commies

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On the current situation between Israel and Palestine: Official statement from the Communist Party of Spain, as a minority partner of the current Spanish Government, on its recognition of the Palestinian State:

Partido Comunista de España - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Communist Party of Spain - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

​

We celebrate the recognition of the Palestinian State by the Government of Spain :​

• May 22, 2024

We demand a ceasefire, a break in relations with Israel, an end to the genocide and occupation, and the return of refugees.

(May 22, 2024)

The President of the Government announced today in Congress that Spain, in accordance with the agreement adopted by the coalition government, will recognise the Palestinian State on 28 May, as will Ireland and Norway. We are pleased that this step has already been taken by more than two thirds of the countries that make up the international community.

It is a decision that we celebrate and that is due to our presence in the Government and the numerous social mobilizations of solidarity carried out in Spain and internationally since the Zionist regime intensified the genocide on October 7, but that cannot stop there, since Israel continues to commit genocide in the Gaza Strip, and murdering hundreds of people in the rest of the occupied territories.

The PCE welcomes the recognition of Palestine as a state, but demands an immediate ceasefire, the immediate breaking of relations with Israel, an effective embargo on the purchase and sale of arms with the Zionist regime, an end to the genocide in Gaza and an end to the Israeli occupation of the rest of the territories, as well as the return of all Palestinian refugees.

The Communist Party of Spain demands increased international pressure so that the International Criminal Court agrees to the request of the Prosecutor's Office to arrest high-ranking Israeli officials, including the criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, so that it is carried out as soon as possible. Likewise, Spain must join the complaint filed by South Africa in the International Court of Justice to condemn Israel for Genocide.

Long live free Palestine!

Celebramos el reconocimiento del Estado Palestino por parte del Gobierno de España.

Exigimos el cese al fuego, romper relaciones con Israel, el fin del genocidio y de la ocupación y el retorno de los y las refugiados.

www.pce.es

 

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Hal Draper (1914 -1990; Brooklyn, New York) is, for me, one of the Marxists of the United States. which has had the most importance for contemporary international (at least European) Marxism:
His Marxism is influenced by the Trotskyist current first, and the Shachtmanist current later.

He turned to Marxismism during the Great Depression of the 1930s, joining the youth section of the Socialist Party of the USA, the Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL). There he took part in the struggle against the right wing of the SP which controlled the leadership. In 1937 the YPSL decided to leave the SP, support the Fourth International, and join the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the USA.

Socialist Workers Party (United States) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (Estados Unidos) - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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The YPSL membership elected Draper, who had been writing articles for the Trotskyist journal Socialist Appeal since 1935 , to the post of national secretary. Following severe internal discussions, the SWP adopted the position that the USSR was a degenerated workers' state which had to be defended against imperialism while continuing to advocate a political revolution against the Stalinist leadership. Draper, who had already begun to regard the USSR as neither a bourgeois nor a workers' state but rather a kind of bureaucratic collectivism, left the SWP in 1940, following the pact between Stalin's USSR and Nazi Germany and the Soviet invasions of Poland and Finland, to form the Workers Party . Draper died in 1990, still active in Marxist politics and theory.

For me, his importance lies in his emphasis on "socialism from below" vs. "socialism from above," which he considers as important as "Marxist democratic socialism" vs. "Single Party socialism."

His most extensive work would be his four-volume study "Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution" (1977-1989);

but its main arguments are summarized in the pamphlet "The Two Souls of Socialism" (1964), which due to its great interest I will reproduce in my next message.

 

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Hal Draper : The two souls of socialism​

(From 1 to 4)

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Written: In English, 1960; edited and augmented in 1968.
First published: In the student magazine Anvil in 1960 and subsequently as a pamphlet in 1968.
This edition: 2001, Marxists Internet Archive.

Summary: "Throughout the history of socialist ideas and movements, the fundamental division is between socialism from above and socialism from below. What unites the very different forms of socialism from above is the conception that, in one form or another, socialism (or a reasonable facsimile of it) must be given as a handout to grateful masses by a ruling elite not in fact subject to their control. The heart of socialism from below is its claim that socialism can only be realised through the self-emancipation of active masses who, raising their hands to it, mobilise themselves 'from below' in the struggle to take charge of their own destiny, as actors (and not just subjects) on the historical scene."

Index:

1. The two souls of socialism​

2. Some socialist "precursors"​

3. The first modern socialists​

4. Marx's contribution​

5. The myth of the "libertarian" character of anarchism​

6. Lassalle and state socialism​

7. The Fabian model​

8. The "revisionist" facade​

9. The 100% American (U.S.A.) scene​

10. Six subtypes of socialism from above​

11. Which side are you on?​

1. The two souls of socialism​

The current crisis of socialism is a crisis of the meaning of socialism.

For the first time in world history, quite possibly a majority of its inhabitants call themselves "socialists" in one sense or another; but there has never been a time when such a label was less informative.1 The closest thing to a common content in the various "socialisms" is a negation: anti-capitalism. On the positive side, the variety of incompatible and conflicting ideas that call themselves socialist is wider than the range of ideas within the bourgeois world.

Even anti-capitalism is becoming less and less a common factor. At one end of the spectrum, some social democratic parties have almost eliminated any specifically socialist claims from their programmes, promising to maintain private enterprise wherever this is possible. The most prominent example is German social democracy ("As an idea, a philosophy and a social movement, socialism in Germany has not, for a long time, been represented by a political party," sums up D. A. Chalmers in his recent book, The Social Democratic Party of Germany ). These parties have so redefined socialism that it no longer exists, but they have only formalised a tendency that is the same as that of all reformist social democracy. In what sense are all these parties still socialist?

On the other side of the world stage, there are the communist states, whose proclamation as socialist is based on a negation: the abolition of the capitalist private profit system, and on the fact that the ruling class is not made up of private owners. From a positive point of view, however, the socio-economic system that has replaced capitalism would not be recognizable to Karl Marx. The state owns the means of production, but who owns the state? Certainly not the masses of workers, who are exploited, unfree, and deprived of all political and social control. A new ruling class, the bureaucrats, dominates over a collectivist system: a bureaucratic collectivism. Unless stateization is mechanically equated with "socialism," in what sense are these societies "socialist"?

These two so-called socialisms are very different, but they have more in common than they realize. Social democracy has characteristically dreamed of "socializing" capitalism from above. Its basic principle has always been that increased state intervention in society and the economy is "in itself" socialist. This principle has a fatal family resemblance to the Stalinist conception of imposing, from above, something called socialism, and of equating statization with socialism. Both conceptions have their roots in the ambiguous history of the socialist idea.

Let us go back to the roots: the following pages aim to investigate the meaning of socialism historically, following a new path. There have always been different "types of socialism", which have been commonly divided into reformist or revolutionary, peaceful or violent, democratic or authoritarian, etc. These divisions exist, but the fundamental one is another. Throughout the history of socialist ideas and movements, the fundamental division is between socialism from above and socialism from below .

What unites the many different forms of socialism from above is the conception that socialism (or a reasonable facsimile of it) must be handed out as alms to the grateful masses, in one form or another, by a ruling elite who are not in fact subject to its control. The heart of socialism from below is its assertion that socialism can only be realised through the self-emancipation of the active masses in motion, coming to it, freely with their own hands, mobilised "from below" in a struggle to take charge of their own destiny, as actors (not simply as patient subjects) of this stage of history. "The emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves" - this is the first paragraph of the statutes written by Marx for the First International, and this is the first principle of his entire work.

It is the conception of socialism from above that explains the acceptance of communist dictatorship as a form of "socialism." It is the conception of socialism from above that concentrates all the attention of social democracy on the parliamentary superstructure of society and on the manipulation of "the top" of the economy, making it hostile to mass action from below. Socialism from above is the dominant tradition in the development of socialism.

Note that this is not a peculiarity of socialism. On the contrary, the longing for emancipation from above is the principle that runs throughout the centuries of class society and political oppression. It is the permanent promise given by every ruling power to keep the people looking up for protection, rather than looking inward for freedom from the need for protection. The people relied on kings to correct the injustices done by the lords, and on messiahs to destroy the tyranny of the kings. Instead of taking the bold path of mass action from below, it is always safer and wiser to find the "good" ruler who "can make the people happy." The pattern of emancipation from above is repeated throughout the history of civilization, and is also evident in socialism. But it is only within the framework of the modern socialist movement that liberation from below can become a realistic aspiration; within socialism, such an aspiration begins to emerge, but in fits and starts. The history of socialism can be read as a continuous but repeatedly failed effort to free itself from the old tradition, the tradition of emancipation from above.

Convinced that the current crisis of socialism can only be understood in terms of this great division within the socialist tradition, we will move on to some examples of the two souls of socialism.

2. Some socialist "precursors"​

Karl Kautsky, the theoretical leader of the Second International, begins his book on Thomas More with the observation that the two great figures who inaugurate the history of socialism are More and Münzer, and that both "continue a long line of Socialists, from Lycurgus and Pythagoras to Plato, the Gracchi, Catiline, Christ..."

This is a truly impressive list of early "socialists," and Kautsky, considering his position, should have been able to recognize a socialist when he saw one. The most fascinating thing about this list is the way in which, once examined, it breaks down into two very different groups.

Plutarch's life of Lycurgus led the early socialists to accept him as the founder of Spartan "communism," which is why Kautsky includes him in his list. But, as Plutarch describes it, the Spartan system was based on the equal division of land under private ownership; it was not a socialist path. The "collectivist" impression that one might get from a description of the Spartan regime comes from a quite different direction: the very way of life of the Spartan ruling class, organized as a permanent and disciplined garrison under siege; and to this must be added the regime of terror imposed on the helots (slaves). I do not understand how a modern socialist can study the Lycurgus regime without having the feeling that he is not dealing with a forerunner of socialism, but with a precursor of fascism. There is quite a difference! But how is it that the leading theorist of social democracy did not get the same impression?

Pythagoras founded an elitist order which acted as the political arm of the landed aristocracy against the democratic movement of the plebeians; he and his party were finally defeated and expelled by a revolutionary popular uprising. Kautsky seems to be on the wrong side of the barricades! Moreover, within the Pythagorean order a regime of total authoritarianism and regimentation prevailed. Despite all this, Kautsky regards Pythagoras as a socialist precursor because he believes that the organized Pythagoreans practiced communal consumption. Even if this were true (and Kautsky later discovered that it was not), that would make the Pythagorean order just as communist as any monastery can be. Let us mark off Kautsky's list a second precursor of totalitarianism.

The case of Plato's Republic is fairly well known. The only element of "communism" in his ideal state is the precept of monastic-communal consumption for the small elite of "Guardians" constituted by the bureaucracy and the army; but the surrounding social system is taken for granted to be privately owned, not socialist. And—again—Plato's model state is ruled by an aristocratic elite, and his argument emphasizes that democracy inevitably means the deterioration and ruin of society. Plato's political purpose, in fact, was the rehabilitation and purification of the ruling aristocracy in order to combat the tendency toward democracy. To call him a socialist precursor implies a conception of socialism that makes any kind of democratic control irrelevant.

As for the other group, Catiline and the Gracchi have no collectivist aspect. Their names are associated with mass movements of democratic and popular revolts against the established system. They were certainly not socialists, but they were on the popular side in the class struggle in the ancient world, the side of the popular movement from below. For the theorist of social democracy it seems that everything was the same.

Here, in the prehistory of our topic, we find two types of figures claimed for the pantheon of the socialist movement. On the one hand, there are figures with a tinge of (supposed) collectivism, who are completely elitist, authoritarian and anti-democratic; and on the other hand, there are figures without any kind of collectivism around them, associated with democratic class struggles. There is a collectivist tendency without democracy, and there is a democratic tendency without collectivism, but there is still nothing that unites the two currents .

The suggestion of such a union does not come to us until Thomas Münzer, the leader of the left wing of the German reform movement; a social movement with communist ideas (Münzer's) that was also engaged in an intense popular democratic struggle from below. A contrast to this is precisely Sir Thomas More: the gulf that separates these two contemporaries goes to the heart of our subject. More's Utopia designs a completely regimented society, more reminiscent of the society in George Orwell's novel, 1984 , than of socialist democracy: elitist through and through, even admitting slave ownership, a typical socialism from above. It is not surprising that, of these two "socialist precursors" standing on the threshold of the modern world, one of them (More) should abhor the other and support the executioners who brought Münzer and his movement to their deaths.

What then was the meaning of socialism when it first appeared in the world? From the very beginning, it stood between the two souls of socialism, at war with each other.

3. The first modern socialists​

Modern socialism was born during the half-century or so between the Great French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. So was modern democracy. But they were not born together like Siamese twins. At first, they moved along separate lines.

When were both lines first cut?

Since the collapse of the French Revolution, different types of socialism have emerged. We will consider three of the most important ones in the light of our question.

1) Babeuf: The first modern socialist movement was led in the last phase of the French Revolution by Babeuf ("the conspiracy of the Equals"), conceived as a continuation of revolutionary Jacobinism with the addition of a more consistent social objective: a communist society of equality. This is the first occasion in the modern era in which the socialist idea is united with the idea of a popular movement, a combination of enormous importance.

This combination immediately raises a critical question: What exactly is the relationship that is conceived in each case between this socialist idea and this popular movement? This is the key question for socialism for the next 200 years.

Babeuf's followers understand this relationship in the following way: the popular mass movement has failed; it seems that the people have turned their back on the revolution. However, the people are suffering and need communism, we know that. The revolutionary will of the people has been defeated by a conspiracy of the right: we need a conspiracy of the left to recreate the popular movement, to carry out the revolutionary will. We must, therefore, take power. But the people are no longer ready for this. It is therefore necessary for us to take power in their name, to raise the people to that height. This requires a temporary dictatorship, which is really of a minority; but it would be an educational dictatorship, with the purpose of creating the conditions that would make democratic control possible in the future (In this sense they are democrats). It would not be a dictatorship of the people, as was the Commune, still less of the proletariat; it is, frankly, a dictatorship over the people, with very good intentions.

For the next 50 years or so, the conception of educational dictatorship over the people remained the programme of the revolutionary left: through the three Bs (Babeuf, Buonarroti and Blanqui) and, with anarchist verbiage added, through Bakunin. The new order will be handed over to the suffering people by the revolutionary band. This typical socialism from above is the first and most primitive form of revolutionary socialism, but there are still admirers of Castro and Mao who believe it is the last word in revolutionism.

2) Saint Simon: Coming out of the revolutionary period, a brilliant mind took a completely different direction. What drove Saint Simon was his repulsion to revolution, disorder and unrest. What fascinated him were the potentialities of industry and science.

His vision had nothing to do with anything like equality, justice, liberty, human rights, or any such passions: he was interested only in modernization, industrialization, planning, divorced from the above considerations. Planned industrialization was the key to the new world, and, obviously, the people who would carry this out were the oligarchies of financiers and businessmen, scientists, technologists, managers. When not appealing to such quarters, Saint-Simon called on Napoleon or his successor Louis XVIII to implement plans for a royal dictatorship. His plans changed, but they were all thoroughly authoritarian, down to the last planned ordinance. A systematic racist and militant imperialist, he was a rabid enemy of the very idea of equality and liberty, which he hated as descendants of the French Revolution.

Only in the last phase of his life (1825), disappointed by the response of the natural elite to his calls to do their duty and impose a new, modernizing oligarchy, did he turn to the workers below. The "New Christianity" would be a popular movement, but its role would be reduced to persuading the powers that be to heed the advice given by the Saint-Simonian planners. The workers would organize themselves... to call on their capitalists and their leaders to replace the "leisure classes."

What was the relationship he established between the idea of a planned society and the popular movement? The people, the movement, could be useful as a battering ram – if placed in the right hands. Saint Simon's ultimate conception was a movement from below to achieve a socialism from above . But power and the capacity to control had to remain where they had always been: at the top.

3) The Utopians: A third type of socialism that arose in the post-revolutionary generation was that of the truly utopian socialists: Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Etienne Cabet, etc. They designed an ideal communal colony, straight out of the brain of the leader, to be financed by the grace of rich philanthropists under the protection of benevolent power.

Owen (in many ways the best of the lot) was as categorical as any of them: "This great change... should and could be brought about by the rich and powerful. There are no others to do it... for the poor to oppose the rich and powerful is a waste of time, talent, and money..." Owen was evidently against "class hatred," class struggle. Of the many who have believed this, few have written so frankly that the purpose of this "socialism" is "to govern or treat the whole society as the most advanced physician governs and treats his patients in the most well-organized lunatic asylum," with "patience and kindness" for the unfortunates who "have been brought to that position by the irrationality and injustice of the present highly irrational social system."

Cabet's model of society provided for elections, but not free discussion; he insistently imposed a controlled press, systematic indoctrination and a completely regulated uniformity.

For these utopian socialists, what was the relationship between the socialist idea and the popular movement? The latter was the flock that had to be guarded by the good shepherd. It should not be assumed that socialism from above necessarily implies cruelly despotic intentions.

4. Marx's contribution​

Utopianism was elitist and anti-democratic in essence because it was utopian, that is, because it sought to impose a ready-made model, inventing a plan that had to be applied. Above all, it was inherent in hostility towards the idea of transforming society from below, through the disturbing intervention of the masses in search of their liberation, even in those cases where it finally accepted resorting to the mass movement as an instrument of pressure on the leaders. In the socialist movement, as it developed before Marx, the line of the socialist idea never intersected with the line of democracy from below.

This intersection, this synthesis, was Marx's great contribution: compared to it, the entire content of Capital is secondary. What he united was revolutionary socialism with revolutionary democracy. This is the heart of Marxism: "This is the law; everything else is commentary." The Communist Manifesto of 1848 expresses the self-consciousness of the first movement (in Engels' words) "whose idea was from the very beginning that the emancipation of the workers should be the work of the workers themselves."

Marx himself passed through the most primitive stage in his youth, just as the human embryo emerges through the gill stage; to put it another way, one of his first immunizations was by catching that most omnipresent of all diseases, the illusion of a savior-despot. When Marx was 22, the old Kaiser died, and Frederick William IV came to the throne amid liberal hosannas and expectations of democratic reforms from above. None of this happened. Marx never returned to that idea which has bedeviled all socialism with its hopes for savior-dictators or presidents.

Marx entered politics as the editor of a newspaper which was the organ of the extreme left of liberal democracy in the industrialised Rhineland, and soon became the main editorial expression of all political democracy in Germany. His first article was a polemic in favour of unlimited freedom of the press in the face of any state censorship. When the imperial government imposed his dismissal, Marx was already in contact with the new socialist ideas coming from France. When this outstanding spokesman for liberal democracy became a socialist, he still saw in this task the triumph of democracy, although now democracy had a broader meaning. Marx was the first socialist thinker and leader who came to socialism through the struggle for liberal democracy.

In handwritten notes made in 1844, he rejected the existing "vulgar communism" that denied human personality, and aspired to a communism that would be a "fully developed humanism." In 1845, he and his friend Engels developed an argument against the elitism of a socialist current represented by Bruno Bauer. In 1846 they organized the "German Democratic Communists" in exile in Brussels, and Engels wrote: "In our time, democracy and communism are one and the same thing." "Only the proletariat will be able to truly fraternize under the banner of communist democracy..."

In elaborating the first point of view that united the new communist idea with new democratic aspirations, they came into conflict with existing communist sects, such as Weitling's, which dreamed of a messianic dictatorship. Before joining the group that would become the Communist League (for which they would write the Communist Manifesto ), they demanded that the organization cease to be an old-style conspiratorial elite and become an open propaganda group, that "everything that leads to superstitious authoritarianism be removed from the statutes," that the leadership committee be elected by the membership as a whole, against the tradition of "decisions from above." They won the League over to their new approach, and in the newspaper published in 1847, a few months before the Communist Manifesto , the group announced:
"We are not among those communists who aspire to destroy personal freedom, who wish to turn the world into one vast barracks or one gigantic asylum. It is true that there are some communists who, in a simplistic way, refuse to tolerate personal freedom and would like to eliminate it from the world, because they consider it an obstacle to complete harmony. But we have no intention of exchanging freedom for equality. We are convinced... that in no social order can personal freedom be so assured as in a society based on communal property... Let us set to work to establish a democratic state in which each party could win, by speaking or writing, the majority for its ideas..."

The Communist Manifesto , which resulted from these discussions, proclaimed that the first aim of the revolution was to "win the battle of democracy." When, two years later and after the decline of the revolutions of 1848, the Communist League broke up, it was once again in conflict with the "vulgar communism" of the putschists, who wanted to substitute certain bands of revolutionaries for the real mass movement of a conscious working class. Marx told them:
"The minority... makes mere will the driving force of the revolution, instead of real relations. Where we say to the workers: "You will have to go through fifteen, twenty or fifty years of civil and international wars, not only to change existing conditions, but also to change yourselves and become qualified for political domination," you, on your part, say to the workers: "We must seize power at once, or else go to sleep."

"To change yourselves and to fit yourselves for political domination" - this is Marx's programme for the workers' movement, against both those who say that the workers can take power any Sunday and those who say that they never can. Thus Marxism was born, in self-conscious struggle against the advocates of educational dictatorship, the saviour dictators, the elitist revolutionaries, the authoritarian communists, the philanthropic do-gooders and the bourgeois liberals. This was Marx's Marxism , not the monstrous caricatures preached under such a label by the establishment professors, who shudder at the irreconcilable spirit of revolutionary opposition to the existing capitalist status quo in Marx, and also by the Stalinists and neo-Stalinists, who have to conceal the fact that Marx declared war on all of their kind.

"It was Marx who ultimately linked the two ideas of socialism and democracy" because he developed a theory that made this synthesis possible for the first time. (The quote is from the autobiography of HG Wells. The inventor of the utopias, of socialism from above, the darkest in all literature, here denounces Marx for this historic step.)

The core of the theory is the following proposition: there is a social majority with an interest and motive to change the system , and that the purpose of socialism can be the education and mobilization of this majority mass. The exploited class, the working class, is ultimately the driving force of the revolution. Therefore, a socialism from below is possible, on the basis of a theory that sees the revolutionary potentialities in the broad masses, even if they seem backward at a given time and place. Capital , after all, is nothing other than the demonstration of the economic basis of this perspective.

Only a theory of workers' socialism of this kind makes possible the fusion of revolutionary socialism with revolutionary democracy. We are not here arguing for our conviction that this belief is justified, but merely insisting on the alternative: all socialists or would-be reformers who reject it are obliged to assume some kind of socialism from above, whether reformist, utopian, bureaucratic, Stalinist, Maoist or Castroist. And so they do.

Five years before the Communist Manifesto , a 23-year-old recent convert to socialism was still writing in the old elitist tradition: "We can recruit adherents from those classes which have enjoyed a fairly good education, that is, in the universities and among the merchants..." The young Engels learned quickly; but this obsolete judgment is still with us.

(...)

 

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(...)Hal Draper : The two souls of socialism
(From 5 to 8)

5. The myth of the "libertarian" character of anarchism​

One of the most profound authoritarians in the history of radicalism is none other than the "father of anarchism," Proudhon, whose name is periodically revived as an example of a great "libertarian," because of his frequent repetition of the word liberty and his calls for "revolution from below."

Some might be condescending and overlook his Hitlerian brand of anti-Semitism ("The Jew is the enemy of mankind. His race must be driven back to Asia or exterminated...") Or his racism in general (he thought the South had a right to keep American blacks in slavery, being the lowest of inferior races). Or his glorification of war for its own sake (much like Mussolini). Or his view that women have no rights ("I deny their political rights and their initiatives. Woman finds her freedom and well-being only in marriage, in motherhood, in domestic duties..." - i.e., the Kinder-Kirche-Küche of the Nazis).

But one cannot excuse his violent opposition not only to trade unionism and the right to strike (even supporting the breaking of strikes by the police), but even to the ideas of voting rights, universal suffrage, popular sovereignty and the very idea of a constitution ("All this democracy disgusts me... I would give anything to charge this mob with my clenched fist"). The characteristics of his ideal society include the suppression of all other groups, the prohibition of any gathering of more than 20 people and of any free press, as well as of any kind of elections; in the same notes he envisaged for the future a "general inquisition" and the condemnation of "some millions of people" to forced labour, "once the revolution is made".

Behind all this was a fierce contempt for the popular masses, the necessary foundation of socialism from above, just as Marxism was based on the opposite sentiment. The masses are corrupt and hopeless ("I adore humanity, but I spit on men"). They are "only savages... whom it is our duty to civilise, without making them our sovereigns", he writes to a friend, whom he scornfully rebukes: "You still believe in the people." Progress, for him, can come only through the authority of an elite that takes care not to give the people sovereignty.

At times, Proudhon sees some despot as the dictator who could bring about the revolution: Louis Bonaparte (in 1852 he wrote an entire book praising the Emperor as the bearer of the revolution); Prince Jerome Bonaparte; finally, Tsar Alexander II ("Let us not forget that the despotism of the Tsar is necessary for civilization").

There was evidently another candidate for the role of dictator, closer to home: himself. He drew up a detailed blueprint for a "mutualist" enterprise, cooperative in form, which would spread by taking over all enterprises and then the state. In his notes, Proudhon places himself as chief director, not subject, of course, to the democratic control he so despises. He has carefully planned many details: "Draw up a secret programme, for all directors: irrevocable elimination of royalty, democracy, property owners, religion [and so on]."
"Managers are the natural representatives of the country. Ministers are simply the top managers or general managers: as I will be one day... When we are the masters, Religion will be what we want it to be, and the same will happen with education, philosophy, justice, administration and government."

The reader, perhaps filled with the usual illusions about the "libertarian" character of anarchism, may wonder: was he lying then when he spoke of his great love for freedom?

Nothing of the sort: it is enough to understand the meaning of anarchist “liberty.” Proudhon writes: “The principle of liberty is that of the Abbé de Thélême (in Rabelais): do what you like!” and this principle means: “any man who cannot do what he likes and whatever he likes, has the right to revolt, even alone, against the government, even if the government is made up of all the others.” The only man who can enjoy this liberty is a despot; this is the meaning of the brilliant insight of Shigalev of Dostoyevsky: “Starting from unlimited liberty, I arrive at unlimited despotism.”

The story is similar with regard to the second "father of anarchism", Bakunin, whose plans for dictatorship and the suppression of democratic control are better known than those of Proudhon.

The basic reason is the same: anarchism is not concerned with the creation of democratic control from below, but only with the destruction of "authority" over individuals, including the authority of the most extremely democratic regulation of society imaginable. This has been made clear by authoritative anarchist authors time and again; for example, George Woodcock: "even where democracy is possible, the anarchist could not support it... Anarchists do not advocate political freedom, but freedom from all politics..."

Anarchism is, in principle, violently anti-democratic, since an ideally democratic authority remains an authority. But since, by rejecting democracy, it has no other way of resolving the inevitable disagreements and differences between the inhabitants of Thélème, its unlimited freedom of each uncontrolled individual is distinguishable from the unlimited despotism of such an individual, both in theory and in practice.

The great problem of our age is the achievement of democratic control from below over the extensive powers of modern social authority . Anarchism, more generous than anyone else in prattling about "anything from below," rejects this goal. It is the flip side of bureaucratic despotism, with all its values inverted, not the solution or the alternative.

7. The Fabian model​

In Germany, following the figure of Lassalle, a series of "socialisms" began to appear, moving in an interesting direction.

The so-called academic socialists ("socialists of the chair" - Kathedersozialisten , a current of the "establishment" academics) placed their hopes in Bismarck even more openly than Lassalle, but their conception of state socialism was not in principle alien to the latter's. The difference was that Lassalle took the risk of promoting a mass movement from below for this purpose (a risk because, once in motion, it could slip out of his hands, as in fact happened more than once). Bismarck himself did not hesitate to present his paternalistic economic policies as a form of socialism, and books were written on "monarchical socialism", "Bismarckian state socialism", etc. Further to the right, we come to the "socialism" of Friedrich List, a proto-Nazi, and to the circles in which an anti-capitalist form of anti-Semitism (Dühring, A. Wagner, etc.) laid part of the groundwork for the movement that called itself socialist under Adolf Hitler.

The trait that unites this whole spectrum, despite all their differences, is the conception of socialism as a mere equivalent to state intervention in the economy and social life . "Staat, greif zu!", Lassalle demanded. "State, take charge of things!" This is the socialism of this whole group.

This is why Schumpeter is right when he observes that the British equivalent of German state socialism is Fabianism, the socialism of Sidney Webb.

The Fabians (or more precisely, the Webbians) are, in the history of the socialist idea, the modern socialist current that developed most completely divorced from Marxism, the most alien to it. It was an almost chemically pure social-democratic reformism, without any admixture, particularly before the rise of the mass labour and socialist movement in Britain, which they did not want and did not help to build (despite a widespread myth to the contrary). Therefore this is a very important test, as opposed to other reformist currents that paid tribute to Marxism, adopting part of its language but distorting its substance.

The Fabians, expressly drawn from the middle class in their composition and influence, did not want to build a mass movement in any sense, let alone a Fabian mass movement. They saw themselves as a small elite of advisers who could permeate existing social institutions, influencing the real leaders in both the conservative and liberal spheres, guiding social development towards their collectivist aims with the "inevitability of gradualism." Since their conception of socialism was limited to state intervention (national or municipal), and since their theory was that capitalism itself was being rapidly collectivised day by day and had to keep moving in that direction, their function was simply to speed up the process. The Fabian Society was projected in 1884 to be the pilot fish of a shark: at first the shark was the Liberal Party; but when the liberal breakthrough failed miserably and the workers finally organised their own class party in spite of the Fabians, the pilot fish was simply added to it.

There is perhaps no other socialist tendency which has worked out its theory of a socialism from above so systematically and consciously. The nature of this movement was recognised early on, though it was later obscured by the dissolution of Fabianism into the body of Labour reformism. A Christian socialist leader within the Fabian Society once branded Webb a "bureaucratic collectivist" (perhaps the first time the term was used). Hilaire Belloc's once famous book ( The Servile State , 1912) was largely provoked by Webb's basically bureaucratic "ideal collectivism". GDH Cole recalls: "The Webbs in those days were fond of saying that anyone who was active in politics was an 'A' or a 'B' - an anarchist or a bureaucrat - and that they were 'B'..."

These characterisations hardly suffice to give us the full flavour of Webb's collectivism, of Fabianism. It was thoroughly dirigiste, technocratic, elitist, authoritarian, 'planning'. For Webb politics was almost synonymous with the manipulation of levers. One Fabian publication wrote that they claimed to be 'the Jesuits of socialism'. Order and efficiency were the gospel. The people, who should be treated kindly, were only capable of being led by competent experts. Class struggle, revolution and popular unrest were harmful. In Fabianism and the Empire imperialism was praised and embraced. If ever the socialist movement developed its own bureaucratic collectivism, it was on this occasion.
"Socialism may be thought to be essentially a movement from below, a class movement," writes a Fabian spokesman, Sidney Ball, to disabuse the reader of that notion; but now socialists "approach the problem from a scientific, not a popular, standpoint; they are middle-class theorists," he boasts, going so far as to say that there is "a clear break between street socialism and academic socialism."
The after-effects are well known, though often obscured. While Fabianism as a special tendency disappeared in 1918 in the broader river of Labour reformism, the Fabian leaders took another direction.

Both Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Bernard Shaw—the leading trio—became principled defenders of the Stalinist totalitarianism of the 1930s. Earlier, Shaw, who thought socialism needed a Superman, found more than one. He supported Mussolini and Hitler as benevolent despots who would give “socialism” to the louts, and was disillusioned only when they did not actually abolish capitalism. In 1931 Shaw revealed, after a visit to Russia, that Stalin’s regime was really Fabianism in practice. The Webbs also went to Moscow, and found God. In their Soviet Communism: A New Civilization , they proved (from Moscow’s own documents and Stalin’s own laboriously researched statements) that Russia was the world’s greatest democracy; Stalin was not a dictator; equality reigned supreme; one-party dictatorship was necessary; The Communist Party was a completely democratic elite that brought civilization to slaves and Mongols (but not to the English); political democracy had failed in the West anyway, and there was no reason why political parties should survive in our time...

They stood firmly by Stalin at the Moscow trials and in the Hitler-Stalin pact without any observable nausea, and died uncritical pro-Stalinists of the kind now no longer to be found even in the Politburo. As Shaw has explained, the Webbs had nothing but contempt for the Russian Revolution as such: "The Webbs waited until the destruction and ruin of change was over, the mistakes were remedied, and the Communist state arose." That is, they waited until the revolutionary masses had been strait-jacketed, the leaders of the revolution deposed, when the effective tranquillity of dictatorship had taken over the scene and counter-revolution had become firmly established; and then they came to proclaim the ideal fulfilled.

Was this really a gigantic deception, an incomprehensible nonsense? Or were they right in thinking that this was indeed the "socialism" that suited their ideology, overlooking a little bloodshed? The turn of Fabianism from the project of influencing the middle class to Stalinism was the swing of a door hinged on socialism from above.

If we look back at the decades before the end of the century when Fabianism was born, another figure emerges, the antithesis of Webb: the leading figure of revolutionary socialism in this period, the poet and artist William Morris, who became a socialist and a Marxist in his early fifties. Morris's writings on socialism breathe the spirit of socialism from below in every pore, just as much as every line of Webb's writing was the opposite. This is perhaps clearest in his profound attacks on Fabianism (for all the right reasons); in his aversion to the "Marxism" of the dictatorial H. M. Hyndman, the British version of Lassalle; in his denunciation of state socialism; and in his repugnance to Bellamy's collectivist bureaucratic utopia, Looking Backward (which prompted him to remark: "If they signed me up for a workers' regime, I would resist tooth and nail.").

Morris's socialist writings are permeated by his emphasis, for the present, on class struggle from below; and, as for the socialist future, his News from Nowhere was written as a direct antithesis to Bellamy's book. He warns us:
"Individuals cannot dump the affairs of life on the shoulders of an abstraction called the State, but must confront them in conscious association with others... The diversity of life is as much an aim of true communism as is equality of conditions, and... nothing but the union of these can lead us to true freedom."

"Even some socialists," he wrote, "are capable of confusing the cooperative machinery, towards which modern life tends, with the essence of socialism itself." This implies "the danger that the community will degenerate into bureaucracy." He thus expressed his fear of a future "collectivist bureaucracy." Reacting violently against state socialism and reformism, he falls into anti-parliamentarism but not into the anarchist trap:
"...The people will have to be involved in the administration, and sometimes there will be different opinions... What to do then? Who should give in? Our anarchist friends say that this should not be done by a majority; in that case, it should be done by a minority. And why? Is there any divine right in a minority?"

This criticism strikes at the heart of anarchism much more deeply than the common view that anarchism's drawback is its over-idealism.

William Morris vs. Sidney Webb: that's one way to sum up this story.

8. The "revisionist" facade​

Eduard Bernstein, the theoretician of Social Democratic "revisionism", was inspired by Fabianism, which had strongly influenced him in his London exile. He did not invent reformist politics in 1896: he simply became its theoretical spokesman. The leader of the party bureaucracy preferred less theory: "One does not say it, one does it, " he told Bernstein, meaning that the politics of German Social Democracy had been emptied of Marxist content long before its theorists reflected the transformation.

But Bernstein did not "revise" Marxism. His role was to uproot it while pretending to prune its withered branches. The Fabians had not had to bother with pretexts, but in Germany it was not possible to destroy Marxism with a frontal attack. The regression to a socialism from above ("die alte Scheisse") was presented as a "modernization", a "revision".

Essentially, like the Fabians, "revisionism" found its socialism in the inevitable collectivisation of capitalism itself; it saw the movement towards socialism as the sum of the collectivist tendencies inherent in capitalism; it aimed at the "autosocialisation" of capitalism from above, by means of the institutions of the existing state. The equation "statisation = socialism" was not an invention of Stalinism, but was systematised by the state socialist, Fabian and revisionist current of social democratic reformism.

Many of the contemporary "discoveries" announcing that capitalism has long since ceased to exist can be found as early as Bernstein, who declared it "absurd" to call Weimar Germany capitalist, given the controls exercised over capitalists. From Bernsteinism it would follow that the Nazi state was even more anti-capitalist, as he claimed...

The transformation of socialism into bureaucratic collectivism is already implicit in Bernstein's attack on workers' democracy. Denouncing the idea of workers' control in industry, he proceeds to redefine democracy. He rejects it as "rule by the people," proposing the negative definition of "absence of class rule." Thus the very notion of workers' democracy as a "sine qua non" of socialism is thrown into the scrapheap, as effectively as the most intelligent of current redefinitions in communist academies. Even political freedom and representative institutions are lost in the redefinition, a theoretical result made all the more impressive by Bernstein not being personally anti-democratic, as were Lassalle or Shaw. It is the theory of socialism from above that compels these formulations. Bernstein is the leading social democrat who theorized not only the equation "statization = socialism," but also the disjunction between socialism and workers' democracy.

It was therefore appropriate that Bernstein came to the conclusion that Marx's hostility to the state was "anarchistic," and that Lassalle was right to rely on the state for the beginning of socialism. "The administrative body of the near future can differ from the present state only in a matter of degree," writes Bernstein; the fact that the "withering away of the state" is nothing but utopian, even under socialism. He, on the contrary, was very practical; for example, when the Kaiser's unextinguished state threw itself into the imperialist scramble for colonies, Bernstein immediately declared himself in favor of imperialism and the "responsibility of the white man": "only a conditional right of the savages to the land they occupy can be recognized; the higher civilization can, in essence, proclaim a higher right."

Bernstein himself contrasted his vision of the road to socialism with that of Marx: Marx's "is the picture of an army marching forward, in a detour, over splinters and stones... Finally it comes upon a great abyss. On the other side beckons the desired goal, the state of the future, which can only be reached across a sea, a red sea , as some have said." Bernstein's vision, by contrast, was not red but rose-colored: class struggle is mitigated into harmony, and a welfare state slowly transforms the bourgeoisie into benevolent bureaucrats. This did not happen: when Bernsteinianized social democracy first crushed the revolutionary left in 1919 and then, by restoring the hardened bourgeoisie and the military to power, it helped drive Germany into the arms of the fascists.

If Bernstein was the theorist of the identification of bureaucratic collectivism and socialism, it was his left opponent in the German movement who became the leading spokesman in the Second International for a revolutionary democratic socialism from below. This was Rosa Luxemburg, who so emphatically placed her trust and hope in the spontaneous struggle of a free working class that the myth-makers invented for her a "theory of spontaneity" which she never had, a theory in which "spontaneity" is contrasted with "leadership."

Within her own movement she fought hard against the "revolutionary" elitists who were rediscovering the theory of the Educational Dictatorship over the Workers (rediscovered in each generation as if it were the real "latest cry"), and wrote: "Without the conscious will and conscious action of the majority of the proletariat there can be no socialism... We shall never assume governmental authority except through the clear and unambiguous will of the great majority of the German working class..." And her famous aphorism: "The mistakes made by a genuine revolutionary workers' movement are far more fruitful and valuable than the infallibility of the best Central Committee."
Rosa Luxemburg versus Eduard Bernstein: this is the German chapter of this story.

(...)

 

[Eltitoguay]

(...)Hal Draper : The two souls of socialism
(From 9 to11 and end)

9. The 100% American scene​

In the origins of American "native socialism" the picture is the same, but to a greater degree. If we ignore the imported "German socialism" (Lassallian with Marxist trappings) of the early Socialist Labour Party, the most important figure is, most prominently, Edward Bellamy and his Looking Backward (1887). Shortly before him had come the now forgotten Laurence Gronlund, whose Cooperative Commonwealth (1884) was extremely influential in its day, selling a hundred thousand copies.

Gronlund was so up-to-date that he did not say he rejected democracy: he simply "redefined" it as "administration by the competent" as opposed to "majority rule," along with a modest proposal to abolish representative government as such and all parties. The "people" want only, he says, "administration that administers well." They should find "appropriate leaders," and then "put all collective power in their hands." Representative government would be replaced by the plebiscite. He is sure that this scheme will work, he explains, because it already works well for the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Naturally, he rejects the horrible idea of class struggle. Workers are incapable of self-emancipation, and he specifically denounces Marx's famous expression of this First Principle. The yokels will be emancipated by a "competent" elite, drawn from the intelligentsia; he once set about organizing a secret, conspiratorial American Socialist Fellowship for students.

Bellamy's socialist utopia in Looking Backward takes the military as its ideal model of a regimented, elite-dominated, hierarchically organized society from the top down, with the pleasant communion of the hive as its great goal. The transition is made, according to the book, through the concentration of society in a great business corporation, with a single capitalist: the state. Universal suffrage is abolished; all grassroots organizations are eliminated; decisions are made from above by technocratic administrators. Here is how one of its followers defined this "American socialism": "Its social idea is a perfectly organized industrial system which, because of the exact meshing of its wheels, would work with a minimum of friction and a maximum of wealth and leisure for all."

As with the anarchists, Bellamy's fanciful solution to the basic problem of social organization - how to resolve differences of ideas and interests between men - was the assumption that the elite would be superhumanly wise and incapable of injustice (essentially the same as the Stalinist totalitarian myth of the infallibility of the party), the essence of this assumption being to make anything like democratic control from below unnecessary. The latter was unthinkable to Bellamy, because the masses, the workers, were simply a dangerous monster, the barbarian horde. The movement based on Bellamy's ideas - which called itself "Nationalism" and originally intended to be both anti-socialist and anti-capitalist - was systematically organized by appealing to the middle class, like the Fabians.

These were the most popular educators of the "native" wing of American socialism, whose views found echo throughout the non-Marxist and anti-Marxist sections of the socialist movement during part of the twentieth century, with a revival of "Bellamy Clubs" even in the 1930s, when John Dewey praised Looking Backward as an exponent of "the American ideal of democracy." Technocracy, already openly fascist in its features, was a direct descendant of this tradition. If one wants to see how fine the line can be between something called socialism and something like fascism, it is instructive to read the monstrous exposition of socialism written by the once famous scientific inventor and Socialist Party dignitary Charles P. Steinmetz. His America and the New Epoch (1916) brings to life, with dull seriousness, exactly the anti-utopia frequently satirized in science-fiction novels. Congress is replaced by senators directly appointed by DuPont, General Motors, and the other major corporations. Steinmetz, presenting the giant monopoly corporations (like his own employer, General Electric) as the ultimate in industrial efficiency, proposed dissolving political government in favor of direct domination by the associated monopoly corporations.

"Bellamism" started many on the road to socialism, but the road forked. Around the turn of the century, American socialism developed the most vibrant antithesis to socialism from above in all its forms: Eugene Debs. In 1897 he was still asking none other than John D. Rockefeller to finance the establishment of a utopian socialist colony in a Western state; but Debs, whose socialism was forged in the class struggle of a militant labor movement, soon found his true voice.

The heart of Debs' socialism was his call for and reliance on the self-activity of the masses from below. Debs' writings and speeches are permeated with this theme. He frequently quoted or paraphrased Marx's "First Principle," using his own words: "The great discovery made by the modern slaves is that they must themselves achieve their freedom. This is the secret of their solidarity, the heart of their hope..." His classic statement is this:
"The workers of the world have waited too long for some Moses to lead them out of their bondage. Such a Moses has not come, nor will he. I would not lead you out of it, even if I could; for if you could be led out, you could also be led back to it. I aspire to convince you that there is nothing you cannot do for yourselves."

It echoes Marx's words in 1850:
"In the struggle of the working class to free itself from wage slavery, it cannot be overemphasized that everything depends on the working class itself. The simple question is, can the workers enable themselves, by education, organization, co-operation and self-imposed discipline, to take control of the productive forces and the direction of industry in the interest of the people and for the benefit of society? That is all."

Can workers empower themselves...? He had no naive illusions as to what the working class was (or is). But he proposed a different goal from that of the elitists whose only wisdom is to point out the backwardness of the people and to teach that it will always be so. Against the faith in the domination of an elite from above, Debs opposed the directly contrary notion of the revolutionary vanguard (also a minority) which his ideas push to recommend a firmer path to the majority:
"It is the minorities who have made the history of this world [he says at the 1917 anti-war rally, for which the Wilson government imprisoned him]. It is the few who have had the courage to take their place at the front; who have been true enough to themselves to speak the truth that was within them; who have risked opposition to the established order of things; who have espoused the cause of the suffering and struggling poor; who have upheld, without thought of personal consequences, the cause of freedom and justice."

"Debsian socialism" evoked a tremendous response in the hearts of the people, but Debs had no successor as a tribune of revolutionary democratic socialism. After the period of postwar radicalization, the Socialist Party, on the one hand, became rosily respectable, and the Communist Party, on the other, became Stalinized. For its part, American liberalism had been developing a process of "statification," which culminated in the 1930s in the great illusion of the New Deal. The elitist dream of "tutelage from above" attracted a whole class of liberals for whom the country aristocrat in the White House was what Bismarck was for Lassalle.

The herald of this kind of people was Lincoln Steffens, the collectivist liberal who (like Shaw and Georges Sorel) was as attracted to Mussolini as to Moscow, and for the same reasons. Upton Sinclair, leaving the Socialist Party as too "sectarian," launched his "broad" movement to "End Poverty in California" with a manifesto appropriately titled "I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty" (probably the only radical manifesto with two "I's" in the title) on the theme of "socialism from above in Sacramento." One of the typical figures of the time was Stuart Chase, who zigzagged from the reformism of the League for Industrial Democracy to the semi-fascism of Technocracy. There were Stalinist intellectuals who subliminated their combined admiration for Roosevelt and for Russia by hailing both the NRA [a centerpiece of Roosevelt's policy] and the Moscow trials. Another sign of the times was Paul Blanshard, who left the Socialist Party for Roosevelt, giving as his reason that the New Deal's "managed capitalism" program had taken the lead in economic change over the socialists.

The New Deal, often aptly called "America's social democratic period," was also the great adventure of liberals and social democrats with socialism from above, Roosevelt's utopia of "people's monarchy." Roosevelt's illusion of "revolution from above" united gradualist socialism, bureaucratic liberalism, Stalinist elitism, and illusions about Russian collectivism and collectivized capitalism in a single package.

10. Six subtypes of socialism from above​

There are several different styles or currents of socialism from above. They are often intertwined, but let us separate some of their most important aspects in order to take a closer look at them.

i) Philanthropism: Socialism (or "freedom" or whatever) must be given, for the "good of the people," by the rich and powerful, out of the goodness of their hearts. As the Communist Manifesto put it, with early utopians like Robert Owen in mind, "For them the proletariat exists only as the class that suffers most." In gratitude, the oppressed poor must above all beware of nonsense about class struggle or self-emancipation. This aspect must be considered as a particular case of:

ii) Elitism: We have mentioned a few cases concerning the conviction that socialism is the business of a new dominant minority, of a non-capitalist nature and therefore with guarantees of purity, imposing its own domination either temporarily (simply for a historical period) or permanently. In any case, this new dominant class is assigned the objective of an educational Dictatorship over the masses - to do them good, of course - with the dictatorship being exercised by an elite party that suppresses all control from below, or by benevolent despots or savior leaders of some kind, or by Shaw's "Supermen", by genetic manipulators, by Proudhon's "anarchist" managers, by Saint Simon's technocrats or by their more modern equivalents, using terms and verbal curtains that allow these conceptions to be proclaimed as a new social theory, as opposed to "nineteenth-century Marxism".

On the other hand, revolutionary democrats who are partisans of socialism from below have always been a minority, but the gap between the elitist perspective and the vanguard perspective is crucial, as we have seen in the case of Debs. For him, as for Marx and Luxemburg, the function of the revolutionary vanguard is to push the majority mass to empower itself in order to take power in its own name , through its own struggles. This is not a question of denying the decisive importance of minorities, but of establishing a different relationship between the advanced minority and the more backward masses.

iii) Planning: The key words are Efficiency, Order, Planning, System and Regulation. Socialism is reduced to social engineering, carried out by a Power over society. Once again, this is not to deny that effective socialism requires global planning (or that efficiency and order are good things); but the reduction of socialism to planned production is something entirely different, just as an effective democracy requires the right to vote, but the reduction of democracy to the right to vote from time to time is a fraud.

In fact, it would be important to show that the separation of the plan from democratic control from below makes a mockery of planning itself, for the immensely complex industrial societies of today cannot be effectively planned by means of the dictates of an all-powerful central committee, which inhibits and represses the free play of initiative and correction from below. This is, in fact, the basic contradiction of the new type of system of social exploitation represented by Soviet bureaucratic collectivism. But we cannot pursue this subject any further here.

The substitution of planning for socialism has a very long history, apart from its embodiment in the Soviet myth that "Statization = Socialism" , a dogma which, as we have seen, was first systematized by social-democratic reformism (Bernstein and the Fabians in particular). During the 1930s the mystique of the "Plan", borrowed in part from Soviet propaganda, came to have great prominence in the right wing of social democracy, with Henri de Man proclaimed as its prophet and as Marx's successor. De Man gradually disappeared from view and is now forgotten because he made the mistake of carrying his revisionist theories first into corporatism and then into collaboration with the Nazis.

Apart from theoretical constructs, Planningism appears in the socialist movement very often embodied in a certain psychological type of radical person. In fairness, one of the first descriptions of such a type is found in Belloc's The Servile State , with the Fabians in mind. This type, Belloc writes:
"He loves the collectivist ideal for its own sake... because it is a form of ordered and regulated society. He likes to contemplate the ideal of a State in which land and capital are under the dominion of officials who will order other men around and who will also preserve them from the consequences of their vices, their ignorance and their folly... In it the exploitation of man does not provoke indignation. In fact, neither indignation nor any other passion of life is familiar to him... [Belloc's eyes are here fixed on Sidney Webb]... the prospect of an extensive bureaucracy under which all life would be catalogued and fixed to some simple schemes... gives his little stomach a definite satisfaction."

As for contemporary examples with a pro-Stalinist colouration, many can be found in the pages of Paul Sweezy's journal, Monthly Review 3.

In a 1930 article on "Motor Models of Socialism," written when he still thought of himself as a Leninist, Max Eastman credited this type with being focused on "efficient and intelligent organization... a real passion for the plan... competent organization."

For such a guy, says Eastman, Stalin's Russia holds a fascination:
"It is a region which at least deserves to be excused in other countries, certainly not censured from the point of view of a mad dream like the emancipation of the workers and, with it, of all humanity. For those who built the Marxist movement and who organised its victory in Russia, this mad dream was their central motive. They were, though some are now prone to forget it, extremely rebellious against oppression. Lenin will perhaps stand out, when the shock caused by his ideas subsides, as the greatest rebel in history. His greatest passion was the liberation of man... If a single concept must be chosen to sum up the aim of the class struggle as defined in Marxist writings, and especially in the writings of Lenin, its name is human freedom ..."

It could be added that Lenin more than once defined the aspirations for total planning as a "bureaucratic utopia."

There is a subdivision within Planningism which deserves a name of its own: let us call it Productivism. We are all, of course, in favour of production, just as we are in favour of Virtue and the Good Life; but for this type, production is the decisive test and end of a society. Russian bureaucratic collectivism is "progressive" because of the statistics of pig iron production (this same type usually ignores the impressive statistics of increased production under Nazi or Japanese capitalism). It is permissible to destroy or prevent free trade unionism under Nasser, Castro, Sukarno or Nkruma, because there is something, known as "economic development", which is superior to human rights. This harsh view was not invented by radicals, of course, but by the cruel exploiters of labour in the capitalist Industrial Revolution; and the socialist movement was born by bitterly fighting these theorists of "progressive" exploitation. However, apologists for modern "leftist" authoritarian regimes tend to regard this old doctrine as the newest revelation of sociology.

iv) "Communism": In his 1930 article, Max Eastman called this the "fraternal union model" of "gregarious or human solidarity socialists... desiring human solidarity, with a mixture of religious mysticism and animal gregariousness." This is not to be confused with the idea of solidarity in strikes, etc., and nor is it necessarily to be identified with what is called comradeship in the socialist movement or the "sense of community" elsewhere. Its specific content, as Eastman says, is "the search for immersion in a Totality, seeking to lose oneself in the bosom of a substitute for God."

Eastman is referring here to the Communist Party writer Mike Gold; another excellent example is Harry F. Ward, the religious fellow-traveller of the Communist Party, whose books theorize this kind of "oceanic" longing to shed one's individuality. The notebooks of the American writer Bellamy reveal a classic case in point: he writes of nostalgia "for absorption in the great omnipotence of the universe"; his "Religion of Solidarity" reflects his distrust of the individualism of personality, his desire to dissolve the Self in communion with something higher.

This distortion is very prominent in some of the more authoritarian partisans of socialism from above, and it is not uncommon to find it in more moderate cases, such as the philanthropic elitists of Christian socialist views. Naturally, this type of "communist" socialism is always proclaimed as an "ethical socialism" and praised for its horror of class struggle; there should be no conflict within a hive. This type tends to contrast "collectivism" with "individualism" (a false opposition from a humanistic point of view), but what it really impugns is individuality .

v) Penetrationism: Socialism from above has many varieties for the simple reason that there are always many alternatives to self-mobilization of the masses from below; but the cases discussed tend to fall into two families.

One of them has the perspective of overthrowing the existing hierarchical capitalist society, to replace it by a new non-capitalist type of hierarchical society, based on a new type of elite and ruling class (such variants are usually labeled "revolutionary" in histories of socialism). The other has the perspective of penetrating the power centers of the existing society, to metamorphose it—gradually, inevitably—into a state-run collectivism, perhaps as, molecule by molecule, wood petrifies into agate. This is the hallmark of the reformist, social-democratic varieties of socialism from above.

The term penetrationism itself was invented as a self-description of what we have called the "purest" variety of reformism ever seen, the Fabianism of Sidney Webb. All social-democratic penetrationism is based on a theory of mechanical inevitability : the inevitable self-collectivisation of capitalism from above, which is equated with socialism. Pressure from below (when it is considered permissible) can accelerate and drive the process, provided it remains under control so as not to frighten the self-collectivisers. Social-democratic penetrationists are therefore not only willing but eager to "join the establishment" rather than fight it, to the extent that their capacity allows, either as manoeuvres or as ministers. Characteristically, the function they give to the movement from below is fundamentally that of blackmailing the ruling powers into paying them with such penetration opportunities.

The tendency towards the collectivisation of capitalism is indeed a reality: as we have seen, it means the bureaucratic collectivisation of capitalism. To the extent that this process has advanced, contemporary social democrats have also undergone a metamorphosis. Today, the leading theorist of this neo-reformism, CAR Crosland, denounces as "extremist" the bland declaration in favour of nationalisation which was originally written into the programme of British Labour by none other than Sidney Webb (with Arthur Henderson)! The large number of continental social democracies which have now purged their programmes of any specifically anti-capitalist content - a remarkable new phenomenon in socialist history - reflects the extent to which the development of the process of bureaucratic collectivisation is accepted as a delivery in instalments of petrified "socialism".

This is penetrationism as a grand strategy. It leads, of course, to penetrationism as a political tactic, a topic we cannot develop here beyond mentioning its most important current form in the United States: the policy of supporting the Democratic Party and the lib-lab (liberal/labor) coalition around the "Johnson Consensus," its predecessors and its successors.

The distinction between these two "families" of socialism from above holds true for home-grown socialisms from Babeuf to Harold Wilson; that is, those cases where the social base of the given socialist current is to be found within the national system, whether it be the labour aristocracy or declassed elements or whatever. The case is somewhat different for the "socialism from without" represented by the modern communist parties, whose strategy and tactics depend in the last analysis on a power whose base is external to any of the domestic social strata; that is, on the bureaucratic-collectivist ruling classes of the East.

Communist parties have proved especially different from any kind of home-grown movement in their ability to alternate or combine both "revolutionary" oppositionism and penetrationist tactics as they saw fit. Thus the American Communist Party would swing from its adventurous, ultra-left "Third Period" of 1928-34 to the ultra-penetrationist Popular Front period, back to an incendiary "revolutionism" during the Hitler-Stalin pact period, and so on, following the ebbs and flows of the Cold War, combining both tactics to varying degrees. With the split of the Communist current along the Moscow and Peking lines, the "Khrushchevites" and the Maoists each tended to embody one of the two tactics they had previously alternated between.

Frequently, therefore, the official Communist Party and the Social Democrats tend to converge in the policy of penetrationism, although from the angles of different socialisms from above.

vi) Socialism from the Outside: The preceding varieties of socialism from above look to the summits of society. We now turn to the case where the expectations for relief are placed on the outside.

The cult of flying saucers is a pathological form of the more traditional messianism, where "out" means out of this world; but in this case "out" means outside the social struggle in one's own country . For the communists of Eastern Europe after World War II, the New Order had to be imported by Russian bayonets; for the German Social Democrats in exile, the liberation of their own people was only imaginable thanks to foreign military victory.

In peacetime, this type of socialism is presented as an exemplary model. This was evidently the method of the old Utopians, who built their model colonies in remote American lands in order to demonstrate the superiority of their system and to convert non-believers. Today, this substitute for social struggle itself is increasingly becoming the essential hope of the communist movement in the West.

The exemplary model is Russia (or China, for the Maoists); and, although it is difficult to make the fate of the Russian proletarians even semi-attractive to workers in the West, even with a generous dose of lies, there are two other approaches with a better chance of success:

a) The relatively privileged position of executives, bureaucrats and intellectual lackeys within the Russian collectivist system can be contrasted with the situation in the West, where these same elements are subordinated to the owners of capital and the manipulators of wealth. Here, the appeal of the Soviet system of state-run economy coincides with that historically achieved by middle-class socialisms: to dissatisfied elements among intellectuals, technicians, scientists, bureaucratic administrators and organisational men of various kinds, who can more easily identify with a new ruling class based on state power rather than on the power of money and property, and who therefore see themselves as the new men of power in a non-capitalist but elitist system.

b) While official communist parties are obliged to maintain the mask of orthodoxy in relation to something called "Marxism-Leninism", it is more often than not that some serious theorists of neo-Stalinism who are not tied to the party find themselves free from the need to pretend. One of its developments is the open abandonment of any prospect of victory through social struggle within the capitalist countries. "World revolution" is equated simply with the demonstration by communist states that their system is superior. This has already been expressed in thesis form by the leading theorists of neo-Stalinism, Paul Sweezy and Isaac Deutscher.

Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capitalism (1966) flatly rejects "the answer of traditional Marxist orthodoxy: that the industrial proletariat must ultimately rise in revolution against its capitalist oppressors." The same is true of other disadvantaged groups in society - the unemployed, peasants, the ghetto masses, etc. - since they cannot "constitute a coherent force in society."

This leaves no way out: capitalism cannot be effectively changed from within. How then? Someday, the authors explain on their last page, "perhaps not in the present century," people will become disillusioned with capitalism, "when the world revolution spreads and when the socialist countries show by their example that it is possible" to build a rational society [emphasis added]. That is all. Thus the Marxist phrases filling the other 366 pages of this essay are reduced simply to an incantation like the reading of the Sermon on the Mount in St. Patrick's Cathedral.

The same perspective is presented, less abruptly, by a writer more given to circumlocution, in Deutscher's The Great Contest . Deutscher conveys the new Soviet theory that "Western capitalism will collapse not so much—or at least not directly—because of its own crises and contradictions inherent in it, as because of its inability to compete with the achievements of socialism [i.e., communist states]"; and then he says: "It must be said that this replaces to a certain extent the Marxist perspective of permanent revolution." Here we have a rational theorization of what has long been the practice of the communist movement in the West: to act as a border guard and cover for the competing, rival system in the East. Above all, the perspective of socialism from below is as alien to these professors of bureaucratic collectivism as it is to the apologists for capitalism in the American academies.

This type of neo-Stalinist ideology is often critical of the present Soviet regime. A good example of this is Deutscher, who is as far from being an uncritical apologist for Moscow as the official communists can be. They must be regarded as penetrationists with regard to bureaucratic collectivism . What is seen as "socialism from without" from the capitalist world is a kind of Fabianism seen from within the realm of the communist system. In this context, change from above alone is a firm principle of these theorists, as it was of Sidney Webb. This was demonstrated, inter alia, by Deutscher's hostile reaction to the 1953 revolt in East Germany and the 1956 Hungarian revolution, on the now classic grounds that such uprisings from below might frighten the Soviet establishment off its course of "liberalization" by the Inevitability of Graduality.

11. Which side are you on?​

From the standpoint of intellectuals who have a choice of what role to play in the social struggle, the prospect of socialism from below has historically been unattractive. Even within the socialist movement, it has had few consistent supporters and not many more inconsistent ones. Outside the socialist movement, naturally, the standard line is that such ideas are visionary, impractical, unrealistic, "utopian" - idealistic perhaps, but quixotic. The popular masses are congenitally stupid, corrupt, apathetic and generally useless; progressive changes must come from "Superior People" like - by chance - the intellectual expressing these sentiments. All this translates theoretically into an Iron Law of Oligarchy or a Tin Law of Elitism, one way or another implying a crude theory of the inevitability of change from above alone.

Without pretending to review in a few words the arguments for and against this omnipresent opinion, we can note the social role it plays, as the self-justifying rite of the elitists. In "normal" times, when the masses are not in motion, theory is simply required to point this out with contempt, while the whole history of revolution and social upheaval is simply dismissed as obsolete. But repeated social unrest and revolutionary upheaval, defined precisely by the intrusion into history of the previously quiescent masses, and characteristic of periods when fundamental social change is put on the order of the day, are just as "normal" in history as the intervening periods of conservatism. When the elitist theorist has to abandon, therefore, the position of an observing scientist who merely predicted that the mass of people would always remain at rest, when he is confronted with the opposite reality of revolutionary masses attempting to subvert the power structure, then it is typical that he has no qualms about moving onto a very different path: denouncing mass intervention as evil in itself.

The fact is that for the intellectual the choice between socialism from above and socialism from below is basically a moral choice , while for the working masses who have no social alternative it is a matter of necessity. The intellectual may have the option of "joining the Establishment" when the workers do not; the same is true for trade union leaders, who, by rising above their class, also have a choice they did not have before. The pressure to conform to the mores of the ruling class, the pressure for bourgeoisification, are proportional to the degree to which personal and organisational ties with the rank and file are weakened. It is not difficult for an intellectual or a bureaucratised trade union boss to convince himself that penetration into the existing power and adaptation to it is the shrewdest course, when (by chance) it also allows one to share the advantages of influence and opulence.

It is an ironic fact, therefore, that the "Iron Law of Oligarchy" is ironclad mainly because of the intellectual elements from which it comes. As a social stratum (that is, leaving aside exceptional individuals) intellectuals have never been known to rise up against the established power in the way that the modern working class has done time and again in its relatively short history. Typically acting as the ideological lackeys of the established masters of society, the non-property-owning section of the middle classes, engaged in intellectual work, nevertheless finds itself at the same time discontented and ill-humoured by its treatment. Like many other servants, this Admirable Crichton thinks "I am better than my master, and if things were different we would see who would bow down." More than ever in our day, when the credit of the capitalist system is disintegrating throughout the world, he readily dreams of a form of society in which he can act as he pleases, in which the Brain rules and not the hands and wealth; in which he and his ilk would be freed from the pressure of Property through the elimination of capitalism, and freed from the pressure of the masses through the elimination of democracy.

Nor need his dream go very far, for there are versions of such a society before his eyes, in the collectivisms of the East. Even when he rejects these versions, for various reasons, including the Cold War, he can theorize his own version of a "good" kind of bureaucratic collectivism, called in the US "meritocracy," "managerism," "industrialism," or whatever else you like; or "African socialism" in Ghana and "Arab socialism" in Cairo; or many other kinds of socialism elsewhere in the world.

The nature of the choice between socialism from above and socialism from below is seen most clearly in relation to a question on which there is a considerable degree of agreement among liberal, social-democratic and Stalinist intellectuals today. This is the supposed inevitability of authoritarian dictatorships (benevolent despotisms) in the new states developing, particularly in Africa and Asia - Nkruma, Nasser, Sukarno and others - dictators who destroy independent trade unions and all political opposition, organizing the exploitation of labor for the purpose of maximizing it, sucking the blood of the working masses to extract enough capital to accelerate industrialization at the pace desired by the new masters. Thus, to an unprecedented extent, "progressive" circles that would once have protested against any injustice have become apologists for any authoritarianism that is considered non-capitalist.

Apart from the reasons of economic determinism usually given for this position, there are two aspects of the issue that shed light on what is really at stake:
a) The economic argument for dictatorship, which purports to demonstrate the need for "run-on-a-row" industrialization, is undoubtedly very compelling for the new bureaucratic masters - who, significantly, do not stint on their own income and aggrandizement - but it is incapable of convincing the worker at the bottom that he and his family must bow to super-exploitation and over-exertion for several generations for the sake of rapid capital accumulation. (Indeed, this is why "run-on-a-row" industrialization demands dictatorial controls.)

The economic-deterministic argument is the rationalization of the point of view of a ruling class; it makes human sense only from that point of view, which, obviously, always claims to identify itself with the needs of "society." It is equally sensible that the workers who occupy the lowest rungs of society must oppose this super-exploitation in order to defend their basic human dignity and well-being. This was the case during the Industrial Revolution, when the "new developing countries" were in Europe.

It is not just a question of technical and economic arguments, but of different sides in the class struggle. The question is: Which side are you on?

(b) It is argued that the popular masses in these countries are too backward to control society and its government; and this is undoubtedly true, and not only there. But what follows from this? How does a people or a class become capable of governing in its own name?

Only by fighting for it. Only by waging their struggle against oppression: the oppression exercised by those who tell them that they are not fit to rule. Only by fighting for democratic power will they educate themselves and rise to the level where they will be able to exercise this power. There has never been any other way for any class.

Although we have considered a particular apologetic line, the two points made apply in fact to the whole world, in every country, whether advanced or developed, capitalist or Stalinist. When the demonstrations and boycotts of the blacks in the South of the USA were putting President Johnson in a difficult position in the run-up to the elections, the question was: Which side are you on? When the Hungarian people were revolting against the Russian invader, the question was: Which side are you on? When the Algerian people were fighting for their liberation against the "socialist" government of Guy Mollet, the question was: Which side are you on? When Cuba was invaded by Washington's puppets, the question was: Which side are you on? And when the Cuban trade unions are subjugated by the commissars of the dictatorship, the question is also: Which side are you on?

Since the beginning of society, there have been endless theories "proving" that tyranny is inevitable and that freedom in democracy is impossible; there is no ideology more convenient to a ruling class and its intellectual lackeys. These are self-fulfilling predictions, since they are only true as long as they are taken as true. In the last analysis, the only way to prove them false is through struggle itself. This struggle from below has never been stopped by theories from above, and it has changed the world time and again. To choose any form of socialism from above is to look back to the old world, to the "old shit." To choose the path of socialism from below is to affirm the beginning of a new world.

 

[Shua1991]

(...)Hal Draper : The two souls of socialism
(From 9 to11 and end)

9. The 100% American scene​

In the origins of American "native socialism" the picture is the same, but to a greater degree. If we ignore the imported "German socialism" (Lassallian with Marxist trappings) of the early Socialist Labour Party, the most important figure is, most prominently, Edward Bellamy and his Looking Backward (1887). Shortly before him had come the now forgotten Laurence Gronlund, whose Cooperative Commonwealth (1884) was extremely influential in its day, selling a hundred thousand copies.

Gronlund was so up-to-date that he did not say he rejected democracy: he simply "redefined" it as "administration by the competent" as opposed to "majority rule," along with a modest proposal to abolish representative government as such and all parties. The "people" want only, he says, "administration that administers well." They should find "appropriate leaders," and then "put all collective power in their hands." Representative government would be replaced by the plebiscite. He is sure that this scheme will work, he explains, because it already works well for the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Naturally, he rejects the horrible idea of class struggle. Workers are incapable of self-emancipation, and he specifically denounces Marx's famous expression of this First Principle. The yokels will be emancipated by a "competent" elite, drawn from the intelligentsia; he once set about organizing a secret, conspiratorial American Socialist Fellowship for students.

Bellamy's socialist utopia in Looking Backward takes the military as its ideal model of a regimented, elite-dominated, hierarchically organized society from the top down, with the pleasant communion of the hive as its great goal. The transition is made, according to the book, through the concentration of society in a great business corporation, with a single capitalist: the state. Universal suffrage is abolished; all grassroots organizations are eliminated; decisions are made from above by technocratic administrators. Here is how one of its followers defined this "American socialism": "Its social idea is a perfectly organized industrial system which, because of the exact meshing of its wheels, would work with a minimum of friction and a maximum of wealth and leisure for all."

As with the anarchists, Bellamy's fanciful solution to the basic problem of social organization - how to resolve differences of ideas and interests between men - was the assumption that the elite would be superhumanly wise and incapable of injustice (essentially the same as the Stalinist totalitarian myth of the infallibility of the party), the essence of this assumption being to make anything like democratic control from below unnecessary. The latter was unthinkable to Bellamy, because the masses, the workers, were simply a dangerous monster, the barbarian horde. The movement based on Bellamy's ideas - which called itself "Nationalism" and originally intended to be both anti-socialist and anti-capitalist - was systematically organized by appealing to the middle class, like the Fabians.

These were the most popular educators of the "native" wing of American socialism, whose views found echo throughout the non-Marxist and anti-Marxist sections of the socialist movement during part of the twentieth century, with a revival of "Bellamy Clubs" even in the 1930s, when John Dewey praised Looking Backward as an exponent of "the American ideal of democracy." Technocracy, already openly fascist in its features, was a direct descendant of this tradition. If one wants to see how fine the line can be between something called socialism and something like fascism, it is instructive to read the monstrous exposition of socialism written by the once famous scientific inventor and Socialist Party dignitary Charles P. Steinmetz. His America and the New Epoch (1916) brings to life, with dull seriousness, exactly the anti-utopia frequently satirized in science-fiction novels. Congress is replaced by senators directly appointed by DuPont, General Motors, and the other major corporations. Steinmetz, presenting the giant monopoly corporations (like his own employer, General Electric) as the ultimate in industrial efficiency, proposed dissolving political government in favor of direct domination by the associated monopoly corporations.

"Bellamism" started many on the road to socialism, but the road forked. Around the turn of the century, American socialism developed the most vibrant antithesis to socialism from above in all its forms: Eugene Debs. In 1897 he was still asking none other than John D. Rockefeller to finance the establishment of a utopian socialist colony in a Western state; but Debs, whose socialism was forged in the class struggle of a militant labor movement, soon found his true voice.

The heart of Debs' socialism was his call for and reliance on the self-activity of the masses from below. Debs' writings and speeches are permeated with this theme. He frequently quoted or paraphrased Marx's "First Principle," using his own words: "The great discovery made by the modern slaves is that they must themselves achieve their freedom. This is the secret of their solidarity, the heart of their hope..." His classic statement is this:
"The workers of the world have waited too long for some Moses to lead them out of their bondage. Such a Moses has not come, nor will he. I would not lead you out of it, even if I could; for if you could be led out, you could also be led back to it. I aspire to convince you that there is nothing you cannot do for yourselves."

It echoes Marx's words in 1850:
"In the struggle of the working class to free itself from wage slavery, it cannot be overemphasized that everything depends on the working class itself. The simple question is, can the workers enable themselves, by education, organization, co-operation and self-imposed discipline, to take control of the productive forces and the direction of industry in the interest of the people and for the benefit of society? That is all."

Can workers empower themselves...? He had no naive illusions as to what the working class was (or is). But he proposed a different goal from that of the elitists whose only wisdom is to point out the backwardness of the people and to teach that it will always be so. Against the faith in the domination of an elite from above, Debs opposed the directly contrary notion of the revolutionary vanguard (also a minority) which his ideas push to recommend a firmer path to the majority:
"It is the minorities who have made the history of this world [he says at the 1917 anti-war rally, for which the Wilson government imprisoned him]. It is the few who have had the courage to take their place at the front; who have been true enough to themselves to speak the truth that was within them; who have risked opposition to the established order of things; who have espoused the cause of the suffering and struggling poor; who have upheld, without thought of personal consequences, the cause of freedom and justice."

"Debsian socialism" evoked a tremendous response in the hearts of the people, but Debs had no successor as a tribune of revolutionary democratic socialism. After the period of postwar radicalization, the Socialist Party, on the one hand, became rosily respectable, and the Communist Party, on the other, became Stalinized. For its part, American liberalism had been developing a process of "statification," which culminated in the 1930s in the great illusion of the New Deal. The elitist dream of "tutelage from above" attracted a whole class of liberals for whom the country aristocrat in the White House was what Bismarck was for Lassalle.

The herald of this kind of people was Lincoln Steffens, the collectivist liberal who (like Shaw and Georges Sorel) was as attracted to Mussolini as to Moscow, and for the same reasons. Upton Sinclair, leaving the Socialist Party as too "sectarian," launched his "broad" movement to "End Poverty in California" with a manifesto appropriately titled "I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty" (probably the only radical manifesto with two "I's" in the title) on the theme of "socialism from above in Sacramento." One of the typical figures of the time was Stuart Chase, who zigzagged from the reformism of the League for Industrial Democracy to the semi-fascism of Technocracy. There were Stalinist intellectuals who subliminated their combined admiration for Roosevelt and for Russia by hailing both the NRA [a centerpiece of Roosevelt's policy] and the Moscow trials. Another sign of the times was Paul Blanshard, who left the Socialist Party for Roosevelt, giving as his reason that the New Deal's "managed capitalism" program had taken the lead in economic change over the socialists.

The New Deal, often aptly called "America's social democratic period," was also the great adventure of liberals and social democrats with socialism from above, Roosevelt's utopia of "people's monarchy." Roosevelt's illusion of "revolution from above" united gradualist socialism, bureaucratic liberalism, Stalinist elitism, and illusions about Russian collectivism and collectivized capitalism in a single package.

10. Six subtypes of socialism from above​

There are several different styles or currents of socialism from above. They are often intertwined, but let us separate some of their most important aspects in order to take a closer look at them.

i) Philanthropism: Socialism (or "freedom" or whatever) must be given, for the "good of the people," by the rich and powerful, out of the goodness of their hearts. As the Communist Manifesto put it, with early utopians like Robert Owen in mind, "For them the proletariat exists only as the class that suffers most." In gratitude, the oppressed poor must above all beware of nonsense about class struggle or self-emancipation. This aspect must be considered as a particular case of:

ii) Elitism: We have mentioned a few cases concerning the conviction that socialism is the business of a new dominant minority, of a non-capitalist nature and therefore with guarantees of purity, imposing its own domination either temporarily (simply for a historical period) or permanently. In any case, this new dominant class is assigned the objective of an educational Dictatorship over the masses - to do them good, of course - with the dictatorship being exercised by an elite party that suppresses all control from below, or by benevolent despots or savior leaders of some kind, or by Shaw's "Supermen", by genetic manipulators, by Proudhon's "anarchist" managers, by Saint Simon's technocrats or by their more modern equivalents, using terms and verbal curtains that allow these conceptions to be proclaimed as a new social theory, as opposed to "nineteenth-century Marxism".

On the other hand, revolutionary democrats who are partisans of socialism from below have always been a minority, but the gap between the elitist perspective and the vanguard perspective is crucial, as we have seen in the case of Debs. For him, as for Marx and Luxemburg, the function of the revolutionary vanguard is to push the majority mass to empower itself in order to take power in its own name , through its own struggles. This is not a question of denying the decisive importance of minorities, but of establishing a different relationship between the advanced minority and the more backward masses.

iii) Planning: The key words are Efficiency, Order, Planning, System and Regulation. Socialism is reduced to social engineering, carried out by a Power over society. Once again, this is not to deny that effective socialism requires global planning (or that efficiency and order are good things); but the reduction of socialism to planned production is something entirely different, just as an effective democracy requires the right to vote, but the reduction of democracy to the right to vote from time to time is a fraud.

In fact, it would be important to show that the separation of the plan from democratic control from below makes a mockery of planning itself, for the immensely complex industrial societies of today cannot be effectively planned by means of the dictates of an all-powerful central committee, which inhibits and represses the free play of initiative and correction from below. This is, in fact, the basic contradiction of the new type of system of social exploitation represented by Soviet bureaucratic collectivism. But we cannot pursue this subject any further here.

The substitution of planning for socialism has a very long history, apart from its embodiment in the Soviet myth that "Statization = Socialism" , a dogma which, as we have seen, was first systematized by social-democratic reformism (Bernstein and the Fabians in particular). During the 1930s the mystique of the "Plan", borrowed in part from Soviet propaganda, came to have great prominence in the right wing of social democracy, with Henri de Man proclaimed as its prophet and as Marx's successor. De Man gradually disappeared from view and is now forgotten because he made the mistake of carrying his revisionist theories first into corporatism and then into collaboration with the Nazis.

Apart from theoretical constructs, Planningism appears in the socialist movement very often embodied in a certain psychological type of radical person. In fairness, one of the first descriptions of such a type is found in Belloc's The Servile State , with the Fabians in mind. This type, Belloc writes:
"He loves the collectivist ideal for its own sake... because it is a form of ordered and regulated society. He likes to contemplate the ideal of a State in which land and capital are under the dominion of officials who will order other men around and who will also preserve them from the consequences of their vices, their ignorance and their folly... In it the exploitation of man does not provoke indignation. In fact, neither indignation nor any other passion of life is familiar to him... [Belloc's eyes are here fixed on Sidney Webb]... the prospect of an extensive bureaucracy under which all life would be catalogued and fixed to some simple schemes... gives his little stomach a definite satisfaction."

As for contemporary examples with a pro-Stalinist colouration, many can be found in the pages of Paul Sweezy's journal, Monthly Review 3.

In a 1930 article on "Motor Models of Socialism," written when he still thought of himself as a Leninist, Max Eastman credited this type with being focused on "efficient and intelligent organization... a real passion for the plan... competent organization."

For such a guy, says Eastman, Stalin's Russia holds a fascination:
"It is a region which at least deserves to be excused in other countries, certainly not censured from the point of view of a mad dream like the emancipation of the workers and, with it, of all humanity. For those who built the Marxist movement and who organised its victory in Russia, this mad dream was their central motive. They were, though some are now prone to forget it, extremely rebellious against oppression. Lenin will perhaps stand out, when the shock caused by his ideas subsides, as the greatest rebel in history. His greatest passion was the liberation of man... If a single concept must be chosen to sum up the aim of the class struggle as defined in Marxist writings, and especially in the writings of Lenin, its name is human freedom ..."

It could be added that Lenin more than once defined the aspirations for total planning as a "bureaucratic utopia."

There is a subdivision within Planningism which deserves a name of its own: let us call it Productivism. We are all, of course, in favour of production, just as we are in favour of Virtue and the Good Life; but for this type, production is the decisive test and end of a society. Russian bureaucratic collectivism is "progressive" because of the statistics of pig iron production (this same type usually ignores the impressive statistics of increased production under Nazi or Japanese capitalism). It is permissible to destroy or prevent free trade unionism under Nasser, Castro, Sukarno or Nkruma, because there is something, known as "economic development", which is superior to human rights. This harsh view was not invented by radicals, of course, but by the cruel exploiters of labour in the capitalist Industrial Revolution; and the socialist movement was born by bitterly fighting these theorists of "progressive" exploitation. However, apologists for modern "leftist" authoritarian regimes tend to regard this old doctrine as the newest revelation of sociology.

iv) "Communism": In his 1930 article, Max Eastman called this the "fraternal union model" of "gregarious or human solidarity socialists... desiring human solidarity, with a mixture of religious mysticism and animal gregariousness." This is not to be confused with the idea of solidarity in strikes, etc., and nor is it necessarily to be identified with what is called comradeship in the socialist movement or the "sense of community" elsewhere. Its specific content, as Eastman says, is "the search for immersion in a Totality, seeking to lose oneself in the bosom of a substitute for God."

Eastman is referring here to the Communist Party writer Mike Gold; another excellent example is Harry F. Ward, the religious fellow-traveller of the Communist Party, whose books theorize this kind of "oceanic" longing to shed one's individuality. The notebooks of the American writer Bellamy reveal a classic case in point: he writes of nostalgia "for absorption in the great omnipotence of the universe"; his "Religion of Solidarity" reflects his distrust of the individualism of personality, his desire to dissolve the Self in communion with something higher.

This distortion is very prominent in some of the more authoritarian partisans of socialism from above, and it is not uncommon to find it in more moderate cases, such as the philanthropic elitists of Christian socialist views. Naturally, this type of "communist" socialism is always proclaimed as an "ethical socialism" and praised for its horror of class struggle; there should be no conflict within a hive. This type tends to contrast "collectivism" with "individualism" (a false opposition from a humanistic point of view), but what it really impugns is individuality .

v) Penetrationism: Socialism from above has many varieties for the simple reason that there are always many alternatives to self-mobilization of the masses from below; but the cases discussed tend to fall into two families.

One of them has the perspective of overthrowing the existing hierarchical capitalist society, to replace it by a new non-capitalist type of hierarchical society, based on a new type of elite and ruling class (such variants are usually labeled "revolutionary" in histories of socialism). The other has the perspective of penetrating the power centers of the existing society, to metamorphose it—gradually, inevitably—into a state-run collectivism, perhaps as, molecule by molecule, wood petrifies into agate. This is the hallmark of the reformist, social-democratic varieties of socialism from above.

The term penetrationism itself was invented as a self-description of what we have called the "purest" variety of reformism ever seen, the Fabianism of Sidney Webb. All social-democratic penetrationism is based on a theory of mechanical inevitability : the inevitable self-collectivisation of capitalism from above, which is equated with socialism. Pressure from below (when it is considered permissible) can accelerate and drive the process, provided it remains under control so as not to frighten the self-collectivisers. Social-democratic penetrationists are therefore not only willing but eager to "join the establishment" rather than fight it, to the extent that their capacity allows, either as manoeuvres or as ministers. Characteristically, the function they give to the movement from below is fundamentally that of blackmailing the ruling powers into paying them with such penetration opportunities.

The tendency towards the collectivisation of capitalism is indeed a reality: as we have seen, it means the bureaucratic collectivisation of capitalism. To the extent that this process has advanced, contemporary social democrats have also undergone a metamorphosis. Today, the leading theorist of this neo-reformism, CAR Crosland, denounces as "extremist" the bland declaration in favour of nationalisation which was originally written into the programme of British Labour by none other than Sidney Webb (with Arthur Henderson)! The large number of continental social democracies which have now purged their programmes of any specifically anti-capitalist content - a remarkable new phenomenon in socialist history - reflects the extent to which the development of the process of bureaucratic collectivisation is accepted as a delivery in instalments of petrified "socialism".

This is penetrationism as a grand strategy. It leads, of course, to penetrationism as a political tactic, a topic we cannot develop here beyond mentioning its most important current form in the United States: the policy of supporting the Democratic Party and the lib-lab (liberal/labor) coalition around the "Johnson Consensus," its predecessors and its successors.

The distinction between these two "families" of socialism from above holds true for home-grown socialisms from Babeuf to Harold Wilson; that is, those cases where the social base of the given socialist current is to be found within the national system, whether it be the labour aristocracy or declassed elements or whatever. The case is somewhat different for the "socialism from without" represented by the modern communist parties, whose strategy and tactics depend in the last analysis on a power whose base is external to any of the domestic social strata; that is, on the bureaucratic-collectivist ruling classes of the East.

Communist parties have proved especially different from any kind of home-grown movement in their ability to alternate or combine both "revolutionary" oppositionism and penetrationist tactics as they saw fit. Thus the American Communist Party would swing from its adventurous, ultra-left "Third Period" of 1928-34 to the ultra-penetrationist Popular Front period, back to an incendiary "revolutionism" during the Hitler-Stalin pact period, and so on, following the ebbs and flows of the Cold War, combining both tactics to varying degrees. With the split of the Communist current along the Moscow and Peking lines, the "Khrushchevites" and the Maoists each tended to embody one of the two tactics they had previously alternated between.

Frequently, therefore, the official Communist Party and the Social Democrats tend to converge in the policy of penetrationism, although from the angles of different socialisms from above.

vi) Socialism from the Outside: The preceding varieties of socialism from above look to the summits of society. We now turn to the case where the expectations for relief are placed on the outside.

The cult of flying saucers is a pathological form of the more traditional messianism, where "out" means out of this world; but in this case "out" means outside the social struggle in one's own country . For the communists of Eastern Europe after World War II, the New Order had to be imported by Russian bayonets; for the German Social Democrats in exile, the liberation of their own people was only imaginable thanks to foreign military victory.

In peacetime, this type of socialism is presented as an exemplary model. This was evidently the method of the old Utopians, who built their model colonies in remote American lands in order to demonstrate the superiority of their system and to convert non-believers. Today, this substitute for social struggle itself is increasingly becoming the essential hope of the communist movement in the West.

The exemplary model is Russia (or China, for the Maoists); and, although it is difficult to make the fate of the Russian proletarians even semi-attractive to workers in the West, even with a generous dose of lies, there are two other approaches with a better chance of success:

a) The relatively privileged position of executives, bureaucrats and intellectual lackeys within the Russian collectivist system can be contrasted with the situation in the West, where these same elements are subordinated to the owners of capital and the manipulators of wealth. Here, the appeal of the Soviet system of state-run economy coincides with that historically achieved by middle-class socialisms: to dissatisfied elements among intellectuals, technicians, scientists, bureaucratic administrators and organisational men of various kinds, who can more easily identify with a new ruling class based on state power rather than on the power of money and property, and who therefore see themselves as the new men of power in a non-capitalist but elitist system.

b) While official communist parties are obliged to maintain the mask of orthodoxy in relation to something called "Marxism-Leninism", it is more often than not that some serious theorists of neo-Stalinism who are not tied to the party find themselves free from the need to pretend. One of its developments is the open abandonment of any prospect of victory through social struggle within the capitalist countries. "World revolution" is equated simply with the demonstration by communist states that their system is superior. This has already been expressed in thesis form by the leading theorists of neo-Stalinism, Paul Sweezy and Isaac Deutscher.

Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capitalism (1966) flatly rejects "the answer of traditional Marxist orthodoxy: that the industrial proletariat must ultimately rise in revolution against its capitalist oppressors." The same is true of other disadvantaged groups in society - the unemployed, peasants, the ghetto masses, etc. - since they cannot "constitute a coherent force in society."

This leaves no way out: capitalism cannot be effectively changed from within. How then? Someday, the authors explain on their last page, "perhaps not in the present century," people will become disillusioned with capitalism, "when the world revolution spreads and when the socialist countries show by their example that it is possible" to build a rational society [emphasis added]. That is all. Thus the Marxist phrases filling the other 366 pages of this essay are reduced simply to an incantation like the reading of the Sermon on the Mount in St. Patrick's Cathedral.

The same perspective is presented, less abruptly, by a writer more given to circumlocution, in Deutscher's The Great Contest . Deutscher conveys the new Soviet theory that "Western capitalism will collapse not so much—or at least not directly—because of its own crises and contradictions inherent in it, as because of its inability to compete with the achievements of socialism [i.e., communist states]"; and then he says: "It must be said that this replaces to a certain extent the Marxist perspective of permanent revolution." Here we have a rational theorization of what has long been the practice of the communist movement in the West: to act as a border guard and cover for the competing, rival system in the East. Above all, the perspective of socialism from below is as alien to these professors of bureaucratic collectivism as it is to the apologists for capitalism in the American academies.

This type of neo-Stalinist ideology is often critical of the present Soviet regime. A good example of this is Deutscher, who is as far from being an uncritical apologist for Moscow as the official communists can be. They must be regarded as penetrationists with regard to bureaucratic collectivism . What is seen as "socialism from without" from the capitalist world is a kind of Fabianism seen from within the realm of the communist system. In this context, change from above alone is a firm principle of these theorists, as it was of Sidney Webb. This was demonstrated, inter alia, by Deutscher's hostile reaction to the 1953 revolt in East Germany and the 1956 Hungarian revolution, on the now classic grounds that such uprisings from below might frighten the Soviet establishment off its course of "liberalization" by the Inevitability of Graduality.

11. Which side are you on?​

From the standpoint of intellectuals who have a choice of what role to play in the social struggle, the prospect of socialism from below has historically been unattractive. Even within the socialist movement, it has had few consistent supporters and not many more inconsistent ones. Outside the socialist movement, naturally, the standard line is that such ideas are visionary, impractical, unrealistic, "utopian" - idealistic perhaps, but quixotic. The popular masses are congenitally stupid, corrupt, apathetic and generally useless; progressive changes must come from "Superior People" like - by chance - the intellectual expressing these sentiments. All this translates theoretically into an Iron Law of Oligarchy or a Tin Law of Elitism, one way or another implying a crude theory of the inevitability of change from above alone.

Without pretending to review in a few words the arguments for and against this omnipresent opinion, we can note the social role it plays, as the self-justifying rite of the elitists. In "normal" times, when the masses are not in motion, theory is simply required to point this out with contempt, while the whole history of revolution and social upheaval is simply dismissed as obsolete. But repeated social unrest and revolutionary upheaval, defined precisely by the intrusion into history of the previously quiescent masses, and characteristic of periods when fundamental social change is put on the order of the day, are just as "normal" in history as the intervening periods of conservatism. When the elitist theorist has to abandon, therefore, the position of an observing scientist who merely predicted that the mass of people would always remain at rest, when he is confronted with the opposite reality of revolutionary masses attempting to subvert the power structure, then it is typical that he has no qualms about moving onto a very different path: denouncing mass intervention as evil in itself.

The fact is that for the intellectual the choice between socialism from above and socialism from below is basically a moral choice , while for the working masses who have no social alternative it is a matter of necessity. The intellectual may have the option of "joining the Establishment" when the workers do not; the same is true for trade union leaders, who, by rising above their class, also have a choice they did not have before. The pressure to conform to the mores of the ruling class, the pressure for bourgeoisification, are proportional to the degree to which personal and organisational ties with the rank and file are weakened. It is not difficult for an intellectual or a bureaucratised trade union boss to convince himself that penetration into the existing power and adaptation to it is the shrewdest course, when (by chance) it also allows one to share the advantages of influence and opulence.

It is an ironic fact, therefore, that the "Iron Law of Oligarchy" is ironclad mainly because of the intellectual elements from which it comes. As a social stratum (that is, leaving aside exceptional individuals) intellectuals have never been known to rise up against the established power in the way that the modern working class has done time and again in its relatively short history. Typically acting as the ideological lackeys of the established masters of society, the non-property-owning section of the middle classes, engaged in intellectual work, nevertheless finds itself at the same time discontented and ill-humoured by its treatment. Like many other servants, this Admirable Crichton thinks "I am better than my master, and if things were different we would see who would bow down." More than ever in our day, when the credit of the capitalist system is disintegrating throughout the world, he readily dreams of a form of society in which he can act as he pleases, in which the Brain rules and not the hands and wealth; in which he and his ilk would be freed from the pressure of Property through the elimination of capitalism, and freed from the pressure of the masses through the elimination of democracy.

Nor need his dream go very far, for there are versions of such a society before his eyes, in the collectivisms of the East. Even when he rejects these versions, for various reasons, including the Cold War, he can theorize his own version of a "good" kind of bureaucratic collectivism, called in the US "meritocracy," "managerism," "industrialism," or whatever else you like; or "African socialism" in Ghana and "Arab socialism" in Cairo; or many other kinds of socialism elsewhere in the world.

The nature of the choice between socialism from above and socialism from below is seen most clearly in relation to a question on which there is a considerable degree of agreement among liberal, social-democratic and Stalinist intellectuals today. This is the supposed inevitability of authoritarian dictatorships (benevolent despotisms) in the new states developing, particularly in Africa and Asia - Nkruma, Nasser, Sukarno and others - dictators who destroy independent trade unions and all political opposition, organizing the exploitation of labor for the purpose of maximizing it, sucking the blood of the working masses to extract enough capital to accelerate industrialization at the pace desired by the new masters. Thus, to an unprecedented extent, "progressive" circles that would once have protested against any injustice have become apologists for any authoritarianism that is considered non-capitalist.

Apart from the reasons of economic determinism usually given for this position, there are two aspects of the issue that shed light on what is really at stake:
a) The economic argument for dictatorship, which purports to demonstrate the need for "run-on-a-row" industrialization, is undoubtedly very compelling for the new bureaucratic masters - who, significantly, do not stint on their own income and aggrandizement - but it is incapable of convincing the worker at the bottom that he and his family must bow to super-exploitation and over-exertion for several generations for the sake of rapid capital accumulation. (Indeed, this is why "run-on-a-row" industrialization demands dictatorial controls.)

The economic-deterministic argument is the rationalization of the point of view of a ruling class; it makes human sense only from that point of view, which, obviously, always claims to identify itself with the needs of "society." It is equally sensible that the workers who occupy the lowest rungs of society must oppose this super-exploitation in order to defend their basic human dignity and well-being. This was the case during the Industrial Revolution, when the "new developing countries" were in Europe.

It is not just a question of technical and economic arguments, but of different sides in the class struggle. The question is: Which side are you on?

(b) It is argued that the popular masses in these countries are too backward to control society and its government; and this is undoubtedly true, and not only there. But what follows from this? How does a people or a class become capable of governing in its own name?

Only by fighting for it. Only by waging their struggle against oppression: the oppression exercised by those who tell them that they are not fit to rule. Only by fighting for democratic power will they educate themselves and rise to the level where they will be able to exercise this power. There has never been any other way for any class.

Although we have considered a particular apologetic line, the two points made apply in fact to the whole world, in every country, whether advanced or developed, capitalist or Stalinist. When the demonstrations and boycotts of the blacks in the South of the USA were putting President Johnson in a difficult position in the run-up to the elections, the question was: Which side are you on? When the Hungarian people were revolting against the Russian invader, the question was: Which side are you on? When the Algerian people were fighting for their liberation against the "socialist" government of Guy Mollet, the question was: Which side are you on? When Cuba was invaded by Washington's puppets, the question was: Which side are you on? And when the Cuban trade unions are subjugated by the commissars of the dictatorship, the question is also: Which side are you on?

Since the beginning of society, there have been endless theories "proving" that tyranny is inevitable and that freedom in democracy is impossible; there is no ideology more convenient to a ruling class and its intellectual lackeys. These are self-fulfilling predictions, since they are only true as long as they are taken as true. In the last analysis, the only way to prove them false is through struggle itself. This struggle from below has never been stopped by theories from above, and it has changed the world time and again. To choose any form of socialism from above is to look back to the old world, to the "old shit." To choose the path of socialism from below is to affirm the beginning of a new world.

Good posts btw. Though I find trotskyists to be spineless romantics who criticised soviets while living in racially segregated former british colonies, who failed at any attempts of revolution via propaganda and the "peaceful route".

The MLM from the Black Panther Party had to exist for a reason. Those trotskyists sure as shit know why.

 

[Eltitoguay]

2019 article by Nafeez Ahmed on Venezuela (capitalism, "Chaves socialism", and the biophysical economics of oil):

Venezuela’s collapse is a window into how the Oil Age will unravel​

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01 FEB 2019
NAFEEZ M AHMED

Protestors clash with police in Caracas (Source: REX / Shutterstock)

For some, the crisis in Venezuela is all about the endemic corruption of Nicolás Maduro, continuing the broken legacy of Chavez’s ideological experiment in socialism under the mounting insidious influence of Putin. For others, it’s all about the ongoing counter-democratic meddling of the United States, which has for years wanted to bring Venezuela — with its huge oil reserves — back into the orbit of American power, and is now interfering again to undermine a democratically elected leader in Latin America.

Neither side truly understands the real driving force behind the collapse of Venezuela: we have moved into the twilight of the Age of Oil.

So how does a country like Venezuela with the largest reserves of crude oil in the world end up incapable of developing them? While various elements of socialism, corruption and neoliberal capitalism are all implicated in various ways, what no one’s talking about — especially the global oil industry — is that over the last decade, we’ve shifted into a new era. The world has moved from largely extracting cheap, easy crude, to becoming increasingly dependent on unconventional forms of oil and gas that are much more difficult and expensive to produce.

Oil isn’t running out, in fact, it’s everywhere — we’ve more than enough to fry the planet. But as the easy, cheap stuff has plateaued, production costs have soared. And as a consequence the most expensive oil to produce has become increasingly unprofitable.

In a country like Venezuela, emerging from a history of US interference, plagued by internal economic mismanagement, combined with external intensifying pressure from US sanctions, this decline in profitability became fatal.

Since Hugo Chavez’s election in 1999, the US has continued to explore numerous ways to interfere in and undermine his socialist government. This is consistent with the track record of US overt and covert interventionism across Latin America, which has sought to overthrow democratically elected governments which undermine US interests in the region, supported right-wing autocratic regimes, and funded, trained and armed far-right death squads complicit in wantonly massacring hundreds of thousands of people.

For all the triumphant moralising in parts of the Western media about the failures of Venezuela’s socialist experiment, there has been little reflection on the role of this horrific counter-democratic US foreign policy in paving the way for a populist hunger for nationalist and independent alternatives to US-backed cronyism.

Before Chavez​

Venezuela used to be a dream US ally, model free-market economy, and a major oil producer. With the largest reserves of crude oil in the world, the conventional narrative is that its current implosion can only be due to colossal mismanagement of its domestic resources.

Described back in 1990 by the New York Times as “one of Latin America’s oldest and most stable democracies”, the newspaper of record predicted that, thanks to the geopolitical volatility of the Middle East, Venezuela “is poised to play a newly prominent role in the United States energy scene well into the 1990's”. At the time, Venezuelan oil production was helping to “offset the shortage caused by the embargo of oil from Iraq and Kuwait” amidst higher oil prices triggered by the simmering conflict.

But the NYT had camouflaged a deepening economic crisis. As noted by leading expert on Latin America, Javier Corrales, in ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Venezuela had never recovered from currency and debt crises it had experienced in the 1980s. Economic chaos continued well into the 1990s, just as the Times had celebrated the market economy’s friendship with the US, explained Corrales: “Inflation remained indomitable and among the highest in the region, economic growth continued to be volatile and oil-dependent, growth per capita stagnated, unemployment rates surged, and public sector deficits endured despite continuous spending cutbacks.”

Prior to the ascension of Chavez, the entrenched party-political system so applauded by the US, and courted by international institutions like the IMF, was essentially crumbling. “According to a recent report by Data Information Resources to the Venezuelan-American Chamber of Commerce, in the last 25 years the share of household income spent on food has shot up to 72 percent, from 28 percent,” lamented the New York Times in 1996. “The middle class has shrunk by a third. An estimated 53 percent of jobs are now classified as ‘informal’ — in the underground economy — as compared with 33 percent in the late 1970's”.

The NYT piece cynically put all the blame for the deepening crisis on “government largesse” and interventionism in the economy. But even here, within the subtext the paper acknowledged a historical backdrop of consistent IMF-backed austerity measures. According to the NYT, even the ostensibly anti-austerity president Rafael Caldera — who had promised more “state-financed populism” as an antidote to years of IMF-wrought austerity — ended up “negotiating for a $3 billion loan from the IMF” along with “a second loan of undisclosed size to ease the social impact of any hardships imposed by an IMF agreement.”

So it is convenient that today’s loud and self-righteous moral denunciations of Maduro ignore the instrumental role played by US efforts to impose market fundamentalism in wreaking economic and social havoc across Venezuelan society. Of course, outside the fanatical echo chambers of the Trump White House and the likes of the New York Times, the devastating impact of US-backed World Bank and IMF austerity measures is well-documented among serious economists.

In a paper for the London School of Economics, development economist Professor Jonathan DiJohn of the UN Research Institute for Social Development found that US-backed economic “liberalisation not only failed to revive private investment and economic growth, but also contributed to a worsening of the factorial distribution of income, which contributed to growing polarisation of politics.”

Neoliberal reforms further compounded already existing centralised nepotistic political structures vulnerable to corruption. Far from strengthening the state, they led to a collapse in the state’s regulative power. Analysts who hark back to a Venezuelan free market golden age ignore the fact that far from reducing corruption, “financial deregulation, large-scale privatisations, and private monopolies create[d] large rents, and thus rent-seeking/corruption opportunities.”

Instead of leading to meaningful economic reforms, neoliberalisation stymied genuine reform and entrenched elite power. And this is precisely how the West helped create the Chavez it loves to hate. In the words of Corrales in the Harvard Review:
“…economic collapse and the collapse of the party system are intimately related. Venezuela’s repeated failure to reform its economy made existing politicians increasingly unpopular, who in turn responded by privileging populist policies over real reforms. The result was a vicious cycle of economic and party political decline, ultimately leading to the rise of Chavez.”

Dead oil​

While it is now fashionable to blame the collapse of the Venezuelan oil industry solely on Chavez’s socialism, Caldera’s privatisation of the oil sector was unable to forestall the decline in oil production, which peaked in 1997 at around 3.5 million barrels a day. By 1999, Chavez’s first actual year in office, production had already dropped dramatically by around 30 percent.

A deeper look reveals that the causes of Venezuela’s oil problems are slightly more complicated than the ‘Chávez killed it’ meme. Since peaking around 1997, Venezuelan oil production has declined over the last two decades, but in recent years has experienced a precipitous fall. There can be little doubt that serious mismanagement in the oil industry has played a role in this decline. However, there is a fundamental driver other than mismanagement which the press has consistently ignored in reporting on Venezuala’s current crisis: the increasingly fraught economics of oil.

The vast bulk of Venezuela’s oil is not conventional crude, but unconventional “heavy oil”, a highly viscous liquid that requires unconventional techniques to extract and flow, often with heat from steam, and/or mixing it with lighter forms of crude in the refining process. Heavy oil thus has a higher cost of extraction than normal crude, and a lower market price due to the refining difficulties. In theory, heavy oil can be produced at below break-even prices to a profit, but greater investment is still needed to get to that point.

The higher costs of extraction and refining have played a key role in making Venezuela’s oil production efforts increasingly unprofitable and unsustainable. When oil prices were at their height between 2005 and 2008, Venezuela was able to weather the inefficiencies and mismanagement in its oil industry due to much higher profits thanks to prices between $100 and $150 a barrel. Global oil prices were spiking as global conventional crude oil production began to plateau, causing an increasing shift to unconventional sources.

That global shift did not mean that oil was running out, but that we were moving deeper into dependence on more difficult and expensive forms of unconventional oil and gas. The shift can be best understood through the concept of Energy Return on Investment (EROI), pioneered principally by the State University of New York environmental scientist Professor Charles Hall, a ratio which measures how much energy is used to extract a particular quantity of energy from any resource. Hall has shown that as we are consuming ever larger quantities of energy, we are using more and more energy to do so, leaving less ‘surplus energy’ at the end to underpin social and economic activity.

This creates a counter-intuitive dynamic — even as production soars, the quality of the energy we are producing declines, its costs are higher, industry profits are squeezed, and the surplus available to sustain continued economic growth dwindles. As the surplus energy available to sustain economic growth is squeezed, in real terms the biophysical capacity of the economy to continue buying the very oil being produced reduces. Economic recession (partly induced by the previous era of oil price spikes) interacts with the lack of affordability of oil, leading the market price to collapse.

That in turn renders the most expensive unconventional oil and gas projects potentially unprofitable, unless they can find ways to cover their losses through external subsidies of some kind, such as government grants or extended lines of credit. And this is the key difference between Venezuela and countries like the US and Canada, where extremely low EROI levels for production have been sustained largely through massive multi-billion dollar loans — fuelling an energy boom that is likely to come to a catastrophic end when the debt-turkey comes home to roost.

“It’s all a bit reminiscent of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when internet companies were valued on the number of eyeballs they attracted, not on the profits they were likely to make,” wrote Bethany McLean recently (once again in the New York Times), a US journalist well-known for her work on the Enron collapse. “As long as investors were willing to believe that profits were coming, it all worked — until it didn’t.”

A number of scientists have previously estimated the EROI of heavy oil production to amount to around 9:1 (with room for variation up or down depending on how inputs are accounted for and calculated; the unfashionable but probably more accurate approach would be downwards, closer to 6:1 when both direct and indirect energy costs are considered). Compare this to the EROI of about 20:1 for conventional crude prior to 2000, which gives an indication of the challenge Venezuela faced — which unlike the US and Canada, had emerged into the Chavez era from a history of neoliberal devastation and debt-expansion that already made further investments or subsidies to Venezuela’s oil industry a difficult ask.

Venezuela, in that sense, was ill-prepared to adapt to the post-2014 oil price collapse, compared to its wealthier, Western competitors in other forms of unconventional oil and gas. To be sure, then, the collapse of Venezuela’s oil industry cannot be reduced to geological factors, though there can be little doubt that those factors and their economic ramifications tend to be underplayed in conventional explanations. Above-ground factors were clearly a major problem in terms of chronic inadequacy of investment and the resulting degradation of production infrastructure. A balanced picture thus has to acknowledge both that Venezuela’s vast reserves are far more expensive and difficult to bring to market than standard conventional oil; and that Venezuala’s very specific economic circumstances in the wake of decades of failed IMF-austerity put the country in an extremely weak position to keep its oil show on the road.

Since 2008, oil production has declined by more than 350,000 barrels per day, and more than 800,000 per day since its peak level in 1997. This has driven the collapse of net exports by over 1.1 million barrels per day since 1998. Meanwhile, to sustain refining of heavy oil, Venezuela has increasingly imported light oil to blend with heavy oil as well as for domestic consumption. Currently, only extra-heavy oil production in the Orinoco Oil Belt has been able to increase, while conventional oil production continues to rapidly decline. Despite significant proved conventional reserves, these still require more expensive enhanced recovery techniques and infrastructure investments — which are unavailable. But profit margins from exports of extra-heavy crude are much smaller due to the higher costs of blending, upgrading and transportation, and the heavy discounts in international refining markets. In summary, oil industry expert Professor Francisco Monaldi at the Center for Energy and the Environment at IESA in Venezuela concludes:
“…oil production in Venezuela is made up of increasingly heavy and therefore less profitable oil, the production operated by PDVSA is falling more rapidly, and the production that generates cash flow is almost half of the total production. These trends were already quite problematic with the peak of oil prices, but with prices falling the problem is much more acute.”

The folly of endless growth​

Unfortunately, much like his predecessors, Chavez didn’t appreciate the complexities, let alone the biophysical economics, of the oil industry. Rather, he saw it simplistically through the short-term lens of his own ideological socialist experiment.

From 1998 until his death in 2013, Chavez’s application of what he called ‘socialism’ to the oil industry succeeded in reducing poverty from 55 to 34 percent, helped 1.5 million adults become literate, and delivered healthcare to 70 percent of the population with Cuban doctors. All this apparent progress was enabled by oil revenues. But it was an unsustainable pipe-dream.

Instead of investing oil revenues back into production, Chavez spent them away on his social programmes during the heyday of the oil price spikes, with no thought to the industry he was drawing from — and in the mistaken belief that prices would stay high. By the time prices collapsed due to the global shift to difficult oil described earlier — reducing Venezuala’s state revenues (96 percent of which come from oil) — Chavez had no currency reserves to fall back on.

Chavez had thus dramatically compounded the legacy of problems he had been left with. He had mimicked the same mistake made by the West before 2008, pursuing a path of ‘progress’ based on an unsustainable consumption of resources, fuelled by debt, and bound to come crashing down.

So when he ran out of oil money, he did what governments effectively did worldwide after the 2008 financial crash through quantitative easing: he simply printed money.

The immediate impact was to drive up inflation. He simultaneously fixed the exchange rate to dollars, hiked up the minimum wage, while forcing prices of staple goods like bread to stay low. This of course turned businesses selling such staple goods or involved at every chain in their production into unprofitable enterprises, which could no longer afford to pay their own employees due to haemorrhaging income levels. Meanwhile, he slashed subsidies to farmers and other industries, while imposing quotas on them to maintain production. Instead of producing the desired result, many businesses ended up selling their goods on the black market in an attempt to make a profit.

As the economic crisis escalated, and as oil production declined, Chavez pinned his hopes on the potential transformation that could be ushered in by massive state investment in a new type of economy based on nationalised, self or cooperatively managed industries. Those investments, too, had little results. Dr Asa Cusack, an expert on Venezuela at the London School of Economics, points out that “even though the number of cooperatives exploded, in practice they were often as inefficient, corrupt, nepotistic, and exploitative as the private sector that they were supposed to displace.”

Meanwhile, with its currency reserves depleted, the government has had to slash imports by over 65 percent since 2012, while simultaneously reducing social spending to even lower than it was under IMF austerity reforms in the 1990s. Chavistan crisis-driven ‘socialism’ began with unsustainable social spending and has now switched to catastrophic levels of austerity that make neoliberalism look timid.

In this context, the rise of the black market and organised crime, exploited by both the government and the opposition, became a way of life while the economy, food production, health-care and basic infrastructure collapsed with frightening speed and ferocity.

Climate wild cards​

Amidst this perfect storm, the wild card of climate impacts pushed Venezuela over the edge, accelerating an already dizzying spiral of crises. In March 2018, on the back of hyperinflation and recession, the government enforced electricity rationing across six western states. In one state, San Cristobal, residents reported 14-hour stretches without power after water levels in reservoirs used for hydroelectric plants were reduced due to drought. A similar crisis had erupted two years earlier when water levels behind the Guri Dam, which provides well over half the country’s electricity, hit record lows.

Venezuela generates around 65 percent of its electricity from hydropower, with a view to leave as much oil available as possible for export. But this has made electricity supplies increasingly vulnerable to droughts induced by climate change impacts.

It is well known that the El-Nino Southern Oscillation, the biggest fluctuation in the earth’s climate system comprising a cycle of warm and cold sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean, is increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change. A new study on the impact of climate change in Venezuela finds that between 1950 and 2004, 12 out of 15 El-Nino events coincided with years in which “mean annual flow” of water in the Caroni River basin, affecting the Guri reservoir and hydroelectric power, was “smaller than the historical mean.”

From 2013 to 2016, an intensified El-Nino cycle meant that there was little rain in Venezuela, culminating in a crippling deficit in 2015. It was the worst drought in almost half a century in the country, severely straining the country’s aging and poorly managed energy grid, resulting in rolling blackouts.

According to Professor Juan Carlos Sanchez, a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), these trends will dramatically deteriorate under a business as usual scenario. Large areas of Venezuelan states which are already water scarce, such as Falcon, Sucre, Lara and Zulia, including the north of the Guajira peninsula, will undergo desertification. Land degradation and decreased rainfall would devastate production of corn, black beans and plantains across much of the country. Sanchez predicts that some regions of the country will receive 25 percent less water than today. And that means even less electricity. By mid-century, climate models indicate an overall 18 percent decrease in rainfall in the Caroni River basin that leads to the Guri Dam.

Unfortunately, no Venezuelan government has ever taken seriously its climate pledges, preferring to escalate as much as possible its oil production, and even intensifying the CO2 intensive practice of gas flaring. Meanwhile, escalating climate change is set to exacerbate Venezuela’s electricity blackouts, infrastructure collapse and agricultural crisis.

Economic war​

The crisis convergence unfolding in Venezuela gives us a window into what can happen when a post-oil future is foisted upon you. As domestic energy supplies dwindle, the state’s capacity to function recedes in unprecedented ways, opening the way for state-failure. As the state collapses, new smaller centres of power emerge, competing for control of diminishing resources.

In this context, reports of food-trafficking as a mechanism of ‘economic war’ are real, but they are not exclusive to either political side. All sides have become incentivised to horde products and sell them on the black market as a direct result of the collapsing economy, retrograde government price controls and wildly speculative prices.

Venezuelan state-owned media have pinpointed cases where private companies engaged in hoarding have close ties to the opposition. In response, the government has appropriated vast assets, farmland, bakeries, other businesses — but has failed to lift production.

On the other hand, Katiuska Rodriguez, a journalist investigating shortages at El Nacional, a pro-opposition newspaper, said that there is little clear evidence of hoarding being a result of an ‘economic war’ by capitalist business elites against the government. Although real, she explained, hoarding is driven largely by commercial interests in survival.

And yet, there is mounting evidence that the Maduro government is complicit in not just hoarding, but mass embezzlement of public funds. Sociologist Chris Carlson of the City University of New York Graduate Center points out that a number of former senior Chavista government officials have come on record to confirm how powerful elites within the government have exploited the crisis to extract huge profits for themselves. “A gang was created that was only interested in getting their hands on the oil revenue,” said Hector Navarro, former Chavista minister and socialist party leader. Similarly, Chavez’s former finance minister, Jorge Giordani, estimated that some $300 billion was embezzled in this way.

And yet, the real economic war is not really going on inside Venezuela. It has been conducted by the US against Venezuela, through a draconian sanctions regime which has exacerbated the arc of collapse. Francisco Rodriguez, Chief Economist at Torino Economics in New York, points out that a major drop in Venezuela’s production numbers occurred precisely “at the time at which the United States decided to impose financial sanctions on Venezuela.”

He argues that: “Advocates of sanctions on Venezuela claim that these target the Maduro regime but do not affect the Venezuelan people. If the sanctions regime can be linked to the deterioration of the country’s export capacity and to its consequent import and growth collapse, then this claim is clearly wrong.” Rodriguez marshals a range of evidence suggesting this might well be the case.

Others with direct expertise have gone further. Former UN special rapporteur to Venezuela, Alfred de Zayas, who finished his term at the UN in March 2018, criticised the US for engaging in “economic warfare” against Venezuela. On his fact-finding mission to the country in late 2017, he confirmed the role of overdependence on oil, poor governance and corruption, but blamed the US, EU and Canadian sanctions for worsening the economic crisis and “killing” Venezuelans.

US goals are fairly transparent. In an interview with FOX News that has been completely ignored by the press, Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton explained the focus of US attention: “We’re looking at the oil assets. That’s the single most important income stream to the government of Venezuela. We’re looking at what to do to that.” He continued:
“…we are in talks with major American companies today… I think we are trying to achieve the same end result here… It will make a huge difference economically for the United States if we could have American oil companies actually investing and producing the oil potential in Venezuela.”

The coming oil crisis​

It is not entirely surprising that Bolton is particularly eager at this time to extend US energy companies into Venezuela.

North American exploration and production companies have seen their net debt balloon from $50 billion in 2005 to nearly $200 billion by 2015. “[The fracking] industry doesn’t make money…. It’s on much shakier financial footing than most people realize,” said McLean, who has just authored the book, Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World. Indeed, there is serious gulf between oil industry claims about opportunities for profit, and what is actually happening in those companies:
“When you look at the company presentations, there’s something that doesn’t make a lot of sense, because they show their investors these beautiful presentations with beautiful slides saying they’re going to produce an internal rate of return of 80% or 60%. And then you go down to the company level and you see that the company isn’t making money, and you wonder what happened between point A and point B.”

In short, cheap debt-money has permitted the industry to grow — but how long that can continue is an open question. “Part of the point in writing my book was just to make people aware that as we trump at American energy independence, let’s think about some of the foundation of this [industry] and how insecure it actually is, so that we’re also planning for the future in different ways”, adds McLean.

Indeed, US shale oil and gas production is forecast to peak in around a decade — or in as little as four years. It’s not just the US. Europe as a continent is already well into the post-peak phase, and Russian oil ministry officials privately anticipate an imminent peak within the next few years. As China, India and other Asian powers experience further demand growth, everyone will be looking increasingly for a viable energy supply, whether from the Middle East or Latin America. But it won’t come cheap, or easy. And it won’t be healthy for the planet.

Whatever their ultimate causes, the horrifying collapse of Venezuela heralds insights into a possible future for today’s major oil producers — including the United States. The US is enjoying a revival in its oil industry but how long it will last and how sustainable it is are awkward questions that few pundits dare to ask — except a brave few, such as McLean.

This does not necessarily mean oil production will simply slowly grind to a halt. As production limits are reached using current techniques, new techniques might be brought into play to try to mine vast reserves of more difficult resources. However, whatever technological innovations emerge they are unlikely to be able to avert the trajectory of increasing costs of extraction, refining and processing before getting fossil fuels to market. And this means that the surplus energy available to devote to the delivery of public goods familiar to modern industrial consumerist societies will become smaller and smaller.

Meanwhile, the environmental consequences of fossil fuel dependency are making investors re-think the financial viability of these industries, creating a growing risk that they become stranded assets. In this emerging future, the trajectory of endless economic growth as we know it cannot continue. Either way, the warnings signs are unmistakeable. As we shift into a post-carbon era, we will have to adapt new economic thinking, and restructure our ways of life from the ground up.

Right now the Venezuelan people find themselves locked into a vicious cycle of ill-conceived human systems collapsing into violent in-fighting, in the face of the earth system crisis erupting beneath them. It is not yet too late for the rest of the world to learn a lesson. We can either be dragged into a world after oil kicking and screaming, or we can roll up our sleeves and walk there in a manner of our own choosing. It really is up to us. Venezuela should function as a warning sign as to what can happen when we bury our heads in the (oil) sands.

In Spanish :

El colapso de Venezuela es una ventana a cómo se resolverá la Era del Petróleo -

Para algunos, la crisis en Venezuela va completamente de la corrupción endémica de Nicolás Maduro, siguiendo el legado inservible del experimiento ideológico socialista de Chávez bajo la insidiosa y creciente influencia de Putin. Para otros, todo va de la intromisión antidemocrática en curso de...

espai-marx.net

In English :

Venezuela’s collapse is a window into how the Oil Age will unravel

ageoftransformation.org

 

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View attachment 19056134

Good posts btw. Though I find trotskyists to be spineless romantics who criticised soviets while living in racially segregated former british colonies, who failed at any attempts of revolution via propaganda and the "peaceful route".

The MLM from the Black Panther Party had to exist for a reason. Those trotskyists sure as shit know why.

Great meme, heh...

Well, I see Trosky, founder and organizer of the Red Army that defeated the attack of the White Russians and the 14 imperialist armies that joined it, rather at the opposite end of the pusillamine... Trotskyism not only contemplates revolution and armed struggle, but various Trotskyist organizations adopted that path, like the Argentinian

Grupo Obrero Revolucionario - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

What exactly is the MLM?
I know little about the political Left in the U.S., but I believed that the founders and firsts leaders of the Black Panther Party

Black Panther Party - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

were more under the influence of a certain Maoism ("Western European" or "Hispanic" or "USA" Maoism, more then traditional chinese "Mao Thought") than Trotskyism...

They remind me more (triying a "parallel" with the Spanish situation, and without the racial component) of the Communist Party of Spain (Reconstituted), PCE(r)

Partido Comunista de España (reconstituido) - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Communist Party of Spain (Reconstituted) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

and its First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups (GRAPO)

Grupos de Resistencia Antifascista Primero de Octubre - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

...more than, for example, the P.O.U.M. (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) in its Trotskyist era.

Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

POUM - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

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In Spain, to the left of the P.C.E.

Communist Party of Spain - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

or Communist Party of Spain (between Marxism-Leninism and neo-Marxist Eurocommunism, and currently a minority partner in the national government of the social democratic majority of the P.S.O.E. or Spanish Socialist Workers Party) there are several communist parties with many fewer militants-supporters-voters; many, splits from the P.C.E.

One of the most active so far in the 21st century is the P.M.L.-R.C or Marxist-Leninist Party (Communist Reconstruction).

Partido Marxista-Leninista (Reconstrucción Comunista) - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Marxist–Leninist Party (Communist Reconstruction) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

For me, too "integral" Leninist-Stalinist, and obsolete.
But his combative and brigade spirit, with his sending of volunteers to international struggles such as that of the Kurdish people in Siria and Irak and the Kurdistan Workers Party against ISIS aka DAESH (including the reward for the death of several of its members, offered by international Islamic-integrity terrorism), has attracted a sector of leftist youth to his youth organization (JML-RC), both among the university youth and the most disadvantaged working class.

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Poscript: VICE-News video about some of the PML-RC brigades against DAESH:
"Several young people who have travelled to Syria and Iraq since 2011 live in Spain. This is the case of "Comrade Martos", 21 years old, who spent six months with the Kurds fighting the Islamic State. Upon returning to Madrid he was arrested and accused of having fought alongside the PKK, considered a terrorist group by the European Union and the United States. Together with some of his colleagues from Communist Reconstruction (RC), the Marxist Leninist political party to which he belongs, he faces possible sentences for collaboration with an armed gang, possession of explosives or recruiting Martos to travel to Syria. VICE News spends three days in Madrid with Carlos, head of RC security, Adrián, who gave talks about Kurdistan, and Roberto Vaquero, recently released from Estremera prison after 49 days of solitary confinement with jihadist prisoners; to find out their opinions regarding the judicial process and the conflict against the Islamic State. Video originally aired on #DIARIOVICE , a Movistar+ production in collaboration with VICE"

 

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Silver or lead? Gangster culture, the ideological battering ram of neoliberalism​

23-May-2017

by Joaquim Martinez​

'Silver (money) or lead?' Pablo Escobar offers a police officer two options: accept the bribe and let his trucks loaded with cocaine pass or be killed.

The phrase of the head of the Medellín cartel, dramatized in the Netflix series Narcos, has become a pop icon.

The series about the Colombian drug lord is one example among many of what we could call gangster culture that extends to all entertainment industries. Other series with stratospheric audiences such as Breaking Bad or Sons of Anarchy follow the adventures of antiheroes dedicated to all kinds of criminal activities.

Al Pacino played Tony Montana, a Cuban counterrevolutionary who arrives in Miami willing to get rich at any cost, in Scarface.

The history of cinema is full of films on this subject, from Coppola's masterful The Godfather saga, to several of Tarantino's also beautiful works, to a host of very low-quality products, as well as other entertaining titles such as American Gangster or Donnie Brasco.

In the late 80s and early 90s, rappers like Ice-T and other members of NWA were putting explicit, criminal rap at the top of the music business in the US. Gangsta rap would continue its lineage with the Death Row Records label of criminal Suge Knight, who was involved in the murders of the two heavyweights of the genre in the mid-90s: Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.

During the 2000s, gangsta stars such as 50 Cent, Lil Wayne and T.I. continued to emerge. To this day, both rap and trap, with Gucci Mane and Yung Thug, continue to be influenced by criminal culture, in which references to characters such as the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, Chapo Guzmán, are commonplace.

The powerful video game industry also has titles such as Saint's Row, Mafia or the GTA saga. The latter, the fifth installment of which is among the ten best-selling video games in history, deals with the criminal careers of criminals of all kinds, from the first small-time crimes to the rise to the most ostentatious power. The gaming experience offers an endless range of missions of extortion, robbery, bribery, murder, pimping or trafficking of any illegal material.

“The old world is dying. The new one is slow to appear. And in this chiaroscuro monsters emerge.” Rivers of ink have flowed about this idea that Gramsci wrote in his notebooks at some point during his imprisonment in Turin.

What we propose here is to assume gangster culture as one of these monsters in the sense that its rise coincides with the collapse of a cumulative cycle of capital, the consummation of the dismantling of any credible alternative to capitalism and with the imposition of the neoliberal socioeconomic project, which will soon prove to be a failure but is far from being politically amended. Understanding that the coincidence of the rise of this phenomenon with the neoliberal cycle is not accidental, we propose to make a materialist dissection of the world of crime that has ideologically crystallized in the so-called gangster culture.

Stealth economy of capitalism

So what role does the criminal economy play in the globalized capitalism in which we live?

In Gore Capitalism, Sayak sums it up irrefutably: “That which is illegal works outside the law but at the service of power, of the power of the law, of the power of the law and of the economy, reworking the scheme of power and reproducing it.”

The members of the TAIFA Critical Economy Seminar call this illegal activity stealth economy.

Also, following Rosa Luxemburg's logic that "capitalism [is governed by] an internal dialectic that forces it to seek external solutions," they distinguish between a hard core and a soft core of capitalism that are organically related by the essential dialectic of the system. The first operates in a legal and institutionalized way and the second, this stealth economy, completely evades the rule of law.

According to Sayak, “drug trafficking is currently the largest industry in the world (followed by the legal hydrocarbon economy and tourism).”

According to the United Nations, in the 1990s, the total drug business reached 500 billion dollars worldwide, of which 200 billion are profits for drug traffickers and only 1.4 billion remain in the producing countries.

Drug trafficking profits mainly from peoples and social strata for whom the legal capitalist circuit does not guarantee the reproduction of life at all.

In turn, the drug business generates a host of affluent criminal economies. Understanding this furtive economy as an exacerbation of the functioning of patriarchal capitalism, we cannot fail to appreciate that women, if we look at the various cultural references mentioned at the beginning, are absolutely excluded as subjects. However, they do occupy a central place as sexual merchandise; according to the European Commission, 1.8 million people are victims of trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation, women in the majority of cases. Pimping is also one of the quintessential occupations of gangsters, turning the pimps of the seventies, such as Iceberg Slim, whose memoirs the publishing house Capitán Swing has published, into another pop icon of this imaginary.

In monetary terms – to give just a few examples of criminal markets – it is estimated that cocaine moves around 70 billion euros annually, sex trafficking moves around 58 and arms trafficking another 10.

Class struggle is the driving force of [criminal] history

We find that criminal activities constitute a very lucrative business that ends up intertwining with the legal capitalist structure in money laundering. There are even those who argue that it is precisely drug money that allowed the financial system to remain fluid during the 2008 crisis. But when we refer to the criminal world as a capitalist nucleus, we do not do so only in the most economic sense, but rather we understand it in relation to capital as David Harvey explains: a process composed of different social relations. Part of these relations are the popular classes and their people, who can discover themselves antagonistic to capitalist logic and wage what we call class struggle.

So what has historically been the role of the most notorious criminal agents in the course of this class struggle?

Although historical retrospective could lead us, for example, to an understanding of the romantic practice of piracy as a tool used by the emerging French and German empires against decadent Spain, we will try to focus on modern criminal icons.

Starting with the classics, at the origins of the modern gangster universe, we travel to the golden Sicily of the beginning of The Godfather II. The land where Don Ciccio orders the killing of Antonio Andolini in fiction is the same one from which most of the real Mafia bosses are born. The Mafia was born during the 19th century as a protection of citrus plantations, which were as productive as they were vulnerable to the slightest accident.

The Mafia obtained political cover from the landowners who required them to guard their farms to carry out their criminal activities, which quickly spread and diversified.

The fascist movement emerged at the beginning of the 20th century among sectors of the proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie, defending a reactionary 'third position' between liberalism and communism. This tendency saw the Mafia as the most acute manifestation of the corruption that liberal democracy caused in the State.

Thus, once Mussolini came to power, he subjected the Mafia to a strong persecution, making many of its members go into exile in the USA. From this exodus was born the famous Italian mafia in the USA; that of the fictional Don Vito Corleone or that of the real Lucky Luciano. “I believe in America. America made my fortune” is the first sentence of The Godfather. The USA 'made the fortune' of the Mafia in exchange for the latter contributing to its political and economic hegemony. Luciano himself, imprisoned at the time for his leadership of La Cosa Nostra in the USA, mobilized the Sicilian Mafia in favor of the Allies in 1943 in exchange for being deported to Italy. Once Mussolini was overthrown, another common enemy continued to unite the USA and the Mafia: Communism.

The social organization around the criminal activities of the Mafia was incompatible with the social control of production proposed by the communists. Thus, the USA allowed the Mafia to regain its hegemony in Italy in order to wage the counterinsurgency war on its behalf, which it was responsible for – and continues to be responsible for – extending throughout the world with its more than questionable alliances.

On both sides of the Atlantic, apart from extortion, drug trafficking and sex trafficking, the mafia developed a lesser-known activity. Vito Genoves said: “I did very well working for companies as a mediator in labour conflicts.” He was referring to his dissuasive intervention in strikes and workers’ struggles.

The anti-worker trajectory of the mafia continues to develop and to interfere in the structures of political power; from contact with far-right terrorist groups such as NAR, which operated between the 70s and 90s, to the relationship with the fascist Gianni Alemano, former mayor of Rome and former minister of Berlusconi. Today – as happens with organised crime in Greece or the Spanish State – the mafia and the autonomous far right – organised there in Casa Pound – meet in a grey amalgam of private security, corporatism of the police forces, businesses on the edge of legality and persecution of social movements.

Moving on to another continent, the character of the moment is Pablo Escobar. His own son explains that the vision of his father given by TV series is unrealistic, glorified and irresponsible.

Epic and imposing, Pablo Escobar is presented to us as a poor man who challenges the status quo; who makes a fortune by being the best at something that, if he didn't do it, someone else would do and about which society is deeply hypocritical; and who still has time to devote himself to a kind of progressive populist politics.

This kind of narco-social work is similar to the architecture of inclusion that was built around the mafia families. This social promotion is due to such a large expansion of the economy based on the drug business that it extends to the very foundations of the States. In addition, this subordinate incentive contributes to the flow of the exorbitant capital it generates. It is necessary to remember that the Cartel earned some 22,000 million dollars a year, a good part of which had to be buried because it could not even be laundered. Escobar had so much money that he did not even know where he had it (and if some peasant found it and spent it he was duly executed) and he could consider paying Colombia's foreign debt.

Far from any progressive character, a 1990 Americas Watch report explained that “the Medellín Cartel systematically attacked union leaders, teachers, journalists, human rights defenders and left-wing politicians, particularly from the Patriotic Union.” The same document explained: “drug traffickers have become large landowners and, as such, have begun to share the right-wing politics of traditional landowners and to lead some of the most notorious paramilitary groups.”

The son of the cocaine czar himself claims, as did Barry Seal – a smuggler and informant for the CIA and the DEA – before being assassinated, that his father worked for the CIA, that he used the drug trade to repress the Colombian liberation movements and that he used drug trafficking to finance counterinsurgency campaigns throughout Central America. In fact, several CIA agents claim that it was the corporation that facilitated the association of the Medellin Cartel from the beginning, as well as the communicating vessels with the internal trafficking of the USA, in order to control a single monopoly of cocaine trafficking in the USA.

The CIA was behind the creation of the Castle and Nugan Hand banks, which were involved in both the laundering of drug money and the financing of counterinsurgency campaigns across the continent, coordinated in what became known as Operation Gladio.

This pattern will be repeated over the next few decades throughout the continent. The Bolivian 'Cocaine Coup' of 1980 against the popular movement; the financing of the Contras, opposed to Sandinismo, in Nicaragua; or the current situation in Mexico, which has become a complete narco-society since neoliberalism was imposed with the Free Trade Agreement with Canada and the USA (NAFTA) that sank the national economy.

Senior US police officials would confirm that the CIA has historically relied on drug trafficking to cover the costs of its counterinsurgency work. Dennis Dayles, a former DEA officer, stated: “In my 30-year career with the DEA, the main targets of my investigations invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.”

Former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics officer Mike Ruppert is also emphatic: “The CIA has been trafficking drugs for every year of its existence.”

Just as the coordinated counterinsurgency plan of the Southern Cone is known as Operation Condor, in Europe, some time ago and promoted by the CIA and NATO, what we know as Operation Gladio took place.

Initially designed as a network of sleeper cells prepared to face an eventual Soviet invasion during the Cold War, the clandestine network – composed of anti-communist militants, often former fascists and Nazi collaborators, with connections to state apparatus and coordinated by secret agents – ended up developing terrorist activity against left-wing movements and false flag attacks – consisting of attributing massacres to the left in order to discredit it in the eyes of the population and justify exceptional repression.

The operation was revealed in Italy by Giulio Andreotti on 24 October 1990 after Judge Felice Casson investigated precisely one of these false flag attacks attributed to the Brigate Rosse in 1972.

Despite being designed by organizations such as the CIA and NATO, the stay behind network had to operate independently of any State [of law] and this meant finding a way to finance itself. The journalist expert in criminal organizations Paul L. Williams, author of Operation Gladio: The unholly alliance between The Vatican, the CIA and The Mafia, explains the solution they found for the economic aspect.

A US Army colonel, who had experience in financing the anti-communist Chinese Kuomintang with the opium business, thought he could adapt the idea and finance the Gladio network with drug money.

At this point, the CIA turned to old acquaintances. According to Paul L. Williams, the CIA again made deals with Lucky Luciano, who was given the Mediterranean monopoly on the heroin market, which would finance the Gladio network.

Michele Sindona, another Mafia boss, had cornered the banking sector and was in a position of power regarding the very important Italian financial activity. Thanks to his personal relationship with Pope Paul VI and Cardinal Marcinkus, Sindona was able to use the Vatican as a tax haven. In addition, Sindona was in a Masonic lodge, known as Propaganda Due, with other members of the Mafia and with Licio Gelli, a former blackshirt of Mussolini, now a CIA agent and involved in the Gladio network. On the other side of the ocean, another member of this organisation was Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State of the USA, who, very concerned about the results of the PCI in the 1969 elections, allocated millions of dollars to the Italian lodge.

In short, we find the same pattern repeated in the Chinese Kuomintang against the Cultural Revolution, in the Afghan mujahideen against the USSR, which ended up becoming a jihadist narco-state, or in the triangle formed by Burma, Laos and Thailand. Around the world, the history of the CIA and counterinsurgency is linked to drug trafficking. But what was the destination of this traffic? Well, to a large extent, the USA itself.

As early as the time of Lucky Luciano, the US had been looking for drug users in its domestic population. While they were looking for Luciano to establish a monopoly capable of covering the costs of Gladio, the CIA also looked to the Italian mafia in the US. In this case, Vito Genovese was the one in charge of finding an outlet for heroin in America. The bet on the jazz clubs of Harlem, frequented by blacks, as a launcher to the heroin market was a complete success: since then, in twenty years the number of heroin addicts in the US has risen from 20,000 to 150,000.

Once again, we are faced with a repeating pattern. Drug imports into the US not only boosted the underground economy to unimaginable levels, but also fulfilled its own counterinsurgency function.

Decades later, the CIA airline Air America carried heroin from Southeast Asia and cocaine from the Southern Cone to the United States.

This drug would be -along with state terrorism- the executioner of the movement that had begun to take shape among the black community in 1966, around a 10-point program, of community self-management and self-defense and a lot of soul; the Black Panther Party and the Black Power movement.

The highest phase of McCarthyism was CointelPro (Counter-Intelligence Program), launched in the 1950s to put an end to the Communist Party of the USA and updated to put an end to the new rebel flares of the 1970s: the Black Panther Party, but also the Puerto Rican independentists or the opponents of the Vietnam War.

The program, once again, was deployed unofficially because it did not comply with any guarantees of a State of Law. It only became known when an FBI office was raided in Pennsylvania and the documents were leaked to the press; a year after the CointelPro scandal, the Watergate crisis broke out and, among other things, it became known that the director of the CIA, with the approval of President Eisenhower, had planned to outsource the assassination of Fidel Castro to former mafia acquaintances.

CointelPro was a repressive development against the Black Panther Party, which, apart from the murders of leaders such as Fred Hampton, was used for many criminal activities of the same nature that concerns us.

The recruitment of informants and whistleblowers from among gangsters and drug addicts in exchange for various kinds of benefits, the linking of the movement to criminal practices in order to stigmatize it in the public eye, or the destruction of the fabric with the introduction of drugs on a large scale were some of the State's most subtle weapons against the movements.

The personified example of the criminal-induced degeneration of this revolutionary wave was the leader Huey P. Newton. He was shot dead by a drug dealer in Oakland, putting an end to a final stage of his life marked by drug use and bad company.

Since the large-scale introduction of drugs into American neighborhoods - which, on the other hand, we find it daring to attribute unilaterally to CIA conspiracies - drug trafficking has fostered the growth of gangs at war for control of the drug business, which, in turn, have continued to expand and diversify many other criminal businesses.

The first gangs linked to this cycle were the Crips and the Bloods: African-American gangs from Los Angeles, whose explosive growth coincided with the dismantling of Black Power and the massive appearance of crack consumption in American ghettos. Since then, both on the streets and in prisons, new African-American gangs have continued to proliferate, in addition to Latino, Asian and white supremacist gangs.

Following the development of the arguments of this exposition, we believe that the conversion of youth groups into drug companies or masses of drug addicts consolidated not only a lucrative market, but also a permanently weakened social fabric. This has also been considered in this way by various civil entities such as the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) or the BAPAC (Black Political Association of California). As a result of the crack boom, arms trafficking, a business that invoices some 6 billion dollars each year, also experienced its own particular boom in a country where there is approximately one gun per inhabitant and 33,000 people die from firearms each year.

This same dynamic of introducing drugs into the community in order to deactivate its most combative sectors, however, can be found much closer.
The so-called Spanish Transition, that of the Moncloa Pacts and the industrial reconversion of Felipe González, was also accompanied by an increase in the flow of drugs. Without going into whether we can speak of the famous “lost generation”, the truth is that a bloodbath of victims of overdoses and AIDS was invading the working-class neighbourhoods – well, and those that were not as well – which were emptied of struggles. "The years of the needle: from political commitment to heroin", describes this parable in Zaragoza.
Particularly famous is the case of Basque Country, where Pepe Rei has been arguing for many years based on his research in Egin that it was a complete State operation against the exceptional mobilisation of the Basque left.
In Intxaurrondo: the green plot, Rei exposes how the state terrorism of the GAL, the Francoist structures of the Civil Guard, the mafia plots of the Spanish oligarchies and transnational drug trafficking converged in this shadowy police station. Corrupt plots that, on the other hand, extend to the present day.

Finally, we must not forget the true fate of the vast majority of people who fall into the criminal circuit, which is not the luxury penthouse of a Los Angeles skyscraper, but prison.
Arnaldo Otegi wrote that 'those of us who do not give up analysing our societies from the perspective of the existence of social classes also observe the prison population and the conclusion is simply devastating: there are no rich people in prisons, there are only humble people, from very low social backgrounds and with serious educational or cultural deficiencies.'
Prisons are also part of the grey zone of capitalism. In conditions of imprisonment, convicts constitute a workforce whose working conditions, in penitentiary regimes and agreements, escape all ordinary legislation. In addition, the penitentiary system generates an entire prison industry, often outsourced. The award-winning documentary XIII Amendment – in reference to the amendment to the US Constitution concerning the prohibition of slavery – shows how the penitentiary system constitutes a true slave system where race and class intersect and that, far from fulfilling the supposed purpose of reintegration, is consolidating itself as a lucrative economic system at the service of large corporations.

Gangster culture: the ideological battering ram of neoliberalism

Once we understand the economic and historical dimensions of the gangster universe… What can we extract from it on a cultural level?

One of the founding sentences of the neoliberal project in Europe was the 'There is no alternative' of the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher. (TINA).

In fact, gangster culture necessarily shares this premise. As we have said before, this culture coincides with the defeat of modern anti-capitalist social projects and the imposition of neoliberalism, first in the globalized periphery and then in the metropolitan core.

In the deprived peripheries, crime ends up imposing itself as the reason for the existence of true narco-societies in which, outside the criminal circle, even physiological survival becomes difficult.

Although one should not underestimate the growing difficulty in obtaining the basket of basic consumer goods for the reproduction of life in metropolitan capitalist societies, there is another logic that must be considered.

In these nuclei, the revolution of the means of production in contradiction with the valorisation of capital based on the exploitation of the surplus value of wage labour has generated – and continues to generate – a mass of wage earners who are increasingly precarious or directly excluded from wage labour. This mismatch between such a development of the means of production that, in a social organisation built around the needs of people and not those of capital, would allow as never before in history not only physical survival but the true development of human potential, lays the foundations of gangster ideology. Simply put, the senseless mismatch between productive capacity and rate of exploitation, coinciding with the absence of tangible community alternatives to the individualistic and consumerist race, generates the substratum of this gangster culture that is so well described by the character played by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas:

'For us, living any other way was unthinkable. Honest people who worked their asses off at shitty jobs for pittance, who went to work on the subway and paid their bills, were dead. They were idiots, they had no guts.'

This is the ideological foundation of what the Mexican doctor Ciro Murayama has described as the conversion of what Marx called the industrial reserve army into a true criminal reserve army.

The disruption with the established order, with the culture of effort typical of the previous capitalist stage and even the gangster antagonism with the state authority and with its armed wing, the police, which tends to harass vulnerable youth, creating an immediate cat-and-mouse enmity, gives it an appearance of countercultural rebellion.

However, the profitability and assimilation of this culture by capitalism, which decorated Madrid's Puerta del Sol this Christmas with a huge banner reading 'Oh, white Christmas. Narcos' and featuring Pablo Escobar, as if nothing had happened, forces us to ask ourselves about the true relationship of this culture with capital.

Sayak explains that crime is not an accident in capitalism but the development of its most aggressive logic.

Based on the famous phrase that gives the text its title, 'Silver or lead?', we reflect that it is necessary to suspend the initial sympathy that hostility against the police authority of an oligarchic Colombian State could generate, and think of the phrase as a metaphor for the nature of crime as a neoliberal battering ram.

According to the metaphor we propose, Escobar's activity would represent the logic of capital accumulation extending intensively against the State, represented by the police, which, despite continuing to serve capitalist reproduction, is also a civil crystallization of the class struggle and, therefore, of containing certain popular victories. Crime is the wildest nature of capital escaping all regulation, the bloodiest confirmation of the victory of the economy over politics in the world of capital.

This text is not intended to be a moral condemnation of the enjoyment of this culture or a re-victimization of the most dispossessed, but rather a critical reflection on what is often presented as a rebellious counterculture that must lead the left to question why it is not able to propose an alternative capable of challenging the hegemony of gangster culture, the ideological battering ram of neoliberalism.

¿Plata o plomo? La cultura gánster, ariete ideológico del neoliberalismo -

El texto no pretende ser una condena moral al disfrute de esta cultura ni una revictimización de las más desposeídas, sino una reflexión crítica sobre lo que a menudo se presenta como contracultura rebelde que ha de llevar a la izquierda a cuestionarse por qué no está siendo capaz de plantear...

espai-marx.net

 

[Eltitoguay]

In relation to the previous article, this other about the book ETA and the heroin cconspiracy by Pablo Garcia Varela,
(without contradicting its spirit and main ideas) qualifies and contradicts the theory of the introduction of heroin in the Basque Country (or in the rest of Spain) as a premeditated plan and organized by the Francoist State and that of the first stage of the subsequent democracy, against the Basque extreme left (and the rest of Spain, by extension):

Sipnosis :

A book that uses data and facts to refute the heroin conspiracy and other myths defended by ETA about the “drug mafia.” In 1980, ETA launched a harsh campaign against the world of drugs in the Basque Country. According to the terrorist group, the State had introduced heroin as a political weapon to demobilize and destroy Basque youth. An offensive that resulted in the murder of more than forty people, supposedly involved in drug trafficking, and whose accusations were in many cases false and unfounded. This book explains how ETA's crusade against drugs formed a fundamental part of its armed strategy to build a nation and consolidate counterpower structures in opposition to the State. But above all, it seeks to challenge with data and facts the version of the heroin conspiracy and other myths defended by the terrorist organization about the "drug mafia." Following a chronological account that covers the eighties and nineties, it analyzes the phenomenon of drug addiction in Spain and the Basque Country, particularly affected by the heroin crisis and the emergence of AIDS at the beginning of the eighties. The interference of ETA and its entourage led to the phenomenon becoming politicised and losing all objectivity. The author shows, on the contrary, that there are causes and factors to understand the problem of heroin in the Basque Country without resorting to conspiracy theory. Among them, the State's inability to deal with a phenomenon of such magnitude and develop an effective drug addiction policy. Errors taken advantage of by the Basque left to attack the State and to install in the collective imagination of Basque society the possibility that everything had been a strategy to destroy the youth support of the nationalist movement.​

Euskadi Ta Askatasuna - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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Euskadi Ta Askatasuna - Wikipedia, entziklopedia askea.

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ETA (separatist group) - Wikipedia

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ETA and the heroin conspiracy theory​

Published: 3 March 2021
Pablo García Varela

In 2017, the year I began my doctoral thesis, when one searched for information about ETA's harsh campaign against heroin trafficking, most entries did not speak of the victims of the attacks, but of an alleged plan by the Spanish State to poison Basque youth and thus destroy the foundations of the Basque National Liberation Movement (MLNV). A widespread and consolidated conspiracy theory that, without any kind of historical or academic rigor, has gained a legion of followers inside and outside the Basque Country.

In fact, the lack of a social history of the heroin crisis has led to a distorted view of the 1980s being consolidated over the years, one that is far removed from the reality of the data and statistics.

For example, in 1985 the first large-scale investigation by the Ministry of Health estimated that the number of heroin addicts in Spain ranged between 80,000 and 125,000. As for regular users, in its 1987 Report , the Delegation of the National Drug Plan estimated that approximately 230,000 could be hooked. At that time, we are talking about a percentage of addicts of less than 0.5% and less than 1% of regular users of the total Spanish population.

But this small percentage had a great social impact precisely because it fueled the serious public safety crisis of the transition, in which the State, in the midst of a transformation process, was unable to address certain health and social problems.
To complicate matters further, the emergence of AIDS on the scene in the mid-1980s further mythologised the phenomenon due to the high mortality rate in the early 1990s (for example, 736 heroin-related deaths in 1990), when it reached its peak, becoming, according to some studies, the leading cause of death among young people in large cities. Even so, heroin was given too much prominence and distorted the view of other addictions, such as alcohol, which, according to data from the Ministry of Health, caused more than 12,000 deaths per year .

ETA and the heroin conspiracy​

For this reason, in the book I recently published with Catarata publishing house, ETA and the heroin conspiracy , I analyse in depth the impact of the heroin crisis in the Basque Country and explain the causes and factors that allow us to understand why it had a higher incidence of consumption than other regions of Spain. Factors such as the social configuration in “gangs”, the high levels of alcohol consumption or the inability of the state security forces to act in matters of drug addiction due to the need for self-protection.

But any reasonable explanation of the heroin crisis was called into question after ETA's first attack on drug trafficking in 1980. On April 27, the gang officially declared war on the "drug mafia" by blowing up the El Huerto pub in San Sebastian. The following week, the newspaper Egin published a long statement claiming responsibility for this action against this alleged drug sales point:

“Basque society is being corrupted and youth is being disoriented in the true objective of personal and collective liberation that is manifested in the revolutionary struggle. Our efforts will be directed towards carrying out warning attacks on establishments that distribute and consume such products, as well as carrying out attacks to physically eliminate prominent members of this alienating and corrupt world of drugs.”
“The explosion of the El Huerto pub in San Sebastián, the beginning of this type of action”, Egin, 03-05-1980

Due to the interference of the terrorist organisation and its entourage, the issue became politicised and all objectivity was lost. The media, political parties and some medical specialists took part in the game, speculation replaced reason and, in this area, the Basque left moved like a fish in water.
In total, between 1980 and 1994, the organization murdered forty-three people using the “excuse” of drugs, repeating the same mantra in its statements: the victim was an informant and drug trafficker who worked for the state security forces.
An idea already present in one of the first attacks of the campaign:

“From now on we will use all means at our disposal to combat all those drug dealers and distributors in southern Euskadi who act in close collaboration with the police and for whom the personal and collective freedom of the Basque people is nothing more than an object of sale on the socio-political level that is part of the genocidal strategy of the Spanish State against Euskadi.”
“The owner of the Copos bar in San Sebastián, accused by ETA (m) of trafficking heroin”, Egin, 01-11-1980.

Many of those killed had nothing to do with heroin, such as Agapito Sánchez Angulo, a young hairdresser from Portugalete who was murdered in January 1985 based on an unfounded rumour from a former sister-in-law who had no proof. Despite this, ETA did not hesitate to accuse him in a brief and harsh statement:

“Agapito was one of the most prominent heroin traffickers in the town of Portugalete, which had been chosen by the enemies of the Basque cause to disrupt its rhythm through drugs.”
“ETA claimed responsibility for the attack on Agapito Sánchez”, Egin, 22-01-1985.

Clipping from La Gaceta del Norteon Tuesday, January 22, 1985.

The victims​

The stain of drug trafficking was permanent for the victims and their families, who, powerless in the face of ETA's accusations, tried, most of them unsuccessfully, to defend themselves against an accusation that presented no evidence. Forgotten and buried by the "he must have done something" that, like so many other victims, has relegated them to oblivion.

This is precisely what Gregorio Ordoñez once reflected on when, following one of the attacks in this campaign, that of the couple Miguel Paredes and Elena Moreno in San Sebastian in 1990, he told the press the following:

“Even among the dead there are first and second class citizens, because when the person killed by ETA has a band, everyone from the Minister of the Interior to the last councillor jostle to get in the photo, but when the dead are a couple of unknowns like Miguel and Elena, you don't see the important politicians anywhere.”
“The funeral for the couple murdered in San Sebastian was held in strict privacy”, El Diario Vasco, 10-04-1990.

Teresa Moreno and Miguel Paredes, murdered by ETA in San Sebastian on April 6, 1990.

ETA and drugs​

Ultimately, it was a campaign of attacks full of contradictions due to the terrorist organization's involvement in drug trafficking, since the gang was in constant direct contact with this international mafia network in order to launder money, obtain weapons and supply its commandos.

Two recent examples. In the 2000s, investigations by French judge Laurence Le Vert and the German public prosecutor's office in Augsburg determined that the Basque terrorist organisation had laundered money from cigarette trafficking and had been laundered in Swiss banks.

In Spain, the Executive Service of the Commission for the Prevention of Money Laundering and Monetary Offences (SEPBLAC) also conducted numerous investigations into the financing of ETA and its money laundering mechanisms. Between 2004 and 2006 alone, both years included, the SEPBLAC carried out 296 operations related to ETA.

As for drug use, the frontal rejection of heroin and other substances by the ETA leadership did not prevent various problems associated with drug addiction from arising within its ranks. In fact, the band, as part of Basque society, had to deal with the same problems and did not understand that even they had a complex relationship with drugs. Cases such as that of the top leader of the “Txarito commando” who in 1987 was admitted to a rehabilitation centre in El Patriarca in Mondoñedo (Galicia) for his heroin addiction . Arrested two years later in the home of a Breton nationalist near Nantes, on 30 November 1990 he was sentenced by the French courts to seven years in prison, where he died years later of HIV in a prison on the outskirts of Paris.

Another highly symbolic case was that of one of its last leaders, Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubina, known as Txeroki. In the early hours of November 17, 2008, the head of the gang was arrested by the French Judicial Police in Cauterets, a town in the Pyrenees in the southwest of the country. Among the documents and material seized in the flat, the police found about one hundred grams of hashish, a small stone for personal consumption. On the same day of the arrest, the then Minister of the Interior, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, confirmed the seizure of the hashish and assessed this fact :

“If historically ETA has viciously fought drug traffickers with arguments about the purity of Basque youth, it seems that in this regard they do not have a very clear moral. Speaking of morals, I think we should rather talk about amorality, but, anyway, while they pursue drug traffickers it seems that they smoke a few joints.”
Excerpt from the press conference of the Minister of the Interior, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, 18-11-2008

​

The conspiracy and its followers​

In short, a series of factors were exploited by ETA to attack the State and to instill in the collective imagination of Basque society the possibility of a large-scale conspiracy against Basque youth.

A theory integrated into the political thinking of the Basque left and which brings together all the typical characteristics of conspiracies : unverified facts, an alternative explanation to the official version, of a marked sensationalist nature, in which nothing happens by accident, everything is a plan orchestrated by the conspirators and it is they who control society and the media to prevent the plan from becoming known.

Secret conspiracies, such as the Navajas Report , a series of preliminary reports written by the prosecutor Luis Navajas on a possible focus of corruption involving smuggling in the Intxaurrondo barracks, which was never proven in court, but which served to fuel all kinds of speculation from the Basque left and from the Egin investigation team headed by Pepe Rei.

A conspiracy theory that, in order to be dismantled, requires comparing all the information published on the subject, gathering all possible sources, investigating and finally determining that there is no solid evidence to support that the State poisoned Basque youth with heroin.

In short, I believe that my essay will help many people of all ideological persuasions to understand the complexity of the heroin crisis and to understand that there was no conspiracy. There are causes and factors that rationally explain the problem; it is as simple as the fact that the State was not ready to deal with a phenomenon of such magnitude and the best decisions were not made to develop an effective drug addiction policy.

ETA y la teoría de la conspiración de la heroína

Son varios los factores que explican por qué el País Vasco tuvo una mayor incidencia de consumo de heroína en los años 80. En este contexto, ETA aprovechó ciertos errores para instalar en el imaginario colectivo la posibilidad de una conspiración a gran escala.

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[Eltitoguay]

2024 article about the Communist Party of the United States, by David Bacon:

Communist Party USA - Wikipedia

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Partido Comunista de los Estados Unidos - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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Bring American Communists Out of the Shadows — and Closets​

BY DAVID BACON

In the 20th century, American Communist Party members were portrayed as the Red Menace, an enemy within. In reality, they were ordinary people with extraordinarily complex intellectual, political, social, and romantic lives that deserve to be chronicled.

Communist Party USA members participate in a demonstration for unemployed relief during the Great Depression in San Francisco, California. (Bettmann / Getty Images)


When I was eight years old, two men in dark suits and fedoras stopped me on my way home from Peralta Elementary School in Oakland, California. “We want to talk to you about your parents,” they said. My mother and father had warned me that this might happen and told me how to respond. “You need to talk to them,” I told them.

I don't know if FBI agents ever came to our house. I doubt it. My parents had been visited before, and they told the agents they had nothing to say. Talking wasn't the point of stopping me anyway. It was to send a message: You are vulnerable. We can hurt you. Be afraid.

Fear was something I grew up with. That's why I'm an Oakland boy, not a Brooklyn boy. Our family left New York the year the Rosenbergs were tried. My father, head of their printing and publishing union, was blacklisted. We got in a car and drove across the country to the Bay Area, where he had found work at the University of California printing press. I was five years old. Two years later, the Rosenbergs were executed.

For better or worse, my mother laughed when she told me stories from those years. She had been given a job as an organizer for the Communist Party in Alameda County after they found an apartment in West Oakland. When she met with the party's district organizer, Mickey Lima, they would go to the end of the Berkeley fishing pier, where they were sure they would not be overheard.

She was frustrated to leave New York. In the years before our trip, she had begun teaching at the Jefferson School, a Marxist school for adults where the Communist Party taught classes for its own members and other left-wing activists. After teaching children’s literature (she eventually became a children’s librarian and a writer), “I finally got the call for a more prestigious politics course,” she recalled in a contribution to a collection of memoirs by veteran radicals, Tribute of a Lifetime. After
World War II, she had edited a party newsletter on the “woman question” with Claudia Jones (“the most beautiful woman I ever met,” she called her). And so she became the Jeff School’s teacher of this subject, as emotionally charged then as it is now.

In 1952 and 1953, my mother recalls, she debated with her students and herself about how to teach it. “I had read a lot, from Engels to Simone de Beauvoir, but what good was it all when an African-American woman accused me – rightly – of ignoring her life experience in favour of book knowledge?”

She taught the course three times, the last time to a disproportionate number of young men. “Their expressions and comments were both aggressive and embarrassing, a curious combination that I didn’t understand at first. I eventually discovered that they had been sent to my class by their Communist Party clubs as punishment for sexist comments and behavior. I still wonder how they ended up.”

A couple of months later, our family moved to California.

Betty Bacon knew how to laugh and teach what she believed, even when she was unpopular with many Party members. Yet at the same time that she, my father George, my brother Dan and I were leaving town, her union had been destroyed in the purge of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. By this time, Party leaders were already in federal prison and others were on trial. Staying meant the possibility of being called before a committee, arrested or worse.

Today, social justice activists are unaware of the lives of most of the people who served in the Communist Party. The Second Red Scare and the ensuing secrecy have obscured not only the identities of party members but also the quality and texture of the lives they led. Yet what they thought and did, their day-to-day political work, how they socialized and supported their families, and the ideas they tried to bring to an increasingly hostile society should be important to us. They faced many of the same questions that organizers of social change face today, and they often had deep and meaningful debates about them that yielded profound insights. As my mother told me, “I can’t help but resent the casual assumption of some of today’s radical activists that they invented the woman question.” Denying or forgetting this history denies people fighting for social change today the ability to take into account the experiences and insights of those who have come before them.

Two recent books help dissipate that cloud of secrecy: San Francisco Reds by Robert Cherny and Communists in Closets by Bettina Aptheker. Each presents important material that helps us assess part of the US radical experience in ways we haven’t been able to before.

Cherny's San Francisco Reds focuses on the history of the Communist Party in and around San Francisco, which had a profound impact on California and national politics. Aptheker's Communists in Closets examines the history of the party's gay and lesbian members, revealing the enormous contradiction of a party that proposed radical social change while upholding some of the most retrograde homophobic and anti-women prejudices.

Because Communists in Closets tells the stories of individual people, often in great detail, it brings us close to the real experience of belonging to the Communist Party. The book is largely Bettina Aptheker's account of her own life in the party, and her increasing difficulty in reconciling the politics with which she was brought up and her growing awareness of her own sexual identity. She also profiles other gay and lesbian members of the party, highlighting their courageous commitment to radical social change and, often, the pain and tragedy that the contradiction brought to their personal lives.

Aptheker identifies with the fear that led many to remain in the closet, and with the liberation that comes with letting the world know who one really is. Despite referring to very frustrating and painful experiences with homophobia and party hypocrisy, Communists in Closets is a deeply engaging book, which makes the lives of communists much more imaginable.

San Francisco Reds is a much more impersonal account, painting a detailed portrait of the Communist Party through its presence in the city. Cherny says in his preface that the book “takes a somewhat biographical approach to political behavior, as I have followed nearly fifty individuals from the time they joined the CP, through the changing policies of the party, to the time when most of them left the party, and what they did afterward.” It is also a remarkable contribution, helping to fill in the parts of our memory that have been erased.

Writing on the blank pages of History​

Cherny moves back and forth between biographical capsules of Communist Party members, using a few at a time to illustrate each turn, in his view, in Communist Party policy. Several of them allude to historical phenomena that could fill volumes on their own. For example, some Californians, mostly immigrants, returned to the Soviet Union to establish communal farms, an experiment that lasted until the mid-1930s.

Colourful figures from the history of the party appear, from the labour activist Mother Bloor to the writer Bertram Wolfe. Rather than recounting their personal experiences, however, Cherny presents them as actors in the party's efforts to elaborate and implement political guidelines coming from the Communist International in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the factional struggle that accompanied them. National figures figure prominently, such as William Z. Foster (a trade union organiser and later CP chairman) in a struggle with Jay Lovestone (an expelled CP leader and later liaison between the Central Intelligence Agency and the AFL-CIO) and then with Earl Browder (a long-time CP general secretary who was expelled for dissolving the party in favour of a Communist Political Association).

San Francisco Reds documents the involvement of California communists in these struggles. Some of the state's leading Reds, such as William Schneiderman, who led the state party for two decades, were themselves national players. Cherny describes in detail how national factional disagreements played out in deep local divisions, sometimes paralyzing political work. He presents the disagreements as largely personality-driven, often using political theory or politics as a pretext for personal feuds. Those he accuses of maintaining such feuds, such as Harrison George, do not come off well.

One of the heroes of Cherny's account is Sam Darcy, described as a gifted organizer willing to put practical needs before unworkable directives. Darcy helped organize the largest farmworkers strike in American history: the 1933 cotton strike of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union (CAWIU), one of the industrial unions that the party launched as a left alternative to the conservatives of the day. Growers gunned down strikers and violence in the San Joaquin Valley reached terrifying levels, but workers won wage increases, though not union recognition. The Communist Party grew because it played a major role not only in planning and strategy but also in providing food for thousands of striking families to eat, in building tent cities, and in freeing people from the clutches of racist sheriffs and courts.

The following year, Darcy was in San Francisco, where he mobilized party members to support longshoremen in one of the decisive battles for the construction of the CIO. The entire city was on strike for three days as police fired on strikers in their effort to drive the strikebreakers onto the docks to unload the crippled ships.

Cherny presents Darcy as the grounded organizer pitted against doctrinaire functionaries such as Harrison George, whose long diatribes critical of the party headquarters in New York are quoted in the book. However, Darcy was also an official, and both before and after the two strikes he spent time in Moscow, in the offices of the Comintern, trying to create an international structure for communist activity.

Two other heroes of Cherny's are Louise Todd and Oleta O'Connor Yates. Both San Franciscans have been forgotten, but their names were familiar to thousands of city residents for two decades. They were Communists and ran repeatedly for supervisor and other public offices. Much of Cherny's analysis of the party's activity in the city is based on these campaigns: how many votes they garnered and, therefore, the size of the party's grassroots base in San Francisco.

Cherny is a thorough researcher, and much of his material comes from files in the Russian state archives. The book includes debates in the Comintern, reports by party officials, and polemics over the general direction of the communist movement. Two debates had a major impact on the California communists. In one, the party discarded policies that led to organizing left-wing unions like the CAWIU, advocating instead a broad “Popular Front” to oppose fascism. The party’s policy was based on defending the Soviet Union, first as a socialist bulwark against fascism before World War II, especially in the Spanish Civil War, then when it negotiated a pact with Adolf Hitler, and finally when it was forced into total war to defeat Nazism (a war in which the Soviet Union lost 22 million people).

Much of Cherny's book deals with how these debates played out in the political life of the San Francisco communists. While defending the Soviet Union and existing socialism as they saw it, most party members found reasons to excuse news of the purge trials of revolutionaries in the 1930s and the development of Joseph Stalin's dictatorship and network of prison camps. Cherny quotes Peggy Dennis, a national leader who lived (and left a son) in Moscow, and was married to CPUSA general secretary Gene Dennis: "We can't say that we didn't know what was going on. We knew the Comintern had been decimated. . . . It was as if we couldn't trust ourselves to open that Pandora's box."

As Ed Bender, who organized unemployed councils and later fought in the Spanish Civil War, explains in Tribute to a Lifetime :

At first I was very inspired by the Soviet Union. They were building the new society. Over the years there has been some disillusionment, but I still believe in socialism and a just society. The class struggle is still here.

After learning of Stalin's repression in Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 report, Bender simply stopped attending party meetings. However, like many others, he continued to work as an activist for social justice.

Keeping Pandora’s box closed meant not giving ground to the government’s and the media’s hostility and hatred toward socialism and, by extension, toward the Soviet Union. That tough advocacy had its roots in repression. San Francisco’s communists often spent time in jail, long before the McCarthy witch hunt. Louise Todd, for example, was charged during the San Francisco general strike for forging signatures on election petitions. At the federal prison in Tehachapi, she joined Caroline Decker, imprisoned for leading the 1933 cotton strike. Though classified as “incorrigible,” Cherny describes a steady stream of visitors: not just other communists, but the socialist author Upton Sinclair, the journalist Anna Louise Strong, and even Hollywood celebrities. Todd served thirteen months. Decker was released after three years.

By the 1950s, the terror of Smith Act committee appearances and trials had stifled that spirit. But the San Francisco Reds proved more flexible and politically astute than the party's New York leaders. When the national party told key activists to go underground, interpreting the moment as five minutes to fascist midnight, California disagreed. Oleta O'Connor Yates, Mickey Lima, and eight co-defendants persisted in defending the party's legal right to exist. They mounted a strong defense at their Smith Act trial in 1951, after the party's national leaders in New York had refused to mount a defense and had gone to jail or underground.

Five years later, his appeal finally reached the Supreme Court, and in 1957 his conviction was overturned. Dozens of other defendants indicted under the Smith Act in cities across the country had their charges dropped. By then, the party, which had numbered 100,000 members during World War II, had dwindled to a few thousand. The attrition could be attributed to the impact of McCarthyism, the party's own internal divisions, and the revelations about Stalin.

Cherny's book is a necessary and revealing chronicle of the life of the San Francisco party, but it is not without omissions. Some of the people who kept the party alive during this period and advocated for an open presence, notably Mickey Lima, are not mentioned.

Nor is there much description of the vibrant cultural life of communist painters, poets, and writers, particularly the influence of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and the Mexican muralists, which endured in San Francisco even during the Cold War. Likewise, the San Francisco Film and Photo League, a group with strong left-wing activist credentials and party connections through the New York Photo League, left a radical mark on California documentary photography that was felt for many decades. Cherny wrote a separate biography of an important communist in this movement, Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art , and some of the story told there would help create a fuller picture here.

Finally, because Cherny relies so heavily in San Francisco Reds on official documents, particularly reports in the party press and archives or state archives in Moscow, he focuses on what they contain. He details the factional fights extensively, but the participation of party members in the mass movements of their times is often hard to see. One result is a general absence of the experience of black CP members, as well as immigrants and other people of color.

The Legacy of People of Color in the San Francisco Party​

Black communists were highly visible and vocal in California, and played a pivotal role in the state's communist and labor movements.

For example, San Francisco-born William L. Patterson led the International Labor Defense, which defended political prisoners for several decades, until the Civil Rights Congress took its place. Patterson’s mother was a slave, and he worked his way through the city’s Hastings Law College in part by working on the railroad. He was arrested several times for protesting the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and went on to defend other prisoners from racism and class warfare. In 1951, at the height of Cold War terror, he and Paul Robeson presented a petition to the United Nations documenting the history of lynching, entitled “We Charge Genocide.” Like Robeson and Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Patterson had his passport revoked in retaliation for his political activity.

The friendship between poet Langston Hughes and William and Louise Patterson, along with Matt Crawford and Evelyn Graves Crawford, is documented in the collection Letters From Langston. Their correspondence, collected by their daughters Evelyn Crawford and MaryLouise Patterson, testifies eloquently to the vibrant cultural life of African American reds. While the Pattersons, who moved around, don’t appear in San Francisco Reds, the Crawfords, whom Cherny does discuss, became stalwarts of the East Bay left.

Black communists were leaders of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), some of whom were openly communist, some of whom were not. As a result of the pact between the city's African-American community and striking longshoremen, the exclusion of black workers from most dock crews ended after 1934. Today, ILWU Local 10 is a majority-black union. Communists contributed to this, as well as to the integration of Longshoremen's Local 34.

Other leaders who briefly enter and exit Cherny's stage include Mason Roberson and Revels Cayton. But others do not appear at all, such as Roscoe Proctor, leader of black workers in the ILWU, or Alex and Harriet Bagwell, who became much-loved singers and music historians. Because their activity is difficult to see, their ideas about the relationship between African-American liberation and class struggle are also absent.

African Americans became communists, say MaryLouise Patterson and Evelyn Crawford, in part because “black and white communists were in the streets and neighborhoods, fighting evictions and racist violence—especially in its most egregious form, lynching—not just talking about it on street corners or writing about it in their newspapers.” International Labor Defense campaigns in San Francisco championed the Scottsboro youth in Alabama and Angelo Herndon in Georgia. Even at the height of the 1950s repression, the Civil Rights Congress sent two white Bay Area communists, Billie Wachter and Decca Treuhaft, to the South to support Willie McGee, an African American falsely accused of rape and later executed. In Oakland, Decca’s husband, Bob Treuhaft, prevented the execution of Jerry Newsom, another black man sentenced to death, and won his freedom.

In the foreword to The Langston Letters , historian Robin D. G. Kelley raises the question of why the Pattersons and Matt Crawford chose communism, and answers:

Because they believed that through relentless global struggle, another world was possible – one free from class exploitation, racism, patriarchy, poverty and injustice. They thought that an international socialist movement offered one of many possible paths to a liberated future.

Cherny mentions the remarkable life of
Karl Yoneda, a Communist born in California to Japanese immigrant parents. But he does not mention the existence of other Japanese American Communists and radicals.

The absence of people of color in San Francisco Reds is especially notable in relation to San Francisco’s Chinese community. Chinese San Franciscans have a long history of Communist activity, which also deserves acknowledgment.

The city’s legacy of violent racism toward Chinese people goes back to its origins in the years of the gold fever, when immigrants came from Guangdong province to work on railroads, drain the delta, and mine gold before they were driven, along with the Mexicans, from the mines.

San Francisco was a base for organizers of the Chinese Revolution. Sun Yat-sen, who planned the overthrow of the last Manchu empress and the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1911, spent time in the city. He is honored with a statue by radical sculptor Beniamino Bufano in St Mary’s Square. Like radicals in other migrant communities, Chinese revolutionaries balanced efforts to support the movement back home with organizing against virulent racism and exploitation in the United States.

Chinese workers had a history of anarcho-syndicalism. In the late 1920s, a Chinatown branch of the Communist Party was organized, and it met until the start of the Korean War. In the 1930s, the Chinese Workers Mutual Aid Association was organized by laborers returning from the Alaska fish canneries. It held classes in Marxism and published writings by leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. Min Qing, the Chinese American Democratic Youth League, had both men and women officers and spread radical ideas among students. The Chinese Daily News and the Chinese Pacific Weekly were only two of the many newspapers that promoted progressive community politics.

When the revolution triumphed in China in October 1949, Chinese Communists in San Francisco organized a celebration with guests from the ILWU and the California Labor School. It was attacked by forty right-wing nationalist thugs. As the Cold War developed, Chinese leftists were hounded by the FBI, while the Immigration and Naturalization Service launched a campaign to terrorize the community, revoking the citizenship and naturalization of hundreds of people. It focused especially on left activists. At least two were deported. Four members of Min Qing were prosecuted for immigration fraud, and in 1962 left-wing journalist and Min Qing member Maurice Chuck was sent to prison.

One of San Francisco’s biggest Cold War trials was that of William and Sylvia Powell and Julian Schuman. They published a magazine, China Monthly Review, in China during the Korean War, listing the names of POWs and exposing the use of chemical and germ warfare. In 1956, after they returned to San Francisco, they were charged with treason. The government was forced to drop the charges five years later.

Political and legal defense was always a big part of Communist Party activity, including the defense against deportation. Cherny describes the trials of ILWU founder Harry Bridges in his biography Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend, but the party’s anti-deportation work was also widespread. Though absent from San Francisco Reds, this work grew critical as deportation became a key weapon in the government’s fight against Communists.

In 1933, the party helped to create the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, which had its headquarters in New York. It had an East Bay subcommittee and a Los Angeles office, and it provided deportation defense throughout the Southwest. One celebrated case was that of Lucio Bernabe, an organizer who went to work for the CIO’s Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers union in the 1940s. After that union was destroyed in the right-wing purge of the CIO, Bernabe became a leader of fruit workers in the South Bay in ILWU Local 11. Immigration authorities accused him falsely of entering the United States illegally, and his case ground on for years.

Cherny’s tight focus on San Francisco (although broadened to include the 1933 cotton strike in the San Joaquin Valley) means he doesn’t look at the party’s activity in the counties surrounding the city, where Mexican and Filipino farmworkers were concentrated. Those communities, however, also had a strong presence in San Francisco itself.

In the late 1940s, party members participated in organizing the Asociación Nacional México Americana (ANMA, or the National Mexican American Association), a pioneering anti-racist and pro-labor group with chapters throughout the Southwest. According to Enrique Buelna’s The Mexican Question: Mexican Americans in the Communist Party, 1940–1957, Mexican American members participated actively in forming the party, including those in the left-led Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. Party members felt ANMA “would merge both the culture and heritage of the Mexican people with the struggles for first class citizenship.”

According to Bert Corona, ANMA’s organizer in Northern California, chapters brought food and support to strikes by braceros in the exploitative contract labor program for growers. Some braceros even organized chapters of their own, facing inevitable deportation as a result.

The San Francisco chapter had three hundred to four hundred families, and there were others in Richmond, Oakland, Hollister, Santa Rosa, Napa, Stockton, and Watsonville. ANMA was put on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations, and its members eventually joined other organizations, including the Community Service Organization led by Cesar Chavez.

Omitting Mexicans and Latinos from San Francisco Reds amounts to more than a lack of acknowledgment of certain people and organizations. It’s a historical oversight, as sections of the Communist Party in San Francisco were the products of the political development within those communities, defined by immigration and national origin.

Justin Akers Chacón makes the case in Radicals in the Barrio that a stream of radical, anti-capitalist thought and activity among Mexicans in the United States extends back to the rebellions following the War of Conquest of 1848. Anarchists and socialists organized the Mexican Liberal Party in US barrios in the years prior to the Mexican Revolution. The decision of many to organize in the US Communist Party was a product of that political development and of the communist movement within Mexico itself.

Akers Chacón criticizes the idea that Mexican farmworkers were only interested in effective organization and not radical politics, writing that they “had their own radical politics that did not have to be taught by Communists, but rather were compatible.”

A similar process developed among the Filipino migrants who came to the United States following the brutal colonial war of 1898, in which the United States seized the Philippines. Abba Ramos, a Communist who worked as an organizer for the ILWU, explains that

The manongs [a term of respect for older Filipinos] who came in the 1920s were children of colonialism. They were radicalized because they compared the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, and of the Filipinos’ own quest for freedom, with the harsh reality they found here.

Ramos was born on a sugar plantation in Hawaii into a radical union family. When FBI agents came to his parents’ home and told them their union was led by Communists, “my father said ‘if winning better wages and making us equal here is Communist, then we are too.'”

Ramos learned radical ideas from Filipino Communists, who migrated between work in Alaska canneries and field labor in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley. As Filipina historian Dawn Mabalon wrote, “Many of the members of the Filipino union, the AWOC, were veterans of the strikes of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s and were tough leftists, Marxists, and Communists. They met the violence of the growers with their own militancy.”

Because it consisted of people who moved with the work, their radical network existed wherever they were. During part of the year, many lived in San Francisco’s Manilatown. The militancy of the International Hotel housing battle in the 1970s, perhaps the city’s most famous tenant uprising, owed to the fact that it was the place where many manongs lived at the end of their lives. This radical Filipino history is woven into the history of Communism in San Francisco, but missing from San Francisco Reds.

Queering Communist Party History​

Bettina Aptheker's Communists in Closets approaches the history of the Communist Party from a very different perspective. By recounting the experiences of gay and lesbian communists, she delves into their position in the party and, above all, into the way in which the development of their political ideas interacted with their sexuality, open or covert.

Aptheker's book contains several shorter stories that support four longer expositions describing the lives of four exceptional individuals. This is combined with historical material about the party's denial of the existence of gays and lesbians among its members, especially after the decisive Stonewall rebellion. During Stonewall and its aftermath, young activists created radical organisations such as the Gay Activists Alliance, debated the emerging concepts of gay and lesbian liberation and appealed for party support. They were met with stony silence.

Aptheker begins by describing her research process, which relies heavily on the personal archives of her chosen subjects and oral histories produced by herself and others. The tone of Aptheker's book is more personal than Cherny's, as she references her own personal struggles and experiences with coming out. She also expresses her love and admiration for the people she meets through her personal networks and research.

A short biographical vignette concerns Maud Russell, who lived in China before joining the American party and returning to take up political work. Aptheker describes her long collaboration with Ida Pruitt, who was born and lived for many years in China. Aptheker can only speculate as to whether they were lovers. She judges Russell’s support for the violent Cultural Revolution as a contradiction to her life of “loving and compassionate service.” However, Aptheker adds: “I also know how many communists, myself included, denied the atrocities of the Soviet Union, for example, because of a blinding emotional commitment to a political ideal that was not the reality. In my case, and perhaps in Maud’s, this emotional need was related to a secret lesbian sexuality.” To live in the closet is to live in fear of exposure and social ostracism. Perhaps such fear can reinforce a person’s attachment to sources of stability, security, identity and belonging.

Other short biographies range from the artist Elizabeth Olds, about whose sexuality Aptheker can, again, only speculate, to the composer Marc Blitzstein, to Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois's adopted son, David Graham Du Bois. More contemporary figures include Victoria Mercado, who grew up in a Watsonville farm-working family and worked on the defense of Angela Davis before her murder at age thirty. Marge Frantz grew up in the South, helped found the Civil Rights Congress, and ended her life teaching with Aptheker and Davis at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The book's description of the eccentric cohabitation between Frantz, her husband Laurent, a respected constitutional lawyer, and his mistress Eleanor Engstrand demonstrates that the lives of communists and ex-communists could be as bohemian as any other.

The book’s major contribution consists of four biographies: Harry Hay, Betty Millard, Eleanor Flexner, and Lorraine Hansberry. The intersection between Marxism and the politics of being gay in America is most evident in her account of the radical politics of Harry Hay, whom she calls “most decidedly a Communist revolutionary.”

Hay was a Communist Party activist through the 1930s and ’40s, joining street actions from the San Francisco general strike in 1934 to the animator’s strike at Disney studios in 1949. He taught courses at the California Labor School with titles like “Music . . . Barometer of the Class Struggle” and “Imperialist Formalism.” And as the Cold War started, Hay began bringing gay Communists together, eventually organizing the Mattachine Society, in which he tried to combine class politics and gay identity.

Aptheker describes the political theory Hay eventually elaborated, in which he asserted that gays and lesbians were a “historically oppressed cultural minority,” as a concept that evolved out of his educational work in the Communist Party. “There were no women in the membership of the original Mattachine Society,” she notes, but “the photographer Ruth Bernhard (1905–2006) often attended Mattachine meetings and joined in their intense political discussions.” Bernhard, an open lesbian, was a mainstay of gay and lesbian subcultural events and was widely celebrated for her photographs of the female form.

Apetheker writes:

As a Marxist scholar of unusual innovation, Harry was trying to argue that gay and lesbian people, because of their persecution and outsider positioning, had the potential to develop a particular consciousness of themselves that could also be a radical or revolutionary understanding of class and racial oppression. . . . Hay thought that gays and lesbians as an oppressed minority experienced the material conditions to make for a specifically gay consciousness distinct from that of the dominant society, and that such a consciousness held revolutionary implications.

Hay patterned this train of thought on the way the party had come to define African Americans as a people who suffer racial and national oppression, distinct from and in addition to their exploitation as workers. “He thought such an oppositional gay consciousness had a culturally revolutionary potential for upending all of society and its conventions.”

The Mattachine Society was a civil rights organization as well, and mounted the first successful legal challenge to police entrapment of gays and lesbians (with a lawyer from the National Maritime Union). In his theoretical framework, Hay regarded entrapment as the “weak link” in the capitalist oppression of his community. Neither the cases nor his expositions got any coverage in the left press however. After organizing the Mattachine Society and coming out as a gay man, Hay resigned from the Communist Party in 1951 because of its ban on gay membership. The party then expelled him to prevent him from rejoining.

Betty Millard also, not without controversy, used the analogy of black oppression in one of the Communist Party’s first attempts to theoretically define the oppression of women. Millard wrote two essays in the party journal New Masses, which were then published as a pamphlet called “Women Against Myth.” In it, Millard sought to weave together a Marxist and feminist analysis. “The way Betty structured her arguments,” Aptheker explains, “also revealed what I would call a queer sensibility in that her lived experiences as an independent woman and a lesbian, however closeted she was, allowed her to see that ‘woman’ and ‘femininity’ and the constraints on women’s lives were the purely (convenient) social constructions of male supremacy. There was nothing natural about them.”

Millard began by deconstructing the way language incorporates the inferior status of women. In using her essay for her course, I can imagine the expressions on the faces of those sheepish young men as my mother tells them that, when they curse with the word “fuck,” their expression of anger and aggression has its roots in violence against women.

In “Women Against Myth,” however, Millard describes the boredom of housewives as a “deadlier kind of lynching.” Claudia Jones challenged her middle-class orientation, and Millard changed “deadlier” to “quieter” but didn’t retract the comparison. Both Jones and Millard articulated the triple oppression of black women through the intersecting systems of domination: race, class, and gender. Jones wrote to Millard, “Does not the inferior status stem now as in the past primarily from women’s relation to the means of production?” Aptheker notes that Jones “did not include sexuality as a key part of the system of domination.”

In 1949, amid this ferment, Louise Patterson organized a national conference on “Marxism and the Woman Question” at which Jones was the lead speaker. My mother’s courses in subsequent years must have followed and been influenced by this debate. She idolized Jones, and used as a text her clarion call “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Jones was indicted under the Smith Act for writing another article, “Women in the Struggle for Peace and Security,” imprisoned for a year in 1955, and deported to the UK when she was released. Millard went on to represent the Congress of American Women internationally, until it was destroyed in the McCarthyite hysteria.

Aptheker describes in moving detail the emotional trauma and roller-coaster experience of Millard and her other subjects as they try to come to terms with their sexual orientation. Eleanor Flexner, who wrote the first scholarly history of the woman suffrage movement in the United States, lived with her lover Helen Terry “in real harmony and mutual enjoyment” for three decades. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Aptheker says, “was encouraged, nurtured and mentored by Black Communist artists and a collective of Black Communist intellectuals and activists,” but nevertheless suffered paralyzing depression and loneliness. Her liberation came with acknowledgment of her lesbian sexuality.

In the book’s final section, the Communist Party finally ends its ban on homosexuality. Aptheker presents contemporary portraits, for example of Rodney Barnette, an activist in Angela Davis’s defense, a Communist warehouse worker, and San Francisco’s first black owner of a gay bar. We also meet Eric Gordon, who today reports on culture for People’s World, and Lowell B. Denny III, who cofounded Queer Nation, a left-wing political movement that took direct action to combat discrimination against gays and lesbians. After Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson in 2014, Denny joined the Communist Party, and today also writes for People’s World.

Communists in Closets ends with Angela Davis, Aptheker’s comrade, coworker, and friend for most of each other’s lives. Davis speaks about her long romantic relationship with Gina Dent, a colleague in feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and celebrates their work together organizing the prison-abolition organization Critical Resistance. “I am fine with queer” as a personal descriptor of herself, Davis tells Aptheker, “but I prefer anti-racist and anti-capitalist” as self-identifiers, since they describe the heart of her political work. That lifetime of work was honored last year when the San Francisco longshore union, ILWU Local 10, made her its third honorary member, joining Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.

Aptheker recalls Davis’s 2009 speech before an audience that gave her a “warm, loving welcome.” She discarded her notes to tell them they had to embrace transgender people as part of “our movement,” regardless of whom it made uncomfortable, insisting that “we must constantly expand our idea of freedom.”

A more complete account of life in the party​

Both Cherny and Aptheker include great detail in presenting their arguments. With Cherny, we get the broad outlines of the party's history in San Francisco, albeit with some blank spaces. With Aptheker, we get deep insight into the travails of individual members—beyond San Francisco, but applicable to many San Franciscans—as they attempt to realize their political ideas in an environment of repression, not only from the power structure they oppose, but also from their own party.
The figures on their stages are mostly (though not entirely) leaders and organizers. Through them, we see much of the history of Communist Party policy and political strategy, and the cost to those at the helm. But behind the leaders were the rank-and-file party members who made it all work. They collected signatures on petitions. They staffed Camp Seeds of Tomorrow, the summer camp for the children of party members and their friends. People like Bob Lindsey, who sat behind the counter at the bookstore on First Street in San Jose, or those who staffed the one on Bancroft Way in Berkeley, or the one in downtown San Francisco.
I think of my parents, who were not national leaders or important people in the way that many are in these two books: My mother in her classes, and later writing children's books. My father as he searched for a job that could support our family after the blacklist, even if it meant moving across the country.
In A Tribute to a Lifetime , published by the Committees of Correspondence after the party split in 1992, I found a passage that for me sums up this kind of contribution. The party had an expression that honoured the ordinary work of political organisation. As Alice Correll, a member of the party, described it:

Ever since I was drafted into the YCU [Young Communist League] in 1937 I have been a Jenny Higgins [the men were called Jimmy Higgins]. I kept the books, collected the dues, cooked the stews, washed the dishes at the fund-raisers, and always paid my dues (the secret of my popularity!). In Seattle, in New York during the Browder period, later in San Francisco when we met only in small "cells," I have always been a private in the army. Where would the sergeants and generals be without us?

​

David Bacon is a California-based writer and documentary photographer. A former union organizer, he now documents labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the fight for human rights.
English:

Bring American Communists Out of the Shadows — and Closets

In the 20th century, American Communist Party members were portrayed as the Red Menace, an enemy within. In reality, they were ordinary people with extraordinarily complex intellectual, political, social, and romantic lives that deserve to be chronicled.

jacobin.com

Spanish:

Sacar a los comunistas estadounidenses de las sombras y los armarios -

En el siglo XX, los miembros del Partido Comunista estadounidense fueron presentados como la Amenaza Roja, un enemigo interior. En realidad, eran personas corrientes con vidas intelectuales, políticas, sociales y románticas extraordinariamente complejas que merecen ser relatadas. Reseña de San...

espai-marx.net

 

[Eltitoguay]

Another article, from 2019, about the Communist Party of the United States, this time by Ricardo Molina Pérez:

A Century of Marxism-Leninism in the U.S.​

Founded in 1919, the American Communist Party has survived repression and demonization. The priority of its 5,000 members is to defeat the far right in the 2020 elections.
Ricardo Molina Perez 10/09/2019

Robert Thompson and Benjamin Davis, members of the American Communist Party,
leaving the Federal Courthouse in New York in 1949.
STIEGLITZ, CM | LIBRARY OF CONGRES

The 31st convention of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) was held in Chicago, Illinois, on June 21-23. A more or less ordinary convention of a seemingly marginal party in the American political landscape would be despicable if it were not for the fact that it marks the beginning of the celebration of its 100th anniversary. A thorn in the side of one of the most anti-communist countries in the world, or, what is the same, one of the most fervently capitalist countries on Earth. Turning a century old, as the CPUSA is doing these days, perfectly expresses the strength of an organization that, beyond its actual size, some 5,000 members at present, has been and is the backbone of workers' and union struggles, of the demand and defense of civil rights, and of the anti-war movements in the USA.

“We are meeting at a crucial moment. The very existence of our people and our planet is in jeopardy,” said John Bachtell, the outgoing president, opening the convention. “It is we who will lead the fight to extend democratic rights and save the planet… who will create a radically new kind of society, free of exploitation, hatred and inequality.” The idealism of the president, and presumably that of the 300 delegates and representatives of various workers’ parties from around the world who accompanied him, is beyond question. But if there is one thing to be recognized about the CPUSA, it is its capacity for initiative, that is, its true vocation as the vanguard of workers’ and citizens’ struggles.

That same desire materialized on September 1st in the turbulent year of 1919 (the year of the largest metal strike in the country’s history up to that time), when 128 men and women, gathered at 1221 Blue Island Avenue in Chicago, founded the CPUSA. The manifesto approved on that occasion by a majority of these men and women read: “The world is on the brink of a new era. Europe has revolted. The masses of Asia are agitated with unrest. Capitalism is collapsing. The workers of the world glimpse a new life and acquire a new courage. Out of the night of war comes a new day… (…) The call to action comes. The workers must answer this call!”

From the beginning, it devoted part of its energies, its cadres and its militants, to the foundation of organizations for the defense of civil rights, the freedoms of minorities, immigrants and those born abroad.

From its very foundation, CPUSA members suffered persecution, imprisonment and, in the case of thousands of immigrant members, deportation. The Attorney General at the time, A. Mitchell Palmer, under the cover of the Sedition Act of 1918 (a kind of “gag law” that punished, among other things, opinions against the war), unleashed the repressive response to the First Red Scare, consisting of workers’ struggles, unrest in the streets, strikes and, to top it all off, the development and deepening of the triumph of the workers of Russia in 1917. The most prominent members of the party leadership had no choice but to go underground. This state harassment occurred in an economic context in which, between 1915 and 1920, in the United States, due to the effect of the First World War, food prices doubled, while clothing prices tripled.


This first wave of repression began to subside in 1921, when the party was able to emerge from anonymity, although part of it remained hidden, in what has been called the “secret apparatus of the CPUSA.” The party’s work then focused on putting down roots among the working class, always with the aim of defending its class interests. To this end, it took the initiative in the formation of as many unions as possible, and as inclusive as possible, with the collaboration of the already existing American Federation of Labor, in all productive sectors of the United States. But it also devoted part of its energies, its cadres and its militants, to the founding of organizations for the defense of civil rights, of the freedoms of minorities, of immigrants and of the foreign-born. And at the same time, to integrating and organizing people of color, black workers in the countryside and in the cities, in the unions. In fact, and to confirm this avant-garde vocation of which we spoke, the CPUSA was the first racially integrated party in the United States.

“An essential feature of the Party’s work is our strategic policy: to identify the most important political objective of the moment, which, when achieved, will advance the entire working class and the democratic struggle,” Bachtell said at the opening conference of the CPUSA convention in June, defining the same strategy that the party has carried out throughout its history. The same at the beginning as later, with failed strikes in some cases, victories in others, with successes and failures, as in every just struggle.

However, in October 1929, after the Wall Street crash , workers who had lost their jobs needed more than just strategies. Communists of the CPUSA immediately took the lead in helping the “starving legion.” They created Unemployed Councils, which were responsible for distributing among the needy the food and supplies that the state, through the relief offices, was unable to provide or only in cases of extreme poverty. These councils also served to block the evictions faced by tens of thousands of tenants (in what were the escraches of the time), and to organize the mobilization to demand public jobs for the unemployed and aid for those who could not work, mainly women with children and/or elderly and/or disabled people in their care, and not only in the city, but also in rural areas, where farms were being foreclosed on. Disillusioned with capitalism, seduced by communist ideas or by the work its militants did on the street with their hands in the dirt, many of the unemployed people joined the ranks of the CPUSA. Its membership , which had been 12,000 members at its founding, rose to 75,000 in 1938.

Following the Soviet Union's entry into the war in 1941, the CPUSA focused on anti-fascist politics and struggle, regaining its influence and reaching 80,000 members.

In 1935, three years after winning the election, Franklin Roosevelt's administration launched the New Deal, "the greatest victory for working people since the Civil War abolished slavery," a turn against the laissez-faire that had led to the crisis. New Deal legislation thus established unemployment benefits, the adoption of collective bargaining, pensions for the elderly and social security, a minimum wage and a 40-hour work week, demands that the CPUSA had pioneered in the country.

“We are an internationalist party whose goal is,” Bachtell says, “to put an end to Yankee imperialism and its global military presence, and replace it with solidarity, equality and global cooperation.” The internationalist character of the CPUSA is thus evident today in its words, as it was yesterday in its actions.

Spain, 1936, “National Uprising” and a coup against the Second Republic. Many party members take to the streets of the United States and demonstrate in defense of the Spanish Republic, against the military coup d’état of July, led by General Francisco Franco. The CPUSA collaborates with the side of democracy and legality, raises funds for medical assistance, and facilitates the integration of many of its members into an interracial group, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, one of the international brigades that fought in the Spanish Civil War.

“The limited civil, social and democratic rights that the working class and the people won under capitalism are always under threat. They are now under assault in unprecedented ways. (…) To one degree or another, the far right will always pose a danger to democracy.” It seems as if we can almost hear the words of former CPUSA chairman John Bachtell reverberating through the conference room. It also seems as if it hasn’t been a hundred years.


With the arrival of General Franco in Spain, Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, fascism spread throughout Europe. Stalin, in power in Russia since 1941, intrigued and ruled with an iron fist the administration, the Party and the Communist International (until he dissolved it in 1943).

Following the Soviet Union's entry into the war in 1941, the CPUSA focused on anti-fascist politics and struggle, regained its influence, and reached its highest membership ever , with a total of 80,000 members.

The CPUSA had, in Earl Browder, general secretary and chairman of the party from 1932 to 1945, as well as in his successor, better known by the pseudonym Eugene Dennis, staunch followers of Stalin's ideas. To illustrate the point, suffice it to say that when in August 1940 a Russian agent assassinated Trotsky with an ice axe, Browder accepted and perpetuated the fiction that the agent was a disillusioned element of the party. Both leaders, along with other CPUSA leaders, were accused by the American justice system of spying for the USSR and were prosecuted and imprisoned.

The CPUSA suffered a haemorrhage of militants after Soviet forces invaded Hungary in 1956, and Khrushchev revealed Stalin's continuing crimes in February of that year.

Shortly after, with the end of the Second World War, with the Cold War, with the launching of the first atomic bomb in 1949 by the USSR, with the arrival to power in China of Mao Zedong that same year and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, the anti-communist psychosis, or the Second Red Scare, would arrive.
The president of the US Senate Committee, Joseph McCarthy, denounced in February 1950 a conspiracy and the infiltration of communist agents in the State Department (equivalent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Thus began the inquisitorial processes against any suspected communist, the "witch hunt", whose victims include Hollywood actors and scriptwriters, government officials and some military personnel. These trials ignored the principle of presumption of innocence, which is typical of any self-respecting democracy, so that it was the accused who had to prove his or her innocence, that is, his or her lack of connection to or sympathy for the Communist Party, or failing that, he or she had to betray his or her comrades.

“We are still perceived by many as illegal or tied to the Soviet Union and past models of socialism. Many of our members, some union and community leaders, and elected officials are afraid to publicly associate with us,” Bachtell acknowledged at the CPUSA convention. “Yet times, people, and the political atmosphere have changed dramatically. Anti-communism has also declined, especially among the younger generation born after the Cold War.”

The CPUSA suffered a bloodbath of militants after Soviet forces invaded Hungary in 1956, and Nikita Khrushchev revealed in an unexpected “secret speech” at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February of that year the continuing crimes of Stalin and his government.
Howard Fast, author of the novel Spartacus and a member of the CPUSA since 1943, expressed the feeling that Khrushchev left among the party members: “Brilliant careers abandoned, success and wealth cast aside by some, respect and honor cornered by others, all together in a small minority group that had been harassed and persecuted for a decade, all of us guided and committed to a splendid dream of brotherhood and justice (…), and in this group (…) I stood up and said: I wonder if there is any comrade who can say now, after what we have known and seen, that she or he would still be alive today if the leaders of our own party had had the power to execute.”
In any case, after this “secret speech”, the dissidents who renounced Stalinism were expelled from the party, others left of their own free will, and some of them formed new left organizations (such as the Progressive Labor Party).
Even today, Bachtell lamented at the CPUSA convention: “The perception that communism is synonymous with totalitarianism (…) is still deeply embedded in the political DNA of the country and is a powerful weapon of division by the ruling class.”

It was in 1990 when finally, after years of insistence, party activist Eric A. Gordon managed to get the first article published in CPUSA circles demanding the rights of LGBT people.

However, those members who remained in the party and were active in spite of everything, continued the work of the CPUSA until Mikhail Gorbachev became head of the Soviet state in 1988. After an initial favourable reception of Gorbachev's far-reaching reforms, in 1989 the metalworker Gus Hall, chairman of the CPUSA from 1959 to 2000, rejected them as a counter-revolution aimed at restoring capitalism in the USSR. This approach weakened the relations of the CPUSA with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to the point that its general secretary cut off its funding. The American communists were financially dependent on the Russian Communist Party, as evidenced by the existence of at least one receipt signed by Hall.

With the dissolution of the USSR and the outlawing of the Russian Communist Party in 1991 by Boris Yeltsin, the CPUSA had to rethink its ideological position, finally reaffirming its Marxist-Leninist approach, as stated in its statutes: “We apply the scientific perspective developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and others, in the context of our American history, culture and traditions.”

There is one issue on which the CPUSA has always lagged behind other left-wing formations. Thus, it was only in 1990 that finally, after years of insistence, party activist Eric A. Gordon managed to get the first article published in CPUSA circles, specifically in the People's Daily World newspaper , demanding the rights of LGBT people.

The American Communist Party is celebrating its 100th anniversary with an immediate priority: “The most decisive battleground is the 2020 election. (…) It will require the maximum unity and mobilization of our multiracial, male and female, gay and straight, multigenerational, native and foreign working class, in alliance with all other essential democratic forces, including communities of color, women, youth, immigrants, the disabled, and all social movements. Defeating the far right is only the first stage of a longer and more expansive struggle against the entire capitalist class,” said Bachtel before giving way to a two-headed presidency composed of Rossana Cambron, the first woman to lead the party since union leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and journalist and activist Joe Sims were president in 1961.

Un siglo de marxismo-leninismo en EE.UU.

Fundado en 1919, el Partido Comunista estadounidense ha sobrevivido a la represión y la demonización. La prioridad de sus 5.000 miembros es derrotar a la extrema derecha en las elecciones de 2020

ctxt.es

 

[Eltitoguay]

As I have commented before, my knowledge of the Marxist movements in the USA is very limited. I think the best known historicaly (I don't know if only for me, or in my country in general), are the one mentioned above

I believe its current ideology would be between democratic Marxism-Leninism and neo-Marxism;

The aforementioned Black Panther Party, (The only one that had an affiliated organization in my country, Spain)

Black Panther Party - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Partido Pantera Negra - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

and the Revolutionary Communist Party

Revolutionary Communist Party, USA - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Partido Comunista Revolucionario de los Estados Unidos - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

I believe its current ideology would be Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-"neo-Maoism"

and the Socialist Workers Party

Socialist Workers Party (United States) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (Estados Unidos) - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

which seems to me to be a democratic Marxism-Leninism-Troskism-Shachtmanism.

 

[Eltitoguay]

2018 interwiew with Tom Watts about the Black Panthers Party, by Oscar Díaz:

INTERVIEW WITH TOM WATTS ABOUT THE BLACK PANTHERS​

(PART 1 of 4)

Posted by Oscar Diaz | 6 Jun, 2018

BLACK PANTHERS: INTERVIEW WITH TOM WATTS, A JOURNEY THROUGH THE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE IN THE USA.​

“The original BPP established fraternal relations with Algeria, Cuba, People’s China, North Korea and North Vietnam, and supported liberation struggles internationally. Several exiled members of the BPP and BLA are still given refuge in Cuba.”

“FIRST, LET ME INTRODUCE MYSELF, I AM TOM “BIG WARRIOR” WATTS, AND I AM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF RISING SUN PRESS AND THE SENIOR ADVISOR TO THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE NEW BLACK AFFILIATION-AFRIKAN PRISON CHAPTER (NABPP-PC). I JOINED THE WHITE PANTHER PARTY (WPP), AN AFFILIATE OF THE ORIGINAL BLACK PANTHER PARTY (BPP) IN 1968 (THE YEAR OF ITS FORMATION), AND WAS THE EASTERN PENNSYLVANIA COORDINATOR.” TOM WATTS. ​

WHAT ARE THE BLACK PANTHERS AND HOW DID THIS ORGANIZATION COME ABOUT?​

The original Black Panther Party was formed in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale , who at the time were students at Merritt College in Oakland, California . Inspired by a speech by Stokely Carmichael promoting the armed organizing efforts of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization ( LCFO ) in Alabama , they decided to adopt the Black Panther symbol used by LCFO and call their organization the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.

The Party's primary goal would be to police officers, armed with shotguns and books as laws, in an effort to prevent police from carrying out terrorist acts against people in black communities.

LCFO People's House in Alabama

WHAT MOTIVATED THEIR FIGHT AND WHY DID THEY FIGHT?​

Huey and Bobby were prepared to fight in self-defense if attacked, but their main motivation was to set an example in defending people's legal rights and getting others to join them. At the time, it was legal to openly carry guns in California , and the Panthers were ordered to keep their guns pointed away from police and not interfere with their lawful performance of duties. At the same time, they would advise people about their legal rights.

DID THE BLACK PANTHERS CARRY OUT AN ARMED STRUGGLE AGAINST THE US GOVERNMENT AND FAR-RIGHT GROUPS IN THE COUNTRY? WHY?​

Following a split in the Party leadership in 1971 , the paramilitary Black Liberation Army ( BLA ), which adopted the line of Eldridge Cleaver's faction, initiated armed struggle in retaliation for police terror and carried out armed expropriations to raise funds. While the BLA was never very large, it was heavily infiltrated by police agents, and many former Black Panthers ended up serving long prison terms, including several who are still incarcerated.

BLA logo.

Cleaver himself capitulated and ended up a disgraced and broken individual.

WHAT CREATED THE BIRTH OF FASCIST GROUPS AND PARTIES IN THE UNITED STATES SUCH AS THE KKK (KU KUX KLAN)?​

The Ku Klux Klan ( KKK ) has a long history dating back to the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War , to which it was a terrorist response. It was founded in Tennessee by former Confederate Army officers and quickly spread throughout the South with the goal of restoring white supremacy and attacking the Republican governments of Reconstruction . It was suppressed by the federal government in the early 1870s, which enacted the Enforcement Acts backed by occupying federal troops and federal commissaries.

The second wave of the KKK emerged in the pre -World War I era as a response to the "Great Migration" of blacks away from the South and the large immigration of Catholics and Jews from Central and Southern Europe. Supported by President Wilson , it achieved mass membership and at its peak in the early 1920s claimed 3 to 6 million members. From Wilson to Truman , no president dared to oppose the Klan , and it had a lasting effect on evangelical Protestant denominations. This wave spread the KKK far beyond the South into other areas of the country .

Hanging of two black civilians at a KKK festival, 1930s.

The third wave arose in response to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and advocated anti-communism, patriarchy, racial purity, “Americanism,” and anti-unionism. It was also anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, isolationist, and generally as reactionary as the earlier waves. It was alternately suppressed and encouraged by the FBI , and tended to die out as the Republican Party under President Nixon absorbed the “ Dixiecrats .” Many of the KKK members infiltrated the police and the “Religious Right.”

KKK Burning Cross Ceremony.

There is currently a fourth wave afoot with the encouragement of President Trump , though it takes more the form of the “Alt-Right” than the traditional hooded, robed knights of the past. The new KKK has to compete with other neo-Nazi and reactionary organizations for membership, though they are making more contacts and working together to hold rallies primarily aimed at anti-immigration and opposition to Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Muslims, and the Left in general.

WHAT KIND OF TRAINING AND IDEAS DID THE BLACK PANTHERS HAVE?​

The Black Panthers were children of two fathers, Malcolm X and Mao Zedong.

The Black Panthers were greatly influenced by the anti-imperialist struggles of the time , especially in Africa , and figures such as Che, Franz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, and Ho Chi Minh , as well as Mao Zedong . Malcolm X was a major influence, and his assassination was a major motivation for the founding of the Party . It has often been said that the Black Panthers were the children of two fathers, Malcolm X and Mao Zedong. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968 caused the Party to double in size overnight. The party drew from a broad base, including students, workers, and ordinary people.

WHAT WAS YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MAOISM AND THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA? WHY WERE YOU CONSIDERED MAOISTS?​

In the early days, the BPP played up the strategy of buying copies of Mao ’s “Little Red Book” in large quantities and selling them on university campuses to raise money to buy weapons. This, of course, led to the reading of the “Red Books” , which greatly influenced the Panthers ’ political-ideological development and the transition from black nationalism to Marxism-Leninism . The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was underway , and this had a worldwide influence, particularly on students and youth. More particularly, the Panthers were influenced by Mao’s “Declaration Supporting American Negroes in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by US Imperialism” (1963) and “A New Storm Against Imperialism” (1968), in which he stated: “Only by overthrowing the reactionary rule of the US monopoly capitalist class and destroying the colonialist and imperialist system can blacks in the United States win complete emancipation.” The Negro masses and the masses of white workers in the United States have common interests and common goals to fight for. Therefore, the Afro-American struggle is gaining sympathy and support from the growing number of white and progressive workers in the United States. The struggle of the Negro people in the United States is destined to merge with the American labor movement, and this will eventually put an end to the criminal regime of the monopoly capitalist class of the United States.”

Black Panther rally in New York.

In both statements, which were widely publicized by the BPP , Mao made the prediction that: “The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and prospered with the enslavement of the blacks and the black trade, and will surely end with the complete emancipation of the blacks.”

WAS THIS ORGANIZATION BORN WITH THE CHINESE CULTURAL REVOLUTION?​

In late September 1971, Huey P Newton led a delegation to China and stayed there for 10 days. At every airport in China , Huey was greeted by thousands of people waving copies of the “Little Red Book” and displaying signs reading “we support the Black Panther Party, we defeat American imperialism” or “we support the American people except Nixon,” “the imperialist regime must be overthrown . ” Huey met with Primer Zhou Enali, Chiang Ch'ing, ( Mao 's wife ), and Chang Chun-chiao , Mao 's close companion and author of “On Exercising Total Dictatorship over the Bourgeoisie” (1975).

Huey Newton with Zhou Enali.

In particular, the Panthers were influenced by Mao's work of “Serving the People” and implementing the “Mass Line.”

WHAT ACTIVITIES DID THE BLACK PANTHERS CARRY OUT DURING THE YEARS FROM 1966 UNTIL THEIR DISSOLUTION IN 1982?​

One of the most famous and popular BPP “ survival programs” was the “Free Breakfast for Children” program started in Oakland in 1968 and replicated across the country. At its peak, the Panthers were feeding more than 20,000 schoolchildren a healthy and nutritious breakfast.

Black Community Conference held by the Black Panthers.

J. Edgar Hoover , the Director of the FBI , dubbed it; “The Greatest Domestic Threat to National Security ,” and the government responded by starting its own free breakfast program for children. Other Survival Programs included Free Health Clinics, Release Schools, free transportation programs for families to visit inmates, free shoes and winter coats, medical exams, lawyer referrals, etc.

DID THEY ORGANIZE WITH UNIONIZED WORKERS? DID THEY PARTICIPATE IN THE UNION STRUGGLE?​

The Panthers had affiliates such as the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement ( TDR ), which later gave rise to the Black Workers Congress ( BWC ), but primarily the Party focused on community organizing and recruiting the lumpen proletariat. At the time, blacks were concentrated primarily in defined ghetto areas, and it was there that the BPP took root .

BWC union propaganda poster.

One of the countermeasures adopted by the government after the ghetto uprisings of 1968 (following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ) was called “Spatial Deconcentration ,” which involved the mass demolition of former ghettos and the dispersal of the Black Community under the guise of “Urban Renewal,” and what is today called “gentrification,” and the creation of zones of urban petit bourgeois communities.
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[Eltitoguay]

INTERVIEW WITH TOM WATTS ABOUT THE BLACK PANTHERS.(PART 2 of 4); by Oscar Diaz | 6 Jun, 2018​

WHAT IS SO-CALLED “BLACK NATIONALISM” AND HOW DOES IT INFLUENCE THE BLACK PANTHERS?​

The “Great Migration,” dispersal across the Americas, proletarianization, and urbanization forever changed the Black Nation into a complex of oppressed communities.

The Black Panthers came out of the black nationalist movement , but through their struggle against the cultural nationalism promoted by leaders like Ron Karenga and his American organization, they came to embrace a broader revolutionary nationalism and eventually to renounce nationalism as an anachronism in the age of neoliberal globalization. Most would agree that black people became an internal nation in the “black belt” south in the post-Civil War period, under conditions of agricultural serfdom and a feudal-type sharecropping economy and “Jim Crow” segregation. Like oppressed peasant masses everywhere, their demand was for land and self-determination.

Ron Karenga.

They were the majority in the region, and the demand for “Land for the Farmer” would naturally lead to the formation of an autonomous national territory. The white peasant sharecroppers would be a minority, but a potential ally in the struggle, at least “one would be divided into two” and a segment of the white community would be a potential ally if they too received the land they had farmed for generations. But the “Great Migration,” dispersal throughout America, proletarianization and urbanization forever changed the Black Nation into a complex of oppressed communities.

Moreover, the transformation of the US from a nation state into a global empire created conditions in which no country could function as an independent nation any longer. National economies were transformed into extensions of the capitalist-imperialist global economy. National liberation struggles in former colonial countries were one by one co-opted and subordinated to neocolonial domination by the imperialist-dominated global political economy, “dollar diplomacy” and military intimidation.

DID THE BLACK PANTHERS CONSIDER THEMSELVES A FEMINIST ORGANIZATION?​

Not exactly, the Panthers identified as “women” rather than “feminist” as they viewed “feminism” as a white petty-bourgeois movement with a basic bourgeois orientation of promoting women’s inclusion in the privileged power elite and with little interest in equal pay for working women and no interest in overthrowing capitalism-imperialism which is the source of class oppression and the oppression of women.

WHAT ROLE DID WOMEN PLAY WITHIN THE ORGANIZATION AND IN THE STRUGGLES THEY LED?​

There were internal struggles against male chauvinism within the Party and a conscious effort to train and include women in leadership positions in the Party. The example of Vietnamese women waging a people's war against imperialism had a great influence on the Party and revolutionary comrades in general. By 1968, women formed two-thirds of the party, while many male members were imprisoned or in exile.

Black Panther women protesting police abuse.

In the absence of much of the original male leadership, women moved into all parts of the organization. Kathleen Cleaver was the first woman promoted to the Central Committee and served as Party spokesperson and chief organizer of the “Free Huey” campaign.

Kathleen Cleaver.

Elaine Brown later became president and led the party during Huey's exile in Cuba.

WHY DOES THE ORGANIZATION CALL ITSELF “BLACK PANTHERS”? WHAT WAS THE MOTIVATION FOR USING THIS NAME?​

As I mentioned, the Party adopted the Black Panther symbol used by the Lowndes County Freedom Association and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), with which the Party attempted to merge in the early years.

Black Panther Party logo.

The panther symbolizes militant self-defense, black pride, and intelligence.

WERE THERE OTHER ORGANIZATIONS, REVOLUTIONARY, DEMOCRATIC OR PROGRESSIVE, THAT FOUGHT FOR THE RIGHTS OF BLACK MEN AND WOMEN?​

There were of course many other black organizations at the time, some of which were inspired by the BPP and others which saw them as rivals. The party cultivated many alliances with a variety of progressive and revolutionary organizations, including those from other ethnic communities, such as the Mexican-American Brown Berets ( Boinas marrones or Brown Bertes in English) and the Puerto Rican Young Gentlemen's Party.

Brown Bertes activists.

In addition to the White Panther Party, there were many local collectives of white working-class youth who formed alliances with the BPP and looked to them for inspiration and leadership.

WHO IS BOBBY SEALE?​

Bobby Seale was the founding chairman and a major influence in the party. He was jailed several times for his activities, but won acquittal each time attempts were made to lock him up. In 1973, he ran for mayor of Oakland and came in second in a field of nine candidates, but lost in the runoff to the incumbent mayor.

Bobby Seale, February 2005 in a photo leaving prison.

He is the author of several books and recently released a documentary called “Eighth Accused.”

WERE THE BLACK PANTHERS INFLUENCED BY AFRICANISTS? WHAT DOES “PAN-AFRICAN” NATIONALISM MEAN?​

Blacks in America are part of the African diaspora, and there were certainly Pan-Africanist influences in the Party. But the Black Panthers became internationalists and eventually intercommunalists. Like the great South African leader, Robert Sobukwe , the term “race” for them existed only in the singular referring to the human race, and “multiracial” implied “multiplied racism.” As Bobby Seale put it : “You don’t fight racism with racism, the best way to fight racism is with solidarity.”

WERE THERE ANY MISTAKES MADE WITHIN THE ORGANIZATION IN ANY ASPECT? FORM OF EXPRESSION, ARMED STRUGGLE, ORGANIZATION…​

Certainly, many mistakes were made within the Party , including the decision to initiate armed struggle prematurely by the BLA faction. Democratic centralism was an ideal that was often discarded in favour of the “commander” and the “cult of personality”. The adoption of the “United Front against Fascism” strategy was a mistake, when the focus should have been on building a “United Front against Capitalism-Imperialism” . The growth of the liquidation tendency within the Party was also a serious mistake which resulted in the dissolution of the Party in 1982.

The original BPP was amateurish in many ways, as few of the comrades had prior organisational experience and were often “block brothers” with unreformed lumpen tendencies. This was reflected in practice in many ways, including attempts to correct these tendencies by equally erroneous methods.

WHO IS ANGELA DAVIS? DID SHE BECOME PART OF THE BLACK PANTHERS?​

Angela Davis was never a member of the BPP but rather a member of the Communist Party who worked closely with the Black Panthers , particularly in defense of its imprisoned members. Davis was a supporter of the Soledad Brothers, three inmates accused of killing a Soledad Prison guard. One of these inmates was George Jackson, the leader of the Prison Chapter of the Black Panther Party. On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson, George Jackson's 17-year-old brother, a high school student, gained control of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in an attempt to free the Soledad Brothers. He and others, including the judge, were killed in the attempt. The pistols he used had been purchased by Angela Davis.

Angela Davis.

A warrant was issued for her arrest, and she became a fugitive who was placed on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted List." On October 13, 1970, FBI agents located her at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in New York City. She pleaded not guilty to the conspiracy charge, and her cause gained widespread popular support, with "Free Angela" committees forming in over 200 American cities and 67 foreign countries. Many cultural icons of the era released songs in her support, including John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and the Rolling Stones . On June 4, 1972, after 13 hours of deliberations, the all-white jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The fact that she owned the weapons used in the crime was judged insufficient to establish her responsibility in the plot.

HOW WAS THE BLACK POPULATION TREATED IN THE UNITED STATES DURING THE BLACK PANTHERS' ACTIVITIES? AND BEFORE?​

Black people in the US have long been victims of racial discrimination, and this intensified after 1968 and the election of Richard Nixon, whose “Southern Strategy” capitalised on the racist backlash to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. The FBI’s “secret war” on the Black Panther Party went mainstream under the cover of a “War on Drugs” , resulting in an eight-fold increase in the prison population since 1970. The “militarisation” of the police began with the formation of SWAT in Los Angeles in preparation for the assault on the Black Panther Party headquarters.

As Huey predicted in 1970, the result of increasing automation was a decrease in the number of workers that capitalists could profitably exploit.

Richard Nixon.

As blacks became less necessary for capitalists to satisfy their need for low-wage workers, the “solution” of mass incarceration became a driving strategy. The criminalization of youth followed the suppression of the Panthers, and ghettos became flooded with illegal drugs and weapons.

WERE THERE VERY RACIST AND SEGREGATIONIST LAWS IN THE UNITED STATES? HOW REACTIONARY WERE THESE LAWS?​

According to John Ehrlichman , a lawyer and assistant to the president for domestic affairs under Nixon : “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. Do you understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be antiwar or black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, attack their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did.”

John Ehrlichman.

Since then, every president has continued these policies and enhanced them with even “harsher” laws targeting young black and brown men. At every stage of the criminal justice system, institutionalized racism targets black and other ethnic minorities, giving them disproportionately longer sentences, transferring them to probation, and placing them in more restrictive levels of confinement. From the police officer in court to the judge in the court of appeals, the law is applied prejudicially against people of color.
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[Eltitoguay]

INTERVIEW WITH TOM WATTS ABOUT THE BLACK PANTHERS. (PART 3 of 4); by Oscar Diaz | 6 Jun, 2018​

COULD YOU JOIN THE BLACK PANTHERS IF YOU WERE WHITE, OR WERE ONLY BLACKS ALLOWED TO JOIN? WHY?​

BLA was an all-black organization, but it had an alliance with the Weather Underground, the militant faction of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society).

Marilyn Buck, a white revolutionary, was convicted along with three BLA members of breaking BLA leader Assata Shakur out of prison and helping her escape to Cuba.

He also allegedly participated in other armed actions alongside BLA members.

WHY WAS THE ORGANIZATION DISSOLVED?​

When the Party was dissolved, there were more Panthers in prison than remained outside.

The FBI’s counterinsurgency program, COINTELPRO, was successful in infiltrating, disrupting, and decimating the BPP. By the time the Party was dissolved, there were more Panthers in prisons than were left outside. Huey Newton was a shadow of his former self, addicted to drugs and acting irrationally. The world had changed dramatically by 1982. After Mao ’s death in 1975, a right-wing coup removed his supporters from power and allowed US imperialism to further consolidate its global hegemony. The prospects for a revolution in the United States looked bleak indeed.

IS THERE CURRENTLY ANY REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATION THAT REMEMBERS OR CLAIMS THE ACTIVITY OF THE BLACK PANTHERS?​

The NBPP has a diametrically opposed philosophy, having co-opted the name and symbolism of the original BPP and more closely resembling the FBI-sponsored American organization that killed Black Panthers.

In 1989, an organization calling itself the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) was formed in Dallas, Texas. Khalid Abdul Muhammad, a former minister of the Nation of Islam (NOI), became the national chairman from the late 1990s until his death in 2001. To this day, the NBPP continues to follow its black ultranationalist ideological and political line. Although the NBPP has a diametrically opposed philosophy, it has co-opted the name and symbolism of the original BPP and more closely resembles the FBI-sponsored American organization that killed Black Panthers. There are other groups that claim the Black Panther legacy , but most incorporate aspects of the NBPP's ultranationalism and reject or fall short of the original BPP's “revolutionary in every sense” orientation.

An exception is the prison-born New Afrikan Black Panther Party ( NABPP-PC ), founded in 2005. In the words of former BPP and BLA leader and current POW, Jalil Muntaqim : “The original Black Panther Party for Self-Defense challenged the prevailing socio-political and economic relationship between the government and Black people. The New Afrikan Black Panther Party is building on that foundation, and Rashid’s writings embrace the need for a national organization in place of the one that has been destroyed by COINTELPRO and racist repression.”

Another former BPP political prisoner , Mumia Abu Jama l, has written: “A new formation has already emerged, calling itself the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, which has prison chapters in several states. Unlike other formations that have used the BPP name, these young people actually read and study the works of Huey P. Newton, George Jackson and other leading members of the Party. The struggle continues!”

DID THE BLACK PANTHERS SYMPATHIZE WITH THE INTERNATIONAL STRUGGLE OF SOME LEGITIMATE PEOPLES OR GOVERNMENTS AGAINST IMPERIALISM?​

The original BPP established fraternal relations with Algeria, Cuba, People's China, North Korea and North Vietnam, and supported people's liberation struggles internationally. Several exiled members of the BPP and BLA are still given refuge in Cuba today. The NABPP has not yet established international relations, but it sympathizes with many struggles being waged around the world, particularly the people's wars being waged in the Philippines and India .

Internationalist poster of the Black Panthers against imperialism and its allies in Africa

There is great sympathy for the Palestinian people, the Kurds and others struggling for their survival, the people of Africa and all those who suffer from class, caste, ethnic and national oppression. The NABPP calls for the formation of a World United Front against Capitalist Imperialism, Racism and Police State Repression.

WERE THE BLACK PANTHERS ORGANIZED INSIDE PRISONS? ARE THERE STILL PRISONERS IN THE ORGANIZATION IN 2018? HOW WERE THEY TREATED?​

“Adopting the principle of “each one teaches one,” many have been mentors to their cellmates or other inmates.” (…) “Panterazionism is alive in U.S. prisons.”

The Panther organization never ceased inside the prisons. In addition to the well-known political prisoners who remain incarcerated, there were many who passed through the Party and/or its prison chapter who are part of mass incarceration. There are many whose parents were Black Panthers or who, as children, were touched by the Party ’s Free Breakfast Program or other “Serve the People” programs , many who studied George Jackson ’s Soledad Brother (1970) or Blood in My Eye (1971), or have read any of the many memoirs or books about Black Panthers .

Panthers soup kitchen.

Adopting the principle of “each one teaches one,” many have mentored their cellmates or other inmates. Newsletters published by Rising Sun Press continue to be passed from hand to hand and inspire prisoners to join the United Panther Movement . Despite severe official suppression, including torture and murder, pantherism is alive in prisons across the United States.

DID THE BLACK PANTHERS EVER COME INTO SERIOUS OR DEADLY CONFRONTATION WITH OTHER BLACK ORGANIZATIONS? WHY?​

The BPP had several members killed by the FBI-backed US organization, including “Bunchy” Carter, the leader of the Southern California branch. As part of COINTELPRO, the FBI promoted “cultural nationalism” as a counterweight to the Party’s revolutionary intercommunalism, and this continues to this day. There were also a couple of deadly clashes between the Cleaver and Newton factions of the Party. Just a few years ago, NBPP members jumped out and tried to beat to death Dhoruba bin Wahab , a 71-year-old elder and former BPP/BLA political prisoner/pow at a meeting in Atlanta to prevent him from speaking.

Dhoruba bin Wahab.

Despite its militant rhetoric and posturing, black nationalism poses no threat to the racist capitalist power structure, whereas class consciousness does. Therefore, at every opportunity, agents of repression will support and use nationalism as a proxy to attack genuine revolutionaries and progressives. The state has a monopoly on legitimizing the use of force and violence, and will attempt to steer the struggle in that direction when it is to its advantage. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and the state has plenty of guns. Of course, as Marx noted:
“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by guns, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has taken hold of the masses. Theory is capable of seizing the masses as soon as it proves ad hominem, and it proves ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.”

WHO WAS MALCOLM X AND FRANTZ FANON, WHY ARE THEY SO WELL KNOWN AMONG THE BLACK POPULATION?​

Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon are two of the strongest influences on the Panther Movement.

Malcolm X was a criminal who converted to Islam when he was a prisoner. He became the leading spokesman for the Nation of Islam (NOI) in the 1950s and 1960s. But as his spiritual and political awareness grew, he began to have problems with the NOI and its founder and leader Elijah Muhammad, leading to his resignation in March 1964. He converted to Sunni Islam and made a pilgrimage to Mecca, which profoundly altered his views on race, thus becoming a great revolutionary. Not long before his assassination by an NOI-FBI conspiracy, Malcolm stated, “I think there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who oppress. I think there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for all and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I think there will be that kind of clash, but I don’t think it will be based on skin color.”

Malcolm X.

Frantz Fanon was a Martinican psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose works are influential in the fields of postcolonial studies, critical theory and Marxism .

In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported the Algerian War of Independence from France, and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front.

Frantz Fanon's book (Spanish edition) on the Algerian Revolution and National Liberation.

Algerian War - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

As a revolutionary psychiatrist, his insights into the effects of colonialism and racism on oppressed people are particularly valuable. His writings, including Black Skin White Masks (1952), A Dying Colonialism (1959), The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Toward the African Revolution (1964), were required reading for BPP members.
Describing one of his first meetings with Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale recalls bringing him a copy of Wretched of the Earth. The 10-point BPP program was heavily influenced by Fanon's writings.

WHO WERE TOMMIE SMITH AND JOHN CARLOS? WHY DID THEY RAISE THEIR FISTS AT THE 1968 MEXICO OLYMPICS AFTER FINISHING FIRST AND THIRD?​

Tommie Smith and John Carlos were African-American athletes who gained worldwide attention by giving the “Black Power” salute at the Olympics as they received the gold and bronze medals for the 200-meter race.
Peter Norman, the white Australian athlete who came in second, also participated by wearing a human rights badge as did the two black Americans.

Tommie Smith later claimed that he was giving a “human rights salute,” as the clenched fist has a broader meaning dating back to the Spanish Civil War.

Both Smith and Carlos were expelled from the games after Avery Brundage, the president of the International Olympic Committee, threatened to expel the entire U.S. team.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos 1968 Olympic Games.

From the Summer Olympics. Some thought it ironic that Brundage, an American Nazi sympathizer, had defended the right of German athletes to give the Nazi salute when receiving medals at the 1936 Berlin games, but now claimed that the games were “strictly apolitical.”
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[Eltitoguay]

INTERVIEW WITH TOM WATTS ABOUT THE BLACK PANTHERS. (PART 4 and the end); by Oscar Diaz | 6 Jun, 2018

DID THE BLACK PANTHERS LEAVE THEIR MARK ON THE AMERICAN AND AFRICAN COMMUNIST MOVEMENT?​

The Black Panther Party was arguably the most influential leftist organisation in US history. It was certainly the most repressed by the government. Despite its short life, it continues to exert a major influence on both the Black Movement and the left in general . It continues to be maligned in the Establishment media and its message is distorted. Its political prisoners are among the longest-serving in the world. When Beyonce and her dancers paid tribute to the Black Panthers at the 2016 Superbowl, celebrating the party’s 50th anniversary, it sparked a storm of reaction and was compared to the stand taken by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics.

But Pantherism is about more than standing up, and it’s about more than taking pride in “blackness.” It’s about taking the next step beyond Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and applying the science of revolution to the world as it evolves in the 21st century.

We live in a time when nations no longer matter because we are too connected for that. Our problems have become too globalized and demand global solutions. Today's world is a global community of communities all interconnected, communicating in real time. We must learn to think and act as a people, an intercommunal class that must rise up to take control of our lives and our future. As Marx noted:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances already existing, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be busy revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they eagerly call upon the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and disguises in order to present this new scene in world history in a time-honored guise and borrowed language.”

In 1970, Huey ’s “theory of revolutionary intercommunalism” was virtually ignored and dismissed by the Left , but as the NABPP has taken it seriously as its political-ideological program, some Marxists are beginning to re-evaluate it. No one can deny that many of his predictions have come true.
In April 2012, the UK-based Democracy and Class Struggle reprinted the text of Huey’s 1970 speech at Boston College, referencing Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, NABPP ideologue and spokesman. What was too new to be seriously considered in Huey’s time may finally be applied to make a breakthrough.

WITH TRUMP'S VICTORY IN THE UNITED STATES AND HIS ANTI-IMMIGRANT POLICIES, CAN WE EXPECT A REACTION FROM ANTI-FASCISTS AND THE ORGANIZED AND RESONANT AFRICAN-AMERICAN POPULATION?​

The NABPP has just begun to organize outside the prisons, with President Shaka Zulu on parole, but we hope to gain a broad following. The left is in disarray, with no clear distinction between liberals and revolutionaries. Most young people and blacks are anti-capitalist (loosely), but few are organized behind a concrete program to end wage slavery and create socialism . Black Lives Matter has no clear political program and is funded by Soros and the Ford Foundation.
Marxism has gained popularity, but few can use it to identify the main contradiction in the world today. Identity politics and divisive bourgeois ideology prevail on both the left and the right. Anti-Trump sentiment is high, but it is more likely to put the Democrats back in power than to produce a real alternative to “business as usual.” We have our work cut out for us.

Anti-fascist protest in the US against the rise of fascism.

Nevertheless, we are optimistic.
As Mao noted, “A single spark can start a prairie fire!”
 The Republican and Democratic parties are a two-headed snake, and neither offers solutions to our dilemma. Both are committed to serving the capitalist-imperialist ruling class and its attempt to consolidate its global hegemony, regardless of the consequences. Revolutionary intercommunalism is the only solution, and the NABPP is the only one that promotes it.
As Mao noted :“The correctness or otherwise of the ideological and political line decides everything. When the Party line is correct, everything will be resolved. If you have no followers, then you can have followers; if you have no guns, then you can have guns; if you have no political power, then you can have political power. If your line is not correct, even what you have can be lost. The line is a net rope. When it is pulled, the whole net is pulled open.” This is the basis of our optimism.

Anti-Trump and anti-fascist activist after Trump's victory in 2016.

Huey’s “Theory of Revolutionary Intercommunalism” is based on a new analysis of the world as it is today, in the final stage of capitalist imperialism, when humanity will make the qualitative leap to the next level of human social evolution or capitalism-imperialism. It will drag us all into the abyss of extinction from which there is no escape. We can continue to try to choose the “lesser of two evils” and follow the “path of least resistance” or we can “dare to scale the heights” and “make the most of the time” while we still have some time left. Pantherism is our last real hope. The future will be bright, if we dare to do so.

DARE TO FIGHT, DARE TO WIN. ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!​

Entrevista a Tom Watts sobre los Panteras Negras.

Panteras Negras: Entrevista a Tom Watts, un recorrido por la lucha revolucionaria en EEUU a través de las palabras del militante de Black Panthers.

www.revistalacomuna.com

 

[Eltitoguay]

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The Black Panthers in Spain: how the revolutionary vanguard that fought Nazi and racist attacks was formed​

By Henrique Marino.
Madrid; 04/25/2024

Beatings, racism and political awareness led several young of Equatorial Guineans origins, to create "a secret self-defense strategy" against the rise of the far right in the 1990s.​

Members of the Black Panthers of Zaragoza, in 1992. — Black Panthers Archive

In the early 1990s, nazi skinheads were rampant in Madrid and other cities. Fed up with racist attacks and insults, the young people of the black movement decided to organize and develop a "collective strategy based on self-defense against the impunity of Nazi terrorism." This is how the Black Panthers were born in Spain, although the embryo had been conceived years before in the context of student protests — whose punk icon was Cojo Manteca —, the rise of hip hop and the fury of street gangs.

However, they needed an organisation that would unite its members and leaders who would instil in them an ideology and a conscience to undertake the racial struggle. Abuy Nfubea , a young man of Equatorial Guinean origin, was one of those responsible for recruiting and training subversive, committed and combative elements to provide cadres for the Black Panthers, recognised in 1994 as the Spanish section of the American New Black Panther Party.

New Black Panther Party - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Nuevo Partido Pantera Negra - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

He knew the theory, but it was time to put it into practice. He and other comrades had been immersed in the doctrine of Malcolm X and had read Kwame Ture's book Black Power , although they were aware that the cause was fragmented and needed the glue of what would later become the Black Panthers, whose first state congress was held in 1992. The setting was Alcalá de Henares, which housed two institutions that were decisive for the development of the movement: the campus of the Universidad Laboral and the Pedro Gumiel Institute.

• 
  Stoners, morphine addicts, drunks and cocaine addicts on the national and republican front

"Malcolm X was inspired by rap and by the Torrejón de Ardoz air base, where we went to the Stone's nightclub , which was frequented by Americans. In addition to his autobiography, we read the magazines Mundo Negro , Tam-Tam and África Negra ," explains Abuy Nfubea, who set out to spread his thesis beyond academic circles and onto the streets. Not only to gangs, but also to other types of brotherhoods, as there was a seed of protest among grassroots Christians and other groups.
On campus, he says, a confrontation arose between two factions: "The black Uncle Toms , kneeling and colonised, who were around the Colegio Mayor Nuestra Señora de África [attached to the Complutense University of Madrid]; and other more radical, politically aware and from a lower social class, who were around the Universidad Laboral de Alcalá and Father Asier." Although Abuy Nfubea was a middle-class lad educated by the Jesuits, he converted to the working-class and pan-Africanist cause.
While some classified his people as immigrants or, at best, as black citizens, he advocated the concept of a black community. The different perspectives when it came to tackling the social struggle against racism came from a long time ago and, in today's eyes, can seem shocking and contradictory. There were organizations linked to Catholics and evangelicals - and even related to Opus Dei - as well as militants from right-wing and left-wing parties, both Spanish and Equatorial Guinean.

• 
  
  Ecuatorial Guinean Falangists: the Spanish black women of the Women's Section

In fact, the fathers of several members of the Black Panthers were Francoists and some were military men, such as the grandfather of Enrique Okenve Martínez or the father of Javier Siale Bonaba, an anti-fascist ska fan who was a member of the Sharps (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice).

Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

For his part, Abuy Nfubea is the grandson of a procurator of the Francoist courts and the son of the founder of Unión Popular, a conservative party that inherited various pro-independence political parties in Equatorial Guinea.

With a background in opposition to dictators Macías and Obiang, as well as the Free Mandela movement , those boys knew or lived through some founding milestones that preceded the creation of the Black Panthers, such as the sexual assault of two Guinean women in Móstoles during the 1982 World Cup in Spain, the reaction to which was the birth of the Black Panthers Feminist Collective; or the campaign against the withdrawal of the black man from Banyoles and the subsequent defence of his liberator, the Haitian Alphonce Arcelín.

The attack on the South African embassy to denounce apartheid in 1986 was also notorious, which later motivated the creation of the solidarity committee with Marcelino Bondjale, leader of Maleva . An action that referred to the seizure of the Guinean diplomatic legation ten years earlier, in protest against the Macías regime. The struggle of many parents - some linked to Falange or Fuerza Nueva - for independence and against the dictatorship, first in their country and then in exile, had become outdated. When their children took over and went into action, the enemies were at home: the neo-Nazis, sometimes integrated or protected by members of the state security forces. In fact, the murderer of Lucrecia Pérez in 1992 was a civil guard.

• 
  The legend of the Quero brothers: an urban guerrilla and nightmare of Francoism

To confront them, they recruited members of the most powerful gangs and brotherhoods: Radical Black Power, Simplemente Hermanos, the Colours, MAN, West Side, the BRA - founded by Fermín Nvo, known as T-7 and considered by the Black Panthers to be the godfather of hip hop -, the Black Stones, Public Enemy Fan Club, Boricua, FTP and the Madrid Vandals , who were joined by some anti-racist skinheads. "We had to organise ourselves militarily so that they wouldn't smash our heads in," explains Abuy Nfubea, who recalls the neo-Nazi attack suffered in a restaurant in Móstoles by Africans celebrating Cameroon's victory over Argentina in the 1990 World Cup in Italy.

"In principle principle, the Spanish section of the Black Panther Party was not created to take revenge on the Nazis , but because Spain was diluting blacks in the Hispanic world, denying them," clarifies the journalist and writer.
However, in 1995, on the occasion of the second state congress, the newspaper El Mundo headlined: The Black Panthers organize to fight against the Nazi skinhead phenomenon .
Violence from the extreme right was a constant at the beginning of the decade, as reflected in another news item published in 1993: Two nazi skinheads end up stabbed after starting a fight against three blacks .
Four neo-Nazis had boarded a commuter train heading from Atocha to Fuenlabrada and shouted: "We are going to kill the blacks." The injured denied it, but El País made it clear that the police version confirmed the initial insults uttered by the skinheads , one of them a soldier.
Events like this had motivated, three years earlier, the Black Panther movement to advocate "the creation of an immediate secret strategy of self-defense against Nazi skinhead terrorism," while some neighborhoods of Alcalá de Henares had graffiti on their walls: "Black Panthers: by any means necessary."

• 
  The flamenco singers who died defending the Republic and fighting against Franco

"Young people were attacked by the bouncers at the discotheques and by the Nazis, who intimidated the boys and girls. Then, after the incident on the commuter train, black people began to patrol the trains and confront them," recalls Abuy Nfubea. And, conversely, was there a hunt for Nazis? "Of course, there was a context of confrontation. That was the situation," admits the founder of the Organised Front of African Youth ( FOJA ). "However, racist violence went unpunished, while activists suffered not only reprisals from the State, but also from Free Mandela, who called Marcelino Bondjale violent, expelled him and caused the movement to break up."
"We had a national vocation and we wanted to extend the Black Panther Party throughout the State. There were already people fighting in other places, but we provided them with an organic, political, ideological and philosophical base," says the author of the book Afrofeminism: 50 years of struggle and activism of black women in Spain (Ménades). Thus, they managed to expand from Madrid - and cities such as Móstoles, Torrejón, Fuenlabrada or Alcalá - to Barcelona, Valencia, Barcelona, Zaragoza and Bilbao, although they also reached towns such as Bembibre (El Bierzo) or Burela (Lugo), where the Cape Verdean community worked in the mines and in fishing.

Abuy Nfubea believes that the main legacy of the Black Panthers was the creation of the black community in Spain:
"It was a disciplined organisation whose objective was not only Nazi retaliation, but also political training and teaching about our history. We wanted to bring black people together, because Adolfo Suárez had carried out affirmative action policies, such as the decree on granting Spanish nationality to certain Guineans.
However, after the law on reparation and recognition of the black people, approved by a right-wing government, the PSOE created an equalising model," says the journalist and writer.

• 
  The Republican teacher who hijacked an ocean liner to sink Francoism

"That is to say, for the left, everyone is equal, there are no blacks or whites. But we were aware that this process was leading us to annihilation, so we were clear that we had to create a movement to defend our community," concludes Abuy Nfubea, who at the beginning of the century decided to re-establish the Black Panther Party, together with dozens of organisations in the Spanish State, in the Pan-Africanist movement. Its members were already too old to continue fighting in the streets, but they will continue to be present in the pages of a book he has written about the revolutionary vanguard of black youth.

Los Panteras Negras en España: así se gestó la vanguardia revolucionaria que combatió las agresiones nazis y racistas

Las palizas, el racismo y la conciencia política llevaron a varios jóvenes ecuatoguineanos a crear "una estrategia secreta de autodefensa" ante el auge de la ultraderecha en los noventa.

www.publico.es

 

[Eltitoguay]

(I will only graphically reproduce the Intro of this article, because it is very extensive):

​

THE BLACK PANTHERS PARTY IN SPAIN 1984-2014​

June 23, 2019

Black Panther Party in Spain;
Where, how and when did the black revolution begin in Spain?:
An approach to the genesis, evolution and concretion of the Spanish section of the New Black Panther Party 1984-2024.

By Nku ya Abamikono, Renata Ondo & Abuy Nfubea.
(Research project sponsored by the Green Ecological Group Life Foundation, Molefi Asante Institute, Temple University, Pennsylvania, Carlos III University Sustainability Chair, Madrid, Dr. Huey P Newton Foundation and Malcolm Garvey University Research Institute )


INTRODUCTION
The Spanish section Black Panthers is a phenomenon that can bring to light an existential element, the existence of the rise of Pan-Africanism is not understood, it is an element without which the black question cannot be understood today, Pan-Africanist history cannot be understood since the Fourth International, Pan-Africanism but from before many people who promoted and made possible the rise that Pan-Africanism has today in Latin America and in the Hispanic world but from a previous phase that started with many people who are the protagonists of this history were somewhere else: the Black Panther Party where leaders (Maaba, Kareba, Rasbabi, Marcelino Bondjale, Tcham, Irene Yamba, Atayte, DJ Moula, Lamine, Yast Jesus Moadjang , Baldw, Mbolo, Abuy etc ...)
It is a background issue without that determining previous experience of the decades of 87-2000.
At the same time, the Black Panthers are a product of the political experience of the Equatorial Guinean exile 1966-1986, of which they are the third generation, and therefore draw on that contingency in the context of the Spanish political transition.
There is a widespread idea on the left (as well as on the right) that there were no blacks here during the transition and that suddenly they all appeared, and in Black Panthers, this is the thesis of the majority of Spanish media and academics, even the most progressive ones. That is right, the right always had or cultivated another epistemology and a different thesis while the left, because of the progressives, embraced this false and falsified thesis and on the other hand is deeply racist. On the one hand, it seeks to expel blacks from the historicity and narrative and collective subconscious of the Hispanic and on the other it seeks to foreignize them through the constant recourse to the boats and the genocides at the Melilla fence, linking any subject with the Equatorial Guineans to Francoism. That means in practice denying and destroying the essence and identity of Spain as an empire of nations, peoples and languages where there are more than 200 million blacks. In part, it is the great political responsibility of the educational system that ignores and has rendered invisible the Equatorial Guineans and thus those who call them sub-Saharans, reducing everything to the image of the pateras. The same occurs with the blacks who are now called Afro-descendants. Many of you wonder what is the origin and evolution of the current black movement in Spain.

The current international Pan-African movement emerged in Spain in the 1980s and has its genesis as an organization in the Black Panthers, which in turn has its precedent in the political and social struggles in Equatorial Guinea that took place during the transition in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Both the Black Panthers and FOJAH have been the protagonists of the activity and crystallization of black political consciousness in Spain between 1986 - 2021, creating -according to the police and Wikileaks papers- more than six hundred militants and cadres attributable to said pan-African organization and other brands that followed it (FAAM, Federation FVGEV Black Parliament, IV International, Uhuru Afrika TV, Canal Afro TV). The idea gained strength in 1985 within the framework of the struggles for the first immigration law and was consolidated after the success of a coalition of militant and revolutionary groups of young Equatorial Guinean women who had suffered a sexual sexist assault in 1982 during the Football World Cup, became radicalized and linked to Maleva and approved the assault on the South African embassy in Madrid in 1986, which over time this action was decisive for them to later split from the Free Mandela movement. From the beginning, its main objectives were the continuation of the process of unification of the black revolutionary youth organizations and brotherhoods, to give continuity to the minimum program of MOLIFUGE, in the context of the liberation of the Equatorial Guinean community, black nationalism has been the resistance to the impunity of Nazi terrorism and the recovery of Equatorial Guinean culture within the Hispanic world. During the transition, blacks grew up in a climate of racist terrorism, institutional racism , violence and repression, both physical and symbolic. They reacted against the conservatism and moderation of Free Mandela , which conditioned the crisis of the black elite, a profound intellectual crisis in Equatorial Guinea because they had accepted the integration or foreignization of blacks and Equatorial Guineans. Starting from the so-called "Theses of Móstoles" launched on the campus of the Universidad Laboral Alcalá before the lumpenproletarian brotherhoods of Madrid, the Black Panthers, in a climate of Nazi terror with the complicity of the media and the police, tried to hegemonize, recover and at the same time displace the role played by the anti-Masonic parties and movements that emerged after 193 such as MOLIFUGE, PANDECA, URGE, ANRD, hegemonizing and radicalizing the African youth movement. They declared Marcelino's feat a declaration of war against Uncle Tom and the elite that emerged from the Lasalle school in Bata.

This competitive structure was an important factor of internal ideological and strategic tensions within the Black Movement until the murder of Lucrecia, when the Spanish transition ended and immigration became a new social and political circumstance, which brought to light the strategic and organic contradictions within the Black Movement between 1986-90, the time of Spain's entry into the European Union. In this context of the emergence of an organized black consciousness not only as Panthers but as a populist phenomenon, it was able to politicize the social antagonisms in Spain of the pre-colonial race through 4 axes: the organic independence of Negritude, the integration of the paradigm, the search for recognition and the link between the charismatic leader and the organized masses with a minimal anticolonial consciousness. That is to say, the FOJAH put the focus on the social subject: the blacks, a stage of reconstruction that led us to identify and confront the great powers of racism in Spain, this power dispute was led by the blacks in the streets in the associations, churches, discos, universities and neighborhoods... this political project with Abuy Nfubea as leadership was the only one that could guarantee survival until today going to the whole Black Community: beyond the Equatorial Guineans. In whose strategic context finally, the Panthers chose 5 antagonistic paths that were also the axis of their success and permanence until today:
1- Become a legal youth cultural association present in the institutions.
2- Remain in the management of leisure as a method of not abandoning the centrality of the daily and popular struggles of the community.
3.-Create a political social movement with different brands (FOJAH, FAAM, Sankofa, LUKUM TAKA or FVGEV)
4.- Create a minimum document that acts on different fronts, called the Pan-Africanist creed
5. -The staunch defense of the popular African sectors of Hip-Hop while simultaneously carrying out military operations that structured and guided the construction of a new political space that supposes the creation of the Black Movement of a Social character through a new Garveyist and popular subculture (Pan-Africanist Movement).

HYPOTHESIS

Until now, the Black Panthers had not been studied systematically in Spain: there were some specific and marginal contributions from some North American universities or the University of Granada had some more or less general contributions but ultimately placed their genesis in the 90s.
This is the first non-definitive contribution that recognizes the prior existence of a Guinean political culture inherited by the Panthers, that is to say there is a very strong memory.
Despite this lack of study, the visibility of the Spanish black movement has constituted an evident turning point with a journey that will give the current Pan-Africanist Movement and in general the whole black movement, as an extra-parliamentary force, a discursive authority with a journey and given that the national leadership of Free Mandela ... did not respond to the demands of the grassroots struggles of the young black rappers who are attacked by the growing Nazi racism policies in the streets, institutes and universities, they begin to organize themselves autonomously, this is the case of the students who are going to confront by giving support to the assault on the embassy of 1986-1988 that were going to end up being defeated, retreating to the outskirts where they will be influenced by the theology of liberation, anarchism and humanism of Silo but that are expressed in another model of dispute.

Continue:

THE BLACK PANTHERS PARTY IN SPAIN 1984-2014

Black Panther Party in Spain ¿Donde, como y cuando empezó la revolución negra en España ? : Aproximación a la génesis, evolución y concreci...

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