Breaking News! Some on the Left Have Benefactors…

In June, I commented on a scurrilous article originally appearing in The Daily Beast and inexplicably reposted on the Portside website. Entitled, U.S Tech Mogul Bankrolls Pro-Russia, Pro-China News Network, the article accused several left groups of having not only received money from a benefactor sympathetic to the People’s Republic of China, but, by implication, directly from The People's Republic of China or the Russian Federation. 

The Daily Beast hitman, William Bredderman, sought to stain individuals and organizations by suggesting that their platforms and ideas were both dictated by their benefactor and traitorous because of his association with countries that many perceive or hope others perceive as enemies. 

But as I argued in my original article, Bredderman’s (and the Portside editors’) “gotcha” was a big, fat “so what!”  

At that, the article was an exercise in slanderous innuendo.

When the mainstream media turns a blind eye to profoundly obvious corruption of the Bidens by foreign influencers, it is difficult to make much of an obscenely rich former tech mogul merely spreading his money around among a number of his favorite left-wing causes. 

At a time when the State Department’s tawdry Victoria Nuland brazenly slips off to Niger to demand restoration of the US’s puppet president, it is cynical for a blinded media to cry foul and imply foreign meddling on the part of a foreign power’s enthusiastic admirer. 

While a Supreme Court Justice disdainfully continues to accept numerous gifts from a prominent, widely connected “friend,” yet incurring no reprimand, it is unseemly for struggling left groups forced to the margins of US politics to have their source of funds cavalierly impugned.

But the ugliness of the article goes far beyond cynicism and hypocrisy.

Quite simply, the conclusion that Bredderman seeks is grounded on nothing. No financial link is established between the headline’s enemies-- Russia and China-- and the independently rich funder of left causes. In fact, it is bizarre to think that he needs to depend on foreign funds given his already deep pockets. Moreover, it is equally bizarre that influencers in the PRC or the RF would choose a high profile, left-identifying admirer to serve as a secret conduit to organizations or individuals within the US left.

Of course, that doesn’t stop Breddeman and those who disseminate his scandal-mongering from pressing onwards any more than an absence of evidence has stopped bogus charges of Northern carpetbagging, Moscow gold, or Communist subversion in past episodes of baseless hysteria. It’s enough to point a suspicious finger at someone breaking expected conformity and throwing his lot in with those otherwise politically marginalized.

The Daily Beast’s superficial, slimy “reportage” has now moved The New York Times editors to elevate the politically-charged claims to national attention. 

Assigning four young journalists-- none with more than two years with the paper and one with some schooling from the notorious Bellingcat, an echo chamber for Western intelligence-- the NYT faithfully reproduced the original charges with only a few new wrinkles. Media scandalizing the reputation of US left groups and individuals will prove to be good career moves, as it always has been in the past.

Again, there is no direct or even indirect evidence linking foreign-originated monies to the left organizations, but the article does offer the news organization’s own touches to the political innuendo: cash recipients “...mix progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points…” leaving the reader with the thought that the convergence of the two points of view could NOT be coincidental or independently derived.

This should come as some bother to those of us on the “extreme” left who often find our progressive ideas converging with ideas shared with the Chinese Communist Party, the Cuban Communist Party, or many other left organizations, though we’ve never gotten one dime from the parsimonious Chinese or anyone else!

The young investigative reporters uncover public events where Mr. Singham-- the former tech mogul benefactor-- has appeared in public with Chinese officials, university professors, administrators, etc. Should they not also investigate Henry Kissinger, who was meeting recently in Beijing with officials?

Let's call this journalistic sin what it is: guilt by association. And it's a grievous sin regardless of whether it’s advanced by J. Edgar Hoover, HUAC, Joseph McCarthy, The Daily Beast, Portside, or The New York Times.

In the case of NYT, it is especially despicable because the article targets the US left group that has, over time, perhaps shown the most integrity in defense of peace. While other left groups were entangled in debate over who they would support when the war in Ukraine broke out, CODE PINK was firmly fixed on what it opposed: war, its spread, and its human cost.

While nearly everyone-- left and right-- obsessed over fixing blame and supporting either NATO/Ukraine or Russia, CODE PINK activism was directed toward ending the war, thwarting its escalation, and finding a durable peace.

Accordingly, it is no accident that it is CODE PINK that the NYT editors-- reliable servants of US foreign policy-- chose to focus its attack upon.

If you object to this New York Times smear, please consider signing this petition.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Settling with Our Past

As the Empire declines, as the myths binding together US economic power, social harmony, and international prestige dissolve, many people want answers.

Why is the US political system dysfunctional? Why does inequality of wealth and power march to ever greater heights? Why does the US government assume unwanted governance beyond its borders, while turning a blind eye to the sins of its allies?

These questions appear challengingly complex and intractable. Politicians, academics, and hordes of pundits offer numerous wide-ranging, but unsatisfactory answers. 

But few, very few, are disposed to face the twin towers of ignorance that left their indelible stamp on US political progress. Racism and Anti-Communism remain the greatest obstacles facing those hopeful of a better, more just future for the US. 

Since its revolutionary, but contradictory beginning as an uninvited settler-colony parting company with an oppressive mother country, the US has been cursed by its reliance on the institution of slavery at the core of its early economic life. That institution could only be justified with a racist, dehumanizing ideology of white supremacy. 

After the institution of slavery was violently overturned, the legacy of racism remained deeply embedded in the US, remaining as an often-used tool of class division by the US ruling class. Race as a weapon of distraction and super-exploitation proved invaluable to the maintenance and domination of capitalism throughout the twentieth century.

Likewise, anti-Communism, applied with a broad brush and used against challenges to capital and steps toward racial unity, has been a consistent tactic of the rich and powerful. Red-baiting, like race-baiting, casts a veil of ignorance over the protagonists of progress. By placing a people or an ideology beyond any acceptance, by making them dangerous, barbaric, or adversarial, mass manipulators can conjure fear, stir hatred, and shape behavior contrary to the interests of a vulnerable majority. Fear of the manufactured “other” fosters divisions, distraction, and demobilization, rendering the masses confused and impotent.

Fresh Air  

Despite the oppressive weight of years of relentless indoctrination, there is a welcome skepticism, a growing questioning of the inherited ideas on race and revolution. 

For most people in the US, the Cold War was the source of an enormous body of myths attached to the US and its role in the world. But there are many people hard at work in terminating those myths. A recent event sponsored by Code Pink, Witness for Peace, and Addicted to War is a fine example of that effort. Rachel Bruhnke and Frank Dorrel moderated a ten-hour online COLD WAR TRUTH COMMISSION - A Day of Education, Testimonials & Action on Sunday, March 21. Billed as “putting the Cold War on Trial,” the event engaged over fifty testimonies, challenging the entire spectrum of US Cold War fictions. 

The Commission billed the leadoff session as “The Roots of US Anti-Communism and Cold War,” a bold announcement that the organizers were not going to bend a knee before the national dogma of unthinking anti-Communism. Where far too many liberals will condemn the “excesses” of McCarthyism while turning a blind eye to the repression of actual Communists, this event made no such compromise. 

The sessions can be viewed here. 

*****

Another welcome development is a growing academic “rediscovery” of the essential role of African American Communists in the struggle for both Black equality and the emancipation of the US working class. 

The ruling class has gone to great lengths to hide the role of Communists in laying the foundation for the modern-era Civil Rights Movement, anti-imperialist action, and subsequent anti-racism struggles. Moreover, they have sought to erase the leadership of the earlier struggles by Black US Communists. The myriad organizations initiated and/or led by Communists have been buried in the past: Council on African Affairs, Civil Rights Congress, National Negro Labor Council, National Negro Congress, Committee for the Negro in the Arts, and a host of other organizations. 

Similarly, the role of figures like WEB Dubois, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry in founding, participating, and advancing these organizations has been side-stepped by mainstream scholarship.

As the Cold War receded, historians like Nell Irvin Painter, Robin DJ Kelley, and Mark Naison-- part of a “revisionist” wave reconsidering the role of the Communist Party USA-- began to reveal the historical symbiotic relationship of the Communists, associated radicals, and Black liberation.

Mary Helen Washington’s 2014 book, The Other Blacklist, does a similar service for Black cultural and artistic figures who moved within or in the orbit of the Communist Party.

No scholar has and continues to plumb the close trajectory of Communism with the Black freedom movement more thoroughly or more diligently than Gerald Horne. Horne’s research has produced over a dozen books on Communists, the Cold War, and radical African American struggles. Horne summarizes the target of his research: “It is easy to see why future generations will be displeased with much of the present history that has been written to this point about the Communist Party because it has been incredibly biased, one-sided, deeply influenced by the conservative drift of the nation – not unlike pre-Du Bois histories of Reconstruction – and, fundamentally, anticommunist.”

And, today, scholars are linking the role of Communism with anti-racism and feminism, importantly through the life and works of deported US Communist leader, Claudia Jones. Scholars like Charisse Burden-Stelly and Denise Lynn are fairly and sympathetically chronicling the contributions of Communists, especially African American Communists, without genuflecting to Cold War shibboleths. See their work (Burden-Stelly) here, here, here and (Lynn) here, here, here. 

Also, scholar Melissa Ford has done important research, including Black Women, Black Radicalism, and the Black Midwest.

Much of this research finds its way to the estimable Claudia Jones School for Political Education, an essential source.

Doubtless the pursuit of these forgotten histories will encourage and embolden others to consider Marxism-Leninism as a beacon illuminating the road ahead in the direction of finally defeating racism and achieving socialism.

*****

Equally welcome is a growing hunger among workers-- in the labor movement-- for something more nourishing than the simplistic slogan of “Throw the bums out” directed at the labor leadership.

Reports grow that workers are discovering the writing of William Z Foster, the mastermind of class struggle unionism as practiced in US labor’s most militant days. Foster’s history in organizing workers in the early twentieth century and in crafting the US Communist Party’s labor strategy until his death in 1961 has been largely smothered by anti-Communism. But, as long-time union activist Chris Townsend reminds us, his ideas are available today with the reissue of his book, American Trade Unionism (International Publishers). 

International Publishers now offers another reissue of an essential labor classic, Roger Keeran’s The Communist Party and the Auto Workers’ Union. Keeran’s scholarly book gives the true account of the building of unionism among auto workers without a Cold War spin or the usual Reuther brothers hagiography.

As an eye opener for union militants, Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge joins the Keeran book to show how militant, multi-racial class-struggle unionism can be achieved and maintained. What Keeran does for the UAW, Gilpin does for the United Farm Equipment Workers of America in Louisville, KY. 

If history is to be a guide to the future, it must be shorn of the illusions, deceptions, and distortions imposed upon it. We must move beyond Cold War myths, restore the missing chapters of race and labor militancy, and reject hysterical anti-Communism, if we are not to be participants in the death throes of a racist, exploitative empire. 

We are fortunate that the quest for the truth is an irresistible force.

Greg Godels 

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Mired in Opportunism

It should be obvious to everyone that the US left is in difficult straits. It is not even remotely clear who or what counts as left in this country.

To most-- encouraged by the capitalist media-- the left is the Democratic Party. But that must undoubtedly be mistaken. To be left, one surely has to be outside of the centers of power, looking in; and that certainly is not true of the Democrats and their leaders. Since the beginning of the modern two-party system, the Democrats have been the Pepsi to the Republican Coke, taking its turn in ruling. There may be an estranged left wing of the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party itself is not a left organization. Only deranged columnists for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal could believe that fantasy.

Aside from dismissing the Democratic Party as an example of the left, it remains difficult to capture what is left in today’s political life. Historically, the thread that united the “left” politics of the last millennium was its rejection of existing political and/or socio-economic formations. Looking back or forward from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, opposition to the existing order generally defined the left, whether that opposition was broadly democratic, liberal democratic, anarchist, or socialist. 

Today, that is no longer true in the US.

Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, self-proclaimed US leftists had lowered their designs from advocacy of a new order to a defense of the more “progressive” old order: The New Deal, the Great Society, and a human rights-based foreign policy.

James Carter’s presidential administration was perhaps the high point of and the point of departure from expanding the social democratic vision of a better world. Carter’s electoral platform captured the highest aspirations of the non-revolutionary left to date, with job guarantees, national healthcare, and reduced militarism. Within two years of his presidency, Carter had jettisoned his platform and Ted Kennedy picked up the tattered banner.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan, the broad left has been in retreat, engaged in a defensive posture, lowering its expectations with every electoral cycle.

Marginalized by the Red Scare, ostracization, official repression, and petty-bourgeois self-indulgence, the radical, revolutionary left clung at the margins of political life, advocating a new world against the cynicism and despair fostered by the rout of the “progressive” hordes.

Of course, the fall of the Soviet Union only added to the difficulties of the radical left with the flight of careerists, opportunists, and fair-weather friends from the Marxist-Leninist left.

“Lesser-of-two-evils-ism” became the guiding light of most of the left from the Reagan era onward. With an emboldened, more radical Right emerging, this posture had some merit. The idea of thwarting the rightward march above all other considerations appealed to many. But far too many equated a new Republican-initiated aggression against the gains of working people with Mussolini’s march on Rome.

But nearly half a century later, it has only hardened into a policy of settling for any concession-- no matter how small or of little consequence-- that the ruling elites will grant. “Lesser-of-two-evils” has inexorably moved the US left to begging for a place within the respectable tent, into a role as the loyal opposition. Too much of our left substituted “please” for “we demand.”

We see this in recent lows in left journalism and commentary. The website Portside-- a creation of 1991 dissidents from the Communist Party USA, recovering members of the New Communist Movement, and assorted other activists-- illustrates this decline. Portside proves the futility of combining loyal opposition to the Democratic Party mainstream with nostalgia for the New Deal and the Great Society.

While the war in Ukraine has exacerbated and exposed the weaknesses of the US left, there has been slow, but encouraging move toward opposition to the war and the demand to negotiate an end (nearly the entire organized US left picked a side early on and hesitated in calling for the war’s end, with the notable exception of Code Pink).

So it was disappointing, but not surprising to see that Portside recently reposted a provocative article, The Surprising Pervasiveness of American Arrogance, from Foreign Policy in Focus. Author John Feffer attacks those within the generic left who dare to challenge the rigid narrative on the Ukraine war established by the US State Department and slavishly followed by the mainstream media. 

Feffer finds arrogance because the US left-- undoubtedly justified in believing that the US manufactures consensus-- does not embrace the views of the Ukrainian “left” (part of an equally manufactured consensus). Feffer suggests that first hand, authentic opinions of those who are living in Ukraine trumps the opinion of outsiders, while concealing the well-known fact that the Ukrainian government suppresses those who oppose the war. With eleven parties banned in Ukraine, it is surely likely that public opinion in Ukraine is stifled by this reality. It would be equally silly to value the opinion of the Russian left on the war over what we can independently establish, given similar official pressure. 

Feffer’s argument is pure sophistry-- a variation on the fallacious argument from authority (ad Verecundiam) as taught in beginning logic textbooks.

Further, Feffer denies that there is a place for US pressure in ending the war. He mocks those who may well exaggerate the possibility of a quick, decisive end to the war, but asks us to believe that it could continue indefinitely without US material aid and encouragement. To promote this view, Feffer pictures the US as a mere ineffective leaf blowing in the global political winds-- a vulgar reversal of the real US situation. He conveniently forgets the consequential effects of the international anti-war movement in the 1960s.

If Feffer mounts the best case for Portside’s siding with the US State Department, the editors have no case at all.

But a week later, Portside stoops even lower. 

Reposting an incendiary article worthy of Hedda Hopper, Walter Winchell, or Red Channels, the editors returned to the era of guilt by association and Moscow Gold. “People’s Media” Network, but Pro-Russia and Pro-China-- taken from The Daily Beast, the self-described “high-end tabloid”-- purports to connect a media outlet and a number of left groups and personalities to a wealthy funding source, Neville “Roy” Singham. 

Author William Bredderman desperately wants to foster the impression that these entities take the positions that they take because they are directly or indirectly on the payroll of the Russian Federation and/or the People's Republic of China, that they are Putin’s or Xi’s puppets. His sole evidence is a two-year old raid and accompanying allegations by the Indian authorities that Singham served as a conduit for foreign money to an Indian opposition media outlet. Even the two-year-old Times of India article cited by Bredderman puts the “link” between Singham and the PRC in quotation marks.

But of course, a link between foreign monies and the Indian medium, NewsClick-- should it be established with Singham as an intermediary-- would have little evidentiary bearing, other than innuendo, upon the relationship between US leftists and the RF or the PRC. No further evidence is introduced.

Bredderman goes to great lengths to show that the organizations and individuals cited all oppose US foreign policy toward the RF and the PRC. He wants the reader to conclude that this opposition is due to influence, rather than principle, despite the well-established fact that these groups and individuals have long been consistently critical of US foreign policy! 

The experts that Bredderman surfaces are all deeply hostile to the left, including the discredited Alexander Reid Ross, the popularizer of the laughably imaginary Red/Brown alliance-- a particularly nasty notion that served to divide the left since the 1930s. 

Many of us have seen this before: the charge that the civil rights movement was directed and funded by Communists, that the anti-war movement was guided by Moscow, that opposition to US foreign and domestic practices must have insidious origins kept from the general public.

The temptation to point to the source of support is especially tempting when power and wealth bear such overwhelming influence through think tanks, institutes, foundations, grants, non-profits, and a host of other ruling-class fronts posing as “independent” voices. Exposing their hypocrisy is a useful service to those who naïvely take their products at face value.

However, “Gotcha” journalism can be an impediment to critical thinking, a diversion from the substance of unconventional views. Since we cannot know if donors support the left because they agree with them, because they insist on compliance for their donations, or if they are solicited by those they fund, we cannot judge the effect upon the recipient’s independence, nor should we be obsessed with it. To be sure, the money won’t come from the US ruling class to seriously subvert  itself!

And that should have crossed the minds of the editors of Portside who posted this scabrous assault on the left. And it should be understood as an attack on the left, since it serves no purpose beyond casting a shadow on a section of the left and raising distracting questions about the rest of the left. 

Are the editors still mired in the nonsense of RussiaGate? Do they still see foreigners under our political bed?1

History will decide many of our differences, without help from ruling-class apologists and hucksters.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

1  While this was being written, Portside reposted an hysterical, crude revival of the RussiaGate nonsense and related conspiratorial gibberish by radio host and spiritualist, Thom Hartmann. By revisiting every discredited, distorted, and misleading claim, Portside demonstrated that it will stop at nothing to get a Democrat elected President in sixteen months.