People Before Profit blog

Republicans and the "Tax Scandal" by Norman Markowitz

Political Affairs — Mon, 20 May 2013 22:10:18 -0400

First let me say that there was an excellent article by Harry Targ on the distortions of the IRS "tax exempt" status, which makes central point that groups on the right who hypocritically attack "big government" are using the law, which gives tax exempt status to groups that are engaged primarily in "social welfare activities" to fund both campaigns for legislation and politicians who seek to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, further undermine the NLRB and other legislation and campaigns which by no stretch of the imagination can be called "social welfare activities."

Harry Targ concludes that "If the Internal Revenue Service is to be criticized, the atttacks should be leveled at the government's inadequate scrutiny of political lobbying groups who are granted tax exempt status contrary to the the intention of the law."

Of course the Republican leadership is howling for "jail time" for those responsible and railing against the Obama administration, which has condemned the specific acts in no uncertain terms.

But no one is talking about the sordid history of using the IRS as a weapon against the left, especially the CPUSA and in the Nixon administration liberals and Democrats.

For example, the IRS destroyed financially Dashiell Hammett, author of the Maltese Falcon, the Thin Man, and other successful novels and stories and Communist party activist, putting him in a Catch 22 financial hole and compelling him to spend the last years of his life supported by his longtime companion and fellow activist Lillian Hellman. A

and that was part of a larger pattern aimed at CPUSA members and also at various organizations which the FBI saw as "communist front" organizations.

When Supreme Court decisions began to limit the FBI's activities directed against the CPUSA they launched the so called "Counter Intelligence Program(Cointelpro) to harass CPUSA members and their families, create divisions within the CPUSA, spread charges of racism and anti-Semitism within the party and from the Soviet Union to demoralize members.

In the aftermath of Watergate, the Church Committee, investigating the abuses of the intelligence agencies stated that "in its efforts against the Communist party, the FBI had unlimited access to tax returns. It never told the IRS why it wanted them and the IRS never attempted to find out."

The Cointelpro program lasted formally until 1971, expanding its list of targets to civil rights groups, women's rights groups, peace groups(in its very last years the Black Panther Party actually replaced the CPUSA as its number one target.)

Richard Nixon hugely expanded these actions of the IRS against groups and individuals that he saw as his political enemies, prominent Democrats(even some Republicans) and activists of both centrist organizations and left organizations of all kinds.

It would take a great deal of time to go into these actions but here is one significant moment. John Dean, by his own subsequent admission, handed in a list of 576 names to the IRS Commissioner, Johnnie Walters, on September 11, 1972, in the most of the presidential campaign. The list was of supporters and even staff members of the McGovern ongoing McGovern presidential campaign

One could go on and on about Nixon and his successors --Nixon's specific instructions to have the IRS go after expletives deleted "Jews" whom he saw as supporting his enemies, the harassement of peace groups, sancturary groups, and in a famous incident the progressive magazine Mother Jones by the "anti-tax" Reagan administration and of course later actions by the George W. Bush administration, including a questionable audit of the NAACP.

That the IRS has long been used as a political tool should not be a surprise. Most of its targets have been on the left or in the center, even though there are examples of investigations of fundamentalist Christian Schools and various groups on the right claiming tax exemption status on religious grounds.

No one of course associated with the IRS to the best of my knowledge ever went to jail or even lost a job for the abuses directed against the CPUSA by IRS connivance with the FBI. Or against Civil Rights and Civil Liberties groups, women's rights groups, peace groups, et al.

The lessons to be learned from this scandal for me are the following

The IRS must be compelled to cease and desist in targeting individuals and groups across the political spectrum with audits and other actions.

The laws governing tax exempt status must be both reviewed and, in the kinds of cases that Harry Targ and others mention, be seriously enforced.

Congress must seriously restrict the use of money in political campaigns and activities which has turned U.S. politics into a business of fund-raising for campaigns and payoffs to politicians.

Finally, tax reform itself, eliminating loopholes and, most importantly, raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, would put the IRS to work doing what is supposed to be doing, what a regulatory agency is supposed to do, that is fairly and fully enforcing law.

A Belated Marxist IQ on the Assata Shakur Case by Norman Markowitz

Political Affairs — Fri, 10 May 2013 19:59:46 -0400

Work has kept me from updating the Marxist IQ but this outrageous blast from the past deserves mention.

1. What is most shocking about the FBI’s placing Assata Shakur on its terrorist list is

a. Her 1973 trial for killing a police officer in a shootout involving the Black Liberation Army(BLA) had nothing to do with terrorism

b. The concept in U.S. law of terrorism, as against specific crimes like kidnapping, hijacking, killing, did not exist at the time

c. There are Cubans in the U.S. who committed crimes, including blowing up airplanes, now considered terrorism under U.S. and international law, whom the U.S. has refused to extradite to Cuba

d. All of the Above

2. The press erroneously reported that Assata Shakur was the first women placed on the FBI’s most wanted list. Actually, the first women on the list was

a. Sarah Palin

b. Ma Barker

c. Angela Davis

d. Mrs. J. Edgar Hoover

3. For many the most sinister aspect of the Assata Shakur incident today is

a. The Obama administration acting in the tradition of the Bush administration to use the completely disconnected Boston Marathon Murders to revive this case

b. The possibility that Assata Shakur was connected to the Boston Marathon Murders

c. The plots that Assata Shakur has been hatching against the U.S. during her 34 years in Cuba

d. The possibility that Assata Shakur has been in touch with North Koreans about placing offensive North Korean missiles in Cuba

4. While the election and re-election of President Barack Obama was and is a historic victory against racism, recent studies show that

a. African American family income has remained the same during his administration

b. African-American family income has dropped significantly during his administration

c. African-American family income has risen significantly during his administration

d. African American home ownership has risen significantly during his administration

5. This whole issue would not and could not have occurred if

a. The U.S. had ended its blockade and established full and friendly diplomatic relations with Cuba

b. The U.S. would have fulfilled the policy of the 1850s Ostend Manifesto and annexed Cuba as a slave colony

c. President Kennedy had followed the advice of Strategic Air Command General Curtis LeMay and initiated a first strike and full scale nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962

d The U.S. would have offered TV personality Desi Arnez as an alternative to Fidel Castro in 1959 and launched a massive advertising campaign to install him and his wife Lucille Ball as president and first lady of Cuba

Soviet Jewish War Vets, posted by Thomas Riggins

Political Affairs — Tue, 07 May 2013 21:41:43 -0400

http://www.wnct.com/story/22164351/ap-photos-few-know-story-of-jews-in-red-army

Check out this link for an interesting story about WW2 Jewish Red Army vets in Israel-- yes they still wear their Soviet metals.

Marxism Reloaded, A Film by Jason Barker: Review and Commentary by Thomas Riggins

Political Affairs — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 10:43:03 -0400

Jason Barker's film, Marx Reloaded, was released in 2011. It is 52 minutes long and is now available for viewing on the internet. It was interesting to watch but it did not have a lot to do with Marx except superficially. If Marx was reloaded it was with blanks.

The film presents a series of talking heads many of whom have no grasp of what Marx and Marxism are all about and who engage in flights of "postmodern'' speculation as to the meaning of Marxism today. There are a few exceptions that I will note. There are also a few non-Marxist supporters of capitalism who don't see any future for Marx. There are no representatives from contemporary labor movements or political parties which are part of the ongoing Marxist tradition.

The question addressed is if Marx's critique of capitalism is valid for our time. If the critique is valid then what comes next? Is Communism going to make a return? Is it coming back to replace the capitalist system?

The film opens with an animation of Marx meeting Trotsky and Trotsky undertaking to enlighten Marx as to the significance of Marxism today. Trotsky will attempt to guide Marx to an understanding of how ideology works in society. Quite the tail wagging the dog.

The film then begins by asking how economists today explain the greatest capitalist crisis since the great depression of the 1930s. The answers we get are not very telling. Now the talking heads take over.

First up is the late former chief economist of the Deutsche Bank, Norbert Walter (1944-1912) who says that we [bankers] made mistakes. E.g., in the USA people could get mortgages at 110% of the value of their houses. The banks made money cheaply available, people borrowed too much and they couldn't pay back what they owed. Later in the film he tells us that Marx's ideas about getting rid of capitalism by abolishing a society based on commodity production for profit would create a world that people would not want to live in as that would lead to the abolishment of "the universal medium of money" which "turns everything around us into commodities" and "money is an essential medium for civilization, for peaceful coexistence and the organization of complex societies." This begs the question as communism is a complex society based on production for human needs not commodities for profit. Mr. Walter must have forgotten about the two world wars that almost destroyed European civilization in the last century when he opined that "peaceful coexistence" is one of the benefits of a money economy.

Next up is Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, and author of "Taming The Trade Unions", who tells us the crisis was caused by inflation due to governments printing too much money. That is all we hear from him.

On a more general level of the problems of capitalism and the meaning of Marx's writing the film interviews several people identified as philosophers, political philosophers, theorists, critics, etc. Some are well known to the academic community although their grasp of Marxism may be questionable. We now hear from Antonio Negri, co-author of "Empire", an expert on Spinoza, and a founder of Italian Autonomism, and "Worker's Power" (Potere Operaio) an ultra-left formation in Italy with a secret armed wing. Negri tells us that the capitalists [neo-liberals] cannot pay the workers the price of their labor [which doesn't even make sense in Marxist terms-- a wage is the price paid for labor-- he should at least be talking about the value of their labor-power not the price] and that they remain in power and are able to wage wars around the world only as long as the working class remains quiescent due to high wages. But as we see the capitalists can't do that so Marx is still relevant.

This line of thought is taken up by the film which now asks does Marx's theory of exploitation hold today or is the way capitalists make their profits changing? The answers are sought from more talking heads without any clear explanation having been given as to what Marx's theory of exploitation is. What is clear is that with a few exceptions, which I will note, none of the answers given in this part of film are dealing with Marx's theory.

The philosopher Slavoj Zizek is now up to bat (what film on "Marxism" would be complete without this latter day Eugen Dühring). He is described as the "leader" of a new movement to revive Marxist and Communist thinking. He revives Marx by proclaiming that the classical notion of exploitation [left unexplained] no longer works due to the knowledge explosion-- he does not tell us why this is so. However, it has something to do with computers because we need them to communicate with each other and so we have pay "rent" to Bill gates because he owns part of our mental substance. I am tempted to think that in professor Zizek's case Mr. Gates is a slumlord. Finally we are told that we need a redefinition of the "proletariat" because the "proletariat" is larger than the working class. Zizek also notes that the unemployed today demonstrate because they want jobs-- "please exploit us in the normal way" they are saying to the capitalists. I think he strikes out as the "leader" of a new "Marxist" movement. He will appear again later.

Antonio Negri now reappears. Capitalism, he says, has evolved in ways Marx could not have predicted. Exploitation is not only of factory workers but of workers throughout society. You can't start a revolution with the factory workers-- you need them but also all the other workers too [I think Marx could have predicted this, in fact he already knew it.] You need the other workers, Negri says, because they are the "most" exploited. What can that mean? The examples he gives is of research and cinema workers and the like because they produce more value. None of this makes sense because the Marxist concept of "value," "surplus value," "labor power" and "exploitation" are never brought up in the film. If they were none of the things these talking heads and intellectual will o the wisps are saying would make sense anyway only the viewers would at least understand why.

Herfried Munkler now makes his appearance. Dr. Munkler, co-editor of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels and a professor at Humbolt University, in contrast to those who have appeared before, actually knows a thing or two about Marxism although in its Social Democratic deformation. His concern is not limited to discussing the plight of working people in the West but focuses on the exploitation of working people in the so-called Third World where working conditions are subhuman and wages are ridiculously low in comparison to the advanced capitalist countries. Here it is obvious that Marxist ideas are relevant and that capitalism is being abusive.

Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri's collaborator on the book "Empire" (not worth the read) now appears to bring us back from the Third World to the the First to tell us the economy is now centered on "immaterial" and "immeasurable" products-- that is, on "ideas" not on "objects" like old fashioned commodities such as cars, refrigerators, toasters-- the products of industrial manufacturing. Economics is about relationships and intangible assets [not, coal, oil or natural gas]. He is listed as a literary critic and political philosopher, at least he talks about political philosophy like a literary critic.

Now is the time for Jacques Ranciere, the co-author with Louis Althusser of "Reading Capital" (although his part was left out of the English version). He is noted for an educational theory which says a person can be a teacher without knowing anything about the subject he is going to teach; a view welcomed by not a few teachers. Ranciere makes three appearances in the film and manages to say nothing of importance in any of them. Here he tells us many societies have had exploitation without "explosions" so we can't draw from exploitation the logic of an end to exploitation. Economic exploitation is not the dominant factor in all social struggle. Ranciere seems oblivious to the Marxist view that, as Engels says, in the last analysis all major social struggles in class based societies have economic exploitation at their root. Each society and its economic formation needs to be individually studied. There have certainly been "explosions" over exploitation in all societies that have distinct social classes despite Ranciere's contrary assertions.

The film now takes up a new subject. We are told that to understand capitalism we must delve into the the "mystic realm" of the COMMODITY. It is certainly true that without an understanding of the origin and role of commodities we will not understand our economic system which is based on the production and exchange of commodities. Marx devotes the first chapter of "Das Kapital" to the commodity. It is a difficult chapter but once grasped the rest of the volumes of Das Kapital will be easily understood.

The film however does not deal with Marx's scientific analysis of commodities but skips to the last section of the chapter which is entitled "The Fetishism of Commodities." Without an understanding of the preceding sections it is easy to misunderstand this last section and, true to form, both the film's narrator and all of the talking heads in this part of the film completely miss the point and fail to grasp Marx's ideas concerning commodity fetishism.

To make a long story short, Marx's point is that the laws of the capitalist system are not products of nature as, say, are the laws of gravity or of aerodynamics but they are the result of human activity. Commodities and their relations are created by human beings and human beings can abolish them. Yet, because we are ignorant of the laws of economics we think of commodities as natural, as things which , although created by us, assume an existence independent of us and go to a market whose laws we are subject to and must conform to. This is similar to the creation of religions or "primitive" belief systems where a person creates a fetish and then bows down to it and thinks it has power over him and he must subject himself to its demands and will. The capitalist market appears as the natural form of economic exchange and there is no alternative to it. It is not true that there is no alternative and humans can abolish capitalism and rid themselves of subjection to the laws of commodity production and create an economic world which serves human needs and one where human needs do not take second place to the need to exchange commodities at a profit. None of this is addressed in this part of the film. Instead we get baloney. This is because the talking heads are in the grips of the very fetishism Marx warns us about.

Norman Bolz (media theorist): "The theory of commodity fetishism is Marx's most important discovery." It isn't. Marx's most important discovery is the distinction between the value of labor and that of labor-power which is the basis of the labor theory of value and of his analysis of capitalism. It is, however, one of the most important consequences of that discovery.

Bolz continues by saying Marx's theory reveals a secret as to why capitalism today "functions so well" [!!!]. The secret is "that goods in the capitalist market place satisfy more than simple needs they also convey a spiritual surplus value and this value is the real reason for the purchase." This is complete and utter nonsense.

Peter Sloterdijk (philosopher [but not a very good one]) is not so definite. He says the theory is probably "the important part of Marxist doctrine." This is because "Marx is among those who discovered the fact that things live." He goes on to say, Walter Benjamin "discovered the structural similarity between human commodities [?] and commodities as objects." He thus "universalized the category of prostitution." While there may be a relationship between fetishism and prostitution on some level, I don't think this is what Marx was getting it. "Prositution is always present when a beautiful thing feigns life and tries to seduce passersby with an offer." I think professor Sloterdijk should reread Marx's chapter on commodities.

Finally, here is Famonn Butler"s (policy analyst) take: he says it's human psychology to want things-- the economy is neutral-- it just produces what people want. Well then, that's it. Capitalism just produces what people want. Then why are there so many adverts all over the place? Do we need to be constantly reminded about what we want?

The film now turns to Marxism and Ecology-- only by now Marxism has been unloaded rather than reloaded. Zizek is now taking about "Communism" in the sense what we have in "common"-- the Earth as our "common substance" and we have to manage it together. He makes no proposal about how to do that. Michael Hart is also back talking about the "common" in "Communism" and how different that is from both the "Communism" found in the Soviet Union (derived from Marx incidentally) and also the "Communism" of American Anti-Communism [evidently he doesn't approve of either kind of "Communism"].

Herfried Munkler points out that Marx "applies exploitation not only to human labor but to the limited resources of nature. He says that if the exploitation of nature continues nature will be destroyed." Munkler thinks that we can reduce the exploitation of nature under capitalism and have common ownership of the Earth without a Marxist society. But this is just social democratic optimism as befits anyone affiliated with the SPD in Germany. He gives no program. But at least he brings up an all important issue; the destruction of the environment under capitalism today.

John Gray weighs in with the observation that international capitalism develops in ways impossible to predict and impossible to control (revealing that he is completely under the sway of the fetishism of commodities). He says the "New Leninists" [we have not met any "Leninists" in this film-- nor will we] and "Greens" are correct about the fact that "human action" has destabilized the environment but they are "deluded" in thinking human action can restabilize it. It doesn't occur to him that it is not humans qua humans that are destructive but only humans under the sway of particular sorts of economic and social relations. Even if humans could get together as a global collective, which he says will never happen, they could not restabilize the environment. Doom and gloom is all we can expect.

The film now asks if the current economic crisis was caused by an under regulated banking system. Is the only solution now and in the future to have state regulated economic systems? The film suggests we look back into history for solutions. I should note here that people who look to the past for solutions to present day problems are usually seen to be reactionaries.

Be that as it may, we return to Norbert Bolz who likes the fact that in the 19th century banks issued their own scripts which functioned as money. You could take it to another bank and redeem it in coin of the realm-- if the other bank trusted it! This system would make all the banks very aware of the true value of the scripts and bad banks would be exposed. He thinks this is a really good idea and I suppose there were no banking crises in the 19th century, except there were.

John Gray rightly thinks this idea is nuts because state monopoly capital [not his term] has become so evolved and complicated since the 19th century and this has happened as a result of the close interconnection between capitalism and state power-- there is no going back. But is there going forward?

Why is it that the state rushes in to save capitalism all the time? Is it possible, the film now asks, that these crises, like the one we are in right now, which broke out in 2007, are not side effects of capitalism but essential to its very existence?

Herfried Munkler tells us that Marx thought that crises would lead to the downfall of capitalism but since his day capitalism has gone through many crises and has "rejuvenated itself." He mentions Joseph Schumpeter's theory of crises as periods of "creative destruction." "Capitalism," Munkler concludes, "doesn't age. Instead crisis is its Fountain of Youth." This from the co-editor of the Collected Works is rather strange. Marx thought the internal contradictions would eventually bring about capitalism's collapse (or the mutual destruction of the contending classes within the system) but there was no time table and he argued that capitalism had at its disposal many tools to stave off immediate collapse but it would eventually prove dysfunctional as had the economic forms (slavery, feudalism,) that preceded it. Schumpeters "creative destruction" (destruction of the lives of workers and the majority of the population and creative of wealth for the so-called 1%-- the capitalists) is no refutation of Marx's theories.

The "theorist" Alberto Toscano, one of the very few interviewed who seems to have his head in the right place, points out that capitalism, whatever its ultimate fate, is responsible for creating a gigantic surplus population that it does not know what to do with. He mentions the book "The Planet of Slums" by Mike Davis and talks about the "surplus humanity" that capitalism has on its hands because its technological advances have made the number of workers it needs redundant. This is the "reserve army of labor" that Marx wrote about-- but now it is no longer a "reserve" it is just a surplus of human beings that are socially unneeded piling up in the slums of the world with nowhere to go. The "creative destruction" they may eventually bring about capitalism may have a hard time dealing with. Only the Chinese, with a non-capitalist economic system, seem to have been able to cope with the massive poverty in the rural areas of their country (and of course Cuba and Vietnam and a few others with non-capitalist economies, and now Venezuela, are beginning to follow suit).

Finally, the film asks what sense is there in believing another world, other than capitalism, is possible. TINA-- There is No Alternative was Ms. Thatcher's motto-- was she correct? Can a Communist alternative emerge after the experiences of the past century?

Antonio Negri says there is only capitalism so we must fight the bosses as the bosses fight us. This seems to be an eternal struggle-- there is only the movement Bernstein thought and so it seems does Negri-- at least in this film-- it is difficult to get just what he means so I may be incorrect here. He tells us what we all know-- Russia didn't have "Communism" it had "socialism." What is socialism? It is a way to manage capitalism, just like liberalism is. How would Communism come about? It "comes into being through a relation between transformations of reality and the will or decision to do it or to build it." After this bit of balderdash he leaves us with the admonition to junk the old Communist Manifesto and to write a new one-- he is not , however, the man to do it.

Nina Power, feminist philosopher, has more regard for the Communist Manifesto, and says it has continuing power to influence people. She is surely correct.

Zizek writes off the 20th century "communist" states, Social Democracy, the idea of local councils, collectives, Soviets (which first popped up in the 1905 Russian Revolution) and their latter day reincarnations. What's left? He tells us he likes the idea that "A communist society is one in which each person could dwell in his own stupidity." Zizek is already doing that so he should be happy. He says he got that idea from reading Frederick Jameson. He thinks it would be great if Communism turned out to be like a Bruegel painting. Whenever I hear Zizek expostulating it brings to mind what Karl Marx said about Jeremy Bentham i.e., "in no time and in no country has the most homespun common-place ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way." At least Bentham did not resort to pseudo-Hegelian verbiage.

Micha Brumlik (professor of education at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main) maintains that after the 20th century we have the right to know what Communism is going to be like-- it has to be democratic to be supported. There will be a big fight over that, I fear, as different concepts of "democracy" will be put forth. But he is right to demand a politically active civil society not divorced from a democratic political system. He thinks that Hardt and Negri's unclear views on the "the multitude" will never get that concept up and running or have any practical outcome.

Jacques Ranciere leaves us with the view that while Marx wanted a "classless society" what we really need is what he calls an "emancipatory society." This is one "in which each has an equal share." This has a vague utopian sound to it-- a throwback to pre-Marxist French socialist thinking. Marxist logic, he tells us, is to prepare for the future, but he believes "instead that the idea of emancipation is really tied to a sort of appearance in the here and now of those we call the 'have-nots' and of those who make their presence felt through their capacity to think, to intervene politically and to prove themselves capable of organizing economic production." Ayn Rand would like this-- the have-nots and their masters-- only for Ranciere they would be good masters. This is a latter day reincarnation of Plato's Republic.

Ranciere goes on to criticize Negri. "Negri thinks capitalism produces communism [in the film Negri appears to think capitalism is here for the long run and must always be struggled against-- or if communism comes about it will be through the triumph of the will-- few of the people in this film are logically coherent]. In reality, capitalism only produces its own form of communism. But this is not the communism of everyone's capacity. There are those who say 'Look at what capitalism does. The idea of communism can't be so bad.' But I don't think those people are involved in constructing the idea of real equality today." What is this rambling discourse suppose to mean?

The last pronouncement I will consider comes from Peter Sloterdijk, who tells us that "People must join together to forge alliances against the lethal. They must provide mutual security and offer each other communities of solidarity on a planetary scale [sounds like an advert for NATO]. Because for the first time collective self destruction is possible. [Is he referring to the bomb? climate change?] Before we say 'communism' we must understand the principle of 'immunism' [a new -ism to worry about] or the principle of our mutual insurance which is the most profound motive of solidarity."

This is the sum and substance of the movie. Some of these thinkers are better than they have appeared in this movie-- but not by much. I don't think this film has reloaded Marx-- quite the contrary. I think it completely fails to present what Marxism is all about and its past accomplishments and future possibilities. No film can hope to present Marxism to the public without at the same time dealing with the real life problems of the union and working class movements and issues in the Third World. As I pointed out at the beginning of this review this film completely ignores working class leaders and the leaders of political movements inspired by Marxism and confines itself to interviewing intellectual talking heads who, quite frankly, often don't know what they are talking about. You can find this movie on You Tube complete with subtitles. It is 52 minutes long, and once you have watched it I think you will agree with my assessment.

Marxism Reloaded, A Film by Jason Barker: Review and Commentary by Thomas Riggins

Political Affairs — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 10:41:04 -0400

Nina Power, feminist philosopher, has more regard for the Communist Manifesto, and says it has continuing power to influence people. She is surely correct.

A Marxist IQ for Mayday and the LatePhil Bonosky by Norman Markowitz

Political Affairs — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 22:49:19 -0400

Proletarian Novelist, non fiction writer, and Communist party activist Phil Bonosky passed away recently at the age of 97. A Memorial to Phil, organized and directed by his family, was held last Sunday at the national headquarters of the CPUSA . I am dedicating this pre May Day Marxist IQ to Phil and to all peoples artists and defenders of working class culture everywhere.

1. The English “Puritan Revolution,” the first successful bourgeois or capitalist revolution, could be seen most powerfully in

a. The plays of William Shakespeare

b. The epic poetry of John Milton

c. The love poems of HenryVIII

d. The Writings of Cotton Mather

2. This lifelong socialist was and continues to be considered the most important playwright in the English language in the first half of the 20^th century

a. Noel Coward

b. Thornton Wilder

c. George Bernard Shaw

d. George S, Kaufman

3. In The Iron Heel(1911) Socialist novelist Jack London warned of

a. a coming depression, which would lead to world revolution

b. new foreign wars between the U.S. and Japan

c. The establishment of a brutal dictatorship of the monopolies, which would later be called in real life fascism

d. A new civil war and the revival of the confederacy

4. The Communist movement through the world attracted some of the most famous writers and artists. Among those who at one time or another belonged to Communist parties through the world were

a. The Spanish Painter Pablo Picasso

b. The Irish Playwright Sean O’Casey

c. The American Playwright Arthur Miller

d. All of the Above

5. Although anti-Communists accused Proletarian novelists of following the formulas of Soviet Socialist realism in a hackneyed way, the novels of Phil Bonsoky,The Burning Valley and The Magic Fern

a. show, in their poetic use of language and their connection of man to nature, the distortion in this analysis

b. show, in their accounts of heroic workers who triumph over evil capitalists, the accuracy of this analysis.

c. Show that literature must be disconnected from history and politics

d. Show a world of class struggle and oppression that modern capitalism in the U.S. has eliminated

Answers to the Marxist IQ for April 13

1.c

2.d

3.d

d.d

5.c

some quick thoughts about the Boston Marathon Atrocity by Norman Markowitz

Political Affairs — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:17:52 -0400

Here are a few quick thoughts about the Boston Marathon atrocity, which may hopefully help to explain at least the large context of events

First, one might see this as being in some respects blowback from the destruction of the Soviet Union, although in this case, unlike the case of the Taliban, bin Laden, and Al Queda, where the U.S. and the CIA funded and provided logistical support for the "freedom fighters" who then proclaimed their holy war against the U.S, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin, also hailed by U.S. cold warriors, may very well be the prime culprit

First, as the Soviet Union collapsed from above, strong man Yeltsin supported anti-Communist elements who attacked the Chechen Soviet. Then when these elements, led by the anti-Soviet adventurer and warlord Dzhoker Dudayev( whose first name is that of the killer whom the police are currently hunting, perhaps a coincidence, perhaps not) sought a separatist state in a region important for pipelines, Yeltsin invaded the region, destroyed its capital, Grozny, which hugely escalated the conflict and also brought in rightwing Muslim clerical elements with Saudi connections. Dudayev has been dead for years but the conflict remains with terrrorist attacks against Russian targets and Russian retaliation.

At this point, little is really known about the two brothers who carried out these atrocities. The initial reports from family members and friends are contradictory,

They from these reports apparently participated in the ego tripping world of "social media "both here and in Russia.. A news report states that their father, who was a car mechanic here went back to Russia. Their reported social media posts proclaim support for Islam in a completely superficial and non belligerant way, like old fashioned U.S. Christian commercials like "the family that stays together prays together"

Much, much more has to known about their and their families background and experiences in Chechnya, and their and their families activities in the U.S., their sources of income, connections, etc, all of which are legitimate questions for police/intelligence services to investigate.. Although I am not in any way sympathetic to the present Russian government, (one of the killers comments on Russian "social media" which have been reported in the press is that the two most important things are "career and money" which would fit int perfectly with the "new Russia of Yeltsin and Putin)this might be an area in which the U.S. and Russian governments could engage in fruitful cooperation

But there are other points which we on the left should make and make now. Attempts by Republicans to use these events to attack immigration reform are two faced and baseless. These individuals have nothing to do with the millions of exploited undocumented workers who form a substrata of the U.S. work force.

They came to U.S. legally, even benefitted according to press reports from athletic scholarships to Boston high schools and were not distinguishable from the general teen-age consumer demographic that our advertisers appeal to.

If there is a bigger picture to this, besides the sociopathic response of two youths, it is first in the events that led to the destruction of the Soviet Union, which our Republicans hail as the triumph of liberty and democracy aka capitalism, and the existence of a mass market in weapons in the U.S. which make guns particularly as easy to get a hold of as they probably are in Chechnya, policies that the Right Republicans continue to front for,

Even though I am aware that some Chechen nationalists blame the U.S. government for not supporting them against Russia(as if any sane person anywhere would not understand that the U.S. government would have no interest on any level in antagonizing the anti-Communist government in Moscow, the first government in power in Moscow that it could support since 1917, on behalf of regional separatists) there is no evidence at this time that there was any connection between these groups and the killers.

And the same is true concerning rightwing Muslim groups who engage in terrorist attacks, that is, the targeting of innocent bystanders to make political points. If there is any connection here, it is an example of tradional blowback, but as of now nothing has been discovered along these lines

In this case, the fact that these individuals made no such pronouncements makes them at this time look more like sociopathic serial killers, pyromaniacs, etc, for whom the actual act of destruction is their only real goal, along with fame, not any political cause,

Finally, as the story unfolds, the Obama administration deserves a good deal of credit for not doing with the Bush administration most certainly would have--fan the flames of hysteria to advance their political agenda, put the nation on full alert, point to various foreign powers and connections and make threats of major military action. Terrorism is a police matter first and foremost and as of now, as I am writing, with one of the killers dead and the other being hunted in an area of Boston where hopefully he will be captured, the police have done a good job

In the weeks though we must join the ideological struggle against those who have already crippled the attempt to create more effective gun and weapons control in the nation and will be attempting to use this example of what our lack of weapons control leads to in order to cripple immigration reform legislation.

The Return of the Marxist IQ by Norman Markowitz

Political Affairs — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 14:44:05 -0400

After a hiatus of too many weeks, the Marxist IQ returns as we approach another May Day.

1. A fierce battle is being fought over social security pensions in the U.S. today. Marxists have long called such pensions along with medical care and other workers benefits

a. Entitlements

b. Compensation

c. Social wages

d. Welfare payments

2. American media is filled with reports of the dangers to world peace represented by North Korea’s plan to launch a missile. What is generally ignored though is

a. The 1950-1953 war Korean war which claimed millions of lives

b. The U.S. large military presence in South Korea from 1953 to the present

c. The fact that the war ended in a now abrogated truce and a new Korean war involving the U.S. forces is once more a possibility

d. All of the above

3. In the present Washington debate on the national budget, what is being ignored is the non Marxist Keynesian principle that

a. Decreased social spending will stimulate the economy

b. Budget cuts should be across the board and effect all programs equally

c. Payroll taxes should be increased rather than benefits reduced

d. Decreased social spending will only decrease mass purchasing power and produce both greater economic hardship and bigger deficits.

4. A time traveler from the U.S. at the time of the first International May Day demonstrations, 1890, to today would find one thing in the U.S had remainedthe same

a. Women still did not have the right to vote

b. The eight hour day, the reason for the original demonstrations, had never been established in law

c. “White Supremacy” and segregation was the official policy of the Southern States

d. The Republican party, more than the Democratic party, was closely associated with the interests of the corporations and the wealthy

5. At the time of the first May Day Demonstrations, movements for socialism had been established in Europe and North America. Today,

a. Those movements have “died” with the death of Communism

b. Those movements continue to advance in the world as they did in the decades immediately after WWII.

c. Those movements, with their victories and defeats, tactical shifts have influenced and continue to the people of the whole world since the Russian Revolution of 1917.

d. Globalization has made the aims of those movements impossible to achieve

The Back to the Future Life of Margaret Thatcher by Norman Markowitz

Political Affairs — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 13:28:06 -0400

The Back to the Future Life of Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher, who played Jane to Ronald Reagan’s Tarzan in that epic of the 1980s, The King and Queen of Jungle Capitalism, (whose author was more Milton Friedman than Edgar Rice Burroughs,) died last week in 2013. Or was it 1913? Or 1813?

The media is filled with stately photos, proclamations that she “changed Britain,” eulogies from assorted Tories of the right and center and some well deserved sneers from the left. I will do a little sneering in this article, which Thatcher deserves, and then get serious.

First the sneering. One of Thatcher’s enemies called her the wicked witch of North London and that was pretty much on target. Ronald Reagan, a B movie actor, tried as President and politician to play the A movie American hero roles he never got in Hollywood—the Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda roles. Thatcher was pretty much what she was, in 20^th century terms a character out of a Harold Pinter play, or in the 19^th century laissez-faire fantasy she projected, a Dickensian villain.

When she first became Prime Minister the joke was “What’s the Good News. A woman is Prime Minister of England, what’s the Bad News? The woman is Margaret Thatcher.” Then, her slash and burn anti-labor, anti-social welfare policies, led to a sharp increase in unemployment and her poll numbers plummeted, she turned things aroundwith the help of a foreign government to the right of her government; soon the joke was on the people of the United Kingdom and it got more surreal as the quasi-fascist Junta in Argentina, which she and Reagan had previously supported strongly against left insurgents, seized the Falkland Islands.

Thatcher went to war, won an easy victory against a very weak former friend and new enemy, and swept to political victory. “She’s Winston Bloody Churchill,” I remember a loud middle aged Brit shouting. Thatcher had saved the Falklands, a chilly feudal colonial enclave off the cost of Argentina, from the Argentinean Luftwaffe, U-boats, and Panzer Divisions in the British tabloids. The Royal Navy could now add Argentina to victories against the Spanish Armada, Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler.

Thatcher continued her real war, against the British welfare state. Some of it was very petty. For example, I read that she put in pay toilets in public facilities. Some of it was simply crackpot—bringing “market mechanisms” and competition into public and social services and even higher education, a sort of Milton Friedman meets Monty Python, except these policies did damage, stimulating among other things a brain drain out of Britain.

My favorite story of Thatcherism from this period occurred in Scotland, where her policies were hugely unpopular. She went in the afternoon to a football (what we call soccer) game, and was roundly booed. A handful of angry young men even mooned her. Then in the evening she addressed a conclave of the Church of Scotland and ventured into the world of theology and political economy.

The employment crisis in Scotland was not. she claimed, the result of her government’s economic policies but of the decline of the Protestant Ethic. And who was responsible for that? Obviously the Church. In her usual threatening and condescending way, she admonished the clergy to get on with the job of reviving the Protestant ethic, which would then solve the unemployment problem.

She won another term in office as official figures, ala Reagan in the U.S., proclaimed economic growth, the British equivalent of Yuppies surfaced, and the real living standards and quality of life for the majority of people stagnated and declined. In the end her own cabinet members, whom she had long tyrannized over, used a political crisis to turn against her and remove her from leadership. I remember one of them I remember, was quoted to the effect that she “broke our pencils,” which I have always considered to be a great Freudian moment in the history of the British Conservative Party.

Then she was replaced with a minor figure named Major and became Dame Margaret Thatcher. Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan was out of office by then and his mind was entering the great beyond. It would have been a fitting end if he had been there to sing “There is Nothing like a Dame” as Thatcher left 10 Downing Street.

Enough of the sneering though. Now for a little serious analysis of Thatcher and Thatcherism. After World War II, as the British Empire collapsed, the British Labor Party, still committed to building a “socialist Britain,” came to power in 1945 and advanced a left program, nationalizing the Steel Industry, banking, and most importantly establishing a comprehensive system of socialized medicine, the National Health Service,(NHS) along with other significant social welfare oriented reforms.

While the Labor government followed U.S. cold war policy, and did not “stay left” as the founder the National Health Service and its most important left leader Aneurin Bevan sought, and the Conservative Party regained power in 1951 and denationalized much of what the Labor government had nationalized, the social welfare reforms, especially the NHS, were maintained.

In the 1960s after a long period of Conservative government, Harold Wilson, whom the U.S. initially feared would advance a left Labor party policy, became Prime Minister. Wilson did not revive any “socialist Britain” policy, seek to nationalize sections of the economy, but he did advance the British welfare state, especially in higher education, and defend the trade union movement.

The long period of global economic expansion after WWII in the developed capitalist countries ended in the 1970s. What also began to end was what the former left New Deal economist John Kenneth Galbriath in the U.S. called the “truce on equality,” namely, the acceptance by capital of the gains that labor and peoples movements had made in the previous decades and the practical acceptance by labor and the political parties which represented it that more advanced policies,

In Britain, this meant socialist nationalization policies, in the U.S., an advanced welfare state program and a full employment oriented mixed economy would be postponed indefinitely.

Many, myself included, hoped that the economic stagnation/inflation crisis and the ensuing “fiscal crisis” of governments in the U.S. NAT0 bloc would see a revival of left mass movements and forms. This, however, was not to be the case However

Instead, it led in the U.S. to Jimmy Carter, in terms of the Democratic Party the most conservative of the Democrats seeking the presidency becoming President and in Britain, James Callahan, a more conservative figure representing the rightwing of the British Labor party, replacing Wilson.

In West Germany and other countries, although not at the same time and sometimes with a different political balance of forces there were similar developments, as parties representing working class and low income voters moved away from their traditional policies and embraced some version of austerity, cutbacks, “learning to do more with less” as the Carter administration in the U.S. argued. France, with a conservative government, was the major exception to this, as Socialist Francois Mitterrand reconstructed in the 1980s a people’s front alliance of French Socialist and Communist Parties and gained the Presidency on a left program, but this was an exception.

The general trend was toward the right and toward a broad based capitalist offensive which sought to undermine if not repeal entirely the gains of the past.

In Britain sharp inflation and a wave of strikes, with left leadership of those strikes threatening British capital directly, saw the conservative party and its leader, Margaret Thatcher, come to power in 1979. Unlike her predecessors, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, and Heath, Thatcher directly attacked the British Welfare State, in both ideology and policy. She identified with and implemented the monetary policies of U.S. economist Milton Friedman, who advertised those policies as both an alternative to Keynesian fiscal (government spending policy) and government taxation and regulation of capital, i.e., a safe way to restore laissez-faire capitalism without depressions. Soon her enemies called her “the mad monetarist” although there was method in her madness.

She won against a weakened and divided Labor party. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won against a weakened Democratic party and in general advanced similar policies, even with the large differences between the two nations’ political systems and level of institutional social welfare. Thatcher did succeed in dividing her enemies. When the Labor Party chose the left oriented intellectual Michael Foote, as its leader, in the early 1980s, the rightwing elements within the party bolted, formed what they called a “Social Democratic Party” and later merged with the Liberal Party—the present “Liberal Democrats” who are the “partners” with the Conservative Party in the present rightwing austerity government in power in the UK.

In domestic policy the legacies of Thatcher are similar to the legacies of Reagan in the U.S., inequality, destitution poverty, a stark revival of the “two nations” that Benjamin Disraeli, a more sophisticated Tory, wrote about in the 19^th century to which Thatcher sought to return.

Those who speak of “modernization” and greater efficiency under Thatcher and her successors see an economy in terms of money and machines, not people, an economy in where the increased concentration of wealth at the top is progress.

In foreign policy, Thatcher made no major innovations. Like all postwar British governments she followed the lead of the U.S. Unlike Labor governments, the Atlee government for example with Truman and even Tory governments, Churchill with Eisenhower and MacMillan with both Eisenhower and Kennedy, she did not privately seek to moderate the aggressive and dangerous cold war policies of U.S. Presidents but if anything egged on Reagan’s cold war revival.

Her open support for brutal Latin American dictatorships, especially Pinochet’s fascist regime, was a major departure from previous British governments both Labor and Tory. She also continued her support for Pinochet, joining with other rightists globally to oppose the Chilean government’s prosecution of Pinochet for his crimes against the Chilean people.

At the same time, she did nothing to support the tiny British Commonwealth country of Grenada, which against much of the Western Hemisphere supported Britain in the Falklands War, when the Reagan administration launched a massive invasion of the island to destroy its revolutionary government. A cartoon which showed her in a movie theater swooning at Ronald Reagan on the screen pretty much summed up her foreign policy.

In a sense, Thatcher’s “greatest legacy” was Tony Blair, who did more to achieve what she sought to achieve than she did, consolidating rather than repealing her policies, establishing a government that one might call “Thatcherism with a human face,” and under the banner of “New Labour” going back to the future himself as he sought to erase what the Labor Party in theory and sometimes in practice had struggled for since its inception in the early 20^th century and make it into something resembling the Liberal Party of the 19^th century

For American labor and all American progressives the task is to eradicate both the policies and the underlying ideologies of the Reagan-Bush era. For British labor and the British left, I would say,the task is to eradicate the Thatcher era which today is carried forward by the present Tory led austerity government, which in its policies is to Thatcher what George W. Bush was to Reagan.

Inequality, insecurity, a harsher labor discipline and much more destitution poverty are Thatcher’s only legacies, as they were Reagan’s and Bush’s.

Although Thatcher like Reagan was not a fascist, and I am not calling either of them that, perhaps the best answer from the left to both her and Reagan was Winston Churchill’s wartime answer to Adolf Hitler and his hagiographers. “We will not rest until we have rid the earth of Hitler’s shadow.”

We should not rest until we have rid the earth of the shadow of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and the other architects of inequality, insecurity, and a global political economy on the edge of catastrophe.

Margaret Thatcher R.I.P, from Thomas Riggins

Political Affairs — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 13:10:00 -0400

This song has rocketed to #3 on the pop charts in the UK indicating that the Iron Lady may not have been first in the hearts of her countrymen (and women).

The Wicked Witch Is Dead - YouTube

A Second Draft, with corrections, on The Communist Movement and Gays Rights, Part One by Norman Markowitz

Political Affairs — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 12:10:31 -0400

The following is a second draft of my article on the Communist movement and gay rights. I thank Erwin Marquit, Art Perlo, and others whose valuable contributions have improved the draft. I apologize to readers for all typos and other errors. Copy editing remains one of the least of my skills

Norman Markowitz

Recently, Putin’s authoritarian state capitalist Russian government pushed through repressive legislation in Russia directed against Gay people, apparently with the support of Duma representatives of the Communist Party of The Russian Federation. This has become the source of controversy.

Also, the conservative dominated U.S. Supreme Court is about to rule on the question of gay marriage, against which conservatives have mobilized fiercely, even though marriage and family are among mankind’s most powerful conservative socializing institutions.

In the 21^st century , at least in the developed countries, homophobia continues to be viewed as a normal attitude toward and homosexual behavior, and homosexuals of both genders acceptable as long as they “keep their place,” a place ranging from invisibility to recycled versions of old stereotypical roles.

This was of course true about anti-Semitism, racism directed against people of color, sexism/male chauvinism and xenophobia/national chauvinism in the past in all of these countries.

The Communist movement consciously fought and helped to win major victories against the ideological and institutional expressions of all of these destructive ways of thinking and living, so much so that they are no longer normal and acceptable in their old forms, even among so called conservatives in the U.S, who in recent decades have expressed their nostalgia for the prejudices of the past by sneering at “political correctness” in the present.

But like all other victories in social struggles and the larger class struggle, peoples movement

gains are always ad hoc, subject to both open and hidden forms of reversal, as long as the repressive class system that serves as their foundation remains.

In that sense the old IWW slogan, an injury to one really is an injury to all, is true in this instance, because the continuation of homophobia as acceptable and normal in clerical and secular guises opens doors for the restoration of sexism, racism and other prejudices in more virulent forms..

In the U.S, particularly, where the postwar purges and persecution of Communists merged with intensified homosphobic purges and persecutions in government, support for anti-gay legislation would be particularly ironic. .

Here, the anti-Communist portrayal of the Communist movement as a sinister conspiracy advanced by people hiding their true identities and seeking to corrupt “normal people” that is, working people filled with love for God, flag, country and capitalism ,fitted in with conventional fears of homosexuals preying upon unsuspecting youth

Anti-Communist political films like My Son John (1952) often hinted that “Communist spies” were possible homosexuals, un-married and effeminate. In that film, the mother of a state department official and Soviet agent worries that he is not married and asks him often about girl friends.

Finally, women Communists were often portrayed as strident masculine ideologues, possible Lesbians. In many of these crude B movies, the upper level Communists were portrayed in such ways while lower level male Communists were portrayed as violent strong arm men doing the dirty work of the party and lower level female Communists as sluts seducing honest male workers for the party.

Rightwing politicians sometimes ranted publically against “queers and Communists” and one even noted that Communists and Homosexuals were the two great conspiracies in the world.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Like all forms of racism, sexism, ethno cultural religious bigotry, the content and forms of homophobia interact with and strengthen attacks on all people’s movements

A Very Short History of Narrow and Broad Approaches to attacks on minorities on the Left

This is a lesson that has to be relearned over and over again, as people’s movements appealing to mankind’s most forward looking aspirations, confront mankind’s most backward sensibilities.

For example, Karl Marx and most of his early followers in the U.S., refugees from the revolutions of 1848, actively supported the anti-slavery movement before the Civil War and the union cause during the civil war. But one prominent refugee, former member of the League of Communists and enemy of Karl Marx, Wilhelm Weitling , refused to criticize slavery in the U.S., appealed to the racist prejudices of American workers as an organizing tool, and refused to support the union against the confederacy during the Civil War.

In the early 20^th century, the Socialist Party was sharply divided on the issue of racism and segregation in the U.S. generally and in AFL unions particularly.

The Socialist party as a whole avoided the issue, taking a “color blind” approach that the victory of the working class would solve all problems for workers[1]

The Communist party in the 1920s, coming into existence as part of a world movement that both advanced the strategically the struggle for socialism everywhere ,also made that struggle inseparable from the struggle against imperialism and colonialism, rejected completely the socialist party position on racism.

Communists made the struggle for what was then called “Negro Liberation” inseparable from the general struggle of the working class, made the struggle against all forms of racism in all peoples organizations including the CPUSA a central priority and contended that it was the duty of all white Communists to fight against all manifestations of racism in trade union, all peoples organizations, and the general community

The struggles of the working class through the world, the defeat of fascism in the world war, and the collapse of colonialism internationally, followed two decades later by the collapse of de jure U.S. segregation, made a racism that was normal and even “scientific” no longer “normal” and acceptable, although it has of course continued as a major negative force in U.S. life..

The “Women Question”

In the 19^th century, the Utopian socialist Charles Fourier said that a society should be judged by its treatment of women. The movement for women’s liberation/women’s rights also struggled and still struggles against institutional and ideological sexism—sexism that portrayed women as “the second sex,” denied or sharply restricted women’s civil rights and liberties, from the right to vote in federal elections in the U.S. until 1920 and later in many European countries, to the right to own property in their own name, gain access to higher education, access to professional and managerial positions, various forms of skilled labor employment, protection from domestic violence, etc.

Women like Clara Zetkin in the SPD and Alexandra Kollontai in Czarist Russia (later a prominent Bolshevik) combined in both their thought and action the larger aims of the socialist movement with the special struggle of women workers and the struggle of all women as an oppressed sex/gender. In the U.S. socialist women like Florence Kelley, who had been a friend of Engels, IWW and later CPUSA leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Anarchist/Feminist Emma Goldman, and Socialist birth control leader Margaret Sanger all combined the struggle for women’s rights /liberation with the larger aims of the socialist movement.

Class conscious women, Marxist and socialist feminists, played a role in the development of the women’s liberation movement through the world in the post WWII era. In the U.S., Betty Friedan, who after WWII had been a journalist for the U.E News, newspaper of the then Communist led United Electrical Workers Union, published in 1963 The Feminine Mystique, a work that galvanized both housewives and often marginalized professional women and appealed specifically to young women in or with aspirations for college and a life beyond that of homemaker. Friedan and others founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 to advance women’s civil and reproductive rights.

While issues of affirmative action for women and minorities, equal rights for women in education and employment, the right of women to pregnancy termination, remain ongoing struggles, sexism like racism is no longer “normal” and acceptable today. And the socialist/communist movement from the late 19^th century to the early 21^st has played a central role in these struggles.

Gay Rights

The history of the struggle for liberation/rights is part of this ongoing history. But in the 21st century, homophobia remains “normal” in most of the world. If one extrapolates from the research of William Kinsey and others concerning homosexual males over half a century ago, as representing an estimated 10 percent of the male population,It is likely that Gay people, existing in all nationalities and are the largest minority group on earth. [2]

One might say as Charles Fourier did in the 19^th century concerning women, that the quality of a civilization in the 2st^t century can be judged by its treatment of Gay people. In a society where Gay civil rights and civil liberties are both clearly defined and established in law and in custom, the civil rights and civil liberties of all other minorities, ethnic, religious, and gender are strengthened immeasurablly[3]

Homophobia is also advanced in the U.S and many other nations by both the secular and clerical right. The late Reverend Gerry Falwell, a major organizer of the clerical right from the 1970s to his death, sought in the early 1980s to blame AIDs on male homosexuals, accusing them of seeking to infect the heterosexual population with the disease.

His successor Reverend Pat Robertson has engaged in similar demagoguery. Gay men particularly continue to be subject to physical assaults, beatings, even murder by homophobes encouraged to acts of violence by a larger homophobic political culture.[4]

In Africa and other former colonial regions, rightwing Christian missionaries, Islamic clergy and other clergy encourage homophobic repression, vigilante violence, and legislation ranging from prison sentences to the death penalty. For the religious right, the “normality” of homophobia makes it, to use a term used about abortion rights by major leader of the post war anti-Communist purges and former U.S, President Richard Nixon, a “wedge issue,” an issue to divide and distract masses of exploited and oppressed people, to see the enemy as Gay rather than landlord, warlord, capitalist, etc

Gays before the development of a gay liberation/gay rights movement were compelled to live [5]in the underground in the U.S. and other countries, which criminalized their erotic orientation, and made them targets of police entrapment and brutality, portraying them at best as victims of mental illness and social maladjustment in a society organized to make deny them any possibility of leading healthy, happy adjusted lives.

Homophobia lives in and through a culture of fear and repression---it encourages men to define masculinity in terms of physical violence and physical domination over other men, women to accept submissive roles in relationship to men for fear that their own sexual orientation will be threatened. In the working class especially it functions to strengthen male chauvinism in general, the association of learning and culture with effeminacy.

Communists, the Left, and Gay Rights

The record of the Communist movement concerning Gay Rights is complicated. Unlike the struggle of the rights of oppressed minorities and women, the development of a movement calling for equality for gay men and lesbians is a development of the later twentieth century. Earlier writing in defense of gay people called for tolerance, and an end to forms of discrimination. In the world, institutions established either by or for gays, called “homophile,” sought to foster self-segregation in a safe environment, not social integration.

Condemnations of male homosexuality, although a special characteristic of the right, went across the political spectrum. Anti-Nazis in Germany, including Communists, pointed to the fact that Ernst Roehm, leader of the Nazi Storm troops was a homosexual to discredit him. Questions of Hitler’s sexual orientation were also used by anti-Nazis [6]

On the left, some pointed to homosexual practices within military cliques and aristocratic ruling groups to connect both militarism and the dissolute world of the ideal rich with homosexual behavior. [7] In the working class, often beneath the service, hostility to gay men was connected to the view that they did not have to bear the costs and responsibilities of supporting wives and children. Also, they were often seen as “privileged” white collar workers, artists, designers, purveyors clothing and other luxury goods to the upper classes. The dominant stereotypes in many working class cicrlces portrayed that as unfit for manual labor and stigmatized them for not engaging in manual labor.

In the CPUSA, “don’t ask, don’t tell,” was a policy that one found from the early 20^th century, long before the Clinton administration sought to make it a policy in the U.S. military in the 1990s.PNevertheless, the pioneers of the Gay Liberation movement in the U.S. also came from the Communist movement.

The socialist/communist movement not only attracts the most class conscious working people but the most advanced members of oppressed minorities, colonized peoples, across class lines. And by combining theory and practice, Communist movement provides ss a higher education in political activism, in how to organize and educate.

The role of Harry Hay and others who founded the Mattachine Society in the U.S. in theearly 1950s and continue their values in the gay rights movement is the best example of this practical role. The Mattachine Society at the time of its founding was the most important gay Rrghts organization in history.

Although Hay and his comrades would leave the leadership of the Society to more conservative elements led by Frank Kameny in the mid-1950s, their vision and their militancy would be expressed in the Gay Liberation movement.

The Gay Liberation movement that took shape at the end of the 1960s began with what was essentially a ghetto riot in Greenwich Village at the Stonewall Bar in the Summer of 1969. The spirit of that riot, its fighting “wretched of the earth” gay working men and drag queens, was essentially the return of Harry Hay’s definitions of gay liberation/rights as part of the postwar liberation struggles for liberation from colonial oppression in which the colonizer forced the colonized to identify with the oppression, to live in a prison of self-hatred , never daring to think that his one culture, language, ethnicity, and erotic sensibilities were entitled to respect and equal treatment in society.

Although the gay liberation movement was born directly of civil rights and women’s rights struggles in the U.S and indirectly of the organizing skills, commitments and courage of people like Harry Hay and his pioneering comrades in the early 1950s, the subsequent history of gay liberation/gay rights in the U.S. has experienced the ups and downs of people’s movements over the last three decades. Today, it would be fair to say that the civil rights of gay men and lesbians in the U.S., while quantitatively a and qualitatively more advanced than half a century ago, have fallen behind the gains made in other developed countries.

A Movement Grows in a Period of Political Stagnation and Reaction

In the U.S. virulent homophobia has been a weapon the religious and secular right since the 1970s. In a later article I will look at the history of the contribution of both Harry Hay and the Communists to gay liberation, in the struggles of the last decades in the United States.

But as we await the U.S. Supreme Court decision (where the Obama administration’s justice department will be arguing in favor of gay marriage rights)Communists and the broad left in the U.S. and internationally might look at the reworked Equal Rights Constitutional Amendment put forward by the National Organization for Women in the United States and other countries. Notice that sexual orientation, along with ethnicity, color, marital status, and “indigency” of poverty is listed in it.

And the Communist Party of the Russian Federation along with the rest of us might listen to this remastered speech by Lenin ,when sound recording was in its infancy, in which he both analyzed and condemned anti-Semitism. I think it can and should be applied to all forms of bigotry, including homophobia. For us there are English Subtitles but I expect that the CPRF could listen to and possibly hear Lenin in his original Russian

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=capVnww7aMU

Ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex," remains a priority for the organization, as stated in their platform. During their 1995 conference, NOW also wrote and adopted their own constitutional amendment that would cover all of NOW's programs of reform, including abortion, lesbian and gay rights, affirmative action, etc., and labeled it the Constitutional Equality Amendment.

Although NOW has given moral support to attempts to ratify the ERA, they also continue to support the CEA as part of their official platform.

The Constitutional Equality Amendment, which has not been introduced into any session of Congress, reads;

1. Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place and entity subject to its jurisdiction; through this article, the subordination of women to men is abolished;

2. All persons shall have equal rights and privileges without discrimination on account of sex, race, sexual orientation, marital status, ethnicity, national origin, color or indigence;

3. This article prohibits pregnancy discrimination and guarantees the absolute right of a woman to make her own reproductive decisions including the termination of pregnancy;

4. This article prohibits discrimination based upon characteristics unique to or stereotypes about any class protected under this article. This article also prohibits discrimination through the use of any facially neutral criteria which have a disparate impact based on membership in a class protected under this article.

5. This article does not preclude any law, program or activity that would remedy the effects of discrimination and that is closely related to achieving such remedial purposes;

6. This article shall be interpreted under the highest standard of judicial review;

7. The United States and the several states shall guarantee the implementation and enforcement of this article.

[edit]S

[1] The party was very divided, with some on the left calling for militant campaigns against racism and segregation and some on the right quietly accepting American Federation of Labor(AFL) union constitutions that barred African-Americans and even segregated socialist party meetings in the South. Although Socialist Party members were involved in the initial founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP), the experience of W E.B. Dubois, NAACP founder and editor of its journal, The Crisis , should be instructive. Dubois, long interested in the socialist movement, joined the Socialist party before WWI but soon left it because he found many of its leaders indifferent to the struggles of African-American people and some openly racist

[2] This research like sexuality itself is complicated and controversial. Kinsey’s research showed a much larger percentage of males having engaged at some time in acts considered homosexual than was previously believed. It also showed that sexual acts, erotic feelings, were or could be situational, and also far less static and fixed than Freudian psychology, which distinguished between acts and feelings, believed. Freudians saw erotic orientation fixed in early childhood,athough one could engage in sexual acts with the same or opposite sex regardless of orientation. Freudian psychology, which saw mental health as individuals learning to cope with and adjust to existing social relations, not struggle individually or collectively against them, encouraged homo erotic oriented people to repress homosexual conduct, although without the moral religious condemnation of such actions that was the norm within society.

[3] The argument long advanced by feminist sociologists is that women, while often a numerical majority in a great many societies, are a sociological minority in that they are subject to the forms of exclusion and discrimination that ethnic, national, and religious numerical minorities usually face

[4] It is interesting to note that both Falwell especially and Robertson in their early days as media evangelists were supporters of Southern segregation and opponents of both the civil rights movement and civil rights legislation.

[5] It is important to remember that the SPD and the KPD both supported in the 1920s the decriminalizing of Homosexual private behavior, a huge advance at the time. Germany with its large left was also the center of the “homophile” campaigns in the Weimar period. After WWII, in the German Democratic Republic(DDR), its Psychological Society was the first on earth to declare formally that homosexuality was not a mental illness, years before the American Medical Association, in response to the gay liberation campaigns, issued a similar statement.

[6] Cuba is also an interesting case. Under the Battista dictatorship, Havana became the Western Hemisphere’s capital for all forms of organized vice, including open gay prostitution. The revolution associated this was both upper class decadence and the subjugation of the country to U.S. colonial domination—as Cuban pimps provided wealthy Americans with heterosexual and homosexual prostitutes, child prostitures, and anything else that they were willing to be for. The revolutionary government then pursued an an anti-gay policy for many years, a policy for which it was justly criticized, albeit often hypocritically by anti-Communists in the U.S. and other countries who would never support gay rights at home. Today those policies have been completely repudiated, a point that the CPRF might investigate, if it is interested in the policies of socialist countries under Communist leadership on the issue of gay rights

A Draft of an article on the Communist Movement and Gay Liberation, part 1 by Norman Markowitz

Political Affairs — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 19:13:24 -0400

The Communist Movement and Gay Liberation part 1

Although the CPRC did not institute the legislation according to press reports, that has not stopped old school anti-Communists from using their apparent support to attack Communist parties generally as “homophobic,” as if the Soviet Union were still in existence and the CPRF had the influence and prestige globally that the CPSU had. Also, the conservative dominated U.S. Supreme Court is about to rule on the question of Gay Marriage, against which conservatives have mobilized fiercely, even though marriage and family are among mankind’s most powerful conservative socializing institutions.

In the 21^st century at least in the developed countries, homophobia remains relatively “normal,” and homosexuals of both genders acceptable as long as they “keep their place,” a place ranging from invisibility to recycled versions of old stereotypical roles. This was of course true about anti-Semitism, racism directed against people of color, sexism/male chauvinism and xenophobia/national chauvinism in all of these countries. The Communist movement consciously fought and helped to win major victories against the ideological and institutional expressions of all of these destructive ways of thinking and living, so much so that they are no longer normal and acceptable in their old forms, even among so called conservatives in the U.S. who in recent decades express their nostalgia for the prejudices of the past by sneering at “political correctness in the present. But like all other victories in social struggles and the larger class struggle, gains are always ad hoc, subject to both open and hidden forms of reversal, as long as the repressive social system that is its foundation remains. In that sense an injury to one really is an injury to all because the continuation as acceptable and normal in clerical and secular guises opens doors for the restoration of sexism, racism and other prejudices in more virulent forms.

In the U.S., particularly, where the postwar purges and persecution of Communists merged with intensified homophobic purges and persecutions in government, this is especially ironic. Also, the portrayal of the Communist movement as a sinister conspiracy advanced by people hiding their true identifies and seeking to corrupt “normal people” aka working people filled with love for God, flag, country and capitalism fitted in with conventional fears of homosexuals preying upon unsuspecting youth

In the U.S. at least, books like psychologist Harold Greenwald’s The Tender Men. Sought to portray male Communists as either repressed or closeted homosexuals. Anti-Communist political films like My Son John (1952) often hinted that “Communist spies” in were possible homosexuals, un-married and effeminate. Finally, women Communists were often portrayed as strident masculine ideologues, possible Lesbians. In many of these crude B movies, the upper level Communists were portrayed in such ways while lower level male Communists were portrayed as violent strong arm men doing the dirty work of the party and lower level female Communists as sluts seducing honest male workers for the party.

Rightwing politicians sometimes ranted publically against “queers and Communists” and one even noted that Communists and Homosexuals were the two great conspiracies in the world.

A Very Short History of Narrow and Broad Approaches to attacks on minorities on the Left

But this is a lesson that has to be relearned over and over again, as people’s movements For example, Karl Marx and most of his followers in the U.S., refugees from the revolutions of 1848, actively supported the anti-slavery movement before the Civil War and the union cause during the civil war. But one prominent refugee, former member of the League of Communists and enemy of Karl Marx, Wilhelm Weitling refused to criticize slavery in the U.S. appealed to the racist prejudices of American workers as an organizing tool, and refused to support the union against the confederacy during the Civil War. In the early 20^th century, the Socialist Party was sharply divided on the issue of racism and segregation in the U.S. generally and in AFL unions particularly.

The party as a whole avoided the issue, taking a “color blind” approach that all the victory of the working class would solve all problems for workers[1]

The Communist party in the 1920s, coming into existence as part of a world movement that both advanced the strategically the struggle for socialism everywhere and also made that struggle inseparable from the struggle against imperialism and colonialism, rejected completely the socialist party position on racism.

The struggles of the working class through the world, the defeat of fascism in the second world war, and the collapse of colonialism internationally, followed two decades later by the collapse of de jure U.S. segregation, made a racism that was normal and even “scientific” no longer “normal” and acceptable, although it continued of course.

The Women Question

In the 19^th century, the Utopian socialist Charles Fourier said that a society should be judged by its treatment of women. The struggle for women’s liberation/women’s rights also struggled and still struggles against institutional and ideological sexism—sexism that portrayed women as “the second sex,” and denied or sharply restricted women’s civil rights and liberties, from the right to vote in federal elections in the U.S. until 1920 and later in many European countries, to the right to own property in their own name, gain access to higher education, access to professional and managerial positions, various forms of skilled labor, trade union membership etc.

All of this was “normal” as a feminist/women’s rights movement developed in Europe and North America to challenge it. In Germany and other European countries, Socialist parties following the example of the flagship party of the Second International, the SPD, fought for the economic and political emancipation of women. Women like Clara Zetkin in the SPD and Alexandra Kollontai in Czarist Russia (later a prominent Bolshevik) combined in both their thought and action the larger aims of the socialist movement with the special struggle of women workers and the struggle of all women as an oppressed sex/gender. In the U.S. socialist women like Florence Kelley, who had been a friend of Engels, IWW and later CPUSA leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Anarchist/Feminist Emma Goldman, and Socialist birth control leader Margaret Sanger all combined the struggle for women’s rights /liberation with the larger aims of the socialist movement.

Class conscious women, Marxist and socialist feminists played a role in the development of the women’s liberation movement through the world in the post WWII era. In the U.S., Betty Friedan, who after WWII had been a journalist for the U.E News, newspaper of the then Communist led United Electrical Workers Union, published in 1963 The Feminine Mystique, a work that galvanized both housewives and often marginalized professional women and appealed specifically to young women in or with aspirations for college and a life beyond that of homemaker. Friedan and others founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 to advance women’s civil and reproductive rights.

While issues of affirmative action for women and minorities, the right of women to pregnancy termination remain ongoing struggles, sexism like racism is no longer “normal” and acceptable today. And the socialist/communist movement from the late 19^th century to the early 21^st has played a central role in these struggles.

Gay Rights

The history of the struggle for Gay Liberation/Gay Rights is part of this ongoing history. But in the 2is century, homophobia remains “normal” in most of the world. If one extrapolates from the research of William Kinsey and others concerning homosexual males over half a century ago, as representing an estimated 10 percent of the male population it is likely that Gay people, existing in all nationalities and cultures as largest minority group on earth.

One might say as Charles Fourier did in the 19^th century, that the quality of a civilization in the 21^st century can be judged by its treatment of Gay people. In a society where Gay civil rights and civil liberties are both clearly defined and established in law and in custom, the civil rights and civil liberties of all other minorities, ethnic, religious, and in sociological terms gender[2]

Homophobia is also advanced in the U.S and many other nations by both secular and clerical right. The later Reverend Gerry Falwell, a major organizer of the clerical right from the 1970s to his death, sought to blame AIDs on male homosexuals, accusing them of seeking to infect the heterosexual population with the disease.

His successor Pat Robertson has engaged in similar demagoguery. Gay men particularly continue to be subject to physical assaults, beatings, even murder by homophobes encouraged to acts of violence by a larger homophobic political culture. In Africa and other former colonial regions, rightwing Christian missionaries, Islamic clergy and other clergy encourage homophobic repression. For the religious right, the “normality” of homophobia makes it, to use a term used about abortion rights by Richard Nixon, a “wedge issue,” an issue to divide and distract masses of exploited and oppressed people, to see the enemy as Gay rather than landlord, warlord, capitalist, etc

The oppression of Gays has one important difference from the oppression of other groups, one similar to what resistance groups face in open dictatorships. Gays must live a life in and of the underground, or “closet,” compelled to hide their erotic orientation or be defined completely and stigmatized by that orientation. People of color except in extreme cases cannot hide their color. Women except in extreme cases cannot hide their gender. Religious and ethno cultural groups can change their religion or ethnicity, but in most societies in modern history are not compelled to. Gays before the development of a Gay Liberation/Gay Rights movement were compelled to in the U.S. and other countries which criminalized their erotic orientation, made them targets of police entrapment and brutality, portraying them at best as victims of mental illness and social maladjustment in a society organized to make deny them any possibility of leading healthy, happy adjusted lives.

Communists, the Left, and Gay Rights

The record of the Communist movement concerning Gay Rights is complicated. Unlike the struggle of the rights of oppressed minorities and women, the development of a movement calling for equality for gay men and lesbians is a development of the later twentieth century. Earlier writing in defense of Gay people was calls for tolerance, and end to forms of discrimination. “Homophile” meant through the world institutions established either by or for gays to foster self-segregation in a safe environment, not social integration.

Accusations of male homosexuality, although a special characteristic of the right, went across the political spectrum. Anti-Nazis in Germany, including Communists, pointed to the fact that Ernst Roehm, leader of the Nazi Storm troops was a homosexual to discredit him. On the left, some pointed to homosexual practices within military cliques and aristocratic ruling groups to discredit both militarism and the dissolute world of the ideal rich with homosexual behavior. Gay men and Lesbians who played important roles in people’s movements and liberation struggles were hailed as individuals but never as gay men or lesbians.

On the left, “don’t ask, don’t tell,” was a policy that one found from the early 20^th century, long before the Clinton administration sought to make it a policy in the U.S. military in the 1990s.

We can say though that the pioneers of the Gay Liberation movement in the U.S. came from the Communist movement. The socialist/communist movement not only attracts the most class conscious working people but the most advanced members of oppressed minorities, colonized peoples, across class lines. And the Communist movement provides by combining theory and practices a higher education in political activism, in how to organize and educate.

The role of Harry Hay and other ongoing and former members of the in the founding of the Mattachine Society in the U.S. is the best example of this practical role. The Mattachine Society at the time of its founding was the most important Gay Rights organization in history. Although Hay and his comrades would leave the leadership of the Society to more conservative elements led by Frank Kameny.

The Gay Liberation that took shape at the end of the 1960s began with what was essentially a ghetto riot in Greenwich Village at the Stonewall Bar in the Summer of 1969. Harry Hays definitions of Gay Liberation/Rights as part of the postwar liberation struggles for liberation from colonial oppression in which the colonizer forced the colonized to identify with the oppression, to live prison of self-hatred , never daring to think that his one culture, language, ethnicity, and erotic sensibilities were entitled to respect and equal treatment in society.

Although a Gay Liberation movement that was born directly of civil rights and women’s rights struggles in the U.S and indirectly of the organizing skills, commitments and courage of men like Harry Hay and his pioneering comrades in the early 1950s, the subsequent history of Gay Liberation/Gay Rights in the U.S. has experienced the ups and downs of people’s movements over the last three decades. Today, it would be fair to say that the civil rights of Gay men and Lesbians in the U.S., while quantitatively a and qualitatively more advanced than half a century ago, have fallen behind the gains made in other developed countries.

A Movement Grows in a Period of political stagnation and reaction

In the U.S. virulent homophobia has been a weapon the religious right since the 1970s. In part two I will look both at the history of Harry Hay and the Communist contribution to Gay Liberation, and also how the struggles of the last decades in the United States. But as we wait in the U.S. the Supreme Court decision (where the Obama administration’s justice department will be arguing in favor of gay marriage rights)Communists and the broad left in the U.S. and internationally might look at the reworked Equal Rights Constitutional Amendment put forward by the National Organization for Women in the United States and other countries. Notice that sexual orientation, along with ethnicity, color, marital status, and “indigency” of poverty is listed.

And the Communist Party of the Russian Federation along with the rest of us might listen to this remastered Speech by Lenin when sound recording was in its infancy both analyzing and condemning anti-Semitism. I think it can and should be applied to all forms of bigotry, including homophobia. For us there are English Subtitles but I expect that the CPRF could listen to and possibly hear Lenin in his original Russian