfo Pérez Esquivel
Afterwords by Lynne Stewart and Ashanti Omowali Alston

ISBN: 978-1-60486-035-1
PM Press/Kersplebedeb co-publication
Release date: September 2008
912 pages paperback • $37.95

Let Freedom Ring presents a two-decade sweep of essays, analyses, histories, interviews, resolutions, People’s Tribunal verdicts, and poems by and about the scores of U.S. political prisoners and the campaigns to safeguard their rights and secure their freedom. In addition to an extensive section on the campaign to free death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, represented here are the radical movements that have most challenged the U.S. empire from within: Black Panthers and other Black liberation fighters, Puerto Rican independentistas, Indigenous sovereignty activists, white anti-imperialists, environmental and animal rights militants, Arab and Muslim activists, Iraq war resisters, and others. Contributors in and out of prison detail the repressive methods – from long-term isolation to sensory deprivation to politically inspired parole denial – used to attack these freedom fighters, some still caged after 30+ years. This invaluable resource guide offers inspiring stories of the creative, and sometimes winning, strategies to bring them home. Click here to continue reading...

The following was originally posted as a comment on the post Revolutionary reflections on the election: we are the wind and the rain on the Marxist-Leninist Blog. This is part of a larger discussion on the Left about electoral politics, strategy and tactics. It raises questions to think about in terms of the national-democratic aspects of the larger Black Liberation struggle for full equality and national self-determination. It deals with other questions as well, such as the war against Iraq. It is reposted here from the Marxist-Leninist Blog.

By LS

I appreciate you bringing up this topic, and grounding it in some key Marxist writings dealing with issues that have some similarities historically. This election is obviously an important topic of discussion for everyone on the U.S. left today. I think all the reasons you talk about for voting to defeat McCain in this election are solid. I’d just like to elaborate a bit more on my thinking about it.

I have three main reason for voting for Obama in this election. The first is that the election has become seen by the masses of people as a referendum on racism and on whether a Black person is capable of being president. Understanding the centrality of white supremacy and the oppression of Black people in all of U.S. history up to the current moment, I think we must strike a decisive blow to McCain/Palin’s shameful whipping up of racism and to the groundswell of fear of Black people (and Black political power) that McCain/Palin are tapping into and in fact fanning (i.e. Palin saying Obama ‘palls around with terrorists’, etc). Given the reality that Cynthia McKinney (the excellent and very progressive African American candidate of the Green Party) has no chance of getting even 1% of the vote in this election, the best way to deliver a decisive anti-racist message in 2008 is for Obama to win a decisive victory over McCain.

The second reason I think it’s important to defeat McCain is the war. The election is also seen as a referendum on the war in Iraq. As anti-imperialists we know that Obama does not really support a ‘troops out now’ position on Iraq, and he supports continued U.S. domination of Iraq. He is not an anti-imperialist, and he also says he supports increasing troops in Afghanistan, possibly waging war on Iran and Pakistan, etc. For good measure he has also taken very belligerent and quite bad positions against Cuba and Venezuela, while his position on Israel is just awful. He is very clearly positioning himself well within (and even on the rightward side of) pro-imperial foreign policy. We could expect a little better, but we frankly shouldn’t be shocked about this from a candidate of one of the two imperialist parties.

All that said, we need to face the reality that the left in the U.S. does not have a viable anti-imperialist candidate contending in this presidential election that even has a shot at getting 1% of the vote nationally. So the decision to vote for Obama to defeat McCain must be seen in that context. The vast majority of people who want the war in Iraq to end have decided that Obama is the vehicle to make that happen. If McCain wins the election, he will take it as a mandate to continue the Iraq war indefinitely. That would be terrible for the Iraqi people and the people of the U.S. and the people of the whole world. If Obama wins, he may in fact also continue the war indefinitely but the masses of people will feel that they gave him a mandate to end the war. If he doesn’t end the war, he will be going directly against the mandate that got him into the White House, and then we as anti-imperialists will have a much larger base of people to try to mobilize to pressure the ruling class to end the war in Iraq.

Also, I’d like to say something in regard to the feebleness of Obama’s “withdrawal plan” from Iraq. For anti-imperialists it is feeble and in fact unacceptable. It would leave U.S. bases and thousands — probably tens of thousands — of U.S. troops indefinitely. It would just withdraw combat troops to Iraq’s borders (or move them to combat in Afghanistan), not send them home to the U.S. It would leave U.S. domination of Iraq’s economy and politics intact. All that said, it must be said that even the partial withdrawal of U.S. troops could give the Iraqi resistance the space they need to surge forward. This is not Obama’s reason for advocating withdrawal — on the contrary, he has counterinsurgency in mind. But objectively even a hesitating, partial withdrawal has the potential to greatly help the Iraqi people and the Iraqi resistance. It would not be liberation, but it could give a bit more space for the liberation movement. Recall that President Carter’s temporary yanking of aid to Nicaraguan dictator Somoza gave the Sandinistas the space they needed to overthrow Somoza and win state power in 1979. That wasn’t Carter’s intention — the U.S. ruling class would have preferred a ‘kinder, gentler’ U.S. client state without the embarrassing excesses and human rights abuses. But Carter’s action in even haltingly and temporarily pulling support from a U.S.-backed dictator gave the liberation forces the space they needed to win.

The third reason I think voting for Obama is correct is the profound fact in and of itself that a Black man is poised to be elected president of the U.S. Lets step back for a second and look at how profound this is. Nearly all Black people in the U.S grasp this and rightfully see this as a historic and proud moment — a turning point in U.S. history. A very real old-school white supremacist veneer could be about to fall. That is a good thing, a victory, and should be unequivocally celebrated by all progressive people. While Obama is clearly pro-imperialist, the fact that it is someone like him, who is ‘progressive’, ‘anti-war’, comes from a community organizing background, etc., as opposed to a right-winger like Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice, is all the better. Many people thought the first ‘viable’ Black candidate would pretty much have to be a right winger like Colin Powell. Lets be clear — Obama is not a Malcolm X, MLK, or even a Jesse Jackson politically. Jackson at least called for cutting the military budget; there’s no such talk from Obama. Obama did not come up through the Black freedom movement. He answers directly to the power structure, not to the Black community or any other community for his rise.

But still, to me it is obviously better to be talking about the first Black president being Obama than Powell or Rice. The fact that Obama is a young “progressive” Democrat and not a right winger like Powell or Rice also has an effect on the mass expression and mass cultural and political motion generated around Obama’s candidacy. Lets face it, if it was a Colin Powell candidacy, you wouldn’t see the Black cultural movement that you see supporting Obama, with folks from Wyclef to Ludacris to Big Boi & Mary J Blige to LL Cool J to Nas, etc etc etc writing songs about or reflecting on the fact that Obama may become president. I mean, if LL Cool J is writing political songs, something important is going on!

And aside from the cultural expressions of support for Obama and his “change” message, the fact that he puts forward a vaguely progressive message using imagery from ‘the movement’ has emboldened Black and other progressive young people to take initiative. These initiatives have so far generally stayed comfortably within the bounds of acceptable political activity (voting for a Democrat). But it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see the possibility of more independent and more radical action in response to possible future events, such as for example a Republican attempt to steal the election, or ongoing racist smear campaigns against Obama if he wins.

If Obama wins does that mean that racism is over and that the U.S. is no longer a white supremacist country? Not at all. It just means that one huge, important barrier is being overcome, and new lines of struggle against white supremacy will be drawn moving forward.

While no analogy is perfect, there are some parallels to the first wave of Black mayors in major U.S. cities in the 1970s and 80s. By electing Black mayors to govern major U.S. cities a huge barrier was overcome, and black political power became a reality in cities across the country that were formerly governed plantation-style by white men, many of them outspoken white supremacists. The election of Black mayors didn’t end racism (Black people in the inner cities still live in poverty, suffer high unemployment, police brutality, imprisonment, and all kinds of oppression). And the forces of reaction mostly scurried to the suburbs, regrouped and counterattacked fiercely (for one example see the excellent book about Atlanta - “White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism”). And some whites who stayed in the cities counterattacked from there, dividing Black forces to reassert power within the Black-dominated cities themselves (this dynamic was artfully portrayed in the HBO series “The Wire”.) Some (but not all) of the Black mayors who had come directly out of the Black freedom movement and catapulted into mayor’s offices from there got mired in business-as-usual bourgeois politics (becoming shills for developers and corporate interests - one of the more egregious examples being former MLK associate and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young flacking for the likes of WalMart!) or getting attacked for scandals, personal vices, or corruption (such as former SNCC leader Marion Barry who became Mayor of Washington DC). The black community became more divided, and the fight against racism and white supremacy continued under new conditions, definitely more complex, but definitely an advance over than the old school white supremacy where Black people were totally excluded from political power and were governed over directly by open white supremacists.

That barrier that was knocked down on the city-level in the 1970s could be about to be knocked down on the national level. Institutionalized white supremacy is still very real in the U.S. — reams of statistics prove that (life expectancy, unemployment rates, hiring discrimination, home ownership rates, incarceration rates, infant mortality rates, etc.) But in addition to those material facts of life, there is still are also still very real racist ideas among white people that belittle Black peoples’ capacities, that say Black people aren’t capable of holding and shouldn’t be allowed to hold positions of power, that they should in fact be feared. Aside from the outright racist attacks on Obama from the right, the more concealed racism of fear and questioning Black people’s basic capacities is being expressed in many different ways all around us. It’s come out recently very clearly at McCain events when audience members say they “fear” an Obama presidency. Tim Wise’s article ‘This is Your Nation on White Privilege’ made a number of sharp points in this regard (see http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/this-your-nation-white-privilege-updated ) Decisively defeating this type of more insidious racist attitude is important. The only real way to do that in this situation is to decisively defeat McCain in this election.

Many revolutionary left groups have said little to nothing about these aspects of the elections this year (the huge significance of the majority of people in the U.S. possibly voting to elect a Black president, running on an ‘anti-war’, ‘change’ platform). I think that left groups are basically missing the boat on a key moment in U.S. history this year if they are supporting Nader this round, are advocating abstention, or are insisting doggedly that Obama and McCain are the same because they’re both pro-capitalist and pro-system (which is of course true), without paying proper attention to the particularities of the dynamics at play in this election. I understand more those that are supporting Cynthia McKinney. She is an African American woman, much more progressive than Obama, a former Democratic member of Congress from Georgia who left the Democrats and is running as the Green Party presidential candidate on a “Power to the People” theme. In solidly “blue states” I think a vote for McKinney might make sense (that is, if we can assume any states are solidly blue when the Democratic candidate is Black, making the polling data likely somewhat less reliable than usual).

I think support for McKinney is understandable - she’s personally and politically compelling, as is her running-mate Rosa Clemente; McKinney is very progressive and outspoken on many progressive and even radical causes; she has been elected to the U.S. Congress so you can’t say she is “unelectable” (though obviously she’s not gonna win this election and won’t even come close to the magic 5%); she got shafted by the Dems for speaking out on Palestine (and other controversial topics), so she left the Dems and joined the Greens, etc. For those who see the elections as a moral question and think they’ve committed a sin if they vote for a Democrat, or for those who just want to make a statement with their vote, McKinney is the best option. She is actually helping to build a more progressive Third Party (the Greens), unlike Nader who again is running lone ranger-style, stubbornly refusing to build a party that can sustain a movement beyond his campaign.

While I understand supporting McKinney, I still think forces supporting her are making a political error in this election, though from what I’ve seen McKinney supporters generally have shown a strong grasp of the importance of confronting white supremacy and national oppression in the U.S. They are making the error of separating themselves from the masses of progressive people in the U.S. at a key historical moment when a key blow will be struck against racism. By way of analogy (again all analogies are imperfect), it seems to me like refusing to have participated in civil rights protests in the U.S. South in the early 60s because the leaders of the protest appealed to U.S. patriotism, echoed anti-communism and used explicit religious appeals in their talking points. It would be like rather than participating in the mass SNCC lunch counter sit-ins in 1960, organizing a separate protest instead with better slogans and politics, purer politically but smaller and isolated. The above-stated things were very true of the civil rights movement including SNCC at the beginning of the 1960s — the leaders were anti-communist, deeply religious, appealed to U.S. patriotism, and portrayed themselves as ‘normal’ middle-class, even conservative Americans. But focusing one-sidedly on those things misses the revolutionary essence of what what actually going on, the radical direct challenge to the entire white supremacist power structure in the U.S. South (and in the whole country). Refusing to participate would have missed the motion that led a large part of the base and many leaders of the Black freedom movement to turn toward revolutionary politics in short order. Will voting for Obama today turn people into revolutionaries tomorrow? Of course not, not most of them, not automatically. But we need to understand the a large number of Obama’s supporters are further to the left than him and are voting for him for progressive reasons (anti-war, anti-racism, anti-Bush). Revolutionaries need to be supportive of the progressive thrust of Obama’s base, and work to move them to more radical conclusions about the kind of change we need.

There may actually be a Black man elected president of the U.S. in November. That is profound. If he wins will you be celebrating that victory on election night as an important blow against racism and white supremacy? I will — without apology. Then we continue the struggle, under new conditions. But to not stop and recognize the significance of a possible Obama presidential victory is to miss out on a key moment in the struggle against racism in the U.S.

This editorial is reprinted from Fight Back! Newspaper.

http://fightbacknews.org/2008/10/economy-peoples-struggle-and-elections.htm

The Economy, People’s Struggle and the Election

By Fight Back! editors

One year after the current financial crisis began, the situation has gone from bad to worse. What began with the failure of small mortgage lenders has toppled Wall Street investment banks, the largest mortgage company in the world, and a trillion-dollar insurance firm. Depositors are starting to flee banks and money market funds, putting businesses in danger of not being able to get loans. Banks don’t want to lend to each other and the stock market can’t find buyers. The economy continues to get worse month by month. As job losses mount, companies declare bankruptcy, foreclosures rise and consumers cut back on spending.

At each stage of the crisis the U.S. government and central bank have had to take bigger and bigger actions to try to stabilize the crisis. The Federal Reserve has loaned out about $500 billion to banks and other institutions, while the U.S. government has committed another $300 billion in loans. Now the Bush administration is planning to commit up to $700 billion more to buy up bad mortgages to try to aid struggling banks. The Federal Reserve will start to provide loans to businesses in addition to banks. Each of the past ‘rescues’ have failed to stabilize the economy and there is no good reason to think the latest plan will either.

The Bush administration wants to ‘avoid finger pointing’ when all the fingers are pointing at the free-trade and deregulatory policies of the Bush years that contributed to the free-wheeling and fraudulent mortgage mess. Nor can former Federal Reserve chairperson Alan Greenspan escape responsibility for the low interest rates and lack of enforcement that contributed to the housing boom and bust.

But the roots of the crisis go much deeper than just the laissez-faire (free-market) policies of Bush and Greenspan. The economic system of monopoly capitalism itself is the cause of the current crisis. Today giant multinational corporations that can produce more than they can sell dominate the world economy. Even with advertising that invades every corner of our lives and easy credit, these corporations can produce more cars, steel, airplanes etc. than can be sold.

U.S. businesses have been on an anti-union drive for 25years, making it easier to cut wages and benefits. Their lobbying in Congress has led to cuts in welfare, the minimum wage and unemployment benefits, forcing more and more workers to take low-paying jobs. They shamelessly exploit millions of new immigrants, even children, and call the ICE if the immigrant workers try to fight back. Corporations send their work to other countries, eliminating better paying jobs here in the United States. At the same time the workers in Asia and Latin America earn just a fraction of what the jobs were paying in the United States.

While this leads to ever-greater profits for a handful of super-wealthy, it means that the masses of working people cannot afford to buy back what it produced. This is not just a result of greedy CEOs (although there is no lack of them). This is a result of drive for profit that is part and parcel of capitalism. Under a capitalist economic system, production is social, with tens of millions of workers contributing to the production, distribution and sale of goods and services, while the means of production (factories, transport and stores) are privately owned, with the profits flowing to a small capitalist class. This contradiction is at the root of economic crisis under capitalism.

With a lack of investment opportunities in the production of goods and services, profits have flowed into a financial sector that has been growing like a cancer the last 30 years. Today there are more than $600 trillion of financial derivatives such as Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS), Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) Credit Default Swaps (CDS), etc. whose value is 40 times the entire U.S. economy.

The deregulation of the 1980s and the growth of basically unregulated financial institutions was not just a policy of the Reagan era, but an outgrowth of the need for capital to have new places to invest. Today the pendulum is swinging back, with many billionaires, politicians and mainstream economists abandoning their free-market rhetoric and calling for more regulation and government monies to help shore up the financial system. Billionaires and their armies of lawyers are masters of corporate manipulation and it is beyond a doubt that they will skim hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars off of these government rescue plans - just look at what the military contractors have done for years.

Of course, as socialists, we have no problem in principle with government intervention in the economy. But we have to point out the hypocrisy of the Bush administration, which opposed spending a few billion more for health care for low-income children, opposed extending unemployment insurance for laid off workers and which was not willing to spend one dime on millions of households losing their homes to foreclosures. But when the big banks and insurance companies are in trouble, all of a sudden hundreds of billions of dollars are available.

Another danger is that right-wingers will call for even more cuts in government spending, saying that there is no money. Of course, there is a grain of truth to this, as the Bush administration has cut taxes for the rich and spent almost $700 billion on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this crisis should help expose the Bush-McCain program to privatize Social Security and Medicare and put our retirement and health care in the hands of private insurers like AIG, which only avoided bankruptcy through a government takeover.

This crisis has made it painfully clear how much the U.S. relies on foreign capital to keep the economy running. The government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was in part to calm the fears of other countries, which have lent Fannie and Freddie more than a $1.5 trillion. In the second quarter of 2008 (April through June), foreign investors sold $150 billion of Fannie and Freddie debt, the largest outflow ever. Just before the government takeover, the Secretary of the Treasury was meeting with foreign investors to calm their fears.

In the past, the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund and World Bank have inflicted painful austerity plans involving cuts in government spending, privatization of government services and higher interest rates in return for loans to developing economies in financial distress. Some foreign investors may well ask why the U.S. should not have to take the same painful medicine if U.S. businesses need capital now.

In the face of growing cuts at the state and now federal level, our focus needs to be building a grassroots movement that can fight for the people’s needs: to fund our schools, to provide health care for all, to provide jobs for laid-off workers and to stop the wave of foreclosures. The struggle to protect our schools, clinics, jobs and homes needs to unite with peace and justice movements to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to stop the wave of raids and deportations targeting Latino communities. Only such movement can put the heat on any new administration to meet the people’s needs.

Our slogan needs to be: Make the rich pay! Taxes need to be raised on the rich, starting with making the Social Security payroll tax apply to all income and restoring the top income tax rates on high-income households. We need jobs or income for unemployed workers! We need a universal health care system that will eliminate costly insurance companies and tell the big drug companies to lower their prices - or else. We need an extension on unemployment benefits and the social safety net must be extended.

The crisis has made it even clearer for all to see that both the Republicans and Democrats are parties of big business. Both parties’ leadership and presidential candidates supported the $700 billion bailout for bankers and billionaires. Having said that, the defeat of the Republicans would be a repudiation of their leadership on deregulating the economy into crisis at home and charging into war abroad. But only a massive people’s movement can force Democrats in power to win more reforms that benefit working people and at the same time show more and more people that Democrats are not for real change; only socialism can bring that about.