How “Gotcha” Journalism Mutes the Truth

A few months ago a Pittsburgh labor attorney and human rights activist, Dan Kovalik, penned an op-ed piece for a Western Pennsylvania daily, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Kovalik took up the case of an elderly adjunct professor at a local private university who died virtually penniless, with insecure shelter, and with tenuous health care. In the several hundred words allowed him, Kovalik brought forward Margaret Mary Vojtko's struggle to eke out a living from the meager salaries offered by adjunct university and college teaching employment. Kovalik made no effort to disguise his own solution: he noted that he met Vojtko in the midst of a union organizing campaign, a campaign which promised some relief from the poverty level wages and absent benefits provided by the well-endowed university.

To probably everyone's surprise, Kovalik's account sparked an enormous burst of commentary and interest in the cause of highly educated, but poorly paid university teachers. Other adjuncts realized that their plight was not uncommon, but shared by thousands working in academic institutions throughout the US. The story of Margaret Mary's tragic demise lifted spirits and provoked anger.

Predictably, the Pittsburgh institution that employed Vojtko, Duquesne University, mounted a feeble, but loud defense. Nonetheless, Kovalik's article pressed school administrators to bargain with the union and imparted meaning to a senseless tragedy. In the hard-hitting and noble tradition of muckraking journalists like Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Stephens, and Ida B. Wells, Kovalik offered Vojtko's story as a case study in the plight of thousands of underpaid and exploited college and university level teachers.

Unfortunately, the valuable muck-raking tradition, like whistle blowing, is considered bad sport in the age of stifling corporate journalism and rampant toadyism. Extremely rare socially relevant journalism is either accidental journalism or revelation wrapped in scandal, smut, or corruption. Today's young journalist with an eye to a career understands that entertainment metrics trump shaking a fist to power, that “reality” voyeurism titillates the passive reader, and that ferreting out injustice doesn't pay.

In that vein, Slate magazine, a journal that appeals to middle-class social liberalism, unleashed an assistant editor, L. V. Anderson, to doggedly dig up the real story of Margaret Mary Vojtko (Death of a Professor, 11-17-2013). Undoubtedly Slate's founder, Michael Kinsley, an old Cold Warrior transformed into a leading spokesperson for post-Reagan liberalism, could smell a radical message in the Kovalik article. The subversive Kovalik was actually suggesting that institutions owed a decent living to their employees! He had the audacity to imply that some employees-- those without trust funds-- actually depend upon their employers for their survival! Such a view offends the sensibilities of our betters who are confident of the many charities and helping hands that are always there for the asking.

Dutiful to her assignment, Anderson visited Pittsburgh on a mission:

Kovalik’s not-so-subtle implication was that if Duquesne had negotiated, Vojtko might not have died the way she did...

 But was that true? Who was Margaret Mary—the person, not the symbol of victimhood?

 Through a journey of several thousand words, Anderson familiarized us with personal details of Vojtko's life-- a veritable made-for-TV reality exposé-- cobbled together from interviews with people who have no fear of contradiction or explanation from the dead. She shares with the reader idiosyncrasies, hardships, and foibles that are embedded in every life, but only deemed relevant in our era of embarrassing mass titillation.

We learn that an eighty-three-year-old woman is untidy, forgetful, rigid in her views, mistrustful, and doggedly independent. How these personal attributes bear on her treatment by Duquesne University is left unexplained; how many of us share these personal “flaws” is never addressed. But the not-too-subtle point is that Vojtko could have fared better if she would only have shed her stubbornness and accepted the help that many claim was there.

Undoubtedly that view is held by those who obstinately refuse to accept any responsibility for the behavior of institutions that dominate our lives. Their indifference to the casualties wrought by banks, corporations, insurance companies, universities, military, and government agencies leave millions of Margaret Mary Vojtkos to the not-so-tender mercies of these institutions.

After six thousand tedious words of the minutia and trivia of Vojtko's life, one may be convinced by Anderson that a human life is indeed complex:

The story I uncovered was more complicated than the story that went viral. The reasons Vojtko’s life ended in misery had much less to do with her status as an adjunct professor than tweeters... might believe.

To be fair to the university, though, better benefits and job security would not have altered many of the personal factors that precipitated Vojtko’s crisis. Her hoarding and her deep-seated stubbornness—not her finances—were behind her refusal to get her furnace fixed, or to move to a facility better suited to her medical condition.

To be fair?

To be fair, Anderson would have interviewed any of the thousands of working class retirees living in Western Pennsylvania who would have told her that Vojtko's “stubbornness” was pride-- a pride born of the belief that when a man or woman works hard all of his or her life, he or she should have a measure of benefits and security without begging or accepting charity. Anderson would understand that motives, like lives, are complex even for those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. As do many other workers, Votjko valued her dignity, privacy, and independence. They were not easily surrendered to accept charity or even well-meant help. Those with a finely honed sense of justice are not quick to trade it for the work house or the charity ward, even in its modern incarnations.

It's a pity that those values are neither understood nor shared by Anderson. When a hundred years ago Upton Sinclair wrote of the workers exploited by the meat packing industry, he undoubtedly knew that many were flawed in character or values. But presenting them in all of their “multidimensional” character, revealing their weaknesses, or pandering to gossip was of little interest to him. Instead, he wrote of the horrific working conditions, brutality, and misery brought on by the industry. He chose to take the side of the weak over the strong.

Today, inequality has reached the extremes of Sinclair's time, yet most of our media chroniclers deliberately ignore the damaged lives, shattered hopes, and even premature deaths spawned by inequality. Turning away from these ugly facts, they-- like L. V. Anderson-- offer casual, flippant bromides: pick up the phone and call for help! As our political leaders work diligently to disassemble the social securities protecting the poor and needy, more and more of our neighbors face the choice of relying on goodwill or accepting a shattered life.

We should be grateful that there are writers like Dan Kovalik who speak out against these outrages.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Looking Back: 50 Years after the JFK Assassination

They are derisively called “conspiracy theorists”. They carry the torch for the beliefs that sixty to eighty percent of their fellow citizens share since the assassination of President John Kennedy. From October 17 to October 19, several hundred gathered in Pittsburgh for the “Passing the Torch” symposium, a forum devoted to many of the leading investigators discussing alternate visions to the US government's official version of the murder of Kennedy.

For three days, a group of ordinary-looking, very well-spoken, collegial people discussed and debated the plausibility of conflicting explanations of the Kennedy assassination. Those who have been misled by the corporately-compromised media would be disappointed with the participants: there were no ominous references to the Holy Grail, Area 51, or Roswell, except in jest. Rather, the atmosphere of the gathering was more akin to a convention of neurosurgeons without the glamor of a glitzy destination. The few cranks-- anti-Federal Reserve exponents and religious zealots-- saw their comments politely dismissed.

Questions and Answers

Broadly speaking, there are two research methodologies that engage assassination investigators. One group of researchers develop, examine, analyze, and debate the physical evidence. The objects of their study are the familiar artifacts: the Zapruder film, the so-called “pristine bullet,” the rifle associated with Oswald, autopsy photos, etc. Of course not all physical evidence is either direct or clearly relevant. Photos, personal accounts, audio tapes, documents, etc. may be merely suggestive and open to broad interpretation. While physical evidence may count as “hard” data, it virtually never fills all of the narrative space between the premeditation to murder and the completion of the act. The judicial system recognizes this oft-occurring opening by placing the “hard” evidence before a jury with the hope that they will have the collective judgment to satisfactorily fill the gaps and arrive at a well-considered conclusion.

But it would be naive to press the idealized courtroom analogy too hard. The court of public opinion, like the real judicial system, allows of differential resources, bias, and clandestine influence. But where honest people recognize that the courts are “overly” fair to the rich, and that the poor suffer a surfeit of fairness, the court of public opinion dispenses entirely with the notion of fairness. With the Kennedy assassination, the government and its agencies have invested overwhelmingly in the Warren Commission/Oswald-did-it-alone version. The US government has resisted, at every step, revealing relevant evidence that might shed new light on the case; it has even denied access to evidence developed to support the conventional view; and it has actively interfered with independent investigations of the assassination. Now-public documents show that the security agencies spied on and interacted with the Garrison investigation in New Orleans. Recent revelations demonstrate that the CIA established their former (1963) chief of covert operations in Miami as their liaison with the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations... without revealing this relevant fact (the Joannides affair). This revelation has belatedly driven the formerly compliant final head of that investigation, G. Robert Blakey, into uncharacteristic fits of indignation:

I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency co-operated with the committee.... I was not told of Joannides' background with the DRE [Revolutionary Student Directorate], a focal point of the investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents. In fact, I have now learned, as I note above, that Joannides was the point of contact between the Agency and DRE during the period Oswald was in contact with DRE. That the Agency would put a 'material witness' in as a 'filter' between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would co-operate with the investigation.

Given that researchers face a hostile government and its lap-dog media, it is truly amazing that researchers have advanced the study as far as they have. Of course hostile intelligence agencies and a media with blinders only reinforce the suspicions that the truth remains to be uncovered.

Blending into the physical evidence and further filling the evidentiary gaps are the circumstances and personal ties of the key players in the murder-- so-called “circumstantial evidence.” For example, the bizarre trajectory of Lee Harvey Oswald's brief adult life is breathtaking and complex. He crosses paths with a wide variety of diverse and contradictory characters while taking on equally contradictory personae.

Apologists for the Warren Commission want us to believe that these oddities reflect an isolated, but unstable personality. But the narrative fails the “credible-movie-script” test: No one would believe this tale if it were a movie.

Further, Oswald's Mexico trip the month before the assassination is a surreal saga fraught with confusion, misidentification, and mystery.

Beyond Circumstances

Is there anything that a Marxist could add to nearly fifty years of skepticism over the Warren Commission and the account of the assassination defended by the security agencies, US elites, and the corporate media?

Certainly a strong case could be made for the account offered by the former head of Cuban counterintelligence, Fabian Escalante. His book, JFK: The Cuba Files, based on his careful review of Cuban evidence, presents many new elements of the days, events, and personalities leading up to the assassination, though no citation of his work arose during the three-day symposium in Pittsburgh. In fact, I inquired of a lobby bookseller with a trove of assassination and associated books why he failed to offer Escalante's book in his extensive collection. He muttered something about how youthful Escalante looks in his pictures despite his retirement-- clear recognition of Escalante's work, but an evasion of its absence.

It is unfortunate that investigators ignore his book because he untangles much of the Mexico City puzzle. And his profiles of likely suspects add much to the existing biographies. But one senses a hesitance to accept a contribution from a Cuban official, a remnant of Cold War distrust. Moreover, the investigators, with only a few exceptions, own a rather conventional, naive politics. At the end of the symposium, a panelist posed what proved to be an embarrassing, but revealing question: How many here would welcome a Kennedy Presidency today?

The participants and audience demonstrated resounding approval with an enthusiasm betraying frenzied devotion to a fallen martyr rather than mere respect for a murdered President.

Perhaps it is here that a Marxist can make a modest contribution to our understanding of the Kennedy assassination by adding an element of political realism and historical context.

Regard Oswald's strange course from his adolescence in the mid 1950s through his death in November of 1963. Many point to the incredible twists and turns taken by him through this period. They argue that other forces must be at play: Oswald must have been a puppet. Opponents dismiss this as only indicative of his instability.

But these arguments miss the point.

The real conundrum is in reconciling that bizarre path with the known, demonstrable behavior of the US security services. It was in that period that their covert and overt surveillance reached unparalleled heights. And it was in that time frame that their suppression and prosecution of the left was at its pinnacle. It is simply impossible for Oswald, posturing as a Communist or Marxist militant, to have escaped their constant attention and, indeed, harassment, if anyone in the higher echelons of the many bureaus and agencies believed that posture. Consequently, it would be beyond comprehension that Oswald would have been where he was alleged to be at the moment of the assassination without those many security offices discounting his “leftist” credentials.

Reflect on the following:

● Oswald was allegedly a self-proclaimed Communist in his adolescence before his Marine Corps enlistment and remained so during his 35 months in the Corps (Oct. 1956-September 1959), often sharing his politics with fellow Marines. Despite his openness, he was given at least a “confidential” security clearance and assigned to a secret U-2 base in Japan. He was trained in sophisticated radar tracking and had access to much sensitive information.

At the same time, hundreds of Communists and thousands of liberals were under surveillance, lost their jobs, or were in jail. Communist leader Claude Lightfoot was sent to jail in 1956 when Oswald joined the Marines. A year earlier, copywriter Melvin Barnet was fired from his job at the New York Times for his political views. The infamous FBI COINTELPRO, a program of active measures against Communists and other leftists, began in 1956. Leaders of the ACLU were informing to the FBI in that period. A Professor at the University of Michigan, Chandler Davis, went to jail for his views in 1959, at a time Oswald was espousing Communism to his fellow Marines.

Is Oswald's story credible? Did he escape the net that captured liberals who were victimized by snitches and liars? What accounts for his immunity?

● Upon discharge, Oswald set off within 10 days on his voyage to the Soviet Union and defection. Investigators quibble over the formalities of the defection, but no one questions that Oswald made the strongest political statement by surrendering his passport and taking residence in the USSR from late 1959 until June of 1962. After stating his misgivings about the USSR, he was smoothly integrated into a nest of anti-Bolshevik Russians living in arguably one of the most rabidly reactionary, anti-Communist cities in the US, Dallas, Texas (the other candidate being Miami, Florida). Oswald and his young wife quickly find friends who would, by inclination, stand off from his politics, social status, and manners. At no time does this produce a backlash commensurate with the tenor of the times.

It wasn't until late 1962 that Junius Scales, a district functionary of the Communist Party in North Carolina, was released from prison for merely being a Communist. The Smith Act, The Internal Security Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Communist Control Act remained in full force in this period, all aimed at suppressing and repressing Communists. Spanish Civil War vet and Communist Archie Brown was arrested in 1961 under the Communist Control Act. In 1962 and 1963, Jack O'Dell was forced out of his leading role in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by the Kennedy administration for his alleged Communist affiliation. The US government pressed again to revoke Paul Robeson's passport in 1962. The Berlin Crisis, the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the October Cuban missile crisis of 1962 brought anti-Communism in the US to a boil.

It was in the midst of this atmosphere that Oswald brought his crackpot leftist ideas to Dallas and into the arms of anti-Communist fanatics. While working at an enterprise engaged in classified military work, Oswald contacted both the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party-- he had maintained subscriptions to their respective newspapers since his return to the US. Unlike thousands of people who were denied employment, experienced harassment, or found their names on watch lists, Oswald enjoyed a charmed life within a cesspool of right-wing intrigue and anti-Red hysteria.

●The spring of 1963 brought Oswald to New Orleans where he mounted a one-man campaign to establish left credentials while blatantly drawing attention to his activities, a bizarre goal for an authentic leftist in a hostile environment and with no allies. Warren Commission apologists like Gerald Posner answer that these actions only prove that Oswald was unbalanced and unpredictable.

But that evades the pertinent question.

Where were the security services that were systematically hunting, harassing, and persecuting everyone in the US with even a pinkish tint? How does Oswald escape their net? Did anyone in the US leave such a trail of provocative left-wing foot prints as did Oswald?

Before, during, and after Oswald's pro-Cuban adventure in the deep South, critics were threatened, beaten, and even killed for opposing segregation. And yet Oswald's television notoriety earned by defending revolutionary Cuba brought a violent reaction only when Oswald provoked one. Lee Harvey Oswald was perhaps the only self-proclaimed leftist in the US who traveled, lived, and acted with impunity during this repressive era.

● Immediately before leaving for Mexico in September of 1963, Oswald telephoned the head of the Texas Socialist Labor Party to mention that he wanted to meet before he left for Mexico City, a conversation that was surely overheard by authorities. What would be the likelihood that the correspondence between two public Marxists would not be the subject of interest in these repressive times and in the paranoid South?

Border crossings were, as they are today, designed to filter those worthy of scrutiny or detention. Yet Oswald went on his merry way to Mexico City with his passport and visa intact. For years, Mexico had been a haven for political expatriates and fleeing victims of the blacklist. All were under constant attention from US and Mexican authorities. Like Portugal and Spain in World War II, Mexico was to the Cold War a hot bed of spying and intrigue where all the antagonists maintained robust stations. Enter Lee Harvey Oswald. Flashing his leftist credentials, Oswald visited and revisited the Cuban and Soviet embassies loudly touting his desires to travel to Cuba and the Soviet Union. Without doubt, these plans were exposed to US authorities, who, uncharacteristically, did virtually nothing. Should his plans have been actuated, he could have been the US's first double-defector! No one seemed too alarmed in the higher echelons of the CIA and FBI.

This tortured history could easily be dismissed as the expression of an unstable, twisted mind. But that dismissal would only strengthen the oddness of the lack of action on the part of the US security services that would have had to curiously dismiss Oswald's vocal leftism and uncommonly audacious expression of that postured leftism.

Viewed from the Marxist left, Oswald's showy exhibition with a gun in one hand and a copy of The Worker and The Militant in the other smells of a provocation. Even a newcomer to the culture of the left knows that Trotskyists and Communists are water and oil. Thus, for a “veteran” of the left like Oswald to go to some lengths to make such a display is only intelligible if he were seeding evidence for some unrevealed purpose. Was the carefully posed picture meant to impress the left? Of course not. Was it meant to make a different impression?

Oswald was likely the only “leftist” in the US to never make first-hand, direct contact with other leftists, to never attend a meeting, to never join an organized demonstration or vigil in 6-8 years of off-and-on “activism.” He was well known as a “leftist” to non-left acquaintances and co-workers as well as much of the general public. But the broad left only knew him through correspondences.

In the end, it is impossible to reconcile Oswald the “leftist” with the unlikely indifference of the US intelligence and police establishment. At the same time, it is impossible to accept the authenticity of that leftism.

But if Oswald was not genuine, if he was only posing as a leftist, what was he really?

Since the intelligence and police agencies ignored Oswald as though they knew he were not a leftist, since he slipped easily through the net that captured thousands of the faintly pink, who did they think he was? He certainly did plenty to deserve their attention, attention that they seemed determined not to give.

Until we know who Oswald really was, we will never solve Kennedy's assassination.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

The Banks: Serial Offenders

Newspaper accounts anticipate that JP Morgan Chase, the huge banking and  financial services company, is close to an agreement with the Department of Justice over charges brought against the company for its mortgage bond policies leading up to the 2008 economic collapse. JP Morgan Chase hopes to avoid legal proceedings by agreeing to settle the matter for around $11 billion with the caveat, of course, that they are admitting no guilt.

Just over a week ago, the same firm agreed to another settlement of just a bit less than a billion dollars over the trading fiasco dubbed “the Whale.”

In addition, JP Morgan Chase has paid out settlements of $1.8 billion for mortgage-foreclosure practices over the last year.

In the same time frame, the company conceded nearly half a billion dollars for the charge of energy market manipulation. Add another $300 million for claims lodged against mortgage-backed securities.

And we mustn't forget the nearly quarter-of-a-billion settlement against allegations of muni-bond manipulation in 2011.

With these six likely settlements in three years alone totaling about $15 billion in charges over questionable practices, one might conclude that JP Morgan Chase was a serial violator.

It might make one angry that JP Morgan Chase executives receive no penalty-- indeed continue to receive large bonuses-- despite these violations.

It might make one angrier still to scrutinize the long list of earlier settlements and penalties incurred by the firm, including for intimate involvement with the criminally corrupted firms of Enron and WorldCom. One might further mention JP's derivative scam that nearly drove Alabama's largest county into bankruptcy, a maneuver that pressured a three-quarter-billion-dollar settlement.

Further outrage might spring from the company's record fine paid to the United Kingdom's Financial Service Authority in 2010.

Certainly JP Morgan Chase's admission in January of 2011 that it systematically overcharged thousands of overseas military personnel on their mortgages would prompt the ire of many.

And then there is the matter of our government rewarding what appears to be a criminal enterprise with $25 billion in TARP funds to guarantee its managers didn't run the corporate ship aground on the shoals of the 2008 economic crisis! A helping hand to a criminal syndicate.

Understandably, some have suggested that “too big to fail” should be construed as “too big to jail.”

But JP Morgan Chase, like other big time criminal gangs, is quick to throw its associates under the bus to avoid prosecution. The mega-bank has postured as the victim of its own mortgage originators while offering to cooperate with federal prosecutors and deflect attention from its own role. A recent report by investigative reporter, Rich Lord, has shed light on this practice in Western Pennsylvania (Indicted Attorney points a finger at JPMorgan, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 10-6-13). To the surprise of no one but, perhaps, Federal prosecutors, documents have surfaced that prove JP Morgan's foreknowledge of mortgage fraud. Meanwhile, JP has bought immunity by claiming victimhood!

In a brazen statement of contempt for justice, Attorney General Eric Holder excuses banker criminality because “...if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.”

 

Will “...have a negative impact...?

Has Holder conveniently forgotten that banking industry practices nearly crushed the global economy five years ago?

Maybe the generous contributions that the financial industry makes to both political parties better explains this blind spot in the criminal justice system. Maybe the incentives spread thickly among the Washington legislators by bank lobbyists account for the apparent immunity. Certainly the charming, boyish grin of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon seems ever welcome in the halls and chambers of government.

It would be unfair to JP Morgan Chase to not note that the other mega-banks are equally criminal in their practices. Just in the last two weeks, CitiBank has incurred a $30 million fine and reached a $395 million settlement, while New York is suing Wells Fargo.

In its entirety, the pattern of mega-bank irresponsibility and criminality is breathtaking. Even more shocking is the realization that these institutions are not above the law, but actually own the law!

To give some perspective, the welfare system in the US-- known since its New Deal inception in1935 as Aid to Families and Dependent Children-- was deemed too expensive, wasteful, and unnecessary by the Clinton Administration and its Gingrich-led Republican legislative rivals in 1996. Accordingly, they dramatically cut a program that provided a floor to the living standards of over 12 million people, 8.4 million of whom were children. In 1996, the program cost a little over $20 billion (under $30 billion in 2012 dollars).

The fines and settlements made by JP Morgan Chase over the last 3 years alone would have paid for over half of the total annual cost budgeted for welfare before its radical surgery at the hands of the bi-partisan government!

Add in the fines and settlement costs of the other serial criminals of the financial sector and we could likely fund a robust welfare system today.

Surely, this is a world turned upside down, a world devoid of compassion for the poor and the needy and blind to the corruption of the rich and powerful.

With Reagan-era ideologues finding happy, well paying jobs with think tanks, big media, and universities, the drum beat of “welfare reform” swept the US in the late eighties and early nineties. They blamed welfare for increasing unemployment, creating dependency, unmarried mothers, and violent crime. The symbol of welfare abuse was the unmarried African American mother of young children living off food stamps and a welfare check. Popular media amplified and exaggerated this image.

And the liberals?

They mounted a tepid campaign of measures to shrink the welfare roles, a campaign that prominent observers like Arthur Schlesinger Junior labeled Reagan-emulating “me-tooism”. He denounced the Democrats as Republican “fellow-travelers.” Thus, it should be no surprise that “welfare as we knew it” was gone by 1996.

With no one to speak for her, it was so easy to demonize a young mother and her innocent children. The cowardly, spiteful courtiers of our ruling class won the one-sided battle to cast millions of this nation's most disadvantaged into greater insecurity.

But Jamie Dimon and his banker cohorts needn't fear the self-righteousness or the indignation of those executive and legislative child abusers who found it so easy to undercut the welfare of children. Their multi-billion-dollar criminality goes unpunished and will go unpunished by the Administration and the two-party legislators who govern our lives. They continue to blatantly rob and prey on us with impunity, knowing that a tolerable spanking is the most they will ever face.

Today, those same legislators of both parties are looking to cut other elements of the social safety net. And the game is the same as it was twenty years ago: the Republicans raise unfounded, irrational fears (in this case, debt, bankruptcy, economic chaos) and the Democrats offer a feeble defense and make an eager “compromise.” Yes, they are coming after our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

In the short run, we have to raise hell before they make their grand “compromise.” But in the long run, we have to find and vote for real peoples' candidates and not corporate Democrats. You'll recognize them when they campaign to put the bankers in jail and nationalize the banks!

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Class against Class

Every commentator of every stripe concedes that US workers have been battered over the last five years since the onset of the global economic crisis. What most fail to concede is that the battering was the direct result of a one-sided class war.

From every perspective, measured by every economic indicator, all US workers-- those organized into trade unions and those not-- have been hammered relentlessly. Unemployment, measured by the government's least telling index, remains unconscionably high. Labor force participation, a better measure of the job picture, continues to decline. And the jobs that do become available are unprecedentedly part-time, low-paying, or temporary.

Wages are stagnant or declining in every sector and labor's share of national wealth continues to atrophy. Benefits are under attack with workers’ contributions to existing benefits growing and employers’ share shrinking.

The oft-cited road to success for working class youth-- a college education-- has proven fool's gold. The average student is saddled with $25,000 in student debt and a marginal job that retards getting out of debt and capturing meaningful savings.

At the same time, a “recovery” has occurred: production and national wealth have rebounded to and surpassed their pre-crisis levels. Profits and profit growth are well above historic levels and trends. And the stock market has revived energetically.

The widely heralded “recovery” has only been a recovery for the very wealthiest. A recent study by the formidable economic research team of Saez and Piketty shows that 95% of the income benefits of this one-sided recovery have accrued to the top 1% of income recipients. The other 99% must settle for a tiny share of the meager remaining 5% gain in income!

That US workers’ fate and the fate of their employers and their minions are on two separate, divergent tracks is undeniable. That these two tracks are sustainable is entirely a different matter, a matter to be settled when workers embrace a fight back in the struggle between classes.

While pundits from across the political spectrum acknowledge the huge and growing chasm between the rich and working people (see, for example, Paul Krugman's Rich Man's Recovery, The New York Times), they offer little by way of explanation and even less toward addressing and correcting the condition.

Instead, they deplore and regret, condemn and rue the sorry plight of working people in the face of burgeoning wealth channeled to the privileged. They trot out a host of tired, ineffective nostrums that consistently evade changing the dynamics that invariably generate growing inequality. Slogans like “tax the rich” warm the blood, but get no political traction. And on the rare occasion when tax increases and the like survive political mine fields, the rich find ways to evade them. Given the political power that inequality confers to the wealthy, it should be no wonder that even modest reformist proposals are decisively aborted by the best “public servants” that monopoly corporations and their wealthy owners can buy.

What, then, are the dynamics that generate inequality? What really accounts for the ever widening income and wealth game between a tiny minority and the vast majority of US citizens?

No understanding of economic inequality in a global capitalist economy can begin without an acknowledgment of class. The existence of social classes is the unwelcome analytic tool that capitalist apologists devote careers to denying. Media savants and academic authorities choke on the word “class.” To them, class division is a distant memory of hereditary aristocrats and down-trodden peasants. Surely, they affirm, the rise of representative government has eradicated class distinctions.

To avoid the obvious, liberals and so-called “progressives” have created a class that simply hangs in the air, absent any supporting structures: the middle class! A favored idea embraced by politicians, top labor leaders, and social workers, the middle class is said to shrink, decline, or disappear; yet no one tells us where the lost members go!

This slick trick hopes to mask the simple fact that the US is not a classless society.

Contrary to popular mythology, social life in the US is not all harmony and bliss. Instead, it is one of conflicting and incompatible interests. Moreover, the sharpest differences, the differences that determine material well-being, are differences of social class. The great contribution of Marxism is to reveal exactly how class is best understood-- not as social position, profession, or subjective perception, but as a material relation between employer and employee. That is, the most useful discrete divide is between those who engage the labor of others and those who provide that labor. The former constitutes a class of employers and their minions; the latter-- a much larger group-- constitutes the working class.

Even a casual reflection on the relation between the two classes in capitalist society exposes a sharp and irreconcilable difference of interest. Those who employ labor share no other goal than maximizing the profit of their enterprises. Put simply, from the Mom and Pop store to the largest monopoly corporation, owners are in business to make money. While small enterprises are limited in scope and intensity, larger enterprises, especially those with investors and shareholders, are driven relentlessly to achieve greater and greater rates of profit and sums of profit.

It is the logic of capitalism to reduce the costs of economic activity and command a greater share of that activity for the owners, investors, and shareholders. From the perspective of the worker, “reducing costs” translates into a relentless attack on the wages and benefits of the working class. The less that must be shared with the worker, the more that can go toward profit.

Since the dawn of capitalism, workers have recognized the divergence of interest between profit maximization and realizing their desire to improve their economic standing. They have understood the necessity of fighting to both maintain and expand their share of the fruits of economic activity. The history of labor is a history of the development of the instruments (unions, political parties), techniques (unity, strikes, demonstrations), and ideology (class, class consciousness, class struggle) necessary to secure a greater share of the surplus generated by the labor process. And among the most advanced, visionary workers, a world entirely free of the employer/employee relationship, a world without exploitation, a world of common, social ownership, is the goal.

Thus, we can and should measure the success or failure of the working class movement by how well it has fared in the battle with employers for a greater share of that surplus.

And by that measure, or any other, not only the last five years have been a disaster, but the previous three decades as well. Income and wealth distribution has shifted dramatically in favor of the employer class and its attendants. The rich are winning a class war for the lion's share of socially produced wealth. The working class is losing even the gains of the past.

How does this happen?

While the employers have mounted an aggressive assault on workers' wages and benefits, ostensible workers' organizations have failed workers.

The Democratic Party enjoyed the support of the working class thanks to both real and imagined gains won through the New Deal of the 1930s. In the ensuing years, that high point of labor-friendliness dissipated, with its last echoes embodied in the 1976 Democratic Party platform. Of course that platform was betrayed by the Democrat President-elect, James Carter. Never again did the Democratic Party embrace labor's cause, despite Don Quixote-like efforts by Jesse Jackson in subsequent years. While establishment Democrats mocked Reagan's lame “trickle down” economics, a decade later they celebrated the same idea with their absurd slogan that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Obama, the latest political “friend” of labor, has so far failed to deliver anything of significance to workers in the five years of his administration, nothing that might have reversed the grinding, painful decline of working class standards of living.

Certainly the top leaders of the trade union movement have served workers no better. Accordingly, they have been punished for their failure by a sharp decline in union membership, a decline that has lead them to panic before their own fate.

Of course their concerns, born of self-preservation, are nothing compared to the devastation of the working class inflicted over the last four decades. Their failure to use the available tools of class struggle, their reliance on cozy arrangements with bosses, and their identification with the health and flourishing of corporations are policies that have proven severely injurious to the working class.

Collaboration that links the fate of the working class to the fate of the corporations has paid off handsomely... for the corporations. A recent study summarized in The Wall Street Journal submits that by the end of this decade, “Adjusted for productivity, average labor costs will beat Japan by 18%, Germany 34%, and France 35%.” The study doesn't bother to mention what this will mean for US workers, of course. Their losses to the gods of competitiveness are capitalists' gains!

To take an example, US auto sales have soared to levels unseen since before the economic crisis first struck. Corporate profits are growing at a record pace.

How do they do it?

First, the US auto industry received massive tax-payer bailouts from the Obama administration, but only on the condition that they close plants and lay off workers! So much for the Democratic Party friends of labor.

Secondly, the industry produces the same amount of vehicles with less than 80% of the former workers, a forced-march increase in productivity.

And thirdly, at United Auto Worker unionized plants, the union submitted to deep concessions. Entry level UAW workers now make $15.78 an hour, a rate commensurate with an annual wage a mere 12% above the level defined by the Federal government as “living in or near poverty.” Once, the UAW wage and benefit package was the gold standard of industrial unionism!

Because of their total capitulation to the auto industry bosses, the leaders of the once proud UAW have resorted to pursuing the organization of the Chattanooga, Tennessee Volkswagen plant by sneaking through the back door. They hope to use a European Union regulation and their cozy relation with the company to secure recognition. How else to “win” a non-union shop when union and non-union wages are virtually equal? (Actually, when relative costs-of-living are factored, they are sometimes better in non-union plants).

Indeed, there is no class war when one side is always in retreat. The rout can only be reversed if workers shed their blind support for the Democratic Party and vigorously exercise their independence. The rout can only be reversed when workers transform their unions into class-struggle weapons and launch a counter-offensive.

The future doesn't have to continue with the past.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Spontaneous Combustion and a Knight in Shining Armor

“Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we will overturn Russia!” V.I. Lenin

The US left suffers from two maladies that persistently thwart any effort to move beyond the malaise of internet negativity and the false activism of online petitions. Setting aside those still desperately clinging to the Democratic Party womb, well-intentioned and serious radicals, young and old, have yet to draw the lessons necessary to unify and focus the seemingly limitless committees, coalitions, and centers that constitute our dysfunctional left.

Most damaging is the mindless and groundless faith in spontaneity. Far too many of our brothers and sisters believe that political action, organization, and change will come the way it does in Hollywood horror movies. The people will emerge from their homes, recognize the danger, and rally to confront the alien threat. Danger combines with self-interest to generate a spontaneous common resistance and a common response. While it makes for entertaining fiction, it seldom if ever happens in real life.

The Occupy movement was the latest iteration of this faith. Life proved that the notion of spontaneous organization and governance would end, leaving barely a trace of its prior existence. Decades before Occupy, the so-called New Left cast its fate to spontaneity. Programs, parties, agendas, etc. were eschewed; the “Movement” would find its own way. Oracles of that flawed thinking have gone on to their life's work as professors, professionals, and Democratic Party operatives.

In the rear-view mirror of bourgeois historians, political movements are depicted as spontaneous risings-- a kind of spontaneous combustion sparked by a particularly hostile affront or violent act. The US colonial rebellion against the British was “sparked” by the Boston Tea Party or the confrontations at Lexington and Concord, never mind the years of debate, struggle, and planning by the Sons of Liberty and other evolving organizations of resistance. Similarly, popular history poses the Civil Rights Movement as a burst of activism ignited by Rosa Parks' courage and channeled by police dogs and fire hoses. The decades of organized and planned resistance that prepared for this moment are largely ignored.

Faith in spontaneous struggle, trust in an instinctive, automatic confrontation with power, spawns inaction. If the oppressed and exploited will unerringly marshal resistance, there is no need to organize and agitate among them; they will find their way without the uninvited help of organizers and agitators. Professional revolutionaries need not apply. They must simply add their bodies to the “movement” when the magic moment arises.

A logical conclusion of the faith in spontaneity is the dangerous and destructive notion that “the worse things get, the better.” When enough pain is felt, the masses will rise; until then we meet in our diverse and numerous causes, sending checks, signing petitions and reassuring each other that something big will undoubtedly erupt.

Among Marxists, the cult of spontaneity takes the form of what V. I. Lenin called “economism.” By acknowledging only the objective conditions, the unseen operations of the laws of capitalist development, the tendency for capitalism towards crisis and the “immiseration of the proletariat,” these “Marxists” see no role for agitation and organization; they see no need for a party of revolutionaries. Instead, they count on the grinding inevitability of crude determinism.

Marxists (and trade union leaders) who fall into the trap of “economism” invariably bury the Marxist principle of class struggle in the day-to-day administration of trade unionism. In writing about the Marxist “economists” of his time, Lenin charged that they “demoralized the socialist consciousness by vulgarizing Marxism, by advocating the theory of the blunting of social contradictions, by declaring the idea of the social revolution... to be absurd, by reducing the working class movement and the class struggle to narrow trade-unionism and to a 'realistic' struggle for petty, gradual reforms. This was synonymous with bourgeois democracy's denial of socialism's right to independence and, consequently, of its right to existence; in practice it meant a striving to convert the... working class movement into an appendage of the liberals.” (What Is To Be Done?)

Faith in spontaneity diminishes politics. Neither the vulgar belief that collective pain will birth action nor the “sophisticated” and distorted Marxist claim that objective laws will inexorably bring change stands the test of history. Agency-- the planned, concerted, and collective effort of organized groups-- make history.

“If only we had a Lenin, Martin Luther King, Ralph Nader, etc., etc....”

A different, but closely related malady retards political action on the US left: the Knight in Shining Armor syndrome. Like spontaneity, it postpones action until something unknown and unpredictable happens; it replaces planned, concerted action with faith.

Many on the left are frozen with inaction while waiting for the next great emancipator or political super-star. This variant of celebrity worship is nurtured by the all-too-common brief appearance of prominent figures on the political stage while leaving no lasting movement or organization in their wake.

The Jesse Jackson Democratic primary campaigns of 1984 and 1988 are cases in point. Jackson offered the most progressive Democratic Party platform since the New Deal. In the first primary battle, he captured nearly 20% of the popular vote. In 1988, he ran again, establishing himself as the front runner after handily winning the important Michigan primary and finished by more than doubling his previous vote total and securing 11 states.

And then he was gone, disappearing from Democratic Party politics, leaving neither a movement nor a political impact on the Party's destiny. By 1992, the Party had moved permanently rightward to embrace right-centrist, Bill Clinton. And twenty-five years later, the progressive wing of the Party waits hopefully and patiently for another celebrity arriving fully armored and on a powerful steed!

Similarly, the Nader Presidential campaigns brought great interest to the Green Party. But the ever-earnest Ralph Nader had little interest in party-building. Though serious, he walked away, leaving others to attempt to construct an on-going political party from the good will left from his runs. Fortunately, the Green Party's latest candidate, Jill Stein, has a more developed understanding of political theory. What she lacks in celebrity status, she more than makes up for with organizational savvy and historical perspective. Her innovative, clever development of the “shadow” cabinet concept is particularly impressive.

But it's not solely the fault of Jackson and Nader--two well-meaning candidates-- that these celebrity campaigns were comet-like. Rather, it is the naïveté of the left that failed to see beyond the immediacy of these political events, that felt no urgency to subordinate an unrealistic chance to actually win to the necessity of leaving something permanent upon which to build.

Behind the Knight in Shining Armor syndrome stands the Great Man (or Woman) theory of history: great events are the work of great personalities. For example, the Pharaohs built the Great Pyramids (All by themselves? to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht). The masses are merely the obliging instruments of superior minds and talented leaders. Lenin refers to this thinking as in the “Ilovaisky manner,” referring to the author of many Russian textbooks who saw Russian history solely as the work of czars and generals.

The political expression of this in Lenin's Russia came from the Norodniks who saw themselves as the saviors of the peasants. Middle class intellectuals impressed with their own superior abilities, the Norodniks “colonized” peasant society in order to surgically implant the great leaders they felt the peasantry lacked. In the words of Soviet writer V.P. Filatov, they believed “that only 'heroes' made history” and that they could turn “the mob into the people.”

Adding the 'Conscious Element'

Lenin's writings demonstrate that there is nothing new or unique in the false ideology of spontaneity. Further, we can learn from Lenin's conclusion: “[A]ll worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of 'the conscious element',... means quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers...” (What is to be Done?) In other words, only attention to the “conscious element” can advance our cause beyond the false path of spontaneity.

But what does Lenin mean by the “conscious element”?

Going forward depends upon a correct assessment of what constrains our progress. It requires a consciousness of the ideas essential to successfully challenge power. It requires an ideology. Moreover, that ideology must be radically different from the ideology of the forces resisting change. Nor can it compromise with the enemy ideology. Thus, it is a revolutionary consciousness.

But revolutionary consciousness must be converted into mass revolutionary consciousness. For that we need an organization. Because its mission is to take the ideology of revolutionary change to those both most in need of it and most able to use it, that organization counts as a vanguard. It is the idea of a vanguard that allows us to advance beyond the illusion of spontaneity.

Opponents of Leninism charge the idea of a vanguard with elitism, the idea that a select group of revolutionaries knows better than the masses. It is nothing of the sort. Rather, a vanguard is the transmission belt for ideas that will not and cannot arise spontaneously within the working class or broader movement.

In our time, the ideology of resistance is decidedly and necessarily anti-capitalist. But that is not enough. A revolutionary ideology must offer an alternative to capitalism, an alternative that is neither cosmetic nor fanciful. That alternative is socialism.

Popular illusions abound: regulation can wean corporations from rapacious accumulation and dominance; small-scale “social” enterprises and cooperatives can erode the unprecedented political and economic power of monopoly enterprises. Such ideas fall far short of ideological credibility. Only socialism—the elimination of the process of private accumulation through labor exploitation-- reaches that credibility.

And who is to deliver the message of socialism; i.e., who is to serve as missionary for the revolutionary ideology?

The answer is as it was in Lenin's time: An organization dedicated to that task above all else; an organization not encumbered by the fetish of bourgeois elections; a party of revolutionaries; a Communist Party.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

From Postmodernism to Postsecularism-- A Review

In January of 2012, I reviewed Eric Walberg's book, Post-Modern Imperialism (Clarity Press, 2011). I enthusiastically concluded that:

Walberg has offered a welcome taxonomy of imperialism from its nineteenth-century genesis until today; he has given a plausible explanation of imperialism’s contours since the exit of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialism from the world stage; and he has convincingly described Israel’s unique role in the continuing reshaping of imperialism’s grasp for world domination.

Further, Walberg gave a needed response to misguided leftists who were quick to label Islamic resistance to US and Israeli predation as “Islamo-fascist.” Much of the US and European left took a smug, chauvinistic posture--a posture that coincided with the interests of imperialism-- toward fighters in the Muslim world daring to defy Western intervention and interference. They ignorantly announced that religious “fundamentalism” fatally tainted their resistance. Walberg struck a powerful blow against these immature conclusions.

Now Walberg has undertaken a more ambitious project in his new book, From Postmodernism to Postsecularism: Re-emerging Islamic Civilization (Clarity Press, 2013). His argument can be summarized-- without too much violence to its nuances-- as:

1. The last great secular social justice project-- socialism-- has failed with the demise of the Soviet Union.

2. Islam and its attendant political-social-economic doctrines are viable alternative routes to social justice.

3. Islam is the only alternative that can deliver social justice. Therefore, Islam is the universal way to social justice.

Of course Walberg goes to great lengths to shore this argument with a detailed, fascinating history of Islam and its currents that, alone, is worth the price of admission. He explores the relative shortcomings of other religions, a brief that is factually accurate, but, like the account of Islam, tellingly selective.

Hints of this thesis were embedded in the earlier book, Post-Modern Imperialism. I noted in my review: 

In the same vein, it is an exaggeration to portray Islam (or any other religion) as inherently anti-imperialist: in his words, “The unyielding anti-imperialist nature of Islam, its rejection of the fundamental principles of capitalism concerning money, its refusal to be sidelined from economic and hence political life…”

Unfortunately, Islam has the same tortured relationship with imperialism as have all the major religions. Precisely because they possess no robust doctrinal opposition to imperialism in general, all major religions have stood on both sides of the barricades.

The Islamist movement, Hamas, for example, stands as an important component of today's anti-imperialist front.

But it was not always this way. US ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, speaking in Jerusalem on December 20, 2001, affirmed that the rise of Hamas coincided with “the promotion of the Islamic movement as a counter to the Palestinian nationalist movement... with the tacit support of Israel” as reported by Dean Andromidas in Global Outlook (Summer 2002). Andromidas quoted Kurtzer: “Israel perceived it as better to have people turn towards religion than toward a nationalistic cause [like the PLO].” PLO leader Yasser Arafat is quoted from the Italian press:

But Hamas is a creature of Israel which gave Hamas money, and more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universities and mosques. Even Rabin ended up admitting it, when I charged him with it, in the presence of Mubarek.

And

Hamas was constituted with the support of Israel. The aim was to create an organization antagonistic to the PLO. They received financing and training from Israel. They have continued to benefit from permits and authorizations.

In the same issue of Global Outlook, author Hassane Zerrouky (Hamas is a Creature of Mossad) outlines how “Hamas was allowed to reinforce its presence in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, Arafat's Fatah movement for National Liberation as well as the Palestinian Left were subjected to the most brutal repression and intimidation.” (reprinted in Global Outlook from L'Humanité).

Thus, while honest revolutionaries must recognize Hamas’s role in defending Palestinians from imperialism today, honesty equally demands acknowledgment of its sordid role in collaborating with Israel in the destruction of secular nationalism and the Palestinian left. It's difficult to find an “unyielding anti-imperialist nature” in this treachery.

Egyptian Communists acknowledge this vulnerability to imperialist manipulation in the August 3 statement of their Central Committee:

One of the objectives of the projects of imperialism in the Middle East is the establishment of states on religious grounds, which serves mainly Zionist plan to declare Israel a Jewish state for all Jews in the world, as well as the important results of  pushing these religious countries to inevitably get caught up in sectarian conflict. And it necessarily creates strategic divisions and fragmentations of the Arab countries and brings the conflict between Sunni - Shiite, Muslim - Christian, Muslim - Jewish to replace the Arab-Israeli national liberation conflict, to replace the social class struggle among the peoples of the Arab countries, and to replace the struggle against authoritarian regimes  allied with the imperialist global and international monopolies.

Most Arab socialists and Communists have sought unity with organized Islamic anti-imperialist organizations, sometimes successfully, as with Hizbullah and Lebanese Communists. But on other occasions that trust has been brutally betrayed, as with the slaughter of the Tudeh (Communists) in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

For Marxists, the major religions are a sometime ally in the struggle against imperialism.

Insofar as they welcome cooperation and reject collaboration with the class enemy, Islam and the other major religions will find consistent friends in Marxist-Leninists. Thus, we welcome and support the current shift in the leadership of the Catholic Church toward the cause of the poor and against the ravages of capitalism, just as we regretted the alienation of past Popes from the fate of the Catholic masses.

Contrary to Walberg's premise number two-- the centerpiece of the above argument-- Islam and the other major religions fall far short of offering an adequate ethics of social justice for today's world. The Quran, like the doctrines of the Catholic Church, forbids usury, the collecting of interest on debt. Absent usury, Walberg believes that a comprehensive practice of charity will provide Islam with a complete program of social justice for today and tomorrow.

Aside from the fact that religious practitioners and their leaders conveniently find ways to sidestep or obscure the prohibition of the collecting of interest, “usury” fails to even remotely capture the prevalence and depth of modern-day labor exploitation. The Catholic Church's condemnation of “excess” profits fails for the same reasons. To suggest that charity alone can solve the incredible poverty, unemployment, and economic inequality of, say, a country like Mali seems patently improbable. And the solution of charity seems dangerously close to the answer advocated by the apologists for unfettered capitalism.

Likewise, the Hebrew concept of “Jubilee,” as an admirable moral prescription of debt removal and property restoration and an answer to the inequities of antiquity, will not put a moral dent in contemporary capitalism. That said, the vital principles of economic justice found in the Torah, the Gospels, and the Quran suggest a posture toward the ravages of capitalism. A casual reader of the texts held sacred by the respective religions will find much encouragement for a condemnation of the process of capitalist accumulation. Should believers read those texts with earnestness, they would undoubtedly become Communists as well as believers!

My own-- perhaps eccentric-- view is that the major religions cannot escape the charge of hypocrisy unless they embrace socialism, the contemporary embodiment of the moral codes of their founders. Unfortunately, most religious leaders in our time choose to accommodate capitalism.

Walberg is not insensitive to the alternative vision of Marx and Communism. He devotes a full chapter to “Postsecularism: Marx and Muhammad,” going to great lengths to show that Islam answers the questions posed by Marxism while avoiding its “shortcomings.” 

Destructive to his argument, he misunderstands the Marxist theory of value as follows:

Kapital's weakness-- the labor theory of value-- is a materialist reductio ad absurdum, denying the 'value' of 'unproductive' labor (the elements brought to bear by the capitalist related to securing markets, research, innovations, factor management)...

This is fatally confused. Marx recognizes a value contribution in ALL necessary labor culminating in the production of a commodity, including the research, innovation, essential organizational management, etc. Further, he sees a necessary value deduction in the labor essential for a commodity's circulation. What he does not recognize is any value created or socially necessary from the mere fact of ownership. And this contradiction between ownership and labor is precisely the element missing in all of the social doctrines of traditional religions including Islam.

Walberg's confusion about Marx's value theory leads him away from the resolution of the contradiction between value created by labor and the ownership of that value by the capitalist, a contradiction only resolved by class struggle.

This error dooms his well-meant, but naive  synthesis of Islam and Marxism:

The ijtihad-jihad process is in a sense just a more comprehensive version of Marxist praxis [by] emphasizing:

●social unity rather than class struggle

●the family and spiritual life rather than material production

●evolution rather than revolution

While the sentiment is noble, it is irreconcilable with Marxism. Capitalism's rapaciousness-- acknowledged by Walberg-- cannot be eliminated by a retreat to mere spirituality, an unconditional appeal to unity or a common destiny, or the virtue of patience. These are simple facts that religions cannot escape.

I would propose a counter synthesis:

●class struggle as the path to social unity

●the family and spiritual life AND material production

●revolution leading to the realization of these values

which could readily open the road to a Marxist-Islamic understanding and cooperation.

Walberg's book is timely, coming in the wake of the so-called “Arab Spring.” One feels a veritable joy in his writings bursting from the optimism generated by the risings in Northern Africa and the Middle East. Unfortunately, that optimism proved short-lived. 

The Islamic governments established in Tunisia and Egypt generated great social rifts culminating in overthrow in one and growing tensions in the other. Open opposition in Libya and Syria drew the intervention of outside forces that swiftly transformed the struggle into imperialist regime change, destabilization of the regions, and enormous human and infrastructure destruction. Grievances were quickly appropriated by US and NATO meddlers who seized an opportunity to shape the outcomes.

In a little over a year, the rise of Islamic civilization that Walberg foresaw was dashed on the rocks of divisiveness and foreign intervention, just as it has in other times and places.

For the Marxist left, the Arab Spring provoked reservations and guarded sympathy, even apart from nefarious outside interference. On one hand, the rising against entrenched, reactionary authority was a welcome expression of popular will. On the other hand, the risings appeared to be more rebellions than revolutions. That is, the goals of the insurgents were neither united nor well-formed.

As events unfolded, these fears were borne out. Rather than challenge the structures of privilege and exploitation, sides were drawn around different attitudes toward tradition and “modernity,” secularism and spiritualism. While real and not fanciful, these differences do not touch the deeper relations of oppression. As with modern-day Western liberals who are occupied with lifestyle decisions and personal choices, the battles contested in the Arab Spring guaranteed that the poverty and exploitation of the masses would remain untouched.

One hopes are for the revival of a vibrant Marxist-Leninist movement in these countries to nurture these developments from rebellion to revolution.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com