Kennedy backs Obama; ‘change’ occurs

A quickie: came across this article on BBC World. Teddy Kennedy, who is apparently ‘patriarch’ of the Kennedy clan, is backing Barack Obama for Democratic candidate for President. Obama, who uses the ‘change’ line (“I represent change”, blah blah blah) about as much as Giuliani mentions 9/11 (i.e. a whole shitload), and who is clearly positioning himself as the anti-establishment candidate (watch as Obama sticks it to the man by… continuing Bill Clinton’s neoliberal foreign policy!), is apparently anti-establishment enough to warrant the approval of… the head of America’s oldest surviving political dynasty.

I would find the irony to be delicious if the fallout from Obama (or any other Demo/Repub candidate, with the exception of loony-tunes faux-libertarian Ron Paul) didn’t mean the continuation of mass-slaughter at the hands of American capitalism and the neoliberal war machine.

Revising our stance towards the anti-revisionists

Lair of the Red Squirrel recently posted about the non-Stalinist left’s attitude towards Stalinism, and I think there’s a lot there for the radical Left to consider. As someone relatively new to the socialist left (refugee from social democracy), and trying to navigate the waters of radical politics trying to avoid sectarianism while not losing sight of my vision of socialism, there’s a lot to be said for avoiding a knee-jerk anti-Stalinism. Not only is this crucial to an accurate historical narrative, but more importantly:

…Stalinism/the bureaucracy is still treated as a thing that is separate from the proletariat, a distinct body that usurps power because of the latter’s weakness. Stalinism is seen as something foreign to the socialist movement, conquering it from the outside.

and further…

We must mercilessly criticise and scrutinise Stalinism. But this criticism must be directed towards the proletarian movement itself, not some fantastical foreign entity. We must understand and most important of all, accept, that Stalinism was part of our movement.

Absolutely true. It is an unfortunate aspect of the left that we must be burdened, as it were, with the combined historical weight of the cock-ups and poor choices of the left’s past, and while we can (and should) attempt to break cleanly with our past in how we act today, we also need to acknowledge (and, ultimately, try to understand and even respect) the choice of leftists to support the Soviet Union throughout its most ugly episodes. Trying to avoid doing so will only result in the same mistakes made in the past. Without becoming too deterministic, we need to acknowledge the material and social reasons those on the left identified with Stalin/Stalinism, and work at learning how to avoid those in the present. As one comment on the post states, there are certainly examples of hard-core Trotskyists who, if given the same opprotunity Stalin was given, would not act fundamentally different. I don’t necessarily agree with the argument that “the only difference between Stalin and Trotsky was whether the icepick was in their hand or in their head”, but there is some truth to the argument that many anti-Stalinist groups on the left have (unconsciously, I would hope) replicated many of the characteristics of what we would consider Stalinism. Of course, no one should be surprised by this:

As long as the the contradiction between mental and manual labour dominates society, it will manifest in our movement as well, whether in the form of personality cults or excessive bureaucracy. Within the context of a revolutionary society, as was Soviet Russia, where even the tiniest element of society is mobilised to its fullest intensity, this shortcomings of our movement can be amplified to reach huge proportions, with tragic consequences.

The attitude of many Greens (and others) to ‘reject ideology’ and argue they are neither left nor right, is not the right path. We cannot ignore our past. We need to recognize that hindsight, in this case the ability to criticize past ideologies that have come and gone, is a luxury afforded by our position in history. We still need to, and will always need to, criticize those ‘disasters of the left’ such as Stalinism, but simplistic answers and the like will only bring the genuine, socialist, democratic left increasingly shrunken influence and power.

Framework for Fairness Agreement (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)

‘Framework for Fairness Agreement’: Certainly sounds very nice, perhaps conjures up images of long-outstanding wrongs finally righted, through civil and polite negotiation. However, since it is supposed to apply to the rough-and-tumble world of ‘labour relations’, i.e. front lines of the class war, it’s a bit useless (to the point of being a major fuck-up for the labour movement in general).Luckily, Bruce Allen (VP of CAW Local 199) has written an analysis of the recent Framework for Fairness Agreement (FFA) between the Canadian Auto Workers and Magna International for New Socialist website that bears reading. I, of course, have my own list of criticisms of the garbage agreement.

Linkity-link: Jan 10th, 2008

In this issue of Linkity-link, we have a rumination on the broader issues of the WGA strike from the media arm of the Fourth International, the NYT reporting America’s dirty little not-so-secret secret of massive income inequality, and some rather heart-warming Bono bashing. Enjoy!

Philip Agee dead at 72

Philip Agee, CIA whistleblower, died Monday at the age of 72. He worked for the CIA for a number of years before quitting in ‘69, apparently under protest of the CIA’s support for Latin America dictators and the like (specifically the repression at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics). He published a book in ‘75 called Inside the Company that exposed a number of CIA operations, and ‘named names’ of CIA operatives under cover in an attempt to sabotage their work.

The guy himself led a fairly interesting life, and was on the run from the U.S. government for years. He went from country to country trying to find a safe haven he wouldn’t be deported from, but the communist or left nationalist governments that sheltered him inevitably suffered ‘regime change’ (which I’m sure his former employers were involved with on more than one occasion).

Something I discovered about the fellow a few years back was that he was largely the reason the U.S. government created the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in 1982. This law makes it illegal to knowingly blow the cover of a covert U.S. intelligence agent. This law, of course, is the one that laid the legal basis for the Washington shitstorm over Valerie Plame’s outing by Rove et al. Now, I for one (like many others) was eager to see Rove and Libby and the rest go down in flames, but the law the Democrats were using to go after them is an embarrassment. Of course, I do find it humourous when state repression of dissenters (as this law essentially is) comes back to bite these chumps in the ass.

WGA crushes Golden Globes; millions flock to their cause

Looks like the Golden Globes are cancelled, folks (via Socialist Unity). It’s kind of too bad, really; it’s not that I love Hollywood awards shows, just that I wanted to see rich Hollywood liberals twist themselves in knots about crossing a picket line or not. It looks like enough of them made the right choice and told the awards shows they would be staying away that night.

If we’re really lucky, AMPTA will be intransigent enough on residuals that the strike will go on long enough to kill some other insufferable specials.

Now, some people have argued the WGA strike is good for showing American workers that strikes are a legitimate tool for the working-class, and I certainly hope this is true; however, I’m not convinced of the accuracy of this claim. I’m guessing that the public probably sees Hollywood as a peculiarity in the country, and doesn’t necessarily translate what happens there to their lives. Of course, the longer the strike goes on, perhaps this will change.

The more things change, the more they stay the same: 1898 & 2008

It’s funny how the historical record of imperialism is treated: it can be to some people, as this CBC news article shows, both something to be criticized, and yet also something to be simultaneously proud of. This is only complicated by current developments where this ‘proud history’ is being repeated, ad nauseum, with only a minor facelift.

The article is essentially a ’support-the-troops’ story about how some Canadian soldier’s great-grandfather was in the same general area (Eastern Afghanistan, presumably) in the late 19th-century. The soldier naturally argues that what Canada is doing in Afghanistan is completely different from what the British Empire was doing in the area:

Taylor said his mission is worlds apart from the work carried out by his great-grandfather’s unit more than a century ago, as the British attempted to subdue Pashtun tribe members in a valley in modern Pakistan.

“The main difference is that when the British were here in the 1890s, it was to colonize the area against the will of the people,” he said, “whereas right now, we’re here at the behest of the democratically elected government of Afghanistan in order to provide assistance to them, in order to provide security and stability within their own country.”

The Tirah Campaign involved the retaking of the Khyber Pass between what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan from the Afridis. The Afridis had been apparently been in the employ of the British Empire (for 16 years) to hold the pass safe for imperialism; they apparently changed their mind about the situation, rose up and took the Pass for themselves. The Empire, of course, could not stand for an indigenous population controlling their own land (especially when it held such important military and economic importance) and proceeded to invade and reconquer the area.

There were, apparently, some ‘Indian princes’ working for the military commander of the expedition, as the British Raj was in effect at the time and there would have been a fair amount of collaboration by the Indian elites with the British Empire. Additionally, a number of the actual soldiers were also indigenous people. Collaboration by elites with imperialist occupying forces is one of those striking similarities between the two military campaigns, although it is interesting to see the active service of the indigenous population in the occupying military.

I cannot claim that late 19th-century imperialism is identical to early 21st-century neo-imperialism, but they are both based on the same idea: control and access to key economically- and politically-strategic resources and locations. How anyone today can still ‘take pride’ in a family history of participating in imperialism, however, is beyond me.