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Whither the Socialist Left? Thinking the “Unthinkable”

Mark Solomon — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:54:00 -0400

Published by Portside

March 6, 2013

On February 4, 2010 The Gallop Poll released its latest data on the public’s political attitudes. The headline read: “Socialism Viewed Positively by 36% of Americans.” While the poll did not attempt the daunting task of exploring what a diverse public understood socialism to mean, it nevertheless revealed an unmistakably sympathetic image of a system that had been pilloried for generations by all of capitalism’s dominant instruments of learning and information as well as by its power to suppress and slander socialist ideas and organization.

In sheer numbers, that means a population at the teen-age level and above of tens of millions with a favorable view of socialism.

Why then is the organized socialist movement in the United States so small and so clearly wanting in light of the potential for building its numbers and influence?

That is a crucial question. At every major juncture in the history of the country, radical individuals and organizations in advance of the mainstream have played essential roles in influencing, guiding and consolidating broad currents for social change. In the revolution that birthed this country, radical activists articulated demands from the grass roots for an uncompromising and transforming revolution to crush colonial oppression. Black and white abolitionists fought to make the erasure of slavery the core objective of the Civil War while also linking that struggle to women’s suffrage and trade unionism. A mass Socialist Party in the early 20th century fought for state intervention to combat the ravages of an increasingly exploitative economic system while advancing the vision of a socialist commonwealth. In the Great Depression, the Communist Party and its allies fought the devastations of the crisis – helping to build popular movements to expand democracy, grow industrial unions and defend protections for labor embodied in the historic New Deal.

Small left and socialist organizations in the sixties supported a range of progressive struggles from peace to civil rights to women’s liberation to gay rights and beyond. The limited resources of those groups were effective in galvanizing massive peace demonstrations and in campaigns against racist and sexist oppression.
But the Cold War and McCarthyism had eviscerated any hope for a major influential socialist current. Consequently, no large and impacting force existed to extend to the peace movement a coherent anti-imperial analysis that might have contributed to its continuity and readiness to confront the wars of the nineties and the new century. Nor was there a strong socialist organization to contribute to the civil rights struggle by advocating for reform joined to a commitment to deeper social transformation. Had such a current existed, it might have contributed to building a broad protective barrier against the devastating FBI and local police violence against sectors of the movement like the Black Panthers.

There should be little debate today on the left over the need for a strong socialist voice and movement in light of festering economic stagnation, war on the working class, looming environmental catastrophe, a widening chasm between the super-rich and the rest of us, massive joblessness and incarceration savaging African Americans and other oppressed nationalities, crises in health care, housing and education. Such a strong socialist presence could offer a searching analysis of the present situation, help stimulate a broad public debate on short term solutions and formulate a vision of a socialist future that could begin to reach the minds and hearts of the 36 percent who claim to be sympathetic to that vision.

Back to the question: why is there no large respected socialist organization today? The answer is complex and not readily subject to a consensus. The failures of the first socialist wave in the 20th century, the unrelenting demonization of socialism by the dominant political apparatus, internal sectarian cultures and narrow social composition that inhibit outreach to youth and oppressed nationalities – have all contributed to a weak socialist presence.

Doubtless, some if not all, existing socialist organizations would insist that they are growing, respected and effective. That can be argued, but it is valid to acknowledge that existing socialist groups, to one degree or another, have made and continue to make important contributions to the struggle for a just present and better future. This is especially true of the work of individual socialists in various unions and mass organizations.

However, the small size and inadequate resources or socialist organization nearly fatally inhibit their impact and influence. No matter how hard working and principled, small socialist groups are drowned out by the power and pervasiveness of the dominant tools of information and education. The Internet has opened a
window to reaching mass audiences. But socialist websites (if one is successful in locating them) cannot substitute for the indispensable task of organizational outreach, of human beings making direct contact with other human beings, of physical debate and discussion, of well-orchestrated, highly visible mass actions.

The time has come to work for the convergence of socialist organizations committed to non-sectarian democratic struggle, engagement with mass movements, and open debate in search of effective responses to present crises and to projecting a socialist future.

There are socialist organizations already airing divergent views within their ranks – reflecting positions that overlap with other socialist organizations committed to democratic struggle and socialist education. The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, the Communist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization have been meeting to explore areas for cooperation in advancing the fight to defend the needs and interests of all working people. With involvement of their members, and with all who honestly wish a unity project to succeed, those organizations could constitute a starting point for other left and socialist groups and individuals to join as equal participants in building an imaginative, revitalized socialist presence.

A conversation with a veteran socialist historian about merger brought a nearly apoplectic response: that will never happen; too much history of mutual antagonism; too much institutional self-aggrandizement; too much belief within each organization of their ideological and strategic “certainties,” etc.

His bleak assessment may well be valid. One could list even more problems: the comfort of organizational silos, the complexity of sorting out and merging the physical resources of each organization, selecting a conjoined leadership, lingering political and ideological differences.

It can also be argued that a merger of organizations with a combined membership of a few thousand would still not be large or vibrant enough to make an impact on a country of over 300 million; nor would its combined membership include a sufficient component of youth, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, etc., commensurate with the country’s changing demographics.

That perhaps misses a crucial point. While growth and dynamism are not guaranteed, the open-minded and comradely spirit embodied in a merger could excite and inspire thousands of former members of those organizations to join a new, collaborative entity. Many others impressed by a revitalized commitment by socialists to put aside narrow interests and seek common ground could also be moved to join. The simple declaration of unity and amalgamation by old ideological foes will stir an energized, hopeful response on the left.

Among socialist organizations there is a long tradition of opposition to racism, sexism and homophobia; a concrete record of unwavering struggle for racial and gender justice as indispensable to all working class aspirations. With that experience and consciousness a renewed socialist organization with augmented resources would have the potential to speak directly to young people of color, to the jailed and formerly jailed, to a new generation of students, to teen aged youth, to the large numbers who joined the Occupy movement, the unaffiliated leftists and socialists who have joined the rapidly growing Jacobin journal, Labor Notes, the large Left Forums, the Left Labor Project, etc. Whatever its initial form, an alliance of socialists offers the promise of a continuous, enduring framework for democratic struggle, for discussion, for debate, for learning, for growing – all within a stable, political and organizational environment.

With a visible presence for outreach to emerging but undefined left forces, a merged socialist movement could presumably generate the financial resources to hire and train young organizers. With stronger organization derived from convergence, it could tap latent left and socialist sentiment in “red states,” especially the South and Midwest that would reawaken the truly national presence of socialism that characterized the Socialist Party in the early 20th century.

Those augmented resources could open up space for expanded socialist education through debate and discussion, through a combination of new publications and continuing publications of the merged organizations, through classes, think tanks and through utilization of the Internet. The present Online University of the Left is an excellent example of the potential for utilization on a large scale of new technology for socialist education.

Despite the enormous challenges inherent in convergence, there are a number of reasons to anticipate readiness for unified socialist organizing:

First and foremost, the present crisis of world capitalism is systemic. While there will continue to be economic peaks and valleys, the overall prognosis is for enervation and stagnation that will increasingly demonstrate capitalism’s declining ability to provide decent lives for present and future generations.
There is likely agreement among various organizations on the need for a long-range socialist transformation. There is a likely consensus on the validity of Marx’s basic critique of the contradictions inherent in capitalism: increasingly socialized production colliding with private appropriation of the fruits of that production – constituting the key source of the system’s inherent instability. Historically, the relations of production (manifested in social classes) become fetters upon the productive forces (human beings and machinery) – thus requiring the overturning of the old system – socializing the relations of production in order to bring them into harmony with highly socialized productive forces. With globalization of capital that contradiction between social production and private appropriation has itself become global – resulting in the accumulation of unimaginable wealth by a small minority while masses languish in deepening poverty and social misery.
There is likely agreement that both the path to socialism and its essential character are subjects for study, debate and experimentation. There is much to study: the “solidarity economy” posits 21st century socialism with workers’ control of all essential institutions, a market function and imperative ecological concern. There are a growing number of experiments in cooperatives, workers’ self-management, and local public ownership of energy. Other approaches stress confrontation with corporate power through mass struggle for control of state policy – aiming to expand the public sphere while reducing and eventually eliminating corporate control of the economy and society. In sum, a new socialist organization will open avenues to fresh, challenging exploration of social transformation.
There is a likely consensus among socialists that “vanguard” organizations and sectarian “cadre” groups have been negated by the existence of a broadly heterogeneous multiracial working class of women and men. The present-day working class and its allies are too diverse to be led by a single, narrowly conceived political current. A renewed socialist organization must reflect that heterogeneity as well as the determination of members to be full, controlling participants in present struggles and in charting a socialist future. The new organization’s structure would likely be neither fully “vertical” nor fully “horizontal.” In the past the former has often undermined democratic participation and the latter (illustrated by the experience of the Occupy movement) has often led to organizational incoherence and stasis.
There is likely agreement that there should be no preexisting, standard for socialist organizing that mandates a “take it or leave it” rigidity. The door should be open to experimentation in exploring both organizational and theoretical issues. There is also likely agreement for the short-and-medium-term at least that a converged organization should not be formed as party or electoral organization. The electoral issue, a major point of contention on the left, could be a major topic of exploration and debate. There should be no obstacles for those who sincerely wish to join the struggle against the ravages of the system and who seek a socialist alternative. In that regard it is important to note the variety of left and socialist movements around the world worthy of study. Clearly, there is no single “correct” path to 21st century socialism.

Greece, in the midst of existential crisis, has given rise to Syriza, merging a remarkable range of organizations despite sharply different ideological and historical roots into a unified party whose platform rejects austerity, demands the cancellation of Greece’s debt and reform of the European Central Bank. Syriza emerged in 2001 from a group called “Space for Dialogue for the Unity and Common Action of the Left.” In June 2012, Syriza received almost27% of the vote in parliamentary elections, making it the main opposition party and positioning it as the potential future governing party.

In France, a coalition of left and socialist parties has formed a Left-Front coalition that ran a unified campaign in the last national elections. Germany has “Die Linke,” the Left Party formed from a coalition of the successors to the old ruling party in the German Democratic Republic and a militant West German labor organization. An all-European Left Party is a continental formation of an impressive array of left and socialist parties and organizations. Latin America is perhaps the region with the greatest left and socialist experimentation that generally stresses democratic and participatory engagement at the grass roots in building alternatives to capitalism. The Latin American left in particular has advanced some of the most compelling interpretations of Marx’s thinking concerning the crucial issues of ecological preservation and survival. It has also engendered, country-by-country a variety of social experiments based upon distinct national conditions involving various degrees of mixed, transitional economies on the road to socialism.

Speaking only for myself, I would like to see the creation of an entirely new organization. However, a total merger of organizations at this time can justly be viewed as utopian at best and naïve at worst. One must acknowledge the need for a patient process – for ongoing consultation, for gradual building of mutual comfort and mutual confidence, for a possible stage of confederation or alliance. Crucially, joint activities to defeat austerity and the right wing offensive constitute a sound basis at this juncture on the road to convergence. In the long term, the next generation and generations beyond will determine the form and content of the struggle for social transformation based on changed circumstances that cannot now be fully envisioned.

That does not negate the need for “all deliberate speed” in building an advanced, effective political instrument to help forge the linkages between the economic crisis, the environmental crisis and the crisis of militarism and war. That instrument is needed to help provide political depth and interconnectedness to burgeoning movements on the environment, immigration, gun control, women’s rights, the prison-industrial complex, voting rights, student debt, protection of Social Security and Medicare, jobs and union rights, and the struggle against interventionism and the national security state. Above all, the urgency of the deepening crisis of capitalism demands the political will of socialist organizations to take those bold and resolute steps to forming a strong new alliance capable of having a powerful and lasting impact on the struggle for justice, peace and a socialist future.

[Mark Solomon is past national co-chair of the United States Peace Council and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He is author of The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 and is currently working on a memoir/narrative at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University on the freedom and peace movements in the 1940s and 1950s.]

Posted by Portside on March 6, 2013

Is full employment possible under capitalism?

Sam Webb — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:35:00 -0400

Editor's note: The following are remarks given by Communist Party USA chair Sam Webb at a Feb. 25 University of Georgia debate sponsored by Phi Kappa Literary Society. The debate topic was "Is full employment possible under capitalism?" Webb debated Greg Morin from the Libertarian Party of Georgia. See video at end of article.

Billed as "The Debate That Never Happened," UGA's Phi Kappa Literary Society decided to recreate an attempted 1963 debate between CPUSA's Arnold Johnson and UGA economist David Wright. That attempt had been squelched by a unanimous vote of the Faculty Committee on Student Affairs. The society was accused of attempting to "incite riot." In the spirit of free speech, the society hosted this debate during its 50^th anniversary.

Thank you, and thanks to Phi Kappa Literary Society for the invitation to participate in this debate on this beautiful campus and in this historic chapel. Thanks also to Speak Progress.

The debate question - "Is full employment possible under capitalism" - is by no means an academic one.

By last count, approximately 12 million Americans were officially unemployed. Of those, 4.7 million have been jobless for 27 weeks or longer.

If we include in our calculations discouraged workers who have stopped looking, and part-time workers who would prefer full-time work, the number is much higher - roughly 20 million people.

If you are African American, Latino, Native American Indian, and/or young, you are going to be overrepresented in those figures.

Here in Georgia the unemployment rate stands at 8.6 per cent. Without fundamental changes in public policies, it is hard to see how this awful situation will change.

Which prompts the question: Is persistent and high joblessness - not to mention stagnant and falling living standards - U.S. capitalism's "new normal?"

If it were, it would contrast with the world that I grew up in. That era, stretching from the end of World War II to the early 1970s, is sometimes referred to as the "Golden Age" of capitalism.

This phrase doesn't capture the full complexities of that period, but it does capture some of its most salient features, namely, that it was an era of sustained growth, diminishing inequality, and low unemployment - the likes of which we hadn't seen before or since.

My father, for example, who was a lineman in the backwoods of Maine, never experienced a layoff, even a short one, in a work life that began during the Depression and ended in the late 1960s.

At the time, economists thought that the cyclical ups and downs of the economy had been tamed and that full or near-full employment was the normal condition of capitalism, not only here but also in Western Europe and Japan.

But looking back a half-century later, one has to think that this period might well be the exception rather than the rule of capitalist development.

Now it's true that during the Clinton and Bush years rates of unemployment were relatively low and the recessions were relatively mild, but I would add four caveats.

First of all, the expansion of employment during this period took place mainly in low-wage, non-union and service sector jobs. The growth of Walmart into the nation's largest employer is emblematic of this phenomenon.

The second caveat is that under the weight of chronic overproduction in global commodity markets, a new phase of the technological revolution, and the relocation of production to low wage economies, tens of millions of jobs, especially in manufacturing, were permanently lost. Many of these jobs provided livable wages and modest health and retirement benefits to "middle class families."

Another caveat is the Clinton-Bush years were marked by growing income inequality and downward social mobility. The gap between the top income layers of our society - the one per cent - and the vast majority of wage and salary workers grew enormously to an historic high.

A final, and especially damning, caveat is economic growth and employment levels rested on enormous stock, housing, and financial bubbles, massive deregulation of markets, and the production of unending amounts of business and consumer debt.

While providing a lift to an otherwise sluggish economy, this financial frenzy engineered on Wall Street and in Washington and driven by corporate capital's drive for maximum profits wasn't sustainable, and eventually came to an end in an economic crisis, the likes of which we haven't seen since the Great Depression.

To sum up, the Clinton-Bush years are not cracked up to what conventional wisdom would like us to believe.

Since 2008, some pickup in economic activity has occurred, but overall employment gains and economic growth have been fitful and meager.

Moreover, it's hard to see where the economic dynamism and jobs are going to come from without action by the federal government, and the restructuring of the economy on a scale that only a few in Washington are ready to embrace.

After all, debt and bubble-driven growth that greased the wheels of the economy during the Clinton and Bush years is not an option.

Nor should any help be expected from our global partners. Europe is stuck in an economic quagmire and its austerity policies are only making it worse. China isn't positioned to carry the rest of the world on its shoulders. In fact, the Chinese economy's growth has also slowed, and it is feeling the contradictions that come from its deep integration into the capitalist global economy.

Furthermore, the longer-term processes that I mentioned earlier - overproduction in global commodity markets, job-displacing technologies, and global supply lines that fan out to distant lands - will only become more pronounced in the years ahead.

Economic crises are supposed to be how capitalism clears away the debris that impedes a revival of production, profits, employment and growth, but that scenario doesn't appear to be the case today.

So I'm guessing you know how I'm going to answer the question of this debate: is full employment possible under capitalism in today's conditions?

My answer, in case there is any doubt, is NO!

Transnational corporate capitalism, in its endless quest to accumulate capital and wealth, has morphed from a generator of jobs and rising income to a generator of unemployment, inequality, and insecurity.

I would quickly add that there are ways to ameliorate the jobs crisis. But only if the American people bring the power of their numbers and unity to bear on government at all levels, much like Americans did in the 1930s.

In his first four years, President Obama enacted policies that prevented the floor from falling out of the economy - an economy, by the way, that was stalled primarily due to insufficient demand for goods and services.

In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama proposed a higher minimum wage, stronger educational opportunities, rebuilding the deteriorating infrastructure, immigration reform, and investment in green technologies and jobs.

He also resisted calls for sweeping austerity measures from his Republican counterparts, since if enacted, they would reduce aggregate demand and in turn exacerbate the economic and jobs crises.

All of which are welcome.

Nevertheless, the president's package of proposals addresses only the edges of the deep and long-term jobs crisis that faces our country.

Indeed, he missed an opportunity to project a bold, transformative "new jobs" agenda. For the sake of our fragile planet and ourselves, such an agenda would transform our economy from one dominated by Wall Street, Lockheed Martin, Peabody Coal, Exxon and Walmart to a Main Street economy rooted in a green, demilitarized production, clean and renewable energy, livable wages and union protections, publicly-owned banks, public controls over the investment policies of the Fortune 500, affirmative action and equality, the modernization of mass transit, aid for small and medium-sized businesses, renewal of both urban and rural communities, democratic forms of worker ownership, and a progressive tax structure.

This reorientation of our economy would create millions of jobs, raise living standards, promote fairness and equality, and give us a fighting chance of mitigating the worst effects of climate change.

Of course, if I had my druthers, I would prefer socialism - democratic, working people driven, and people not profit centered.

But that debate is for another time.

The Debate That Never Happened from Phi Kappa Literary Society on Vimeo.

Photo: Hundreds of job seekers gather at the Los Angeles Mission for the ninth annual Skid Row Career Fair last month. (AP/Adam Lau)

Hugo Chavez empowered and united

Sam Webb — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 13:31:00 -0400

The powerful voice of Hugo Chavez - a voice for economic justice, democracy, empowerment, national independence, continental solidarity, peace, anti-imperialism, and socialism - has been stilled.

While local and global elites sigh in relief and belittle his life in the major media, the untimely death of Chavez is also evoking a heartfelt cry from millions of abused, marginalized, and exploited people across the globe - none more so than in Venezuela and throughout Latin America.

In that cry one doesn't hear a note of despair and defeat, but rather an unmistakable affirmation that the irrepressible spirit, intellectual curiosity, and disposition to action that defined this man's life will find reflection in the lives of struggling humanity in the years to come.

The celebrations in the seats of power of the global elite over Chavez's death are very premature. The "masters of the universe" make the mistake of underestimating the consciousness and capacity of people in Venezuela and elsewhere to carry forward Chavez's legacy of challenging entrenched capitalist power and injustice. This misunderstanding is not unusual for a class that is steeped in notions of racial superiority, patriarchy, and class entitlement, and tucked away in bubbles of privilege and opulence.

Few of us leave an individual imprint on history. For most of us, our ability to affect history lies in joining with others in collective action.

But some individuals do play an outsized role shaping historical events - as part of the wider struggles taking place in society.

Hugo Chavez Frias falls into this category.

He was an early and unyielding opponent of neoliberal globalization - a system of political and economic capitalist domination that grew out of the dynamics and contradictions of capitalism in its current stage of development. This system of governance broke up traditional farming in the countryside and forced vast numbers of peasants off the land. It created massive slums rimming South America's major cities, rolled back social provisioning by the state, degraded the environment, generated ever wider inequalities, tore down trade and financial barriers protecting local economies, decimated and de-nationalized industry, and condemned millions to impoverishment and spiritual hopelessness.

Drawing inspiration from Simon Bolivar, Fidel Castro and other revolutionaries of Latin America, Chavez challenged in words and deeds this system of exploitation and oppression.

But his fight was not a lonely one. This great leader of indigenous and African descent (a fact that fueled the hatred of the elites even more) not only gave voice to the impoverished and rootless, but also inspired them to become political actors in their own right. Indeed, Chavez played a singular role in transforming a fragmented mass of people in Venezuela into an organized force challenging the profits and prerogatives of local and global capital.

If we left it here however, we would miss the other side of the dialectic. Chavez, like other great leaders, was as much a product of his times and the people he sought to influence as they were of him. Changing circumstances and an aroused people remade him as much as he remade them.

Chavez was a socialist, and one whose feet were very much in this century. While he was inspired by struggles of the past, he wasn't a prisoner of the received wisdom of earlier times. His socialism - its sensibilities, goals, theory, program, and path - were conditioned by the particular, novel circumstances of the 21st century.

At the core of his worldview and political practice were people's needs, people's empowerment, and people's unity at the national, regional, and global level. His politics grew out of the real movement of people and a sober estimation of the actual balance of class and social forces.

At times, his views raised the eyebrows of those on the left who considered problematic any deviation from what I would call their undialectical and rigid reading of Marxism.

In an interview with Tariq Ali, Chavez said,

"I don't believe in the dogmatic postulates of Marxist revolution. I don't accept that we are living in a period of proletarian revolutions. All that must be revised. Reality is telling us that every day. Are we aiming in Venezuela today for the abolition of private property or a classless society? I don't think so. But if I'm told that because of that reality you can't do anything to help the poor, the people who have made this country rich through their labor - and never forget that some of it was slave labor - then I say: 'We part company.' I will never accept that there can be no redistribution of wealth in society.

"Our upper classes don't even like paying taxes. That's one reason they hate me. We said: 'You must pay your taxes.' I believe it's better to die in battle, rather than hold aloft a very revolutionary and very pure banner, and do nothing ... That position often strikes me as very convenient, a good excuse ... Try and make your revolution, go into combat, advance a little, even if it's only a millimetre, in the right direction, instead of dreaming about utopias."

As you can see, Chavez's theory and practice included intermediate steps and stages of struggle. It embraced the struggle for reforms, even minor ones that would meet in some, even small, ways people's needs, and at the same time act as a matrix for mass political participation, anti-capitalist education, and deeper and broader unity. And it rested on a creative and flexible application of theory to changing reality.

Hugo Chavez will be greatly missed in his home country and worldwide, but the way to honor him isn't to turn him into an icon and his words into sacred texts. We honor Hugo Chavez by embracing his passion and courage, his curiosity about the world, his tireless struggle for unity of diverse forces, his readiness to think independently and develop Marxism in fresh and creative ways, and his belief in the intelligence and power of an engaged people.

Building International Labor Alliances in This Fiercely Competitive Global Economy

David Trujillo and Scott Marshall — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 13:05:00 -0500

There is no question that corporations will go global whether or not unions will. Union members realize that jobs, decisions that may shape their lives and bargaining power are increasingly made in the boardrooms of multinational corporations that compete in the global economy. As the result of globalization the labor movement will be forced to organize on a very complex level. One of the most important levels is learning how to interact with others from different backgrounds and cultures. Labor as well as corporate managers/CEO understand that intercultural aspects and perspectives on International trade are now more important than ever in this era of globalization.

The idea that past organizing models or any one influential person can determine decisions in a global environment is not realistic. Organizing theories of the past such as the "industrial-based organizing" model or a sole charismatic leader do not fix the current needs in a global world. A more inclusive and informal understanding of organizing across borders and on international level with a shared social process where union members are influential is a far better perspective.

The union movement comprising rank and file members within the United States remains a widely multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multigenerational and a gender-integrated movement, each with some different views of the world. These labor movement trends along with globalization changes are challenging the adaptability of traditional structures and organizing patterns within the labor movement. Labor leaders and the U.S. trade union movement because of globalization are developing a different mindset as they move forward in this era of globalization.

Thus, the ability to organize effectively for labor to combat negative globalization policies means developing strategies between unions here in the United States and unions around the world.

A laid-off steelworker now realizes that foreign imports made by U.S. corporations abroad and exported to the U.S. are due to the fact that it creates more profits. Union members from the Communications of America (CWA), the United Auto Workers (UAW), United Steel Workers (USW) and numerous other unions have seen thousands of good paying jobs move overseas. All this movement of capital resources overseas is due to the constant need to expand markets and find new ways of making more profits. It is in this global environment that the labor movement has made an issue of 'globalization' and the need to participate in developing cross border alliances their major issues.

Unions in the U.S. are aware that multinational corporations, in order to increase their profits, will attempt to restrict Labor's right to organize. They will aggressively push to stop any efforts to negotiate collective labor agreements. The only pro-active response for labor is to organize solidarity efforts between workers of all nations. The question for labor is how to activate and maximize the unity of a very diverse multi-cultural base and continue a fluid coalition in the course of globalization struggles.

In order for labor to remain strong, every union and its leadership must bring an unprecedented range of skills and experience to the union movement mission while assuming leadership responsibility. This includes all aspects of national organizing and global union coalition building. The Trade union movement must create new alliances with other unions, creating global unions, in key industries and key companies if labor is serious about confronting globalization.

One important major challenge for labor is to better prepare union leaders who can effectively create this change and navigate worldwide efforts to build collective coalition union building. One such example of preparing union leaders is the UCLA Labor Center in Los Angeles. Kent Wong, Director of the Labor Center has facilitated exchanges between the United States and Pacific Rim Countries, such as China and Vietnam. Recently the Labor Center participated in a binational US-China conference hosted by the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). Other examples include cross-border organizing between the Unions in the U. S. and Mexico/Latin American countries. The world is rapidly changing and in this global environment such exchanges and information sharing will be critical.

The Union movement has never faced such extreme global movement of finance and corporate restructuring as it must face today. In this world of corporate globalization, multinational corporations have merged, reinvested, refinanced, and restructured their organizations to compete in a new-world market. Unions now face the difficult task of organizing in this competitive global environment, where goods and capital cross borders freely. In addition, Unions must face the reality that the current U.S. trade policies are constantly moving toward in fast track legislation which will give authority to the President to sign trade agreements without any Congressional debate, public input or added amendments.

Needless to say, these trade agreements are developed to make it easier for corporations to have foreign ownership, affecting everything from factories to real estate. In addition, economic reforms that are promised by these trade policies are no guarantee that conditions in these countries will improve. These so-called reforms will restrict labor's influence on wages and workplace environment standards and in the process allow corporate multinationals to maximize profits at the expense of workers. One thing is sure to remain constant during these times is the need for Unions be forward looking. The only question is can the Union movement take past events and current experiences and translate this experience into a dramatic new approach to organizing worldwide?

In summary, it is no secret that the globalization of the economy has led to record high profits for corporations, but also the stagnation of living standards and unprecedented job insecurity for working people. Over the past two decades, American businesses responded to this international competition by outsourcing, shipping jobs to foreign countries, cutting the work force and driving down wages. Today, multinational corporations freely cross national boundaries in search of the cheapest labor possible and the highest profit margins.

The possibilities for continuing cross border alliances and global unionism are increasing on a daily bases. As multinational corporations globalize their operations, unions and their allies will have to continue to develop structures and alliances that will ensure the total workforce is afforded strong representation.

Conclusion

Globalization is a new movement in the development of capitalism. This development is characterized by economic concentration in the hands of multinational corporations. For Unions, this concentration and globalization of capital are the main cause of the worsening unemployment, poverty and social disintegration in the world today. In order for the multinationals to maintain control they must continue to increase their profits, restrict labor's right to organize and negotiate favorable collective labor agreements. In the mean time, multinational corporations will also continue to rely on U.S. trade policies to relax regulations that govern social, environmental and labor conditions.

For now, Unions will need in to continue to provide beyond information sharing by coordinating actions including strikers for worker rights and labor struggles with rank-and-file union members in other countries. U.S. Unions will have to increase signing solidarity agreements and alliances with other countries. In addition, labor needs to build day-to-day ties with global leaders and continue global conferences.

There has been some progress by the union movement recently to influence globalization policies. In one aspect, union leaders are increasingly more educated and informed. Union leaders understand that increasing diversity, advancing technology and globalization require new approaches to organizing.

Today Unions must have the ability to meet global problems that are unanticipated, and focus on developing organizing models that are inactive and one that achieve shared vision, mutual trust and respect for workers around the world.

"International solidarity is not just in our blood in the trade union movement, it's also in our interest. The lessons that we have to learn from the economic catastrophe of the last year are that it's just not safe to leave the globalized economy in the hands of rampant global capitalism. The lesson is that labor has to forge its links of solidarity across the world in steel so that they will not break down when those who try to pit workers of nation against those of all other nations because if we let them, they'll do it." (AFL-CIO)

Finally, in examining 'globalization' the issue is not the expansion of production and trade to the entire world. That seems inevitable. The real issue is that capitalism is the driving force behind this globalization of economic activity. The answer, as we have suggested, as well as many others, is in the solidarity of workers of all nations. The fight is ultimately for the elimination of private ownership in industry, finance and trade and for the enormous wealth that working people everywhere have created to be used for the benefit of working people.

While there are union leaders who practice and promote a progressive leadership there still is a view that there is lack of uniformity among labor unions on how to best develop global unionism to combat against Multinational efforts globalization. However to the union movement's credit they continue to research and use best practice approach to globalize organizing.

Only by building the broadest trade union solidarity and forming strategic global, national and labor-community coalitions will the trade union movement have a chance to stop multinational global campaigns from attempting to destroy the labor movement worldwide.

Socialism and the path to Socialism-Vietnam’s Perspective

Nguyen Phu Trong — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 08:58:00 -0500

Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, has paid an official friendship visit to Cuba and gave a presentation at the Nico Lopez Party School of the Cuban Communist Party. Following are excerpts from Party leader Trong's presentation.

Socialism and the path to socialism is a fundamental and practical theoretical topic with broad and complicated content, demanding thorough and in-depth study. I hereby mention just a few aspects from Vietnam's perspective for your reference and our discussions. And several questions are focused: What is socialism? Why did Vietnam choose the socialist path? How to build socialism in Vietnam step by step? How significant has Vietnam's renewal and socialism building process been over the past 25 years? And what lessons have been learnt?

As you know, socialism can be understood in three different aspects: socialism as a doctrine, socialism as a movement, and socialism as a regime. Each aspect has different manifestations, depending on the world outlook and development level in a specific historical period. The socialism I want to discuss here is a scientific socialism based on Marxist-Leninist doctrine in the current era.

Previously, when the Soviet Union and its constellation of socialist countries existed, striving for socialism in Vietnam seemed logical and implicitly validated. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, socialist regimes fell in many countries and the worldwide socialist revolution began to ebb. Now, the cause of socialism has been revived, sparking widespread interest and heated debate.

It is true that capitalism has never been more widely accepted than it is now, and it has achieved great successes, especially in liberating and developing productive capacity and advancing science and technology. Many developed capitalist countries have established social welfare systems which are more progressive than ever before, thanks to strong economies and long struggles by their working class. However, capitalism cannot overcome its inherent fundamental contradictions. We are witnessing a financial crisis and economic decline which originated in the US in 2008, rapidly spread to other capitalist centers, and has impacted every country around the globe.

In addition to this economic crisis with its related food and energy crisis, a depletion of natural resources and deterioration of the environment are posing great challenges to the existence and development of humankind. These are the consequences of a socio-economic development process which champions profits, considers wealth and material consumption the measures of civilization, and makes individualism the main pillar of society. They are the essential characteristics of capitalism's mode of production and consumption. The ongoing crisis once again proves that capitalism is anti-advancement, anti-humanity, and unsustainable economically, socially, and ecologically. As Karl Marx said, capitalism damages the things that constitute its wealth, namely, labor and natural resources. According to scientists, the current crisis cannot be completely resolved in the framework of a capitalist regime.

Recent social protest movements flaring up in many developed capitalist countries have exposed the truth about the nature of capitalist political entities. In fact, democratic regimes which follow the "free democracy" formula advocated and imposed by the West never ensure that power truly belongs to the people and for the people-the natural factor of democracy. Such a power system still belongs mostly to the wealthy minority and serves the interests of its major capitalist groups. A very small proportion, as small as 1% of the population, holds the majority of the wealth and means of production, controls most of the financial institutions and mass media, and dominates the whole society.

We need a society where development is truly for humans, instead of exploiting and trampling on human dignity for the sake of profits. We need economic development in parallel with social progress and fairness instead of a widening gap between the rich and the poor and social inequality. We need a society which yearns for progressive and humane values, a society of compassion, unity, and mutual assistance instead of rivalry for the selfish benefits of individuals and groups. We need sustainable development and harmony with nature to make our living environment clean for present and future generations, instead of exploiting, appropriating resources, infinitely consuming materials, and destroying the environment. And we need a political system under which power truly belongs to the people, by the people, and serves the interests of the people, instead of a wealthy minority. These are the authentic values of socialism, aren't they?

As you comrades and friends know, the Vietnamese people have undergone a prolonged, harsh, sacrifice-filled revolutionary struggle against colonialist and imperialist domination to win national independence and sovereignty in the spirit of the slogan "There is nothing more precious than Independence and Freedom".

National independence associated with socialism is the basic guideline of Vietnam's revolution and the essential point of Ho Chi Minh's legacy. His rich experience combined with the revolutionary theories and science of Marxism-Leninism led Ho Chi Minh to the conclusion that only socialism and communism can create a truly free, prosperous, happy life for every person in every nation. Advancing to socialism is the objective and the inexorable path of the Vietnamese revolution, harnessing the people's aspirations and historical trends.

But what is socialism? And how does one advance to socialism? This is what absorbs our thoughts-finding our way step by step, creating orientations and guidelines which fit the specific circumstances of Vietnam.

* *

To date, though there remain some issues that need further study, we realize that the socialist society that the Vietnamese people are striving for is a society of prosperous people in a strong nation characterized by democracy, fairness, and civilization. It's a society where the people are the masters, which has a highly-developed economy and is based on modern forces of production and progressive relations of production. It has an advanced culture imbued with national identity, and a prosperous, free, and happy people who are blessed with opportunities for comprehensive development. Ethnic groups in the Vietnamese community are equal, united, respectful and supportive of each other. A law-governed socialist state of the people, by the people, and for the people is led by the Communist Party and has friendly and cooperative ties with countries all over the world.

To achieve these goals, we should speed up national industrialization and modernization; develop a knowledge-based and socialist-oriented market economy; build an advanced culture imbued with national identity; boost human resource development; improve people's living standards; promote social progress and fairness; ensure national defense; safeguard national security and social order; implement a foreign policy of independence, self-reliance, peace, friendship, cooperation, and development; proactively integrate into the world; build a socialist democracy; exercise national unity; expand the national unification front; build a law-governed socialist state of the people, by the people, and for the people; and build a stronger, more transparent Party.

The more we delve into reality, the more we are aware that the transitional period to socialism is a long, extremely difficult and complicated process because it needs to create a profound change in all areas of social life. Vietnam is bypassing the stage of capitalism and moving on directly to socialism from an obsolete agricultural society with low productivity further weakened by decades of wars. Constant attempts at sabotage by hostile forces have hindered Vietnam's path to socialism, which unavoidably involves a lengthy transition period through various stages and forms of socio-economic organization accompanied by inevitable conflicts between the old and the new. By ‘bypassing the stage of capitalism', I mean bypassing a regime of oppression, inequality, and capital exploitation, bypassing evils and political entities inappropriate to a socialist regime. This doesn't mean that we must ignore the achievements and civilized values that humankind has achieved during the process of capitalist development. Indeed, the inheritance of these achievements should be based on an attitude of selective development.

The concept of a socialist market-oriented economy is a creative and fundamental theoretical breakthrough for our Party and an important fruit of the 25-year renewal process, which stemmed from Vietnam's reality and accumulated experiences of the world. In our opinion, a socialist market-oriented economy is a multi-sector commodity economy, which operates in accordance with market mechanisms and a socialist orientation. It is a new type of market economy in the history of the market economy's development. It is a kind of economic organization which abides by market economy rules but is based on, led by, and governed by the principles and nature of socialism reflected in its three aspects-ownership, organization, and distribution-for the goal of a prosperous people in a strong nation characterized by democracy, fairness, and civilization. This is neither a capitalist market economy nor a socialist market economy.

In a socialist-oriented market economy, there are multiple forms of ownership and multiple economic sectors. Economic sectors operating in accordance with the law are major components of the economy and equal under the law in the interest of co-existence, cooperation, and healthy competition. The state economy plays a key role; the collective economy is constantly consolidated and developed; the private economy is one of the driving forces of the collective economy; multiple ownership, especially joint-stock enterprises, is encouraged; the state and collective economies provide a firm foundation for the national economy. The relations of distribution ensure fairness, create momentum for growth, and operate a distribution mechanism based on work results, economic efficiency, contributions by other resources, and distribution through the social security and welfare system. The State manages the economy through laws, strategies, plans, policies, and mechanisms to steer, regulate, and stimulate socio-economic development.

Typical characteristic of the socialist orientation in Vietnam's market economy is the combination of economics and society, the coordination of economic and social policies, economic growth in parallel with social progress, and fairness applied at every step, in every policy, throughout the development process. This means that we neither wait for the economy to reach a high level of development before implementing social progress and fairness, nor "sacrifice" social progress and fairness to the pursuit of mere economic growth. On the contrary, every economic policy should target the goal of social development and every social policy should create momentum to boost economic development. Encouraging people to enrich themselves legally should go hand in hand with reducing poverty and taking care of the disadvantaged and those who have rendered great service to the nation. These are the principles required to ensure a healthy, sustainable, socialist-oriented development.

Our Party sees culture as a spiritual foundation of society and considers cultural development on a par with economic growth and social progress in its fundamental orientation toward socialism building in Vietnam. The culture Vietnam is building is progressive and imbued with national identity, a united-in-diversity culture based on advanced humanitarian values, where Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh's thoughts play a leading role in social spiritual life, where we inherit and uphold the fine traditional values of all ethnic groups in Vietnam, absorb humankind's cultural achievements, and strive to build a healthy, civilized society that promotes human dignity, higher knowledge, morality, physical fitness, aesthetics, and a fulfilling lifestyle. We believe that people should play the central role in any development strategy; that cultural development and human resources development are both the target and the momentum of the renewal process; that the development of education and training and science and technology should be priorities of national policy; that environmental protection is one of the vital issues and a criterion of sustainable development; that building happy, progressive families to be healthy cells of society and implementing gender equality are criteria of advancement and civilization.

A socialist society is a society that yearns for progressive and humane values based on people's common interests, which is totally different from competitive societies based on the interests of individuals and groups. A socialist society fosters social consensus rather than social opposition and antagonism. In a socialist political regime, the relationship between the Party, the State, and the people is a relationship of entities unified in their goals and interests. Every Party guideline, every government policy, law, and action is in the people's interest. The political model and overall mode of operation is that the Party leads, the State manages, and the people are the master. Democracy is the nature of the socialist regime and both the goal and the momentum of socialism building. Building a socialist democracy, ensuring that real power belongs to the people, is the ultimate and long-term task of Vietnam's revolution. We intend to unwaveringly uphold democracy, build a law-governed socialist State truly of the people, by the people, and for the people on the basis of an alliance between workers, farmers, and intellectuals led by the Communist Party of Vietnam. The State represents the people's right to mastery and at the same time organizes the implementation of Party guidelines. There are mechanisms for the people to exercise their right to direct mastery in all areas of society and to take part in social management. We realize that a law-governed socialist State is by nature different from a law-governed capitalist State. Legislative power under a capitalist regime is really a tool to protect and serve the interests of the bourgeois class, while legislative power under a socialist regime is a tool to reflect and exercise the people's right to mastery and protect the interests of the masses. By enforcing laws, the State enables the people to wield political power and dictate against all acts that violate the interests of the fatherland and the people. At the same time, we define national unity as a source of strength and a decisive factor for the lasting victory of the revolutionary cause in Vietnam. Equality and unity between ethnicities and religions are constantly promoted.

Being well aware of the Communist Party's leadership as a factor that decides the victory of the renewal process and ensures a national development in line with socialist orientation, we pay special attention to party building, considering it a key and vital task for the Party and the socialist regime. The Communist Party of Vietnam is a vanguard of the Vietnamese working class. The Party was born, exists, and develops for the interests of the working class, the laborers, and the nation as a whole. When the ruling Party leads the nation, it is acknowledged by the entire people as their vanguard. Therefore, the Party is the vanguard of the working class, the laborers, and the Vietnamese nation as a whole. This doesn't mean playing down the Party's class nature, but reflects a more in-depth and more complete awareness of the Party's class nature since the working class is a class whose interests match the interests of the laborers and the nation as a whole. Our Party unswervingly considers Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh's thoughts as the ideological foundation and lodestar of our revolutionary activities, and considers democratic centralism as the basic organizing principle. The Party leads with its platforms, strategies, and policy guidelines, with its communications, persuasion, mobilization, organization, and supervision, and with Party members' role models and unified leadership of personnel work. Considering corruption, bureaucracy, and moral deterioration as threats to the ruling Party, particularly in a market economy, the Communist Party of Vietnam demands constant self-reform, self-rectification and rejection of opportunism, individualism, corruption, bureaucracy, waste, and moral deterioration within the Party and the entire political regime.

The renewal process, including the development of the socialist-oriented market economy, has truly brought about positive changes in our country over the past 25 years.

Vietnam used to be a poor, war-torn country, with devastated human lives, infrastructure, and environment. Food and other necessities were in critically short supply, and people's lives were extremely hard, three-fourths of the population being below the poverty line. That was the reality in Vietnam before the renewal process.

Thanks to the renewal process, the economy has been growing steadily over the past 25 years at an average annual rate of 7 to 8%. Per capita income has increased 11 fold. In 2008 Vietnam escaped from its former status as a low-income country. From a country with chronic food shortages, Vietnam now not only ensures its own food security but also has become a leading exporter of rice and other agricultural produce. Industry has developed rapidly with industry and services now accounting for 80% of GDP. Exports have increased steadily, topping 100 billion USD in 2011. Foreign investment had climbed to nearly 200 billion USD by the end of 2011. Economic growth has enabled the country to escape the socio-economic crisis of the 1980s and improve its citizens' living standards. The poverty rate falls 2 to 3% every year. It went from 75% in 1986 to just 9.5% in 2010. Vietnam completed the eradication of illiteracy and popularization of primary education in 2000 and popularization of secondary education in 2010. The number of tertiary students has increased 9 fold over the past 25 years; 95% of Vietnam's adult population is literate. Many common diseases have been successfully contained. The poor, children under 6, and the elderly are provided free health insurance. The child malnutrition rate has been slashed 3 fold. The new-born mortality rate has fallen 6 fold. Life expectancy has increased from 62 in 1990 to 73 in 2010. Vietnamese cultural life has expanded to include an ever-wider range of cultural activities. Vietnam now has about 25 million internet users and is one of the countries experiencing the fastest growth of IT technology. The United Nations has recognized Vietnam as one of the leading countries in reaching its Millennium Development Goals.

So it can be said that the renewal policy has brought about very positive changes in Vietnam: economic growth, higher productivity, rapid poverty reduction, a higher standard of living, reduced social problems, more political and social stability, ensured security, enhanced national posture and strength, and greater trust in the Party's leadership. Reviewing 20 years of renewal, our 10th National Party Congress remarked that the renewal has recorded "great achievements of historical significance". In fact, the Vietnamese people are now enjoying better living conditions than at any time in the past. That's why the renewal initiated and led by the Communist Party of Vietnam has received the Vietnamese people's full and active support. Renewal achievements in Vietnam have proved that socialist-oriented development not only has a positive economic effect but also resolves social problems much better than capitalist development at a similar development level.

Despite all these achievements, there remain shortcomings, limitations, and new challenges to be overcome in Vietnam's pursuit of national development.

Economically, the quality of growth remains low, infrastructure development is uneven, the efficiency and capacity of businesses-including state-owned enterprises-are limited, the environment is polluted in many areas, and market management and regulation are inadequate. Meanwhile, competition is becoming fiercer with globalization and international integration.

Socially, the gap between the rich and the poor is widening, the quality of education, healthcare and many other public services is low, culture and social ethics are deteriorating, and crimes and social vices are becoming more complicated. In particular, corruption, waste, and the deterioration of political ideology and personality morality are tending to spread among cadres and Party members.

We realize that Vietnam is now in a transitional period towards socialism. During this transition, socialist factors have been established and developed, intermingling and competing with non-socialist factors, including capitalist factors. The intermingling and competing are more complicated and aggressive in the current context of market opening and international integration. Along with positive aspects, there will always be negative aspects and challenges that need to be considered wisely and dealt with timely and effectively. It is a difficult struggle that requires spirit, fresh vision, and creativity. The path to socialism is a process of constantly consolidating and strengthening socialist factors to make them more dominant and irreversible. Success will depend on correct policies, political spirit, leadership capacity, and the fighting strength of the Party.

At present, we are revising our growth model and restructuring our economy with greater priority being given to quality and sustainability by focusing on infrastructure, human resources and administrative reforms. Socially, we are continuing to pursue sustainable poverty reduction, improve healthcare, education, and other public services, and enrich the people's cultural life.

Theory and experience agree that socialism building means creating a new type of society, which is by no means an easy task. The challenges and difficulties before us require that the Party's leadership role be matched by the creative ideas, political support, and active participation of the people. The people will accept, support, and enthusiastically take part in carrying out the Party's guidelines when they see that those guidelines answer their needs and aspirations. The ultimate victory of Vietnam's development is deeply rooted in the strength of the Vietnamese people.

At the same time, the Party's directions and policies must originate not only in the reality of Vietnam and its history, but also in the reality of the world and era in which we all live. In today's globalized world, no country can stand aloof from the world community and its complex interactions. We therefore intend to proactively integrate into the world and implement a foreign policy whose pillars are independence, self-reliance, peace, cooperation, and shared development. Vietnam is committed to multi-lateralization and diversification of its international relations on a basis of equality, mutual benefit, and respect for national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and non-interference in each other's internal affairs.

Even more important is that we should be consistent and firm on the foundation of Marxism-Leninism, a scientific and revolutionary doctrine of the working class and the masses of laborers. The radical scientific and revolutionary characteristics of Marxism-Leninism are lasting values and have been pursued and implemented by revolutionaries around the globe. It will continue to develop and prove its vitality in the reality of revolutions and scientific development. We need to selectively accept and supplement in the spirit of criticism and creativity of the latest ideological and scientific achievements so that our doctrine will be forever fresh, energized, and filled with the spirit of the era.

We are aware that ours is an extremely complex and unprecedented undertaking, which will require us to learn the lessons we will need as we go along. The steps we have already taken are just the first steps of a long journey...The goals of socialism may be the same in every country, but the methods necessary to achieve those goals are diverse, depending on the specific circumstances of each country. Our journey will demand all of our ingenuity and vitality.

Sandy Hook: Grieving the unthinkable

Communist Party, USA — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 18:54:00 -0500

The Communist Party USA offers its most heartfelt condolences to the parents and families of the victims of the horrendous crime and tragedy which took place today at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut. To say that 20 young children were gunned down in their elementary school as were six adults - teachers, staff and principal - is so unspeakable and heinous it boggles the minds and hearts of our members as it does all Americans. We extend condolences to the entire community of Newtown and the state of Connecticut as all begin the terrible grieving process. Our members grieve with you and offer support today and the many hard days to come.

It should also be said that we recognize the incredible courage of teachers, staff, parents and the first responders, who held it together in order to usher the rest of the children to safety.

The ages of the overwhelming majority of the victims in this mass shooting make this crime particularly heartbreaking and tragic. Yet, too often our country has to grieve and question mass murder by a lone killer armed with guns and assault weapons - just this year in Oregon, Wisconsin and Colorado. Too often mass murder also occurs one by one, day by day on the streets of our cities and towns. President Barack Obama told the nation today, "As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it's an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago - these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children. And we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics."

As the country grapples with the politics and aftermath of Sandy Hook, let us not forget that there are some who profit from the manufacturing and peddling of assault weapons, dealing in fear and offering constitutional and political cover for the unthinkable. We will continue to work for bringing the necessary coalitions together that - through common sense and a common stance - work for a culture, government and country where such tragedies and crimes are indeed unthinkable and unheard of.

Photo: As hundreds stand outside St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church, which was filled to capacity, a couple embrace during a healing service held in for victims of an elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., Friday, Dec. 14, 2012. (AP/Charles Krupa)

Cliff Notes -- No Grand Bargain on the backs of the Working Class

Art Perlo — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 05:58:00 -0500

Report to CPUSA teleconference Dec. 4, 2012

Introduction -- We are facing a critical battle. The so-called fiscal cliff, and the possibility of a grand bargain to avoid it, can be a turning point.

A lot of good material is available, though it rarely penetrates the mainstream media. (provide links at the end?)

What is the fiscal cliff -- As a result of legislation passed by Congress in 2011, a number of events are scheduled for January 1:

Ending Bush-era tax cuts and other tax breaks for the rich.
Ending so-called "middle class" tax cuts, including income and payroll tax
Ending federal unemployment benefits for long-term unemployed
Across-the-board discretionary spending cuts of $110B/year split between defense and non-defense spending.

Why is it called a cliff?. If nothing is done, the provisions of the 2011 legislation will result in a new recession. The tax increase on working families will mean cuts in consumer spending. The federal budget cuts, on top of the cuts already taking effect, will cause further suffering, and will impact on state and local governments. Along with the cuts in government spending, the reduced demands for goods and services will cause businesses to cut back and lay off workers, causing a further reduction in demand and lost tax revenue.

Is it an accurate term? No.

It's not a cliff because that won't happen all at once. It will take several months for the effects to gradually kick in. For that reason, the situation has been more accurately described as a slope than a cliff. This should strengthen the hand of the administration and anti-austerity forces.

But for the long-term unemployed, it is a human cliff. Two million jobless will lose benefits at the beginning of next year, and million more by April. (The "human cliff" metaphor comes from Sen. Sander Levin (D-MI), quoted in the Washington Post).

What's a better term? The legislation that goes into effect Jan. 1 has been better described as an austerity bomb.

Most economists agree that this is an austerity crisis -- ie, absent congressional action, $500B-$700B of government spending would be cut in 2013. These cuts in govt spending, whether direct payments for unemployment insurance or food stamps, or spending on goods and services, could trigger a new recession. But the so-called solutions, the grand bargains, focus on "...more austerity... the conversation in Washington tends to focus exclusively on achieving deficit reduction -- even though the economic threat we face in January is too much deficit reduction. " (Ezra Klein)

We should emphasize that last year's budget deals have already led to severe cuts. For example, from an email from the AFGE, the union that represents federal govt workers:

The cliff is high and millions of retirees, survivors, and the disabled are being thrown over it right now...

Cuts to the Social Security Administration core budget – not benefits but the money that keeps the lights on and allows AFGE members to help recipients – are already impacting millions of Americans.

Applications and appeals are backlogged, eligibility reviews are being postponed indefinitely, and offices across the country are being shut down. Americans filing for retirement, survivor, and disability benefits are forced to stretch their savings while sometimes waiting years for their benefits or coverage.

Equally importantly, 9,000 SSA employees will be cut by next summer and tens of thousands are facing furloughs. With 10,000 new people eligible for Social Security each day, we simply can't sacrifice these critical employees or the services they provide.

That's just one measure of the human cost and the economic cost of the budget cuts that are imposed at every level of government.

What to do? Even Republicans admit that austerity is bad -- when talking about the effects of cutting the military budget. Republicans say -- we cant cut military because it would cost jobs. Duh. Guess what? Cutting infrastructure costs jobs. Cutting renewable energy credits costs jobs. Cutting medical and scientific research costs jobs. Cutting safety net programs costs jobs. Cutting unemployment benefits would cost 300K jobs. Cutting the postal service costs jobs. Failing to support state and local governments costs jobs of teachers, firefighters and other essential workers.

Republicans say everything they do -- tax breaks for the rich, ending regulations, undermining health care -- is to create jobs. But their program is even more austerity, which will result in even more lost jobs and a new recession. That is the lesson of US history in the Great Depression. But we don't have to go back 80 years. In the current global capitalist crisis, Britain's conservative government enacted an austerity policy. Their slow recovery stalled, and Britain fell into a double-dip recession. And in continental Europe, the ECB and dominant German banks have imposed severe austerity, especially on the people of Greece and Spain. As a result, not only have the economies of those countries crashed, with 25% unemployment rates, but most of Europe is falling into recession.

The Republicans, fronting for corporate interests, say that if we don't cut the deficit, we will end up like Greece. Their cure is to impose an austerity package that will indeed make us like Greece -- depression level unemployment, no future for youth, massive cuts in health, education and public services, steep cuts in wages and pensions.

There is an alternative. Deal with the real economic crisis -- the lack of good jobs, and the depressed which makes poor use of our country's vast human and productive capacity.

The Obama administration has at least a serious proposal. This reportedly includes:

End Bush tax breaks for the rich.

Continue "middle class tax cuts"

$50 billion stimulus package in FY13

No immediate new spending cuts

Extension of unemployment insurance: (cost: $30 billion)

Increase in the debt limit to avoid requiring Congress to vote to increase

Many progressives argue for more extensive revenue measures, including higher tax rates on multi-millionaires, closing more corporate and loopholes, and a financial transaction tax. Some also argue for a reversal of previous spending cuts, and a much more extensive stimulus package, including substantial aid to state and city governments. Unions, progressive and working class organizations are also unanimous that there should be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

Embodying many of these features, 44 members of Congress have introduced H.Res. 733, calling for (1) no cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security, (2) increased tax rates on the rich and closing corporate loopholes, (3) significantly cutting defense spending and (4) strong levels of job-creating Federal investments in areas such as infrastructure and education. Progressive Caucus chair Keith Ellison says the progressives can only accept a deal that includes these features.

But -- how do we pay for it? What about the deficit?

What deficit are you talking about? We have a real deficit of jobs -- especially useful, productive jobs. We have a deficit of classroom teachers. A deficit of neighborhood health clinics and workers to staff them. A deficit of youth programs. A deficit of renewable energy. Any serious discussion of economic programs should address these deficits.

But OK. Let's talk about the federal budget deficit.

There are three main contributors to the deficit.

1) tax breaks for the rich -- we deal with that by letting those tax breaks expire, and we should go further and close other loopholes enjoyed by the suer-rich and their giant corporations.

2) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the accompanying explosion in all military spending -- we can deal with that by ending those wars and occupations around the world.

3) The deficit really exploded with the economic crisis in 2008 and the continuing depression economy. This is the main reason for the current federal and state deficits and for deficit projections for the next several years!. The depression has caused increased spending for unemployment insurance and other safety net program and, more important for the budget, it has caused a catastrophic drop in tax revenues for the federal, state and local governments.

The depressed economy -- the biggest cause of the ongoing deficits, would be made even worse by austerity budgets and reduced spending. The solution is to spend more now, even though that temporarily increases the deficit. Of course, it matters what you spend money on. Spending on tax breaks for the rich creates relatively few jobs, and the increased sale of yachts, mansions and private jets does nothing for the nation's environment or productivity. Spending on infrastructure, on energy, on protection from climate-related disasters creates more jobs and is doubly effective: it helps put people to work and revive the economy now, and it lays the basis for a stronger and more productive economy in the future.

Don't look at it as government spending. Look at it as investment. This isn't radical. It's business 101. Suppose you own a small construction company that uses a pickup truck to bring supplies to building sites. The truck is old and keeps breaking down, resulting in idle workers, job delays and lost income. So you take advantage of low interest rates and borrow the money for a new truck -- you make the payments out of the money saved on the job.

Robert Reich puts it like this:

If there was ever a time for America to borrow more in order to put our people back to work repairing our crumbling infrastructure and rebuilding our schools, it’s now.

Public investments that spur future job-growth and productivity shouldn’t even be included in measures of government spending to begin with. They’re justifiable as long as the return on those investments – a more educated and productive workforce, and a more efficient infrastructure, both generating more and better goods and services with fewer scarce resources – is higher than the cost of those investments.

In fact, we’d be nuts not to make these investments under these circumstances. No sane family equates spending on vacations with investing in their kids’ education. Yet that’s what we do in our federal budget.

We should remember why the so-called fiscal cliff is a crisis. It is not a deficit crisis. It is not a debt crisis. The crisis is that, starting January 1st, the government will spend too little, and will tax too much. That will reduce the deficit short-term, but will hurt tens of millions of families and will do immediate and long-term damage to the economy.

Right now, the federal government can borrow money at close to zero percent interest. Just ask those of us in the Northeast, after storm Sandy, about the need to put power lines underground, and for stronger defenses against flooding. We have construction workers idle, construction equipment sitting idle, and plenty of work that needs to be done. In New York and New Jersey alone, $80 billion worth of infrastructure repair and strengthening is needed. If the only obstacle is money, this should be a no brainer. Investing in America is the only way to overcome all the real deficits I talked about earlier. And it's an essential part of putting the economy on a sound footing so that government finances can be brought into balance.

If it's a no-brainer, how come it's not happening?

The negotiations in Washington over the January 1 austerity bomb, AKA fiscal cliff, is not a reasoned, academic discussion of economic policy. It is not even a knock-down, drag out political fight about economic policy. This is open, naked class war.

The case for austerity is couched in terms of controlling the deficit. I have already discussed that this is itself counter-productive. The priority right now should be on productive investments in people, infrastructure and environment -- even at the expense of a short-term increase in the deficit.

But let's say you are convinced the deficit is a problem that must be addressed NOW NOW NOW. Then certainly you would support the Obama proposals. They don't provide nearly enough investment, and they are very cautious in increased taxes on the super-rich and the Fortune 500 corporations. But like the Clinton administration in the 1990s, the Obama administration is serious about reducing the deficit -- we would argue it has given too much credence to the deficit reduction goal. And some of the saner sections of Wall Street and the ruling class support the administration approach.

Then look at the proposals put forward by Republican leaders McConnell and Boehner. They avoid tax increases on the very rich, while calling for unspecified loophole-closing. They eliminate mandatory spending cuts, and replace them with unspecified cuts in discretionary spending, which has already been cut to historic lows as a share of GDP. Their proposals to raise Medicare retirement age and charge higher premiums and cut the Social Security COLA hurt seniors but provide only small savings. In total, the Republican plan offers only $800B in savings over 10 years, much of it unspecified.

So the Republican position has little to do with deficit reduction. As Paul Krugman says, "This is pathetic – and these people are definitely not serious."

But of course, they are serious. Not about the deficit, but about their real goals. Their goals are exactly reflected in their proposals: preserve and extend tax breaks for the very rich and biggest corporations, undermine Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, deepen cuts already made in vital programs for education, infrastructure, research, and every other useful government function. And they are anti-tax only when it comes to their wealthy corporate masters. They increase taxes on the working class. And their cuts to federal programs such as education and Medicaid, will force states and cities to cut services and/or raise taxes, which fall most heavily on the working class.

For more than thirty years, they have been shouting, "deficit, deficit," then pursuing policies that increase the deficit, then using the deficit to attack popular programs that are essential for working people and effective government.

As Krugman says in another column, "The important thing to understand now is that while the election is over, the class war isn’t. The same people who bet big on Mr. Romney, and lost, are now trying to win by stealth — in the name of fiscal responsibility — the ground they failed to gain in an open election."

This is not simply partisan politics. I don't pretend to understand the thoughts and motives of congressional Republicans. But they faithfully represent the interests and the ideology of the most predatory sections of the ruling class -- the Wall Street banksters, the vulture capitalists, most of the biggest off-shoring, tax-dodging, outsourcing, union-busting, global-warming, environment-trashing corporations.

For thirty years, they have generously funded academics, think tanks and front groups that have raised alarms about runaway deficits and the future bankruptcy of Social Security. Between their ability to lavishly reward academics and opinion-makers that echo their line, and direct ownership of the mainstream media, corporate forces have made deficits and debt the number one public issue, to the exclusion of the real issues facing the American people.

The latest incarnation is a group of top CEOs operating under the name "Fix the Debt." One of the group is Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs paid the largest SEC fine in history for fraudulently deceiving investors about mortgage-backed securities. “Deficit reduction” and the “fiscal cliff” are in the same tradition of fraud. These CEOs don’t really care about the deficit. What these CEOs really care about is bigger tax breaks – for themselves and their corporations. (parphrased from ourfuture.org blog.)

What about all these projections of zillion-dollar debts crippling our grandchildren, and legions of greedy old people living high on the Social Security hog at the expense of the few working-age Americans? The scare stories are even more fraudulent than those concerning the current federal deficit, though space does not permit elaboration in this article. The propaganda about leaving our grandchildren in debt obscures the real threats to our grandchildren -- threats like global warming, decaying infrastructure, war, apartheid-like education and prison systems.

But in any case, the long-term funding of Social Security, Medicare or anything else have nothing to do with the immediate crisis, which is political, not economic. It is not necessary to solve problems that Social Security may or may not face 25 years from now, in order to agree on a simple resolution to the Jan 1. cut-off of unemployment benefits, payroll tax cuts, and government programs and services.

Summary -- A minimum program to prevent widespread hardship, to begin moving the economy forward, to meet real pressing needs, and to create jobs would include:

Allow Bush tax cuts to expire for the richest 2%, as well as closing their individual and corporate loopholes.

Preserve tax cuts for the 98% including the payroll tax cut.

No cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security,

Immediately renew the federal extended unemployment program and return it to the 99-week limit.

No cuts to domestic discretionary spending that meets real needs.

End wars and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and reverse the last decade's military buildup.

Promote economic growth with strong levels of job-creating Federal investments in infrastructure and education

Eliminate the unnecessary debt limit which has become a tool for economic sabotage

These or similar points are included in the programs being advanced by the AFL-CIO, progressive and human service organizations, peace and environmental groups, and rank-and-file activists who provided the energy that defeated the ultra right in last month's elections. The common focus is on the first three points.

Finally -- the outcome doesn't depend on who is right or wrong. It depends on what side is stronger. The elections were a strong ratification of taxing the most wealthy and not cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But big business, operating through the Republican leadership in Congress, wants to short stop the election mandate.

Large, visible, creative, public demands can have a decisive effect on the outcome. The degree of mass mobilization and organization can set the stage for the future battles throughout the next four years.

One of the most encouraging things about the November election was the mobilization around the Lame Duck session of Congress that began the morning after election day with a call by the AFL-CIO and other unions and progressive organizations resulting in actions that week in over two hundred cities, national call-in days to Congress, and visits to members of Congress by constituents. This mobilization is having an effect in the somewhat firmer position taken by the administration.

Take Action -- The CPUSA supports these initiatives, and has issued a Call to Action: No Grand Bargain on the backs of Working People .

Building on the initial congressional visits and call-ins, actions are being organized across the country on Monday, December 10. The first demands are: No tax breaks for the top two percent! No cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid!

To find the action near you visit the AFL-CIO website America Wants to Work or go to Move On or to The Action and post or find your local December 10 Candlelight Campaign Against Cuts.

In addition, a campaign is underway to get 218 members of Congress to sign a discharge petition that would require the House leadership to bring to the floor HR 15 The Middle Class Tax Cut Act. This act, already passed by the Senate, would extend the Bush tax cuts for the 98 percent.

The incredible organizing that resulted in the election victory must continue and expand to achieve priorities that say no to austerity and no to wars and put working people first. We need jobs not cuts.

Abortion and the 2012 Election: A History Lesson

Anna Bates — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 13:17:00 -0500

November 29, 2012

I laughed out loud when Barak Obama won the 2012 Presidential Election, and not just because he won, though I was very happy that he did. I laughed because I had, for more than a year, been following the election through two lenses: that of a history teacher, and that of a seasoned feminist. Obama's victory boosted the power of many American citizens, and offered renewed hope for American women. We are moving in a positive direction as a nation. Here is my analysis.

Early during every term of my World History courses, I give my students some basic terminology. Pointing to Ancient Athens, I explain that Democracy aspires to grant political authority equally to all. Though fundamentally patriarchal and operating within the same stratified societies as other forms of government, democracies offer opportunities for groups without power to find their voices and transform power structures.

I then turn to Ancient Rome, and explain that a republic is a state where most adult citizens play some role in government. I discuss the Roman senate, where wealthy elite presided over a stratified society wherein plebeians had limited political power, and slaves had none. In its most basic form, republican government does not guarantee, or even suggest, equality. More than that, almost all republican governments have been patriarchal, with women of all classes barred from power, at home and in government.

The United States is , at least in theory, a democratic republic. I was amused how closely the 2012 election exemplified the history lessons I have taught my college students for nearly thirty years. Never, in my lifetime, have the lines been so clearly drawn. The Republican Party wanted a republic, wherein a tiny number of wealthy entities controlled both the government and the economy. Voting rights would be limited, and some groups of people would have no rights at all.

The Democrats argued for a democracy, wherein all people have rights, and the function of government is to ensure that (a) people's voices are heard, and that (b) their basic needs are met. Barack Obama wanted a government by the people and for the people. On many occasions he encouraged Americans to e-mail and tweet their Senators and representatives about particular issues. He encouraged community organization and supported labor unions. And, he supported women's right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term.

The fundamental issue of abortion was one of the most pivotal issues in 2012. The Republican platform explicitly banned all abortions, regardless of how a woman got pregnant.
Besides a college teacher, I am a product of the feminist movement of the 1970s and 80s. I cut my political teeth in the National Organization for Women. I attended "consciousness raising" sessions, where I learned that women's control over their fertility is their most basic power. I cheered Roe v. Wade, and assumed that safe abortions would forever be available for women who wanted or needed them. I joined the fight against the "pro-life" movement, which chipped away at Roe v. Wade.

In those days, feminists did not identify with one political party or another, and were skeptical of all male-dominated institutions. There were always a few pro-choice Republican women, and some pro-life Democrats. However, the 2012 Presidential election served as a centrifuge. Most feminists, even some who supported Republicans earlier, gravitated to the Democratic camp. The Democrats were unequivocally the pro-choice, pro-women's rights party.

Obama's message to women was clear on Roe v. Wade: "[T]his Supreme Court decision not only protects a woman's health and reproductive freedom, but also affirms a broader principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters. I remain committed to protecting a woman's right to choose and this fundamental constitutional right." (President Obama's statement marking the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, January 23, 2011).

Republicans who, despite noise about small government by their Tea Party minions, supported an authoritarian government run by rich and powerful men and corporations that would restrict women's power. Indeed, the government they wanted would be very small - consisting of a few very rich entities. It would, however, have tremendous power, and would include mechanisms to control the health care options and personal lives of all citizens under its tutelage.

Such a government would be truly republican in the classical sense, but certainly not democratic. Those on the bottom of the economic pyramid would have no rights or power at all. Women across the board would not control their bodies. The government and its related law enforcement mechanisms would control the economic purse strings of everyone. To make matters worse, they wrap their economic arguments in religious and moral garments to remain above criticism in the public's eyes.

The 2012 Republicans included in their platform an endorsement of the medically unsupported claim that fetuses can feel pain before they are viable. More than that, the platform stated "the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed." (GOP Platform). And, even though some Republicans censured Todd Akin for making insensitive remarks about rape and abortion, they supported a platform that makes no provisions for victims of rape and incest.

The Republicans did not stop with abortion. Their "sanctity of human life" proposal also opposed "the non-consensual withholding or withdrawal of care or treatment, including food and water, from people with disabilities, including newborns, as well as the elderly and infirm, just as we oppose active and passive euthanasia and assisted suicide.... (and) We oppose federal funding of embryonic stem cell research." (GOP Platform) So, not only would women be forbidden to seek abortions, people making end-of-life decisions would be impacted also, not to mention people who might be helped by embryonic stem cell research. According to the GOP, the rights of fertilized eggs supersede those of suffering adults. The same strictures would cover women seeking access to contraception, and couples pursuing in vitro fertilization, all of which would be forbidden if Republican lawmakers prevailed.

The 2012 Democratic victory made sure that, for now, Roe v. Wade will stand. Despite setbacks, women will be able to get legal abortions, although the cost will not be covered by Obamacare. So, why am I talking now? The Democrats, after all, won the presidential election. Obama supports Roe v. Wade, opposes parental notification for young women seeking abortions, and supports Planned Parenthood and embryonic stem cell research. The support of Obama and most Democrats does not, however, guarantee rights to anyone. Republican legislative initiatives will continue, and anti-abortion organizations, such as the infamous "Crisis Pregnancy Centers," will continue to pound their messages into vulnerable women already making difficult choices. There are still plenty of organized pro-life Democrats. As Jo Freeman, one of the first feminist scholars I read in the 1970s and 80s, points out, Democratic women might be forced to curb their commitment to their own agenda in favor of the party's goals, if those goals change from Obama's supportive stance. (Jo Freeman, "Who You Know Versus Who You Represent," http://www.jofreeman.com/polparties/femifluence.htm).

This is not, therefore, a time to bask in the 2012 Democratic victory. It is time to reload. We, the women who want to control our fertility, who demand affordable health care and end of life options, support democracy and all efforts to expand, not constrict ct, political power. We must forge new alliances and find new forums for our voices. We must not allow further er4osion of Roe v. Wade. We must maintain control over our fertility. It is our right, as members of this democratic republic.

Is Paul Ryan Making Americans More Favorably Inclined Toward Socialism?

John Nichols — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 12:17:00 -0500

Frank Zeidler would be delighted.

The last Socialist Party leader of a major American city, Zeider died in 2006 at the age of 93. But, to the end, the man who served three terms as the “red mayor” of Milwaukee always believed that it was only a matter of time before America began to renew its interest in socialism.

It seems that Zeidler was right.

A new Gallup Poll finds that socialism is now viewed positively by 39 percent of Americans, up from 36 percent in 2010. Among self-described liberals, socialism enjoyed a 62 percent positive rating, while 53 percent of Democrats and independent voters who lean Democratic gave socialism a thumb’s up.

Needless to say, this provoked the predictable fine whine of right-wing media. The conservative Washington Timesnewspaper declared: “Yes, Democrats, liberals favor socialism.” The Business Insider website announced: “Everything Republicans Fear About Democrats Is True.” William F. Buckley’s old magazine, National Review, allowed as how there is “much that is peculiar, and much that is worrying” about the new polling data.

That reactionary Republicans get a little hysterical at the mention of the word “socialism” is not news. But the reaction to their reaction is. No two groups of Americans talk so much about socialism in so many public settings these days as Republican candidates and conservative commentators. And this appears to be influencing the discourse.

Indeed, it is fair to say that nothing has done more to promote the cause of socialism than the ranting and raving of Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. It’s not just that the right has spread the word about socialism, raising the ideology’s profile to levels rarely experienced in recent decades—if ever—and associating the ideology with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, President Obama and a lot of other programs and people that Americans actually like. The fact that so many agitated, angry and—at least in some cases—politically toxic characters go apoplectic at the mere mention of the ideology has undoubtedly caused millions of Americans who don’t know much about socialism to say to themselves, “Anything that Paul Ryan does not like must have some merit.”

But I have to agree with the National Review assessment that the Gallup survey information “is worrying”—at least for conservatives.

The most significant increases in sympathy for socialism over the past two years—since the last time Gallup polled on economic and ideological terms such as “socialism” and “capitalism”—have been among self-identified “conservatives” and “Republicans.”

In 2010, only 20 percent of conservatives viewed socialism favorably. Today, the number is 25 percent. That’s right: one-quarter of American conservatives view socialism favorably.

Among Republicans, the increase has been slightly more notable. In 2010, only 17 percent of self-identified Republicans had a positive view of socialism. Now, that number had increased to 23 percent. So if you meet four Republicans, one of them is harboring socialist sentiments.

Shocking?

Not really.

Socialism has deep America roots—going back to when Tom Paine used his final pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, to outline a social-democratic model for establishing a just and equitable society. Socialist communes and political movements flourished in the United States during the first decades of the republic’s history, and the advocates for those movements found a home in the radical experiment that came to be known as the “Republican” Party.

Founded at Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854 by utopian socialists and militant abolitionists, the early Republican Partyincluded many German-American immigrants who arrived in the United States after the European revolutions that stirred in 1848 were repressed. The man who issued the call for that meeting in Ripon, and who is to this day frequently identified as a founding figure for the Republican Party, was Alvan Earle Bovay, a veteran radical who had led militant movements for land reform that urged the poor to organize politically and “Vote Yourself a Farm.”

Among the first Republicans were many allies and associates of socialist causes, and even of Karl Marx. Among their number was Joseph Weydemeyer, a former Prussian Army officer who would continue to correspond with Marx as he rose through the ranks as a military officer during the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln, like most of the leading Republicans of his day had read Marx and Engels in the pages of the Horace Greeley’s New York Herald Tribune (for which the two men wrote for many years as European correspondents). The sixteenth president spoke often about the superiority of labor to capital and was highly critical of concentrated wealth. Toward the end of the Civil War, the White House accepted the congratulations of Marx and his fellow London Communists after Lincoln’s 1864 re-election.

Lincoln was no Marxist. But, like a good many of the initial leaders of the Republican Party, he had been exposed to the ideas of Marx and Engels in the Tribune. In fact, Lincoln chose as one of his closest White House aides (and eventually as his assistant secretary of war) Charles Dana, Marx’s long-time editor. Famously, Dana once declared,“Everyone now is more or less a Socialist.”

In fairness, that’s not the case today.

There are still substantial numbers of Americans who do not view socialism positively, just as there are substantial numbers who do not view capitalism positively. But Americans are less inclined to be troubled by mentions of socialism, or by socialist and social democratic ideas today than in the past—just as Americans are less inclined (according to a recent CNN poll) to be unsettled by the mention of libertarianism, or by libertarian and libertarian-lite ideas. This is healthy. A republic is best served by differing ideas and ideals with regard to economic and social arrangements.

There will always be reactionaries like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan who try to make ideas scary. But when one in four Republicans have a positive reaction to the word “socialism,” it is pretty clear that the reactionaries are not doing any better in framing the economic and intellectual debate than they did on Election Day.

And, yes, that would have made Frank Zeidler, who was at once a great believer in socialism and a believer in the American experiment, a very happy man.

John Nichols is the author of The “S” Word:A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism (Verso).

Armistice Day Address, Blue Hill, Maine

Dud Hendrick — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 12:42:00 -0500

Armistice Day
Blue Hill, Maine
November 10, 2012

Good morning. Thanks for being here. And thanks to Peninsula Peace & Justice for all their work-and, today, in particular for creating this space that serves to remind all who pass by of what our country is doing and what the greatest cost of war has been. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to speak.

I've been asked to speak thanks largely to my military background-not necessarily for my oratory skills or my considerable and undeniable charisma. Any credentials I have that might make my thoughts and words appropriate surely do arise from my military service and who I've become since---which is for better or worse, largely a function of that service. Who or what I have become I attribute to those four years I spent at the Naval Academy, and the four years to follow.

I want to use the occasion to make the case for us to continue, even redouble our efforts to bring real change-represented by turning away from militarism that took the lives of those we commemorate here.

I have a comforting expectation that my words will fall on sympathetic ears. Not so, if this were your typical Armistice Day parade or gathering happening all over the country this weekend. That is because my remarks don't celebrate or glorify the military, which is what we generally hear on this day. Quite the opposite. And, in as much as this is, in essence, a call to arms it also seems antithetical to Armistice Day---but it is not.

I am extremely proud to be a member of Veterans for Peace. Founded 27 years ago in Maine, VFP now has over 5000 members and more than 130 chapters. We are the only veterans' organization that is opposed to all war and we're dedicated to increasing awareness of the costs of war, to counter-recruiting, and to seeking justice for veterans and all victims of war.

We're so out of step that our Seattle Washington chapter had their application to march in the Auburn, Washington Veterans Day Parade denied this year. The Auburn city attorney stated that, "the city has had increasing concerns about Veterans for Peace...in past parades some members have carried peace flags."

Unfortunately, most Americans would be dismissive of VFP, maintaining we're naïve, that man is absolutely inherently violent and that, therefore, war is inevitable. My experience teaching peace has convinced me that, on the contrary, there are many cultures that are peaceful and that war is a matter of choice. We here in America resist that notion, I think, largely, because of our violent history. It is simply too uncomfortable for Americans to accept that wars aren't necessary, or that war often has been closer to our leaders' first option rather than their last. And so our history only contributes to the disheartening resolute march down the same beaten, blood-soaked path.

We Americans need to examine America's record honestly, just as we need to examine the American mythology of exceptionalism. Years ago after beginning to pay attention, I came to the conclusion that Martin Luther King, Jr's stinging rebuke on April 4, 1967, was right on. His country was the greatest purveyor of violence. That distinction is inarguably, I think, just as valid today.

Making the case for the U.S. being among the bloodiest of nations prior to WWII meets with considerable resistance, though it's pretty hard to dismiss the genocide of native Americans, the slave trade, our Civil War, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War to include war in the Philippines where the enemy's death toll was between 300,000 and 500,000, and WWI and II. Could they all be aberrations.

The picture since WWII is too fresh, at least in this septuagenarian's memory to deny. Between six and seven million people died in our three big wars since the "good" one-Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. A total of six to seven million!

Celebrated author and activist Brian Willson's research found that between 1945 and 2008 there have been 390 overt U.S. military interventions. Author William Blum writes that we've bombed 28 countries. When I was teaching I was fond of citing peace teacher Colman McCarthy's quiz. He asked his students how many of those incursions led to the establishment of a democratic government respectful of human rights. The answer not surprisingly is zero.

I have recently been reading John Tirman's, "The Deaths of Others", which addresses the question, "Why are Americans so indifferent to the deaths of others?" Tirman is the executive director of the Center for International Studies at MIT and was responsible for the surveys that found that an astonishing 655,000 deaths were attributable to the war in Iraq by 2006. That discovery prompted his investigation into the evident lack of sympathetic response in America to the bloodshed.

In part, Tirman explains, this callousness can be attributed to a conscious campaign by policy makers to assure the American public of the essential rightness of our wars and their benefits to those populations under siege, never mind the horrific death toll.

The selling of war to the American public is, of course, responsible for the victimization of the mostly young people commemorated here. No doubt, many, probably most, believed they were serving an admirable cause-that they were taking freedom and democracy to dark regions of the planet.

These lives lost, along with the physically and emotionally damaged who have returned represent the highest costs of our wars. As an aside: Can we ignore the suicides-nearly one military suicide a day for the first six months of 2012, 26 attempted suicides by active military personnel in July alone? But, the toll is extensive in many other ways we know.

There's the shear monetary drain and the associated "opportunity costs". Costs of our wars since 9/11 will be over $4 trillion. Trillions down a drain that might better have been dedicated to other problems---world poverty, climate change, renewable energy solutions.

Tirman has brought home to me the costs of wars and our militarism as experienced by others and the associated loss of our international stature. Americans may give little attention to our track record-they may be ignorant or oblivious, but citizens of other countries may not be so clueless.

It is well known in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East that the incidence of abnormal births in Fallujah and Basra is off the charts, though not generally known here. The abnormalities found among the newborn to over half the families recently surveyed in Fallujah included "heart defects, malformed limbs, swollen heads, and other grotesque deformities from which we'd rather turn away. An echo of the legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam where some 2-3 million victims live today, unable to take care of themselves.

In a world connected and informed as it is today, very little is secret. Not these histories in Iraq and Vietnam. Not the torture at the hands of our military, or CIA, or private contractors. Not the renditions, or drone assassinations, or kill lists. Not the crippling sanctions we have imposed on Iran based on totally unsubstantiated claims of a nuclear weapons program. It's all known.

Brian Willson believes that each of those killed at our hands leave behind an average of 5 loved ones who are traumatically conditioned to violence. We should ask what that means and how might those survivors feel about America. A family member of one of our errant drone attacks in Pakistan was quoted as saying, "It is beyond my imagination how they can lack all mercy and compassion, and carry on doing this for years. They are not human beings." We don't want to think about who "they" is.

It is useful to view the consequences of our vast military empire from the perspective of the "other"-through the eyes of the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Pakistanis. I do believe we'd have serious objections if the Chinese were to build a base on a Caribbean island as we are doing on the Korean island of Jeju where our friend Carolyn Coe will soon be going. I do believe there would be "push back" if toxic defoliants were sprayed over Miami. I do believe there would be serious blowback if suddenly Americans were essentially vaporized from above as is happening in Pakistan, and Yemen, and the Sudan, and Mali.

And I believe all these bases around the world cause far more mischief than do they make us safe.

So, yes, my experiences in the military and those years have led me to hate war, as Eisenhower did. For me it is personal. I have sat with and interviewed Inuit from Greenland who were displaced in Trail of Tears-like fashion to make way for Thule AB. I have sat with and interviewed people of Diego Garcia, a remote Indian Ocean island, who were evicted to make way for a gigantic base from which we have launched bombing missions over Iraq and Afghanistan. I have sat with and interviewed Marshall Islanders whose islands became uninhabitable thanks to our atomic weapons testing there. And I have sat with and interviewed Agent Orange victims and family members in Vietnam. The heart-wrenching stories I have heard, without being overly dramatic, have etched searing images. They are us and we are them and we ought to know their anguish.

For me it is personal. I did not know anyone commemorated here. But, I do know former Marine Jerry Stadtmiller, who was shot in the face in Vietnam and is blind, Duane Wagner who lost both legs to a grenade, Allen Hayes another double leg amputee, victim of a land-mine, Artie Guerrero who was shot four times in Vietnam and is confined to a wheelchair with trauma induced MS, Carlos Moleda, a Navy Seal paraplegic who was shot in Panama, Dan Jensen who lost a leg to a land mine. I knew well my three teammates, nine classmates, and my best friend, Don MacLaughlin whose names are all on the wall. I mourn for them. Just as I mourn the loss of these here. All victims of failed leadership. All victims of our failure to redirect our government.

Buffy Sainte-Marie has written, "He's the universal soldier. He's fighting for Canada, he's fighting for France and he's fighting for the U.S.A. He's the universal soldier and he really is to blame." But then, she goes on to say, "his orders come from far away no more. They come from here and there and you and me and brothers can't you see. This is not a way to put an end to war." In a youtube video Sainte-Marie says she suddenly realized that we all must take responsibility-that the soldiers take their orders from the generals, that the generals take their orders from the politicians, but the politicians take their orders from us. These days, more like the 1%; but we can't concede responsibility to them or allow them to prevail.

So I see all those commemorated here to be like you and me. It is right that they be mourned and not forgotten. They are you and me and we all must take responsibility and redouble our awareness and our work to stop what is being done in our names. I realize I'm talking to the choir here, but will say this regardless. We must build coalitions, with Occupiers, labor activists, education activists, with health care activists, marriage equality, women's rights, environmentalists, move to amend, all of us and we must persist and we must know that if not us, then who?

Dud Hendrick
Veterans for Peace
November 10, 2012

President Obama,

I have no illusions that this is other than a fool's errand, but at the urging of friends write regardless.

I am a Naval Academy graduate, a former Air Force officer, a Vietnam War vet, and an extremely proud member of Veterans for Peace. The attached copy of my speech delivered at an Armistice Day gathering in Blue Hill, Maine may be too long for you to read, but, in my immodest opinion, contains a perspective, the validity of which, our country's leadership must consider.

I do not anticipate a response, but would sure appreciate it-however concise-as a beacon of hope.

Sincerely-- a disillusioned American,

Dud Hendrick
P.O. Box 10
Deer Isle, Maine
04627

Defeat for the Right, Victory for the People & Democracy

Sam Webb — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:53:00 -0500

We meet on the heels of an enormous people's victory. It was a long and bitterly contested battle in which the forces of inclusive democracy came out on top. The better angels of the American people spread their wings.

An African American president was reelected to the Presidency, the Democrats unexpectedly strengthened their hand in the Senate and House, new progressive voices, like Elizabeth Warren, are coming to Washington, and victories, including for marriage equality, occurred at the state level.

On the other end of the political divide, Romney lost decisively and right wing extremism, while not a completely spent force (and it probably never will be) was greatly weakened. Its candidates and, even more, its ideas were repudiated by tens of millions.

Moreover, the balance of power, that is, the ground on which people will fight shifted in a progressive direction, thanks in large measure to what might be the most notable development in this election - the further emergence (compared to 2008) of a multi-racial, male-female, working class-based electorate - an electorate that has the potential to renew and realign politics for decades to come.

Finally, millions come out of this election with a far deeper political understanding - and on a range of issues: corporate plunder and profiteering, racial and gender inequality, sexual orientation and gay marriage, immigrant, reproductive, and labor rights, the corrupting role of money in politics, global warming, and militarism and military adventures.

All this bodes well for the future.

Main front of the class struggle

The Communist Party said a year ago that the 2012 elections would be the main front of the class and democratic struggle and subsequent events have confirmed that fact.

Indeed, we argued (and not everyone on the left agreed and probably still don't) that defeating right-wing extremism was the key to moving the whole chain of democratic struggle forward.

Conversely, we said that if right-wing extremists came out victors in the elections, they would accelerate to warp speed a capitalist class counterrevolution against people's living standards, rights, and organizational capacities the likes that we haven't ever seen.

But that won't happen due to the fact that the voters - a rainbow coalition of largely working people - in their majority reelected the President.

Notable features

While many things went into Obama's victory, what was notable was the ability of the democratic movement to turn back Republican efforts to suppress the vote; what was of great import was the determination of the people's movement (with labor in the lead) to reach, educate, and turn out tens of millions of American voters on Election Day; what not surprising was the continuing, strategic, and sometimes underappreciated role of the African American people (93 per cent voted for the president) in the front ranks (at the head in many instances) of the struggle for progress and democracy.

What stands out was the resolve of women and especially single young women to defend their rights and democracy generally; what was heartening was the readiness of millions of white workers and trade unionists to stand with the President even in a weak economy and in the face of unrelenting and crude racist appeals.

Of fundamental importance was the dramatic show of strength of the Latino people on the national political stage; what was extraordinary was the turnout of the Asian and Pacific Islander people; what is easily lost sight of is the critical role of the Native American Indian people in Montana and North Dakota; what was encouraging was the continuing support of young and Jewish voters for the President.

What was extraordinary was skill and reach of Organizing for America; what was uplifting was the capacity of the American people to sift through the myriad of lies and deceptions that came from the Republican side; and, above all, what was of enormous significance was, as I mentioned above, the crystallization of a multi-racial, male-female, working class based electorate on a new level.

Mandate for progressive change

The Republicans were quick to say that no sweeping mandate emerges out of this election -- people voted for the status quo. Look at the results in the House, they say.

But apart from the House, where Republicans retained their majority (in part because of gerrymandering), there is no evidence to support their claim.

And if we look underneath the surface metrics of the elections, we find even less evidence. If anything the vote, and here I include more than a sliver of Romney supporters, is an insistent call for action on the most pressing problems facing the working class and people. That is the election's mandate.

This was not a vote in favor of destroying social programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; or rolling back domestic spending; or resolving the budget crisis on the people's backs.

It was instead a vote for jobs, housing relief, health care, withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan, an end to U.S.-led wars in the Middle East, preservation of the social safety net, health care access, reproductive rights, and equal pay for women, infrastructure renewal (an issue that took on greater importance after megastorm Sandy), marriage equality, a larger commitment to public education, a tax system in which the wealthiest families and corporations pay a much larger share, reform of our punitive and anti-democratic immigration laws, a reduction in unconscionable inequality, a legislative and electoral system that isn't awash with corporate money.

It was a vote for an America that stands for tolerance, inclusiveness, and fairness.

Immediate struggles

As I said, the Republicans are not on board with this assessment.

But the bigger problem at this moment is that politicians, including too many Democrats, major opinion makers, the corporate elite, and financial markets are saying that a "Grand Bargain," is called for, beginning with spending cuts and a weakening of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Otherwise the country, the grand bargainers claim, will fall off a "fiscal cliff," threatening the economic recovery, global markets, and the long-term viability of existing social programs.

But is this the case? Progressive and left economists say "No." They argue that the immediate crisis is not a fiscal one, but a jobs and growth crisis. Once people get back to work and once economic activity picks up the nation can turn its attention to the deficit.

In fact, any attempt to resolve the nation's fiscal problems too quickly via deep budget cuts, they warn, could very easily plunge the economy into a nosedive and worsen government finances - much like what is happening in many European countries.

The American people should not be stampeded into a "Grand Bargain" that punishes working and poor people.

Congress should feel compelled to do only three things in the lame duck session.

First, to renew lower taxes for the middle class, while allowing the Bush tax cut for the rich to expire.

Second, to launch a green designed program to rebuild coastal areas destroyed by the hurricane. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed people, skilled and unskilled, could be put to work.

Third, to extend unemployment benefits.

In January when the newly elected Congress convenes, it can give its full attention to the state of the economy. And again, jobs and a robust economic recovery should be at the top of its "to-do list."
In due time the nation's budgetary problems can and should be resolved, and resolved easily, if we go where the money is - the incomes of the wealthy, corporate profits, and the military budget.

Up and running

Without stopping to catch its breath after the long election grind, the AFL-CIO and its allies are organizing for a working-class and people's solution along these lines. But organized labor can't do it alone.

The coalition that mined the country for votes over the past several months and the rainbow electorate that elected the President must spring back into action.

A broad appeal to many who cast their ballots for Romney is in order too. The division in the country that obtained on November 6 should not be seen as some sort of hardened divide.

Moreover, the popular movement must bring its political and numerical weight to bear on Congress - Democrats and Republicans alike.

Not least, President Obama needs to hear from the tens of millions who reelected him. The President is the most popular politician in the country. Nobody has the political and moral authority that he has. He isn't a radical, but by the same token to classify him as a run-of-the-mill capitalist politician doesn't fit either. Of the Democratic Party presidents of the 20th century, none had the deep democratic sensibilities that he possesses. It is crucial that he lead this struggle.

But he can't and won't do it alone. He needs a mass movement that will nudge him forward as well as have his back as he goes up against recalcitrant Republicans, big sections of monopoly capital, and wavering centrist Democrats in Congress in this and in subsequent battles.

Which is where communists, socialists, and left and progressive people come into the picture. Our main task is to build broad people's unity, guarantee the participation of the key social and class forces, counter the right-wing narrative with a working-class and people's narrative, and bring forward an alternative program.

When we differ with the President, we should express our differences in a constructive way, that is, they shouldn't be so sweeping, unbalanced, unforgiving, and de-contextualized that they serve no purpose other than to demobilize people and take right wing extremists out of view.

In other words, political judgments of the president shouldn't be arrived at in a vacuum.

While the immediate struggle over the "Grand Bargain" is largely defensive, we should not lose sight of the fact that the election results create space to move to a more offensive posture in the coming year. Legislative initiatives to address unemployment, infrastructural renewal, immigration, public education, climate change, military conversion, and so forth can be real ground for struggle for millions of Americans.

We may not get everything we fight for; compromises may be necessary, but we make those judgments based on concrete circumstances. The main thing now is to reactivate the millions who went to the polls on Election Day.

Labor on a roll

In the post-election commentary, the most underreported factor is the role of the labor movement. And yet labor's role was critical.

For some time now our Party has recognized powerful progressive trends in the labor movement. In this election, the actions of labor brought these trends to a new level.

Labor had more "boots on the ground" than ever before - in its phone banks, in-plant and workplace organizing, and coalition efforts. Across the country, union members walked picket lines in the morning and joined ‘labor walks' for the President in the afternoon. And labor spent (as it has been doing for some time now) most of its money on building its own infrastructures and campaign organizations.

New and improved were labor's efforts to brings its own ongoing struggles into the election campaign. So, for example, teachers striking in Chicago injected questions of public education into the national election debate. Or to take another example, the national campaign to expose Bain Capital's role in closing a plant in Illinois, where labor helped make clear the choice between vulture capitalism and sound public investment in infrastructure and alternative energy for jobs.

Or to take still another example, unions across the country brought the urgency of jobs and economic recovery to the attention of the electorate as well as the candidates.

Labor's Super PAC "Workers Voice" also deepened its influence in the broader coalition that defeated the far right, allowing it to speak to many working people who are not union members.

No less important is that labor forged broad new ties with most of the constituent groups active in this election. It was not unusual at all to have local unions working shoulder to shoulder with OFA, Moveon, Planned Parenthood, the NAACP and many others in all phases of electoral work.

Finally, labor's election activity revealed its ongoing evolution into a social movement whose mission is to fight for the interests of the entire working class and people. Accordingly, labor's message combined the fight for jobs, the preservation of Social Security and Medicare, taxing the rich and corporations, investment in infrastructure, etc. with issues like racial equality and the fight against racism, women's rights, peace, student debt and education, marriage equality, and economic and social justice.

With the dust barely settled from the elections, virtually every union has hit the ground running. Unlike the 2008 election, labor is determined to continue the momentum of the 2012 election victories into the struggles of 2013, 2014 and beyond.

Dialectics of unity and diversity

What stood out in the election was the power of unity and diversity. That may seem contradictory, but it was the interaction of the two that turned what could have been a defeat into a people's victory.

Had Latinos not voted in such significant numbers in Nevada, Colorado and Florida, it is hard to see the President's path to victory. Had African Americans not turned out in record numbers it is tough to see how the President could have won in most of the battleground states. Had labor not mobilized its membership to vote in Ohio and other Rust Belt states, it's a stretch to see the President emerging triumphant on election night. Likewise, had single young women not cast their ballots in large numbers, it is difficult to visualize his victory.

I could go on, but by now I hope that I have made my point: each of the core forces - the working class, people of color, women and youth - played a decisive role in this election.

At the same time, it should also be said that as powerful as each of these forces undeniably and strategically is, it was the unity of this diverse coalition, stitched together in no small measure by the glue of class, equality, and democracy that, in the final analysis, powered the victory.

As exciting as this is, much still needs to be done to further empower, transform, and unify this diverse movement that moves largely on parallel lines into a mighty political and organizational force for economic justice and advanced democracy. For now anyway, it has nothing close to the messaging power or dense organizational network that the right wing and corporate America have. Herein lies the challenge for left and progressive forces in the labor and broader movement going forward.

GOP: it's more than demographics

While millions are celebrating, the right wing is going ballistic; they saw this election in existential terms.

Given the demographic and political changes taking place countrywide, the election for them was do or die; for many the defeat means that the world as they know it is coming to an end.

Now that may be a little too apocalyptic, but clearly right-wing extremism took a big hit. Some commentators have suggested that its best days are in the rear view mirror, and that it will give way to a more moderate version of the Republican Party.

Such a prognostication is premature, but it is almost inevitable that there will be tensions within the Republican Party and a contest over policy, image, and tone going forward. To simply take the position of unyielding opposition to President Obama will be difficult in current circumstances.

Furthermore, if demographic and political trends continue, old right-wing fortresses like Texas and Arizona will become swing states and Florida, Nevada, and Colorado will become comfortably blue.

Senator Lindsey Graham, no stranger to right-wing politics, put it this way: "The demographics race we're losing badly. We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term."

Steve Schmidt, campaign manager for John McCain in 2008 and MSNBC analyst, put it a little differently: "We have been horrific" towards Latinos, adding that the party needed to start speaking to that rising population with "respect."

What Schmidt and Graham conveniently forgot is that the GOP has been "horrific" and disrespectful toward people of color generally, beginning with African Americans, for a long time.

Its inclination to tone down anti-immigrant rhetoric and soften its position on immigration is to be welcomed, but more than a change in tone and position is necessary to improve the standing of the GOP in the Latino community.

It wasn't simply the harsh anti-immigration rhetoric and positions of Romney and other Republican candidates that turned off millions of Latino voters. It was also their positions on a broad range of issues.

Republican Party strategists forgot that Latinos are overwhelmingly a part of the U.S. multi-racial, multi national working class, albeit one that encounters not only class but racial and national oppression in their daily lives.

Moreover, Latinos in their majority are multi-generational Americans. The ancestral roots of some pre-date the nation's founding.

Thus, any idea that Latinos will bid farewell to their natural allies -African Americans, other people of color, and the labor movement - and make common cause with the GOP based on a few cosmetic changes grossly underestimates Latinos. It is nothing but fantasy, and racist and arrogant fantasy at that.

In fact, the Republicans' new interest in Latinos is nothing more than an updated version of their long-standing racist "divide and rule" strategy.

The Republican dilemma as to how to remain a relevant party in the 21st century will not be easily solved.

White workers and the vote

It is easy to dismiss white people, including white workers, as not only racist, but also backward on a range of issues, such as peace, gun control, reproductive rights, gay marriage, and so forth.

Looking at the white vote in this election provides ample evidence for this claim. The white vote for Romney reached historical highs (nearly 60 per cent), compared to earlier Democratic Party presidential candidates.

Worse still, close to 65 per cent of white men cast their vote for Romney. What motivated them can't be reduced to race alone. A substantial number of white people, I'm sure, bought the idea that in an underperforming economy Romney would be a better steward than the President. And there were other issues that motivated them to vote for Romney as well.

But, at the same time, for many of them, racism must have either taken up the biggest space in or is closely entwined with the bundle of resentments and wrong understandings that accounts for their voting behavior.

That a section of the American people and working class hold such views isn't a reason to feel superior or dismissive. Rather, for Communists and for everyone who hopes for a better future it is cause for profound concern.

After all, at the core of progress, in our view, is the unity of the multi-racial, multi-nation for Communists and for everyone who hopes for a better future al working class. A divided working class is not a serious threat to monopoly capital. It is certainly not the train to bring the country into the socialist station.

But lucky for us, this captures only one side of reality. For while racist ideas, old as well as updated, influenced the white voting patterns far more than we would like, anti-racist ideas among white people were evident too.

And they expressed themselves in the face of a full-throttle racist ideological offensive over the past four years to de-legitimize President Obama.

In Ohio, one of the states that helped to deliver the second term -- and not coincidentally a ground zero of this racist offensive -- the President won roughly 45 per cent of the white vote, and tied Romney among white men with incomes of $75,000 or less.

Racial appeals in other battleground states like Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan didn't resonate to the degree that the Romney campaign had hoped either. And in each state, white workers were a key demographic in Obama's victory.

Then there were other non-battleground states where the majority of white voters cast their vote for Obama.

Among trade unionists, 70 per cent voted for the president. While the union vote isn't broken down along racial lines, it is probably safe to say that white trade unionists voted roughly the same as they did four years ago.

A few weeks before the election, I attended a rally in Cleveland organized by the Teamsters, where many labor leaders and members of Congress spoke of the urgency of supporting President Obama.

One shouldn't generalize from one rally, but I have to say that the support for the President at this gathering of rank and file Teamsters and other trade unionists - the majority of whom where white - was nothing short of enthusiastic. They were ready to go. And I was inspired.

Why? Because these workers had no problem whatsoever in supporting and voting again for an African American to the highest office in the land. From what I could see, they were more than eager to do so. I suspect that many other white trade unionists felt the same way.

All of which underscores the importance of expanding the ranks of the organized working class and ratcheting up the fight against racism. Both are strategic tasks that the entire movement for progressive change should embrace.

The economy

Framing everything in the post-election period is the economy. While some pickup in economic activity has occurred, overall employment and economic growth have been fitful and anemic.

It's hard to see where the dynamism is going to come from without the entry of the federal government on a scale that only a few in Washington are ready to embrace.

The old dynamic of debt and bubble-driven growth, which drove the last economic expansion here and worldwide (1992 -2007), is not an option.

Nor should any help be expected from our global partners. Europe is reeling. And China is not positioned to carry the rest of the world on its shoulders. Its growth too has slowed and it's feeling the contradictions that come from its deep integration into the capitalist global economy.

Crises are supposed to be capitalism's mechanisms to clear away the debris that inhibits a revival of production, profits, employment and growth on a wider scale, but that scenario doesn't appear to be in capitalism's future.

Instead, stagnant growth and high unemployment seem like the "new normal." And, always lurking in the background is the danger of deeper crises.

All of which begs the question: are we entering a new era of capitalist development, characterized by overproduction, hyper-intense monopolistic rivalry, and stagnant growth on a world scale?

My initial read (which requires more in-depth study) is that we are, which would explain why big capital is in such a frenzy to impose a new model of political and economic governance on the working class and people - one that is stripped of social obligations to its citizens, free of unions and a dense network of civic organizations, deficient in full-blooded democratic institutions, and shorn of any barriers to its global accumulation strategy.

The dream of the one per cent is to return to the gilded age when neither the people nor nature had any rights that capitalism had to respect.

The outcome of this election has made the realization of that dream more difficult -- but don't expect capital to throw in the towel.

While it supported Romney, its claws are in the sides of both parties and in every branch of government, as they have been in the past. The state remains a capitalist state.

Faced with this reality, the option for the working class and people in the near and medium term isn't to retreat from electoral and political struggle. But rather to further expand its independent presence in the crucial arena of struggle.

In the longer term, the option is socialism - a society in which Marx's "associated producers" and their allies govern and rule in the interest of the immense majority.

Foreign policy

The present direction of our foreign policy has the country cascading from one crisis to another. And in every instance, it isn't the interests of the American people that are being advanced, but rather the interests of the global corporations and the foreign policy establishment.

There is some reappraisal of the conduct of our foreign policy going on in the Obama administration and the national security state. In all likelihood some changes will occur, not necessarily unimportant ones, but at the same time don't expect
the Obama administration or U.S. ruling circles to give up their global ambitions.

We are still employing harsh sanctions against Iran and the danger of war grows; we are still imposing a half-century-long blockade on Cuba; we are still doing little to support the Palestinian people's desire for national statehood; we are still sitting on our hands as far as finding road to a cease fire and a negotiated settlement between the warring parties in Syria; we are still modernizing our weaponry, while insisting that other countries forgo their pursuit of nuclear armaments; we are still determined to isolate North Korea; we are still at loggerheads with the countries of Latin America who are pursuing their own independent path of development; we are still using drones to prosecute the "war on terror'" even though their use puts us at loggerheads with people in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa; we are still negotiating NAFTA-like trade agreements; and we still cherry picking who we will ally ourselves to in the Arab Spring, that leaves us supporting some of the most backward regimes in the world.

The Obama administration and the foreign policy establishment need to pivot not to the Pacific region, but away from these policies of global domination. Of prime importance is that we walk back our rhetoric and sanctions against Iran. Negotiations not confrontation are needed. A war with Iran would have horrific consequences across the world and negative impacts on the class and democratic struggles at home. There is no desire among the American people for such a confrontation.

No less importantly, the Obama administration has to become a force for a peaceful and negotiated resolution of the crisis in Syria and a more forceful interlocutor of a two-state solution between the Israelis and Palestinians. Netanyahu's intransigence has to be walked back in the interests of both peoples.

But none of this will happen without a "peace surge" across the length and breadth of our country. The economic crisis has turned the attention of the American people inward, but only up to a point. More and more are realizing that a people centered domestic policy is bound up with a foreign policy of peace, cooperation, and disarmament and economic conversion.

Build the Communist Party

We can be proud of our role in the election. Our contribution was both ideological and practical. Nearly every member and leader was involved. Our work gives us much to build on as we throw ourselves into the post-election battles.

In every state and city our political relationships are broader and deeper; our presence and prestige are on a new level.

We come out of this election poised to play a larger role in the unfolding struggles, beginning with the struggle over the "fiscal cliff."

If there is anything that the election revealed about us it is that we are too small in size. Thus we have to grow at a faster pace. Our main audience is not among those who sat out the election struggle, but among those who were in its front ranks.

We should organize meetings with these activists in December and January where they can have the opportunity to get better acquainted with us as people and political activists.

The distance between our positions and the positions of many who worked tirelessly in the campaign is less than we probably think. No longer does the "s" word send shivers down people's spines - in fact, many of today's activists embrace it, according to public opinion polls.

Another requirement to building the Party is that we do more to strengthen it in our traditional centers.

I'm not suggesting that we do any less to bring in new internet recruits, as we are currently doing. But this has to be combined with breathing new energy and life into our Party in the centers where we have had a long-term presence. Every district and club should organize a discussion along these lines.

Still another growth requirement is that we utilize the social media better. This is not to take away from what we have already done. We have websites, online publications, a growing group of writers, and a presence on facebook and twitter. Still the whole Party and YCL are not yet engaged.

In the same vein, we also must make a bigger effort to break into the mainstream media. This is an untapped source that would allow us to get our message out to a much bigger audience. There are still too many misunderstanding and stereotypes, which are big impediments to our growth.

Finally, we can't build the Party and YCL without confidence, spirit, and boldness.

Fired Up and Ready to Go!

Joelle Fishman — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 10:57:00 -0500

The world breathed a sigh of relief and a shout of joy went up clear across the country when Ohio was called for President Barack Obama on election night, putting him over the 270 electoral college threshold to win four more years.

Yet in that shout of joy for a giant people's victory was also the realization that we can't miss a beat going forward in this ongoing battle to wrest the country from the grip of the reactionary, corporate right-wing extremists.

We and the country have been through a remarkable, challenging, grueling, exhausting and exhilarating year, really two years. We have given our all within a maturing, expanding broad electoral alliance and people's movement.

In the process, a new respect and appreciation for the strategy and tactics, team work and vision of the Communist Party and YCL is emerging.

Congratulations are in order!

Our projection that the election was at the heart of the class struggle, that we were at the crossroads for democracy has been born out. Our policy of the need for and commitment to help build a broad united alliance against the extremists is being proven sound.

The election of tea party Republicans to Congress and Governorships and State Houses in 2010, reflecting a racist backlash from the election of the first African American president, brought with it a full blown campaign to undo every democratic achievement ever won by the people of this country. Finance capital was on overdrive to grab every public asset for the private profit of a few at the expense of the many.

The extremes between great hoarded wealth and growing poverty exposed the inequalities of capitalism and gave rise to giant struggles for livelihood and the right to be heard.

Workers in our country also saw the struggles of workers abroad being pushed down in the global economic crisis, and identified with their strikes, uprisings and hard fought elections.

Millions became engaged, many for the first time, from the massive fights for workers' rights in Wisconsin and Ohio, to the dramatic protests of economic inequality by Occupy and at Bainport, to the inspiring actions for social justice by the Dreamers, to courageous stands in defense of women's reproductive rights and marriage equality, to determined fightback against racist voter suppression most notably in Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania, and then the realization, in the wake of Storm Sandy, that yes, we are all in this together.

All these challenges, experiences, and organizing drives laid the groundwork for a historic effort by labor, civil rights, women and youth along with environmental and LGBT organizations. The result is majority repudiation of the politics and policies of the 1%, exemplified by the glimpse into raw class warfare as Mitt Romney dismissed 47% of the people.

Romney's outrageous statement blaming his loss on "Obama's gifts" (like healthcare and student loans) to "certain groups" ramps up the class warfare and disrespect.

The media plays up the idea that the election shows a widening racial divide. In reality, what this election shows is a new level of coming together, of class and social solidarity, of rejecting racism.

It was growing class consciousness that made victory possible for so many progressive candidates and ballot measures which featured anti-corporate arguments in their campaigns.

The high finances and tactics of Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers and company to seize this election did not work. Gerrymandered redistricting, restrictive voting laws, anti-Communist baiting, racist ads, lies and trickery backfired.

These blatant attacks got people's attention. They gave rise to a civil rights style movement in communities across the nation embracing the increasing diversity of our country.

Determination and resolve became the order of the day to overcome all obstacles and get out the largest vote ever. In Ohio the mobilization by African American churches and organizations, refusing to be disenfranchised, filled long lines at early voting stations for a month. On election day, in some precincts the wait was hours long (in Miami-Dade County till 1:30 am!), but people stood it out. In New Jersey and New York, despite the consequences of storm Sandy, voters cast their ballots.

President Obama carried all the tipping point swing states. His electoral college sweep and popular vote win is a tremendous accomplishment made possible by a powerful grass roots on-the-ground effort joining together labor and progressive democratic-minded forces. It set the framework for all the other races.

While the U. S. House of Representatives remains in Republican hands, it is a different House with new dynamics. Republicans won the majority of seats due to gerrymandering, but more votes were cast for Democrats nationwide.

Six tea party incumbents were defeated by progressive democrats. Additional progressives won open seats, although every race was not won. Tea party leaders Alan West, Joe Walsh, Brian Bilbray and Mary Bono Mack are out. Progressives Alan Grayson from Florida, Tammy Duckworth from Illinois, Carol Shea-Porter and Annie Kuster from New Hampshire, Dr. Raul Ruiz from Riverside California, and Mark Pocan, a leader in the Wisconsin walkout, are in.

The composition of the 200 member Democratic Caucus will make history. In the words of Nancy Pelosi, "for the first time in Congressional history -- the majority will be women and minorities. We expect to have 61 women, 43 African Americans, 27 Hispanics, 10 Asian Americans and 6 LGBT Americans in our Caucus."

In the Senate, the Democratic majority has been enlarged to 54. Notorious tea party Republican challengers Todd Aiken and Richard Mourdock went down to defeat. Newly elected progressive women bring the total of women Senators from 17 to 20. Mazie Hirono the first Asian American woman, Tammy Baldwin the first openly gay woman, and Elizabeth Warren who said "the system is rigged against you." Heidi Heitkamp won in North Dakota, Chris Murphy defeated billionaire wrestling mogul Linda McMahon. Sherrod Brown, who was a top target of the right-wing, won re-election in Ohio as did Bernie Sanders in Vermont. Tim Kaine won in Virginia.

A progressive shift was also apparent in several ballot questions including the passage of marriage equality in Maine, Maryland and Washington, and initiatives in California and Oregon to increase taxes on the wealthy and close a corporate loophole to fund public education and services. Spending on education with job creation passed in New Jersey. The Dream Act passed in Maryland. The proposition to limit labor's participation in elections was defeated in California. Emergency Manager was defeated in Michigan. Ballot questions to amend the constitution to abolish Citizens United passed in Montana and 100 cities. San Jose voted to increase the minimum wage from $8 to $10 an hour. And in towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut non-binding ballot questions to cut military spending and increase spending for job creation and human needs passed overwhelmingly.

Missouri, Washington and New Hampshire elected new Democratic Governors in open seats after difficult races. While the struggle to overturn tea party advances in 2010 is still underway, in Minnesota the 2010 takeover of the State Legislature by the religious right was reversed in this election.

In Tucson, a peoples coalition captured the majority on the School Board defeating incumbents who had capitulated to the racist edict banning Chicano studies.

The attempts to minimize the vote for President Obama and the progressive shift in the overall election is a continuation of the vicious racism since 2008. The 2012 victory was definitive despite every possible tactic used by and on behalf of the Romney/Ryan campaign.

The vote was not spontaneous. It was hard fought and unprecedented. It was the result of millions of conversations at doors, at work, on the phone and on social media.

In the last four days alone, AFL-CIO members from 56 unions made 10.7 million door knocks and phone calls. SEIU members knocked on 5 million doors including 3.7 million in battleground states on those final days.

70% of union households voted for Obama in Ohio, and 65% nationwide. The contribution of the labor movement with its multi-racial, male-female, young-old, gay-straight, immigrant-native born membership to this election cannot be over stated. This includes release time given to staff, mobilization of members, and especially in framing the debate around class issues and exposing Romney/Ryan for undermining jobs, not creating them and threatening the future of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

In battleground states, where Workers Voice, the AFL-CIO super PAC was utilized, union members were freed up to speak with all voters and not just other union members. Nearly 400,000 Workers Voice volunteers made 80 million phone calls and knocked on 14 million doors.

Hearing their message helped shift the thinking of white workers who had been for Romney. In these battleground states, white working-class voters rejected racist appeals and supported Obama at a much higher rate than elsewhere. In Ohio, 65% of white union members voted for Obama.

Working America households, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, voted 66% for Obama. In battleground areas where there was extra focus, Working America households voted 74% for Obama.

I'm sure many of us found that a "labor walk" got a much different response than a general door knock. The labor mobilization was important to this election and for the labor movement itself. We need a much larger labor movement in our country, and this campaign has opened the door to go back and organize among the unorganized voters.

Lumping together "white voters" as opposing Obama is misleading and fails to show the growing anti-racism trend exhibited in this election. "White voters" as a category is distorted because it includes the 1% and other well off people who identify with the 1%.

Where a class approach to the election was presented and argued for, the majority of white voters chose Obama. Visiting the homes of union members on 'labor walks" in largely white communities from New Hampshire to Iowa identified many enthusiastic Obama supporters. These lessons are important going forward in the continuing struggle against racism and for class unity.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka gave the lead when he said, if you care about your jobs and health care and social security and the right to vote and sending your kids to college, get rid of your racism and vote for the candidate whose program speaks to your needs, Barack Obama.

The labor movement's unique role in representing the interests of the entire working class came through in this election. It underscores the importance of building up labor's political action structures that can mobilize on the basis of workers' issues year round, pull out the vote in elections, and become strong enough to elect many more union members and working people to public office.

The political structures built up during this election are a potential pathway for independent progressive politics to continue developing and exerting its force.

Side by side and intertwined with the labor movement was the new and growing role of the rising American electorate, which made up nearly half of all voters. African American, Latino, Asian American, Native American voters, women voters, youth voters all were highly mobilized.

Their determination and activism was propelled in part as a response to being targeted and threatened with loss of voting rights. These expanding sections of the electorate have a large working class composition and add to the foundation of the broad electoral alliance.

The NAACP registered 42,000 new voters and engaged 1.2 million people. African Americans voted 93% for Obama, maintaining their historic progressive leadership and refusing to fall for the tactics of division emanating from the Romney/Ryan camp.

The National Council of La Raza registered 97,000 new voters, knocked on 113,016 doors, made 233,897 calls, and sent 257,000 emails and 90,780 text messages reminding voters to cast their ballots early where possible. Latinos voted 71% for Obama up from 67% in 2008. Latino voters made up 10% of the electorate (9% in 2008), and made the difference for Obama in key battlegrounds Nevada and Colorado. Latino voters have emerged as a powerful, progressive force. The number of Latino voters is expected to double in the next 20 years.

Planned Parenthood mobilized 10,000 "Women are Watching" volunteers. Members of NOW and others came out in full force horrified by the meaning of the "war on women" for themselves, their daughters and their mothers. Single women voted 67% for Obama and made up 23% of the electorate.

Youth were written off by the media as being disaffected, but youth organizations registered tens of thousands of new voters on campuses and in communities and made up a large section of campaign volunteers. Youth voted 60% for Obama and were 19% of all voters (an increase of 1% over 2008). Youth turnout was highest in the battleground states, and made a difference in the outcome.

Asian American Pacific Islanders for Obama played a prominent role in the Democratic National Convention. The preparations for grass roots organizing were impressive. Asian Americans voted 73% for Obama, a dramatic shift from the 30% who voted Democrat for Clinton in 1992.

The National Congress of American Indians reached out nationwide to 3 million voters calling turnout "a civic emergency" and made the difference for Senate in Montana and North Dakota, in New Mexico, Arizona and in other local races.

In addition:

Jewish voters went 70% for Obama, despite a highly funded effort by right-winger Sheldon Adelson to separate Jewish voters out on the basis of supporting Israel. Two thirds of Jewish voters said they approve of Obama's handling of the Israeli-Arab conflict and 90% said their main concern is domestic issues.

MoveOn involved its 7 million members on-line through social media and joined with Workers Voice for phone calls to battle ground states. The Sierra Club mobilized 12,000 volunteers across the country. The Alliance for Retired Americans organized 250,000 calls to retirees.

The Obama for America campaign mobilized on a giant scale. The campaign created neighborhood groups and on-line interest groups and utilized social networking, texting and new technology. Over 30,000 volunteers registered 2 million new voters in battleground states, and made 145 million phone calls and door knocks. This has been called the largest grassroots effort ever seen.

Direct voter contact was so important because it allowed the chance for discussion, and the opportunity to break through the lies and rhetoric filling the airwaves. Voters wanted to know what each candidate's program would mean for their lives.

The most powerful contrast was the fact that Romney and Ryan represent the 1% while Obama and Biden were oriented to the problems of middle and low income families. Romney and Ryan wrote off 47% of the country and said "you're on your own." Obama and Biden said government has a responsibility because "we're in it together."

Jobs in the auto industry, health coverage for young adults, increased student loans, aid for the victims of Sandy were concrete manifestations that influenced opinions.

Concepts such as "class struggle" and "tax the rich," -- ideas we have long supported -- emerged in this election and made common sense to millions of people, taking precedence over the Republican cry of "socialist," used as if it were a bad word. The framework of the debate was changed from "deficit reduction" to "jobs not cuts."

In a post-election survey of voters by Democracy Corps, two-thirds say the priority should not be deficit reduction, but "a plan to invest in new industries and rebuild the country and create jobs over the next five years."

Over 60 percent oppose cuts in Medicare and Social Security as part of deficit reduction.

Over 75 percent, including a majority of Republicans, favor both a new higher tax rate over a million dollars, and a tax on overseas profits.

Nearly three-fourths, including 60 percent of conservatives, favor cutting military spending by ending the war in Afghanistan.

In contrast, the big corporate profiteers who control the economic levers are determined to impose an anti-people austerity program. They are chomping at the bit to get their hands on the Social Security Trust Fund under the guise of a "fiscal cliff."

Many sections of Wall St that backed Obama in 2008, backed Romney in 2012.

But the election results, and the loss of Grover Norquist's anti-tax majority, make it harder for extremist Republicans to hold everything hostage to tax breaks for the super rich. Vulnerable Republicans may be pushed to a more moderate position.

The wide agreement on the need for organizing and street heat post-election is a good indication of new possibilities under more favorable conditions.

President Obama himself is asking for grass roots pressure as he prepares for a second term. He urged 30,000 OFA volunteers to stay involved through a new website, theaction.org. "The election is over. Don't rest. Join THE ACTION. :: End the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2%."

The day after election Richard Trumka issued a call to action. Rallies were held in 200 cities that week demanding an end to tax breaks for the top 2% and no cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, the issues of the election.

Clergy speaking out to tax the rich are helping expand the broad electoral alliance while building street heat. This combination of protests like Bainport and door knocking and social media messaging was important to win the election. It will be important to win on every issue going forward.

The coalition that the AFL CIO is part of, Strengthening Americas Values and Economy for All, has produced fliers, talking points, power points and other materials available on-line for local meetings with members of congress and going door to door.

If this immediate battle against the Grand Bargain is won, it can be a factor in breaking the logjam for other legislation for jobs and peoples needs. The necessary extension of unemployment benefits is also at stake, as are cuts to human needs programs versus cuts to the military budget.

In the course of standing up to the tactics of the extreme right-wing many people are thinking more deeply. The votes on ballot questions are an indication. So are the rising number of strikes around the country.

Many are wondering how to transform the economy and change priorities for good jobs and a secure, peaceful and sustainable future - the American Dream.

The issues facing people, jobs in the first place, comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship, universal voting rights and campaign finance reform will shape the battles in the new Congress along with taxing wealth and protecting vital programs. Addressing voter suppression is fundamental to expanding democracy.

Unions are already gearing up their members who were in the thick of the election battle to hold those they helped elect accountable. Many new, young leaders are emerging. They are ready and looking to join forces with groups in the community.

Inside Congress, the Progressive Caucus will be enlarged, and can play a stronger role. But to get a majority vote in the House will need some Republicans.

The most reactionary, racist elements have been delivered a setback in this election, but like Rep Allan West who refused to concede for three weeks and those who are calling for secession, they will do everything they can to continue to distract and obstruct.

The battles to realize the election mandate will not be easy. The amazing organizing that won this election has to be kept up around the immediate needs for jobs with a living wage, education, health care, the needs of youth, cutting military spending and ending the war in Afghanistan. A longterm program is needed to convert to a peacetime, green, sustainable economy and rebuild the infrastructure. The alliances have to keep growing on the ground. In this volatile world, enlarging the struggle for peace will help determine the success of the next four years.

As Sam points out, "the struggle to put the people's needs and nature before corporate profits and war spending will be a long one...The main thing is that the still-emerging multi-racial, working-class based coalition never lose sight of the necessity of deepening and extending its reach, unity, and multi-racial, class based character."

A feature of this election was increased rejection of both racism and anti-communist baiting. The tea party pursued an unsuccessful attempt to isolate President Obama and many progressive candidates for Congress by utilizing anti-communist red baiting. This tactic was carried out around the country in specific instances in an attempt to poison the atmosphere. It did not take hold, which is worthy of note. At the same time we realize that such provocations are bound to continue.

In one example in Riverside, California newly elected Democratic candidate for Congress Dr. Raul Ruiz was attacked with a barrage of radio and television ads for speaking at a rally to free Leonard Peltier and Mumia when he was a student. This red baiting and Mecha baiting by Republican Mary Bono Mack backfired. Hundreds of volunteers for Ruiz were even more fired up. Significantly, the tribes, which are very important in the district, dropped their longtime support for Bono Mack and strongly supported Ruiz, who they knew had put himself on the line for justice for Native Americans.

Communist Party and YCL

We, the Communist Party and YCL, are an important part of the rising electorate. We bring our working class tactics and participation along with our vision for equality and a path to socialism. Building a larger Communist Party and YCL is a unique contribution toward further weakening the extreme right-wing and strengthening working class ideology and action.

The fact that "Democracy at the Crossroads" by Rick Nagin was appreciated so widely in Ohio and elsewhere, especially among union activists, underscores this point. A highlight for me was handing out 400 copies to union member delegates from around the country in Charlotte, knowing they would share them at home. A revised edition, reflecting post-election conditions, will be issued in the beginning of the new year.

Coverage and circulation of the elections in the People's World was an important feature of our work. The editorials, the commentaries by Sam Webb, Jarvis Tyner and others, the news and analysis from the battlegrounds and all over, served to keep us informed, alerted and united and hopefully reached a wide audience.

The People's World averages 3000 readers a day. After labor day, readership went up which Terrie Albano says "reflects our class struggle election coverage." The People's World was the first to cover the struggle of the Sensata workers against Bain Capital and Romney's outsourcing. That plus the Walmart Warehouse workers struggle has led to People's World stories and photos being linked on left news sites like Democracy Now and Truthout in addition to the labor sites that have linked to People's World stories for some time.

Joe Sims indicates, "One of the most important developments in the election period was the creation of a team of 400 circulators of the People's World on Facebook and the growth on Facebook to 22,000 likes."

The paper is an organizing tool off-line as well. The print edition was used starting a year ago in a key election district in Connecticut. The new readers helped get out the vote that defeated the worst anti-labor, anti-communist member of the state senate.

The Political Action Commission has produced an e-newsletter, UNITY, for the past six months. Each edition addresses a key question with news briefs, links to People's World articles and actions. Hopefully it will be useful in the upcoming legislative battles and will be circulated to a broad array of allies and friends as well as our members. Appreciation to the entire political action commission for a lot of intensive work this whole year. The commission added new members reflecting some of the battlegrounds and we are still working on rounding out our composition.

Around the country there are a growing number of progressive elected officials who work closely with the grass roots movements. We should find ways to develop infrastructure required to increase the number of candidates for public office at the local level.

Around the country, there has been a high level of member involvement with the electoral alliance in extensive voter registration, door knocking, phone banking and GOTV. There has been a lot of travel and phone calls into all the key battleground states.

Some special initiatives include. Mommas for Obama in Oakland, the national YCL Trayvon Martin Voter Registration project, the People before Profits team in Connecticut and the spectacular Welcome Angela Davis to Detroit rally of 2,000 organized by the People's World and elected officials, unions and .clergy in Michigan.

Several states reported a good response to Democracy at the Crossroads among campaign volunteers. Several used literature available for download including the Why Vote brochure, the Beware Romney/Ryan White Skin Strategy flier, and the Save Our Nation! Tax Corporations! Tax The Rich! brochure which has an excellent 8-point program that fits the post-election period and should be quickly updated and re-issued.

The New Members Committee contributed to the effort by organizing its outreach to those who joined on-line around the battleground states with visits, phone meetings, suggestions for how to connect with the mobilization, and phone banks to new members.

The progressive shift in this election and in people's thinking creates new conditions for struggle. Our Party and YCL were part of the tremendous experience. We too are changed, and should build on that.

This is a time to think fresh, think bold, and act strategically.

Without delay, we should systematically reach out to the people we met while door knocking, traveling to swing states, phone banking or who joined on-line during the elections. We should get to know each other and invite them to a club meeting and get involved in the local actions, struggles or strikes we are engaged in. There are already some major events and schools planned post election.

The six-week battle to stop the "Grand Bargain" in Congress is a priority. Where there is a campaign in the area of a club or individual member we should get involved. Where there is not, we should urge our members to sign up with one of the sites on-line and get the ball rolling.

The common sense of the people, the solidarity that the vote expresses, and the high level of organization all produced this election victory. Against all odds the broad rainbow alliance stuck together and won. A powerful movement is being born in our nation.

Just a week and a half out, there is still much to examine and draw conclusions about.

Like in the 1930s when the economy was in crisis and people did not know where their next meal was coming from, there was an upsurge. The Communist Party was in the fore. Social Security was one product of the mass marches, rallies and organizing.

Today, we see and are part of the beginnings of a people's upsurge to protect that which was won and to move forward.

We face some fierce battles ahead, but we are fired up and ready to go!

No Grand Bargain on the backs of Working People -- A Call to Action

It is cruel and divisive to whip up hysteria around the so-called "fiscal cliff" crisis. The calls to make benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare go in the opposite direction of the mandate delivered by the majority of voters on November 6. The message of the election clearly was: tax the wealthy more and protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Our country will be stronger by focusing on the real deficits we face. The deficit of jobs, the deficit of health care, of education, the deficit of infrastructure after decades of neglect. The deficit of renewable energy.

All of these deficits can best be addressed by employing 15 million who are without job or working part-time, and putting people to work meeting these real needs. In the first place, hire the unemployed to clean up from the devastation of storm Sandy.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent by the wealthy 1%, through their tax free foundations, to spread lies and panic about Social Security and play on our fears so they can get their hands on the hard-earned Social Security taxes that we have paid.

We support the initiatives of the AFL CIO and many other organizations to demand that the tax breaks which the super rich have enjoyed come to an end, and that no cuts are made to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. We strongly support President Obama's determination that the tax cuts for the wealthy expire. But that is not enough.

We reject any "compromise" that balances very modest taxes on the wealthy with severe spending cuts on top of cuts already made that will affect all working class families, starting with children and youth and the most vulnerable.

Instead, an enhanced version of the American Jobs Act should be put forward as part of a green New Deal to create millions of jobs for infrastructure, renewable energy, education and support to state and local government services. Until these programs take effect, Congress must immediately extend the federal Unemployment Compensation program.

To finance these programs, the expiration of the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy should be only the starting point. We support calls for a financial transaction tax, for closing the capital gains loophole and increasing tax rates on millionaires to the level of the prosperous 1960's, and cutting the level of Pentagon spending in order to meet pressing domestic priorities that create jobs .

The outcome of this battle will set the framework for the next four years and have impact on the lives of ordinary working people for decades to come.

Only the mobilized working people can stop the corporate offensive and begin to meet our needs. The unity of the broad, inclusive and diverse alliance that won this year's election victory should now be directed to reaching out in every community and workplace to bring the message to Congress in a strong and public way. We urge immediate participation in this critical struggle.

Adopted by the National Committee, Communist Party USA, November 17, 2012

Reading Karl Marx with Abraham Lincoln Utopian socialists, German communists, and other republicans

John Nichols — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 10:38:00 -0500

These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people.
-Abraham Lincoln, from his first speech as an Illinois state legislator, 1837

Everyone now is more or less a Socialist.
-Charles Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune, and Lincoln's assistant secretary of war, 1848

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.
-Karl Marx and the First International Workingmen's Association to Lincoln, 1864

ON DECEMBER 3, 1861, a former one-term congressman, who had spent most of the past dozen years studying dissident economic theories, mounting challenges to the existing political order and proposing ever more radical responses to the American crisis, delivered his first State of the Union address as the sixteenth president of the United States.

Since assuming office eight months earlier, this new president had struggled, without success, first to restore the severed bonds of the Union and then to avert a wrenching civil war. Now, eleven southern slave states were in open and violent rebellion against the government he led.

His inaugural address of the previous spring had closed with a poignant reflection on the prospect of eventual peace, imagining a day when the Union might again be touched "by the better angels of our nature." But, now, in the last month of what Walt Whitman would recall as America's "sad, distracted year"-"Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp'd cannons"-the better angels seemed to have deserted the continent. Every effort to restore the republic had been thwarted. There was no room for accommodation with the Confederate States of America. Fort Sumter had been fired upon and the flag of southern rebellion now flew above Charleston Harbor. Virginia, the cradle of presidents, the state of Washington, Jefferson and Madison, had joined the revolt and assembled a capital of the Confederacy less than 100 miles from Washington. Hundreds of Union and Confederate soldiers had died, with thousands more wounded at the First Battle of Bull Run. Armies had been reorganized and generals replaced with the recognition that this was no skirmish. This was a protracted war that would eventually force all Americans to "[throw] off the costumes of peace with [an] indifferent hand."

In the presence of the remaining congressmen and senators who filled only a portion of the seats in the Capitol chamber on that December day, the new president knew that he needed to address the circumstance of a nation that was no longer in any sense united. He did so as an agitated, angered American who spoke no more of angels and instead bemoaned "the disloyal citizens of the United States who have offered the ruin of our country." He warned, ominously, of how "A nation which endures factious domestic division is exposed to disrespect abroad, and...is sure sooner or later to invoke foreign intervention." He fretted about a strained federal budget, expressing hope "that the expenditures made necessary by the rebellion are not beyond the resources of the loyal people." He noted that three vacancies would need to be filled on a suddenly abandoned Supreme Court and observed that "one of the unavoidable consequences of the present insurrection is the entire suppression in many places of all the ordinary means of administering civil justice by the officers and in the forms of existing law."

This was a wartime State of the Union address delivered not so much by a president as a commander in chief. Its purpose was to rally what remained of the House and Senate-after the exodus of the southern Solons who had joined a mutiny against the elected government-and to portray the struggle as not merely one for the preservation of a system of governance but for democracy itself. "It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government-the rights of the people," declared the solemn speaker. "Conclusive evidence of this is found in the most grave and maturely considered public documents, as well as in the general tone of the insurgents. In those documents we find the abridgment of the existing right of suffrage and the denial to the people of all right to participate in the selection of public officers except the legislative boldly advocated, with labored arguments to prove that large control of the people in government is the source of all political evil. Monarchy itself is sometimes hinted at as a possible refuge from the power of the people."

These were the words that might have ended the address, had the president not begged the pardon of his listeners to add: "In my present position, I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism."

There was something more that Lincoln wanted to say to America. He needed to speak of another division, another struggle. The man who so carefully chose his words did not relinquish the podium before devoting "brief attention" to his fears regarding "the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government."

Amid all the turbulence of a burgeoning Civil War, Abraham Lincoln wanted it to be known that he was unsettled by the rising assumption "that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life."

That false construct could not be allowed to take hold in a free country, argued the president. It must be understood, he concluded: "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

To be sure, Lincoln related this observation to the wrenching questions posed by the Civil War. "A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class-neither work for others nor have others working for them. In most of the Southern States a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters, while in the Northern a large majority are neither hirers nor hired."

But Lincoln was speaking now of a broader concern: his fear that the few who were possessed of capital might, in a time of turbulence, seek to bend the rule of law-diminishing the historic respect for the rights of man outlined by Lincoln's hero Tom Paine in order to favor their interests above those of the great many Americans who toiled for wages, or the fees paid farmers. "No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty; none less inclined to take or touch aught which they have not honestly earned," the president warned. "Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost."

Lincoln's insistence that labor guard against the surrender of political power to capital-a point he began to outline before his presidency and would repeat throughout his tenure-is rarely afforded the attention paid to his rhetoric regarding the state of "a house divided against itself," "the proposition that all men are created equal" or the faint hope that: "Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth."

Yet, how can we neglect the words that this most instructive of presidents chose to insert in so critical a commentary as his first State of the Union address?
How can we fail to recognize the echoes of a language which scholars of economic, social and political rhetoric might associate less with the sixteenth president than with one of his contemporaries: a Prussian-born son of the Enlightenment, who was causing a stir on both sides of the Atlantic at precisely the moment when Lincoln was casting about for a language to describe the economic forces that were carrying America from its agrarian roots to its industrial future?

Didn't Karl Marx take an interest in the relation of labor and capital? Was it not the coauthor of Das Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei who observed that: "the essential condition of capital is wage-labor"? And that: "Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the laborer"?

Well, there can surely be no connection, no tangible link between Abraham Lincoln, the log cabin-born, rail-splitting, archetypal nineteenth-century American and founding Republican, and Karl Marx, the bearded, brooding, archetypal "European" and proud socialist plotter.

Unless, of course, we bother to examine the tattered copies of the American outlet for Marx's revolutionary preachments during the period when Lincoln was preparing to leave the political wilderness and make his march to the presidency. That journal, the New York Tribune, was the most consistently influential of nineteenth-century American newspapers. Indeed, this was the newspaper that engineered the unexpected and in many ways counterintuitive delivery of the Republican nomination for president, in that most critical year of 1860, to an Illinoisan who just two years earlier had lost the competition for a home-state U.S. Senate seat. The Tribune is remembered, correctly, as the great Republican paper of the day. It argued against slavery in the south. But it argued as well, with words parallel to Lincoln's in that first address to the Congress, that "our idea is that Labor needs not to combat but to command Capital."

Seven years before he and Lincoln served together in the Congress (during each man's sole term in the U.S. House) Horace Greeley-or "Friend Greeley," as Lincoln referred to the editor in their correspondence-began the Tribune with a stated purpose: "to serve the republic with an honest and fearless criticism." He succeeded, more wholly than any American editor before or after his transit of the mid-nineteenth century, in creating a newspaper that was not merely a newspaper. Greeley's nationally circulated Tribune was, as Clarence Darrow aptly remembered it, "the political and social Bible" of every reforming, radical and Republican household. The Tribune was surely that for Lincoln, whose engagement with the paper would last the better part of a quarter century and eventually extend to wrangling with Greeley about the proper moment at which to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln's involvement was not just with Greeley but with his sub-editors and writers, so much so that the first Republican president appointed one of Greeley's most radical lieutenants-the Fourier- and Proudhon-inspired socialist and longtime editor of Marx's European correspondence, Charles Dana-as his assistant secretary of war.

Greeley's newspaper was the tribune of the agitation that spawned the Republican Party and its successful presidential campaign of 1860. Lincoln would say of the editor: "every one of his words seems to weigh about a ton."

This was as Greeley, an epic figure of American journalism, a political and social reformer who reveled in his ability not merely to report upon but to bend the arc of history, intended it.

After learning the printer's trade at the Northern Star in tiny Poultney, Vermont, Greeley arrived in New York in 1831, during the period when Fanny Wright and her allies were forging explicitly socialist political parties and movements in the city. Greeley came both to make his fortune-and that he did-and to steer the political progress of a young nation. William Seward, the radical Republican whose presidential ambitions were thwarted when Greeley switched his allegiance to Lincoln, celebrated the young newspaper editor as a Whitmanesque figure: "rather unmindful of social usages, yet singularly clear, original, and decided, in his political views and theories."

Greeley was what the British refer to as a "campaigning editor." He started newspapers as platforms to promote ideas-for example, the Jeffersonian was established to advance Seward's successful Whig Party challenge to conservative Democratic governor William Marcy, a hack of the highest order who preached the patronage gospel of "to the victor belong the spoils." Two years later Greeley would edit a national newspaper, the Log Cabin, as the campaign journal of another Whig, William Henry Harrison, who would win and briefly hold the presidency.

With the Tribune, however, Greeley would no longer crusade for candidates-although he certainly had his favorites-but for a set of ideals that would come to define the Whig Party, to which he and Lincoln remained in many senses true loyalists. When the Whigs failed to effectively confront issues of slavery, urbanization and economic transition, however, the Tribune became the prime proponent of a new and more radical political constellation that took as its name the word used to describe proponents of the "constructive treason" that began with a rejection of "the divine right of kings" and with it of the favored position of the propertied classes: "Republican."

"It has been urged as an objection to the Tribune that it proposed to ‘give hospitality to every new thought.' To that profession we shall be constant, at whatever sacrifice," Greeley wrote when the paper's radicalism began to shake some political foundations in the mid-1840s. "Full of error and suffering as the world yet is, we cannot afford to reject unexamined any idea which proposes to improve the moral, intellectual, or social condition of mankind."

Greeley practiced an advocacy journalism that was not cautious about taking sides in the great debates of his day. His first editorial duty, he explained, was to keep "an ear open to the plaints of the wronged and suffering, though they can never repay advocacy, and those who mainly support newspapers will be annoyed and often exposed by it; a heart as sensitive to oppression and degradation in the next street as if they were practiced in Brazil or Japan; a pen as ready to expose and reprove the crimes whereby wealth is amassed and luxury enjoyed in our own country as if they had only been committed by Turks or Pagans in Asia some centuries ago."

That final reference to reproving "the crimes whereby wealth is amassed and luxury enjoyed" might not meet with the applause of the trickle-down economists and laissez-faire fabulists who today guide the policies of what has become of Greeley's Republican Party. But Greeley would never have recognized today's so-called Republicans as heirs to the party he and his comrades forged.

Greeley welcomed the disapproval of those who championed free markets over the interests of the working class, a class he recognized as including both the oppressed slaves of the south and the degraded industrial laborers of the north. In a memorial column that the Tribune published after his death in 1872-at the close of the editor's quixotic "Liberal Republican" presidential campaign-it was recalled of Greeley:

If there was any special class of whom this plain man was the champion, for whom he used all his skill, and his zeal, and influence, it was the class of the poor and the oppressed and the forsaken, of those who were abused and outraged by their fellow men.... [The] sober verdict of history will be that no single man did so much for the overthrow of human bondage in this land as the editor of the New York Tribune. If he did not lay his ax so unsparingly to the root of the tree as some other of the reformers, he destroyed it quite as effectually by steadily hacking away its limbs and tendrils, and ruining so its inner life. That he wished and longed for its destruction, who ever dared to doubt? That he was the enemy of every form of social wrong and iniquity, who ever doubted? You cannot imagine this man palliating or tolerating any custom or traffic which degrades or imbrutes or depraves men. Not to one, but to many, moral reforms his time and heart were given. To education, thorough and universal; to sobriety, in eating not less than in drinking; to cleanliness, with him very near to godliness; to humanity, for beasts not less than for men; to free homes for emigrants; to cordial welcome of exiles from other lands, seeking refuge on these shores; to the liberation of all oppressed and struggling peoples. When was his word of cheer and sympathy wanting? With the weak against the strong, with the abandoned ones, his heart went, and he would give to these more than justice. This made him the friend of Hungarians and Poles and Irishmen, and the defender even of the Pagans against Christians. When the weak and the needy called, he did not stop to ask whether these shared his political or his religious creed, or what his race or his party would gain in befriending them. He obeyed the Divine call, and not seldom was made half a martyr in obedience to his instinct of compassion. His fame for wisdom suffered in the promptness of his sympathetic zeal.
Greeley's sympathetic zeal was that of a distinct breed of nineteenth-century social reformer, who was not satisfied merely with the repair of the breach created when the founders of the American experiment failed to keep faith with their initial recognition of the self-evident truth "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." He was profoundly concerned, as was Lincoln, with the question of how to maintain a measure of economic equality in a time of unprecedented and overwhelming accumulation of wealth-not merely by southern planters but by northern bankers and businessmen. These concerns led him to embrace the teachings of Charles Fourier, the French utopian socialist who complained: "Once upon a time people talked about the infallibility of the pope; today it is that of the merchant which they wish to establish." In Fourier's view, the promise of equality was an idle one unless it was coupled with economic protections for the great mass of working men and women. The French socialist held:
Equality of rights is another chimera, praiseworthy when considered in the abstract and ridiculous from the standpoint of the means employed to introduce it in civilization. The first right of men is the right to work and the right to a minimum [income]. This is precisely what has gone unrecognized in all the constitutions. Their primary concern is with favored individuals who are not in need of work.
Fourier's writing was popularized in the United States by Albert Brisbane, an American who traveled to France in the 1820s, studied with the philosopher and then returned to the United States to spread the socialist gospel. He found a comrade in Greeley, who referred to Fourier's views in the Log Cabin and championed them in the Tribune. Greeley made Brisbane a columnist for the paper and, when the new journal was attacked for spreading such radical views, the editor wrote: "Do not stand there quarreling with those who have devised or adopted a scheme which you consider absurd or impracticable, but take hold and devise something better. For, be assured, friend! that this generation will not, must not pass without the discovery and adoption of some method whereby the Right to Labor and to receive and enjoy the honest reward of such labor, shall be secured to the poorest and least fortunate of our people."
In the mid-1840s, explains historian Roy Marvin Robbins, "Greeley preached a new order of society with Brisbane's socialistic ideas as its basis." Even as the utopian ideals of Fourierism proved difficult to realize in practical form-despite the best efforts of social reformers such as Brisbane and his compatriot Bronson Alcott-Greeley evolved his own advocacy and that of theTribuneto champion land reforms that combined elements of Fourier's socialism and the pioneering ideal. Greeley's famous line "Go west, young man" was the practical expression of a broader vision of distributing open and unsettled land to the poor-even if, at the same time, it shamefully disregarded the Native Americans of the western lands, who both the editor and Lincoln failed to ever fully or even adequately respect or protect.

Attacked by a rival newspaperman in James Watson Webb's Courier and Express-which journalist and historian Francis Brown describes as "a Wall Street paper" that "catered to mercantile interests, to finance, and to shipping, and editorially...voiced the conservative views of the merchant class"-on grounds that he was a "Fourierist, an Agrarian, and an Infidel," Greeley replied:

We admit and insist on the legal right of the owner of wild lands to keep them uninhabited forever, but we do not consider it morally right that he should do so when land becomes scarce and subsistence for the landless scanty and precarious...yes...something will be done, in spite of any stupid clamor that can be raised about "Infidelity" and "Agrarianism," to secure future generations against the faithful evils of Monopoly of Land by the few.
The boldness of Greeley's stances won him a good deal of personal popularity among the radical Whigs of New York and the champions of the nascent "Free Soil" movement, which Greeley urged to "secure to each and all...a really Free Soil!-especially free from the hated speculators." In an 1848 special election, he was sent to Congress as a representative from New York. Greeley served for only a few months, but he used his time in the House to propose and promote an early version of the Homestead Act. Challenged by a western conservative to explain why an urban member was so interested in freeing up rural land for settlement, Greeley countered that he "represented more landless men than any other member" of the Congress. A good line, but unlikely to please a chamber that did not share the editor's radicalism. One of his few allies was the young first-term Whig congressman from Illinois, who Greeley recalled as a comrade with whom he "agreed on the slavery issue as one which must be answered permanently in the course of a few years." The two men spoke on a daily basis during their joint tenure in the nation's capital and formed a bond that would last until Lincoln's assassination seventeen years later.
It was not mere personal acquaintance that linked Greeley and Lincoln, however. By 1848, Greeley's Tribune was already a journalistic and political phenomenon. "Acknowledged the most influential Whig editor in 1844, [Greeley] had by 1850 become the most influential anti-slavery editor-the spokesman not of Whigs merely but of a great class of Northerners who were thoroughly antagonistic to slavery," recalls Frank W. Scott in his study of nineteenth-century American newspapers. As the slavery issue came to a head, the Tribune's influence grew so that it became not just a popular newspaper in New York City but a widely circulated national journal of opinion, distinguished by what Scott characterizes as "some of the most vigorous and trenchant editorial writing America has ever known." In the early 1850s, the circulation of the Tribune's weekly national edition nearly tripled to more than 110,000 copies as it became what another historian, James Ford Rhodes, described as "pre-eminently the journal of the rural districts, [where] one copy did service for many readers. To the people in the Adirondack wilderness it was a political bible, and the well-known scarcity of Democrats there was attributed to it. Yet it was as freely read by the intelligent people living on the Western Reserve of Ohio"-not to mention in Abraham Lincoln's Illinois.

By the late 1850s, the weekly Tribune's Illinois circulation was close to 20,000, making the New York-based journal one of the midwestern state's most widely circulated newspapers. There is no debate that Lincoln was among the most avid of the Tribune's Illinois readers. His correspondence with Greeley confirms this passionate relationship with the paper, as does his more extensive correspondence with his third and last law partner, William Herndon, in which Lincoln would sometimes complain that Greeley's newspaper was not being supportive enough of his political ambitions. It was in one of these fretful notes that Lincoln first expressed the view that "every one of [Greeley's] words seems to weigh about a ton."

Lincoln did not merely consume Greeley's words, however. He devoured the whole of his weekly Tribune, as he did every other newspaper he could get his hands on. "What Lincoln really liked to read were newspapers, reading them, a friend said, ‘more than books,'" writes Lincoln biographer John C. Waugh. "Another friend said he ‘never saw a man better pleased' than when Lincoln was appointed postmaster, because he could read [newspapers from around the country] before delivering them to their subscribers."

In his period of deepest inquiry, the five years after his 1848 departure from Congress as a disappointed Whig and before his return to the political hustings as a champion of what would become the Republican Party, Lincoln devoted himself to examining, debating and ruminating on the reports in the national newspapers that were delivered to his Springfield law office-especially Greeley's Tribune. Keenly aware of the rising tide of liberal, radical and socialist reform movements in Europe, a tide that would peak-at least for a time-in the "revolutionary wave" of 1848 and its aftermath, the young congressman joined other American Whigs in following the development of that year's "Springtime of the Peoples," which saw uprisings against monarchy and entrenched economic, social and political power in Germany, France, Hungary, Denmark and other European nations. For Lincoln, however, this was not a new interest.

Long before 1848, German radicals had begun to arrive in Illinois, where they quickly entered into the legal and political circles in which Lincoln traveled. One of them, Gustav Korner, was a student revolutionary at the University of Munich who had been imprisoned by German authorities in the early 1830s for organizing illegal demonstrations. After his release, Korner returned to his hometown of Frankfurt am Main where, according to historian Raymond Lohne, "he was one of about fifty conspirators involved in an attack upon the two main city guardhouses and the arsenal at the police facility and jail. This admixture of students and soldiers had planned to seize cannon, muskets, and ammunition; free political prisoners accused of breaking press-censorship laws, and begin ringing the great Sturmglocke (storm bell) of the Dom, the signal for the people to come in from the countryside. At that point, the democratic revolution would be announced.... Unfortunately, they were walking into a trap.... Betrayed by both a spy in their midst, and the reluctance of the common people to rise, nine students were killed, twenty-four were seriously wounded, and by August 3, 1833, Gustav Körner found himself riding into downtown Belleville, Illinois."

Within a decade, Korner would pass the Illinois bar, win election to the legislature and be appointed to the state Supreme Court. Korner and Lincoln formed an alliance that would become so close that the student revolutionary from Frankfurt would eventually be one of seven personal delegates-at-large named by Lincoln to serve at the critical Republican State Convention in May 1860, which propelled the Springfield lawyer into that year's presidential race. Through Korner, Lincoln met and befriended many of the German radicals who, after the failure of the 1848 revolution, fled to Illinois and neighboring Wisconsin. Along with Korner on Lincoln's list of personal delegates-at-large to the 1860 convention was Friedrich Karl Franz Hecker, a lawyer from Mannheim who had served as a liberal legislator in the lower chamber of the Baden State Assembly before leading an April 1848 uprising in the region-an uprising cheered on by the newspaper Marx briefly edited during that turbulent period, Neue Rheinische Zeitung-Organ der Demokratie.

Thwarted by military forces loyal to the old order, Hecker fled first to Switzerland and then to Illinois, where he would join Lincoln in forging the new Republican Party and become a key speaker on his American ally's behalf in the 1858 Senate race that is remembered for the Lincoln-Douglas debates. With a commission from Lincoln, Hecker served as a brigade commander in the Union Army during the Civil War, as did a number of other '48ers.

The failure of the 1848 revolts, and the brutal crackdowns that followed, led many leading European radicals to take refuge in the United States, and Lincoln's circle of supporters would eventually include some of Karl Marx's closest associates and intellectual sparring partners, including Joseph Weydemeyer and August Willich. Weydemeyer, who maintained a regular correspondence with Marx and Engels, soon formed a national network of Kommunisten Klubs to promote what the New York Times decried as "Red Republicanism." Weydemeyer then allied with the new Republican Party and the presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln, who would at the start of the Civil War appoint the former Prussian military officer as a technical aide on the staff of General John C. Fremont-the 1856 Republican presidential nominee who became the commander of the army's Department of the West. Later, Lincoln issued Weydemeyer a commission as a colonel of the Forty-First Infantry Missouri Volunteers, charging the German Marxist with the defense of St. Louis. Willich, known as "the Reddest of the Reds," was a leader of the left faction of the German Communist League, which decried Marx's relative caution when it came to revolutionary agitation. As a key commander of the radical Free Corps in the Baden-Palatinate uprising of 1849, Willich chose as his aide-de-camp a young Friedrich Engels. Forced to flee to the United States after the defeat of the uprising, Willich decamped to Cincinnati, where he became editor of the socialist Republikaner newspaper and backed the candidacies of Fremont in 1856 and Lincoln in 1860. At the outset of the Civil War, Willich recruited a regiment of German immigrants and became its first lieutenant, quickly rising to the rank of brigadier general and making a name for himself by having military bands play revolutionary songs such as the "Arbiter [Workers'] Marseillaise"-"A reveille for the new revolution! The new revolution!"

Lincoln did not merely invite the '48ers to join his campaigns, he became highly engaged with their causes. As Lohne notes, "Lincoln was paying attention to these revolutionaries." In his hometown of Springfield, the former congressman rallied support for revolutionary movements in Europe, particularly the Hungarian revolt of Lajos Kossuth. Lincoln's name led the list of signatories on calls for public meetings to discuss the Hungarian revolt that appeared in the Illinois State Register and the Illinois Journal in January 1852. A week later, Lincoln helped to pen a resolution declaring that "we, the American people, cannot remain silent" about "the right of any people, sufficiently numerous for national independence, to throw off, to revolutionize, their existing form of government, and to establish such other in its stead as they may choose."

Lincoln's resolution argued:

That the sympathies of this country, and the benefits of its position, should be exerted in favor of the people of every nation struggling to be free; and whilst we meet to do honor to Kossuth and Hungary, we should not fail to pour out the tribute of our praise and approbation to the patriotic efforts of the Irish, the Germans and the French, who have unsuccessfully fought to establish in their several governments the supremacy of the people.
The proclamation even took a shot at the British Empire, resolving:
That there is nothing in the past history of the British government, or in its present expressed policy, to encourage the belief that she will aid, in any manner, in the delivery of continental Europe from the yoke of despotism; and that her treatment of Ireland, of O'Brien, Mitchell, and other worthy patriots, forces the conclusion that she will join her efforts to the despots of Europe in suppressing every effort of the people to establish free governments, based upon the principles of true religious and civil liberty.
What set Lincoln and his compatriots off? There's no mystery. The Illinois agitators had merely to open their weekly editions of Greeley's Tribune, which was declaring at the time that "of the many popular leaders who were upheaved by the great convulsions of 1848...the world has already definitely assigned the first rank to Louis Kossuth, advocate, deputy, finance minister, and finally governor of Hungary." The great historian of the Tribune's ideological and political battles, Adam Tuchinsky, notes: "Louis Kossuth and the Central European national liberation movements remained familiar subjects in the pages of the paper"-so much so that conservative critics of the gazette objected to its "Kossuthism, Socialism, Abolitionism and forty other isms."
Greeley believed that 1848's European revolts and their aftermath revealed "boundless vistas" along with the outlines of the "uprising which must come." Predictably, his paper covered the revolutionary ferment of Europe with an intensity that made it virtually a local story for radicals in places like Springfield, Illinois. They pored over their copies of theTribunefor the latest from the front in what the paper's editor portrayed as a global struggle for "the larger liberty" of "the Rights and Interests of Labor, the Reorganization of Industry, the Elevation of the Working-Men, the Reconstruction of the Social Fabric."

The Tribune did not urge a "to-the-barricades" moment for the United States. Greeley and most of his editors still believed in the prospect of reform, although their frustration with the spread of the evil they referred to as "the slave power" would at times cause the paper's proprietor to ponder whether "revolution is the only resource left." Ultimately, however, what most excited Greeley and his readers about the stirrings of 1848 were the new and radical ideas that had emerged, and the mingling of those ideas with action that might lead to their implementation.

The Tribune's European correspondent in the early stages of the period of uprisings, Henry Bornstein, admitted in his columns that he was "giddy" at the developments in France, Germany and other countries. "Every day comes fresh news, each thing more astonishing than the next," wrote Bornstein, who spiced his correspondence with exclamations such as: "Hurrah! How gaily it burns!" The Tribune was not just publishing news, Greeley announced, it wanted analysis, "to increase the aggregate of information afforded by our columns." Bornstein agreed, arguing: "Correspondents now have to talk about other topics besides political events because these topics are outdated. Now they have to provide the ‘big picture' about what is going on in Europe. Explain the reason for events to supplement the dry telegraph reports."

Correspondent Bornstein, notes Tuchinsky, was "the paper's link to Karl Marx and a more class-conscious radicalism that would emerge in Europe during the 1848 revolutions and in their aftermath."

But Bornstein's "big picture" reporting style-which he would eventually bring to the United States as an astute observer of the Civil War-was only the start of the Tribune's emergence as the primary source of detailed reporting on international events and ideas that would reshape the way American radicals and reformers thought about their own struggles, against slavery in particular and economic and social injustice in general. No longer satisfied with the pastoral reforms of Fourier and the romantic French communalists, the Tribune now considered more radical responses.

"Ultimately, 1848 would unearth an immense variety of French and European radical discourse; as a result, the Tribune diversified its coverage of socialist ideas," explains Tuchinsky. "But more than that, socialism itself became not simply a mode of reform but also, significantly, of explanation, a way to interpret events. Fourierism was a sectarian movement, and it failed, but along with the revolution it cleared the way for a new language and a new political mentality through which American progressive intellectuals perceived and critiqued their social and political world."

To understand and interpret that new language, Greeley dispatched a recent hire, Charles Dana, to Paris. An idealistic polymath, Dana had for several years in the mid-1840s been a central player in the Brook Farm Association for Industry and Education in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. A utopian experiment in communal living that sought to implement Fourier's ideals, Brook Farm counted among its residents, investors, supporters and allies Greeley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote of the prospect that residents might be "Fourierized or Christianized or humanized," with the observation that "in a day of small, sour, and fierce schemes, one is admonished and cheered by a project of such friendly aims, and of such bold and generous proportion; there is an intellectual courage and strength in it, which is superior and commanding: it certifies the presence of so much truth in the theory, and in so far is destined to be fact."

Dana sought to spread the "build-heaven-on-earth" gospel in the Harbinger, a journal edited by Brook Farm founder (and future Tribune literary editor) George Ripley, where the younger man's writing skills came to Greeley's attention. Impressed with the twenty-nine-year-old wordsmith's intellect and style-and also, perhaps, by the fact that the Harbinger hailed the "indomitable Tribune" as the nation's great newspaper-Greeley began grooming Dana to be the Tribune's managing editor. But the protégé had grander goals. "Dana longed to travel to Europe. More than that, like most members of the Tribune's socialist circle, Dana viewed the European revolutions as a historical turning point and he was anxious to witness them firsthand," observes Tuchinsky. In particular, he was looking for new notions that might propel the socialist discourse beyond the romantic "associationist" thinking of Fourier's followers. Along with Greeley, Dana had just a few years earlier hailed Fourier's ideas as the "last hope of Divine Providence" on earth; now, however, he was anticipating the moment when reformers and radicals would "yield to necessity" and recognize that the "harmonious" agrarian ideal must give way to the barn-burner battle cry of "Free soil, free labor, free speech, free men."

Leaving New York in June 1848, Dana arrived in France just in time to race into the thick of the Parisian turmoil. He penned an immediate report that declared he was witnessing "a glorious chance to do something immortal." While the calculus of how the immortal leap might be made remained indefinite, the ideological impulse was, to Dana's view, certain. "Socialism is thus not conquered nor obscured in France by [the turmoil] but strengthened. It is no longer Fourierism, nor Communism, nor this nor that particular system which occupies the public mind of France, but it is the general idea of Social Rights and Social Reorganization. Everyone now is more or less a Socialist."

Dana's small-"c" catholic approach to the ideological divisions on the ground in Europe allowed him to sample freely from the different streams, to consult broadly and to keep American readers abreast of what seemed to the young writer to be a continent-wide struggle to throw off "the royalty of money...the aristocracy of capital." Still clinging to at least some of his Fourierist ideals, Dana inclined toward the libertarian socialist preachments of the French philosopher and parliamentarian Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who argued for the establishment of workingmen's associations around a "revolutionary program" of "No more governments, no more conquests, no more international police, no more commercial privileges, no more colonial exclusions, no more control of one people by another, one State by another, no more strategic lines, no more fortresses...." In particular, Dana was inspired to turn the Tribune, which had traditionally been friendly toward trade unionism, into an even more explicit advocate for organized labor, arguing editorially that: "we see no other mode in which Labor can protect itself against the overwhelming power of Capital than by this very method of Combination." Lincoln, the voracious Tribune reader, would frequently express such sympathies, not merely in debates and State of the Union addresses but in direct communications to labor groups. To the New York Workingmen's Association, the sitting president would in 1864 observe: "The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds."

But even as he was busy popularizing Proudhonist cures for the ailments of capital-especially the project of creating a popular bank ("banque du peuple") with the purpose of freeing up credit for workers and farmers-Dana was searching for new correspondents for Greeley's paper. In particular, he wanted to identify radical thinkers who could interpret for American readers not just the transitory developments in Germany, France, Holland or Hungary but also the social, economic and political currents that might resolve the great challenge that theTribuneoutlined in an editorial of the era: "[While] no theorist has yet truly solved the great problem of the harmonious and beneficent combination of Labor, Skill and Capital, it is none the less palpable that the problem must be solved, and that Society fearfully suffers while awaiting the solution."

In this search for "alternative strains of socialist thought," Dana made his way to the city of Cologne, where a friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, was working with a radical paper that intrigued the American visitor. The editor of the paper had recently coauthored a much-circulated German-language pamphlet, Das Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, which argued: "The essential condition for the existence and rule of the bourgeois class is the accumulation of wealth in private hands, the formation and increase of capital; the essential condition of capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests entirely on the competition among the workers." To upset that condition, the writers had declared in February of 1848 for a "Communistic revolution" with the words: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!"

The pamphlet would be translated two years later into English as The Communist Manifesto. The editor in question was, of course, Karl Marx, with whom Dana spent a midsummer day in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung-Organ der Demokratie office. Neither Dana nor Marx recorded the details of the meeting, although we are afforded a sense of the man the American writer encountered from a mutual acquaintance, Carl Schurz, the German editor and revolutionary who would flee to Wisconsin, help to form the Republican Party and return to Europe in 1861 as Abraham Lincoln's ambassador to Spain. Visiting Marx during the same long, hot summer of 1848, Schurz observed "the recognized head of the advanced socialistic school. The somewhat thickset man, with his broad forehead, his very black hair and beard and his dark sparkling eyes. I have never seen a man whose bearing was so provoking and intolerable. To no opinion which differed from his, he accorded the honor of even a condescending consideration. Everyone who contradicted him he treated with abject contempt; every argument that he did not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives of him who had advanced it. I remember most distinctly the cutting disdain with which he pronounced the word ‘bourgeois.'" Somehow, Dana and Marx connected. Indeed, they hit it off so famously that Dana would, according to Marx's biographer Francis Wheen, provide the philosopher with "the closest thing he ever had to a steady job."

That job was as one of the most frequently published correspondents for the New York Tribune, with which Dana served a dozen years as managing editor. After Dana returned to New York to take up his new duties, he contacted Marx in London, where he had been forced to flee after German authorities shuttered the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, with an invitation to begin writing for the Tribune. And write Marx did. As Wheen notes, "The Tribune was by far the largest publisher of Marx's (and to a lesser extent, Engels's) work.... The Tribune articles take up nearly seven volumes of the fifty-volume collected works of Marx and Engels-more than Capital, more than any work published by Marx, alive or posthumously, in book form." The "singular collaboration" between Greeley's paper and Marx continued from the early 1850s until the time of Dana's departure to join Lincoln's White House staff. "During this period," according to historian William Harlan Hale's masterly examination of the relationship, "Europe's extremest radical, proscribed by the Prussian police and watched over by its agents abroad as a potential assassin of kings, sent in well over 500 separate contributions to the great New York family newspaper dedicated to the support of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, temperance, dietary reform, Going West, and, ultimately, Abraham Lincoln." The official count of articles published by the Tribune under Marx's byline was 350, while Engels wrote 125 and the duo produced 12 together. But, as the philosopher himself noted, many more articles ended up running as the official line of the Tribune. "Of late, the Tribune has again been appropriating all my articles as leaders [unsigned editorials]," Marx complained in 1854.

Even if Marx did not always get the credit he thought he deserved (and what ink-stained wretch does?), Dana was unstinting in his praise. "It may perhaps give you pleasure to know that [the articles] are read with satisfaction by a considerable number of persons and are widely reproduced," the editor wrote Marx, describing the correspondent as "not only one of the most highly valued, but one of the best-paid contributors attached to the newspaper."

Greeley and Dana were so excited about Marx's contributions, in fact, that they showcased the German's first article in the paper's newly expanded Saturday edition on October 25, 1851. An editorial announced that among the "articles from...foreign contributors that are especially worthy of attention [was a rumination] upon Germany by one of the clearest and most vigorous writers that country has produced-no matter what may be the judgment of the critical upon his public opinions in the sphere of political and social philosophy."

The "worthy" article, "Revolution and Counter-Revolution," appeared over the byline "Karl Marx" (even though it was actually a collaboration written largely by Engels). The language was, well, Marxist:

The first act of the revolutionary drama on the continent of Europe has closed. The "powers that were" before the hurricane of 1848 are again the "powers that be," and the more or less popular rulers of a day, provisional governors, triumvirs, dictators with their tail of representatives, civil commissioners, military commissioners, prefects, judges, generals, officers, and soldiers, are thrown upon foreign shores, and "transported beyond the seas" to England or America, there to form new governments in partibus infidelium, European committees, central committees, national committees, and to announce their advent with proclamations quite as solemn as those of any less imaginary potentates. A more signal defeat than that undergone by the continental revolutionary party-or rather parties-upon all points of the line of battle, cannot be imagined. But what of that? Has not the struggle of the British middle classes for their social and political supremacy embraced forty-eight, that of the French middle classes forty years of unexampled struggles? And was their triumph ever nearer than at the very moment when restored monarchy thought itself more firmly settled than ever? The times of that superstition which attributed revolutions to the ill-will of a few agitators have long passed away. Everyone knows nowadays that wherever there is a revolutionary convulsion, there must be some social want in the background, which is prevented, by outworn institutions, from satisfying itself. The want may not yet be felt as strongly, as generally, as might ensure immediate success; but every attempt at forcible repression will only bring it forth stronger and stronger, until it bursts its fetters. If, then, we have been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the beginning. And, fortunately, the probably very short interval of rest which is allowed us between the close of the first and the beginning of the second act of the movement, gives us time for a very necessary piece of work: the study of the causes that necessitated both the late outbreak and its defeat; causes that are not to be sought for in the accidental efforts, talents, faults, errors, or treacheries of some of the leaders, but in the general social state and conditions of existence of each of the convulsed nations.
It happened that Marx's article appeared at a time of "beginning again from the beginning" for a great many American radicals. The Whig Party, with which Greeley, Lincoln and compatriots of like mind had aligned themselves, was collapsing under the weight of its internal divisions between those who believed in aggressively confronting the spread of the "slave power" and more cautious reformers. Lincoln, who with Greeley had left the Congress in 1849, was practicing law in Springfield and on "the circuit" of county courthouses in Illinois. But he had not left politics behind. William Herndon observed years later that his law partner was in the early years of the 1850s "like a sleeping lion...waiting for the people to call." Biographer John Waugh writes of a future president who "with this tightly disciplined, deeply honed mind he read what he really considered important-newspapers. Now, on the circuit, out of politics, he was reading newspapers more than anything else, reading them aloud, carefully following the rise and drift of political sentiment over the divisive issue of slavery-reading them more closely, [fellow lawyer] Henry Whitney thought, than anybody he knew."
Slavery was an omnipresent issue, but surely not the only issue for Lincoln, whose circle of close compatriots now included a number of the radical '48ers who had turned Wisconsin, Illinois and Missouri into new hubs of agitation. Lincoln watched international developments with frustration following the setbacks of the late 1840s and early 1850s, bemoaning in a letter to Herndon his sense that "the world is dead to hope, deaf to its own death struggle made known by a universal cry. What is to be done? Is anything to be done? Who can do anything and how can it be done? Did you ever think on these things?"

While studies of Lincoln place appropriate focus on his domestic engagements, there has been far too little attention paid to his global interests, especially during the period "in the wilderness" between the end of his congressional term and his return to the political stage. Yet, there can be no doubt that the future president was conscious of and highly engaged with developments in foreign lands-thanks no doubt to his close reading of the Tribune and its most prominent European correspondent-or that the future president made connections between what he read of distant divisions and what he thought about developments at home. Eulogizing his political hero Henry Clay in 1852, Lincoln would make frequent reference to Clay's international interests and involvements, declaring: "Mr. Clay's efforts in behalf of the South Americans, and afterwards, in behalf of the Greeks, in the times of their respective struggles for civil liberty are among the finest on record, upon the noblest of all themes; and bear ample corroboration of what I have said was his ruling passion-a love of liberty and right, unselfishly, and for their own sakes." Lincoln invoked the struggles of the European revolutionaries and denounced "oppression of any of its forms...crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings." He dismissed the rhetoric of his arch-rival, Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, finding it "as bombastic and hollow as Napoleon's bulletins sent back from his campaign in Russia." And when Douglas compromised on the issue of allowing the spread of slavery to new territories, he declared: "Equality in society alike beats inequality, whether the latter be of the British aristocratic sort or of the domestic slavery sort."

Lincoln was arguably at his most radical when he penned those words in 1854. The man whose law partner described him as "always calculating, and always planning" would grow more circumspect as he proceeded from the political backwater of Springfield to the podium at New York's Cooper Union and the prospect of the presidency. In the immediate aftermath of Douglas's betrayal, however, Lincoln's language bore the distinct accent of Greeley's Tribune and its most radical writers.

When Lincoln emerged in 1854 from his self-imposed political exile, it was with the intention of doing electoral battle not just with slavery but with those who stood in the way of the free soil and free labor movements the Tribune had popularized. "Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope," declared the future president in one of his frequent linkages of ideological mantras. As he returned to politics, initially as a campaigner for old Whigs and new Republicans, and then as a contender in his own right for the Senate, Lincoln echoed the ideals and language of the era's fresh and determined radicalism. This is not to say that he embraced all the views of the Tribune's European correspondent; he was never so bold as to argue, in the way that Marx would in Capital-a book that borrowed liberally from his writings for the Tribune-that "in the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded."

But, now "primed" by what his biographer Waugh describes as "all of his newspaper reading...all of his study and thinking and analyzing for all those five cheerless politically deprived years," Lincoln recognized that the most radical promise of America's founding-that "all men are created equal"-was being destroyed in a manner that would thwart progress not merely for Black slaves, but for white workers and farmers who sought their own freedoms. In his remarkable letter of August 15, 1855, to former Kentucky congressman George Robertson, a compatriot of Henry Clay and champion of the old-school Whig hope that slavery would gradually be abandoned, the forty-six-year-old Illinoisan would bemoan the dying of the Founders' faith. Recalling an address delivered decades earlier by Robertson, Lincoln wrote:

You are not a friend of slavery in the abstract. In that speech you spoke of "the peaceful extinction of slavery" and used other expressions indicating your belief that the thing was, at some time, to have an end[.] Since then we have had thirty-six years of experience; and this experience has demonstrated, I think, that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us. The signal failure of Henry Clay, and other good and great men, in 1849, to effect any thing in favor of gradual emancipation in Kentucky, together with a thousand other signs, extinguishes that hope utterly. On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that "all men are created equal" a self-evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim "a self-evident lie." The fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day-for burning fire-crackers!!!
That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery, has itself become extinct, with the occasion, and the men of the Revolution. Under the impulse of that occasion, nearly half the states adopted systems of emancipation at once; and it is a significant fact, that not a single state has done the like since. So far as peaceful, voluntary emancipation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave in America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of a free mind, is now as fixed, and hopeless of change for the better, as that of the lost souls of the finally impenitent. The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.

The letter to Robertson was composed during a period in which Lincoln was arguing to his law partner, William Herndon, that "the day of compromise has passed. These two great ideas (slavery and freedom) have been kept apart only by artful means. They are like two wild beasts in sight of each other, but chained and apart. Some day these deadly antagonists will one of the other break their bonds, and then the question will be settled." What did Lincoln mean when he spoke of freedom as a great idea that stood in conflict with slavery? Was he merely addressing the condition of those physically enslaved by the southern plantation owners-and the political and legal structures that supported them? Or was he speaking of a broader freedom? The answer is found in the records of Lincoln's public addresses from the time.
While much is made of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas first contended in a series of dialogues prior to the election of 1854, which saw Lincoln return to the campaign trail with an energy and earnestness not seen since he made his House race eight years earlier. In the months after Douglas reopened the slavery question with his advocacy of the hated Kansas-Nebraska Act, the sitting senator and Lincoln, the former congressman who suddenly wanted very much to be a senator, clashed rhetorically in cities up and down Illinois. The speeches that Lincoln delivered that fall-several lasting more than three hours-wrestled mightily with the meaning of words such as "equality," "liberty" and "freedom." At Peoria, he tossed his jacket aside on an uncommonly hot October day and delivered an address that Lincoln historian Lewis Lehrman would describe as "a rhetorical and literary masterpiece" that "dramatically altered the political career of the speaker and, as a result, the history of America.'"

A young journalist who covered the session in Peoria recalled both the words and the remarkable passion with which they were uttered. "Progressing with his theme, his words began to come faster and his face to light up with the rays of genius and his body to move in unison with his thoughts," wrote Horace White, the city editor of the Chicago Daily Journal. "His gestures were made with his body and head rather than with his arms. His speaking went to the heart because it came from the heart. I have heard celebrated orators who could start thunders of applause without changing any man's opinion. Mr. Lincoln's eloquence was of the higher type, which produced conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker himself. His listeners felt that he believed every word he said, and that, like Martin Luther, he would go to the stake rather than abate one jot or title of it. In such transfigured moments as these he was the type of the ancient Hebrew prophet as I learned that character at Sunday-school in my childhood."

While Lincoln on that day may have been of "the type of the ancient Hebrew prophet," the "biblical" text to which he turned was not the Old Testament, nor the New. He was relying instead on Euclid's Elements, the philosophical study the former congressman had read and reread during his wilderness years, honing the logical constructs that would less than a decade later prepare him to deliver his best remembered address on a blood-soaked battlefield where the Army of the Potomac and the army of Northern Virginia had over the course of three days sacrificed a combined 7,500 soldiers. As he would in those "few appropriate remarks" at Gettysburg about a country "dedicated to the proposition that ‘all men are created equal,'" Lincoln at Peoria summoned ancient algorithms-and more contemporary rhetorical flourishes-to identify the greatest common divisor of a young republic. It was in Jefferson's promise of a great equality that the debater of 1854 and the president of 1863 would find his moral grounding.

Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the grave, we have been giving up the OLD for the NEW faith. Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a "sacred right of self-government." These principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and Mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other. When Pettit, in connection with his support of the Nebraska bill, called the Declaration of Independence "a self-evident lie" he only did what consistency and candor require all other Nebraska men to do. Of the forty-odd Nebraska Senators who sat present and heard him, no one rebuked him. Nor am I apprized that any Nebraska newspaper, or any Nebraska orator, in the whole nation, has ever yet rebuked him. If this had been said among Marion's men, Southerners though they were, what would have become of the man who said it? If this had been said to the men who captured Andre, the man who said it, would probably have been hung sooner than Andre was. If it had been said in old Independence Hall, seventy-eight years ago, the very doorkeeper would have throttled the man, and thrust him into the street.
Let no one be deceived. The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter.

Fellow countrymen-Americans south, as well as north, shall we make no effort to arrest this? Already the liberal party throughout the world, express the apprehension "that the one retrograde institution in America, is undermining the principles of progress, and fatally violating the noblest political system the world ever saw." This is not the taunt of enemies, but the warning of friends. Is it quite safe to disregard it-to despise it? Is there no danger to liberty itself, in discarding the earliest practice, and first precept of our ancient faith? In our greedy chase to make profit of the negro, let us beware, lest we "cancel and tear to pieces" even the white man's charter of freedom.

Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of "moral right," back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of "necessity." Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south-let all Americans-let all lovers of liberty everywhere-join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.

While Lincoln may have recognized a need to "repurify," he was not himself ideologically or morally pure. The man who as president would stand justifiably accused of mangling civil liberties, disregarding the aspirations and basic humanity of Native Americans and willingly sacrificing principle on the alter of political expediency had learned too well from his fellow Whig Henry Clay, "the great compromiser." Lincoln was an imperfect foe of slavery, as even his most generous biographers now acknowledge. Yet, it is reasonable to suggest that the Lincoln of 1854 was in the process of becoming the president who would-pressured by Greeley-finally sign an Emancipation Proclamation. What he was coming to understand, intellectually and emotionally, was that slavery was an oppression of a kind with other oppressions. And he was not on the side of the oppressors. He was on the side of freedom-not merely as a moral or social construct, but as an economic one.
This was a concept that was hardwired into the Republican Party from the moment of its founding-by followers of Fourier's utopian socialist vision, by German '48ers and especially by the muscular veteran campaigner for radical land reform Alvan Bovay. It was an idea that Lincoln emphasized as he campaigned in 1856 for "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men and Fremont." Slavery was an issue that year, and Frederick Douglass was surely right when he argued that voting Republican was the best way to strike "the severest, deadliest blow upon Slavery that can be given at this particular time." But slavery was not the only issue, as a southern Illinois newspaper, the Belleville Weekly Advocate, noted after Lincoln stumped across the region on behalf of the ticket of General John C. Fremont and former New Jersey senator William Dayton (who had defeated Lincoln for the new party's vice-presidential nomination in a 253 to 110 vote at the first Republican National Convention that summer in Philadelphia). "He vindicated the cause of free vlabor, ‘that national capital,' in the language of Col. FREMONT, ‘which constitutes the real wealth of this great country, and creates that intelligent power in the masses alone to be relied on as the bulwark of free institutions.' He showed the tendency and aim of the Sham Democracy to degrade labor to subvert the true ends of Government and build up Aristocracy, Despotism and Slavery."

Two years later, on October 15, 1858, in the last of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the Republican candidate would frame the issues in the boldest possible terms, linking physical and economic slavery-"It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself "-as he addressed a crowd of 5,000 that had gathered in front of the Alton, Illinois, city hall. "That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles-right and wrong- throughout the world," Lincoln thundered. "They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle."

As he prepared for the 1860 presidential race, Lincoln would align with those who "hold that labor is the superior-greatly the superior-of capital." That line, from one of Lincoln's most striking speeches of the period, his September 30, 1859, address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, was reprised with minor variations throughout the difficult campaign for the Republican nomination. It was a nomination that saw Lincoln prevail with strong support from Greeley, who argued that the Illinoisan's determination to mingle free soil and free labor messages with his condemnations of "the Slave Power" established the right mix for a winning campaign in a country that the editor believed "will only swallow a little Anti-Slavery in a great deal of sweetening." Whether it was Greeley's calculus, the fact of a divided opposition, Lincoln's oratory or Carl Schurz's successful rallying of German-American '48ers and their immigrant communities to fight the "slaveholding capitalists" on behalf of a "society, where by popular education and continual change of condition, the dividing lines between the ranks and classes are almost obliterated"-or, as is always the case in politics, by a proper mingling of all the messages-the Republicans won the opportunity to preside over the conflict.

"The Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the slaveholders at their root," argued Marx in one of his many articles celebrating the rise of the new radical party in the United States-just as he decried "the connivance of the Northern Democrats" (or, as he referred to them, "Slavocrats") with "the Southern Slavocracy." The columnist, often displaying enthusiasms as idealistic as the Republican campaigners of Vermont or Wisconsin, argued that the party's rapid rise offered "many palpable proofs that the North had accumulated sufficient energies to rectify the aberrations which United States history, under the slaveholders' pressure, had undergone for half a century, and to make it return to the true principles of its development." Lincoln's victory was in Marx's view a signal that the workers of the north would not "submit any longer to an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders." That would not sit well with the south, and Greeley's European correspondent explained to readers of the Tribune what they well knew to be the next stage in the history of the United States: "The Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to open struggle between North and South."

The Civil War defined Lincoln's tenure in the White House. The nation's first Republican president was more than a mere warrior, however. He sought, sincerely if not always successfully, to strike the difficult balance between the duties of a commander in chief and a domestic policy maker, a balance he recognized in that first State of the Union address. Just as there were triumphs on the battlefield, there were triumphs in the economic debates that Lincoln had outlined. Chief among these was the enactment of the Homestead Act of 1862, a soft version of the land reforms proposed by Paine-influenced agrarian socialists and social democrats of varying stripes-led by George Henry Evans, who suggested the movement be dubbed "Republican" as early as the mid-1840s, and Evans's aide, Bovay, who would apply the name a decade later when he called the party into being at Ripon, Wisconsin. The act, which promised "land for the landless," allowed any adult citizen (or anyone who had applied for citizenship) to claim a 160-acre parcel of land in the public domain. Greeley hailed it as "one of the most vital reforms ever attempted" and predicted it would usher in a postwar era of economic equity characterized by "Peace, Prosperity and Progress."

Even as they agreed on homesteading, Greeley and Lincoln wrangled over the timing and scope of an emancipation proclamation. The editor joined Frederick Douglass in demanding that the president take steps to make the Civil War not merely a struggle to preserve the Union, but "an Abolition war." Even as Greeley and Lincoln exchanged sometimes pointed letters, the Tribune's longtime managing editor Charles Dana was now working for Lincoln. Officially assigned to the War Department-where he would eventually serve as assistant secretary-Dana's real role was as an aide and adviser to the president on questions of what the former newspaperman described as the "judicious, humane, and wise uses of executive authority." That Lincoln spent much of his presidency reading dispatches from and welcoming the counsel of Marx's longtime editor-like the fact that he awarded military commissions to the numerous comrades of the author of The Communist Manifesto who had come to the United States as political refugees following the failed European revolutions of 1848-is a shard of history rarely seen in the hagiographic accounts that produce a sanitized version of the sixteenth president's story. In the years following Lincoln's death, his law partner and political comrade, William Herndon, complained that Lincoln's official biographers were already attempting "to make the story with the classes as against the masses," an approach that he suggested "will result in delineating the real Lincoln about as well as does a wax figure in the museum."

The real Lincoln was more of a Jeffersonian, and especially a Paineite, than an orthodox Marxist. The president rejected the idea of "a law to prevent a man from getting rich" as an impractical plan that would "do more harm than good." He expected that, while labor was "superior" to capital, there "probably always will be a relation between labor and capital." But if he was something less than a Marxist, Lincoln was also something less than a laissez-faire capitalist-indeed, quite a bit less. Even as he accepted a relationship between capital and labor, he expounded on the "error" of "assuming that the whole labor of the world exists within that relation."

To the extent that sides were to be taken, Lincoln was on the side of labor. He urged working men to "combine" and organize labor unions-"uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds." He wanted "free labor" to be able to make demands on capital, without apology or compromise. He proposed this, not as a young man in a "radical phase," but as the president of the United States. And he said as much when leaders of the New York Workingmen's Democratic-Republican Association arrived at the White House in March 1864, to inform the president that they had elected him as an honorary member of their organization. Lincoln "gratefully accepted" the membership, read the attending paperwork and then responded appreciatively to his visitors: "You comprehend, as your address shows, that the existing rebellion means more, and tends to more, than the perpetuation of African Slavery-that it is, in fact, a war upon the rights of all working people. Partly to show that this view has not escaped my attention, and partly that I cannot better express myself, I read a passage from the Message to Congress in December 1861."

Having recalled his declarations about the superiority of labor, Lincoln spent a good deal more time with the Workingmen, despite a busy schedule that placed on his shoulders all the weight of decisions regarding the war and an impending re-election campaign. The campaign would see Lincoln's supporters distribute handbills in working-class wards of New York and other cities, arguing that the war was a fight not just to free slaves in the south but to free workers in the north from "Slave Wages." The most ardent abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass, had always reasoned that: "Liberty to the slave is peace, honor, and prosperity to the country." But now this message was becoming central to the appeal of Lincoln's campaign to voters in the swing states that would decide whether the president could see the war through to "an Abolition peace" characterized by "liberty for all, chains for none." Emancipation, argued Lincoln's supporters, would allow African Americans in the south to "demand wages that would allow them to live in a decent manner, and therefore would help the poor white man to put up the price of labor instead of putting it down as [slavery does] now."

"Let the workingman think of this and go to the polls and vote for Abraham Lincoln, who is the true democratic candidate, and not the representative of the English Aristocracy, or their form of government, to be rid of which so many have left their native shores, and which form the leaders of the Rebellion are in favor of, in evidence of which we have the fact that in many of the Southern States no people can hold office but a property holder..." went one leaflet's class-based appeal, which was critical to building the majority that would allow Lincoln to carry New York and retain the presidency with a decisive national landslide.

From afar, Marx (who corresponded with Dana and other American compatriots during and after the war) cheered on the campaign, writing to Engels in September 1864 with considerable enthusiasm: "Should Lincoln succeed this time-as is highly probable-it will be on a far more radical platform and in completely changed circumstances."

Marx and Engels had been busy in the fall of 1864 with the work of organizing the International Workingmen's Association-the "First International" of the communist movement and its allies on the left. At the meeting on November 19 of the International's general council in London, Marx presented a letter of congratulation to Lincoln, which the council endorsed. It read:

Sir: We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.
From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counter-revolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution," and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution," indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor," and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice"-then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the pro-slavery intervention of their betters-and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The letter was duly delivered to Charles Francis Adams, Sr., the grandson of John and son of John Quincy, who had since the beginning of the war served in the delicate capacity of Lincoln's ambassador to the Court of St. James. Adams was well acquainted with Marx. A Greeley man, who would campaign for the vice presidency in 1872 on a "Liberal Republican" ticket led by the editor, he had been the subject of glowing accounts by Marx in theTribunesince his arrival in London in 1861. His own son and private secretary, Henry, after attending "a democratic and socialistic meeting" organized by Marx and Engels, had reported approvingly to Washington that the speakers emphasized "that their interests and those of the American Union were one, that the success of free institutions in America was a political question of deep consequence in England and that they would not tolerate any interference unfavorable to the north." Marx, Engels and their comrades suggested the great-grandson of one American president and the grandson of another were among the best friends that Lincoln and the Union cause had in London.
The senior Adams dispatched the letter from Marx and the leaders of the First International in a packet of diplomatic correspondence that was delivered to the State Department in Washington. Secretary of State William Seward promptly replied that "these interesting papers have been submitted to the president." Seward then communicated Lincoln's response, which Adams in turn delivered to Marx and his comrades:

"I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him," began Adams. He went on:

So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.
The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.

Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.

Marx was thrilled by "the fact that Lincoln answered us so courteously," as he was with the rejection of "reactionary" policies and the expression of solidarity with "the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world." No fool, the philosopher recognized, as he wrote during the war, that "Lincoln's principal political actions contain much that is aesthetically repulsive, logically inadequate, farcical in form and politically, contradictory." He did not imagine the president as a revolutionary, let alone a likely recruit to the International. Yet he was inclined to believe, based on his many years of following and commenting upon the economic and political struggles of the United States, that the American erred to the left, and he was certain that "Lincoln's place in the history of the United States and of mankind will, nevertheless, be next to that of Washington!" As such, the organizer in him delighted in the broad reporting of the exchange between the International and the Lincoln White House, which was featured news in the Times of London, along with other British and American papers. "The difference between Lincoln's answer to us and to the bourgeoisie [anti-slavery groups that had also written the president] has created such a sensation here that the West End ‘clubs' are shaking their heads at it," Marx informed Engels. "You can understand how gratifying that has been for our people."
In the decades following Lincoln's assassination, the story of his exchange with the First International was well known and often recounted. Eugene Victor Debs would stop his 1908 presidential campaign train-"The Red Special"-in Springfield to deliver a celebratory address at Lincoln's grave. Years later, in the midst of another presidential campaign, Debs would argue that "The Republican Party was once red. Lincoln was a revolutionary." It is indisputable that the Republican Party had at its founding a red streak. And it is arguable that the party's first president was a radical; his great struggle, rooted in the ideals of the founding, was for "a new birth of freedom" that would be aptly characterized by the historian Charles Beard as the "Second American Revolution, and in a strict sense, the First." The fight, Lincoln argued at Gettysburg, was waged to give meaning to the founding promise that "all men are created equal." This did not, as some of the more excitable revisionists of the 1930s imagined, make Lincoln a communist. The man who clung so tightly in his Gettysburg Address to the Enlightenment visions that birthed the nation kept the faith in "that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found"-as the plaque on display for more than a century near the great Lincoln statue on the University of Wisconsin campus describes it. Lincoln was not a Marxist, but the first Republican president belonged to a time when men such as he were familiar with the writings of Marx and the deeds of the revolutionary circle that spread from Europe to the United States in the aftermath of the 1848 rebellions. He sifted and winnowed the radical ideas of his day. He found truth in notions about the superiority of labor to capital, just as he found important-at times essential-allies among the radicals who shared the view that a dying southern aristocracy was mounting not merely a last desperate defense of slavery but "in fact, a war upon the rights of all working people."

A century after Lincoln's death, and barely five weeks before his own assassination, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., would recall the connection. King's comment came at a celebration of the life of W. E. B. Du Bois, which had been organized by the journal Freedomways at Carnegie Hall. Addressing the issue of Du Bois's radicalism, King used the address to urge a break with the "red scare" thinking that demonized everything and everyone associated with communism:

We cannot talk of Dr. Du Bois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life. Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years. It is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. In contemporary life the English-speaking world has no difficulty with the fact that Sean O'Casey was a literary giant of the twentieth century and a Communist, or that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the greatest [living] poet, though he also served in the Chilean Senate as a Communist. It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.
While King offered a corrective to the casual dismissal of socialists, communists and other radicals, and of those-including American presidents-who might have been informed by them, it was Du Bois, a half century earlier, who offered the perspective on Lincoln that remains the most useful for those seeking a sense of what distinguished the most nuanced of American presidents.
As a product of his times and of the great debates that defined them, as a student of ancient ideas and fresh ones, as an American born in the last weeks of Thomas Jefferson's presidency, when it was still perhaps possible to detect the fading glimmers of the Age of Enlightenment, Abraham Lincoln understood that the best answers to societal challenges were found in "regions hitherto unexplored." This is why he read so widely. This is why he followed the freedom struggles that played out in distant lands so closely-and so passionately. This is why he befriended radicals, many of them refugees from the great revolutions of 1848; and this is why he sampled so broadly from their proposals and platforms-even if the man Du Bois recognized as "big enough to be inconsistent" refused to embrace the whole of any one. "He did not always see the right at first," Du Bois said of Lincoln. But, the scholar noted, America's sixteenth president retained a remarkable "capacity for growth." It was that latter capacity that led Du Bois to suggest that Americans would do well to "take pattern of Lincoln" and emulate his openness to ideas generated in those regions hitherto unexplored-a newspaper office in Cologne, a Springfield meeting organized in solidarity with a Hungarian revolutionary, a Wisconsin schoolhouse filled with Fourierists and "Vote Yourself a Farm" land reformers, a workingmen's club in New York, a gathering in London of the First International. Presidents who choose to dismiss individuals, ideas and ideologies with which they do not fully agree take too many options off the table; in so doing they ill serve the republic. There are points on every nation's arc of history where radical ideas are more than merely interesting, intriguing or perhaps unsettling; they are the "new enlightenments" that enable and encourage the pursuit of "the welfare and happiness of mankind." Jefferson, at his best, recognized this. Paine as well. And, surely, Lincoln, when he observed in the darkest hours of his presidency: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country."

STOP THE VIOLENT ESCALATION IN GAZA

COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE USA — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 17:06:00 -0500

The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) calls for an end to the dangerous escalation in Gaza, and a return to serious negotiations on the basis of a two-state solution.

Events in recent days between Israel and the Hamas led government of Gaza show, once again, the danger of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's refusal to work seriously toward the resolution of Palestinian grievances.

For some time, a shaky de facto truce had existed between Israel and the Hamas led government of Gaza, though Qassim rockets were still being sporadically fired into Israel from militant groups in Gaza. In the past week, however, this truce has broken down, with the Israeli Defense Force having killed two civilians in Gaza (one a 12 year old boy, the other reportedly mentally handicapped 20 year old man). A barrage of rockets was fired into Southern Israel by militant groups in Gaza, which resulted in injuries to four Israeli soldiers.

Reportedly, a truce agreement was in the works when, on Wednesday, Israel sharply escalated the conflict by assassinating the head of the military wing of Hamas in Gaza, Ahmed Jabari, in a drone strike. This attack also killed and injured bystanders, and set off an angry reaction which included a great escalation of the firing of rockets at Israel. Israeli bombing of targets in Gaza has also sharply escalated, and civilian casualties, including children, are mounting on both sides, but more on the Gaza side.

At writing, Netanyahu is hinting that a ground invasion of Gaza, similar to the one in 2008 is in the offing. Reserves are being called up and troops are massing on the border for what the Israeli's are calling “Operation Pillar of Cloud”.

The United States and other Western powers have condemned the rocket attacks and emphasized Israel's right to defend itself, while most Arab states, among others, have condemned the Israeli attacks as brutal aggression.

The CPUSA points out that the present escalation must be seen in the context of the intransigence of the Netanyahu government, which has stalled all peace talks while it continues to promote building of settlements in land promised to the Palestinian people. This continues the imposition of another regime of violence on the Palestinians both in Gaza and in the West Bank: The violence of poverty and of the crushing of a people's aspirations. While there is no progress toward a peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine situation, and while the mass of the Palestinian people, in Gaza, in the West Bank and in exile, suffer the consequences, the danger of war continues to be high. The bellicose rhetoric of the Netanyahu government, toward the Palestinians but also in the context of the Iran situation, increases the danger even more. A case in point is the recent threatening stance Netanyahu has taken toward the Al Fatah led government in the West Bank should they push their claim to enhanced status at the United Nations, a claim they have every right to make. We condemn, also, the irresponsible rocket bombardments from militants in Gaza (and the failure of the Hamas government to take action to stop this).

The CPUSA calls for the following:

*The Netanyahu government in Israel must cease the escalation of the Gaza situation, stop the attacks and pull back from sending in ground forces.

*The United States government must not confine itself to bland statements about Israel's right to defend itself, but must exert far more pressure on Netanyahu and his government to cease and desist from further attacks in Gaza, and to return to serious negotiations toward a two state solution that finally begins to fulfill the aspirations of the Palestinian people.

*The Hamas government in Gaza needs to move to stop the rocket attacks against civilian areas in Israel.

How the Left Can Become a True Political Force to Be Reckoned With

Bill Fletcher, Jr., Carl Davidson — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 16:38:00 -0500

November 13, 2012 |

The 2012 elections may prove to have been a watershed in several different respects. Despite the efforts by the political Right to suppress the Democratic electorate, something very strange happened: voters, angered by the attacks on their rights, turned out in even greater force in favor of Democratic candidates. The deeper phenomenon is that the changing demographics of the USA also became more evident—45% of Obama voters were people of color, and young voters turned out in large numbers in key counties.

Unfortunately for the political Left, these events unfolded with the Left having limited visibility and a limited impact—except indirectly through certain mass organizations—on the outcome.

The setting

On one level it is easy to understand why many Republicans found it difficult to believe that Mitt Romney did not win the election. First, the US remains in the grip of an economic crisis with an official unemployment rate of 7.9%. In some communities, the unemployment is closer to 20%. While the Obama administration had taken certain steps to address the economic crisis, the steps have been insufficient in light of the global nature of the crisis. The steps were also limited by the political orientation of the Obama administration, i.e., corporate liberal, and the general support by many in the administration for neo-liberal economics.

The second factor that made the election a ‘nail biter’ was the amount of money poured into this contest. Approximately $6 billion was spent in the entire election. In the Presidential race it was more than $2 billion raised and spent, but this does not include independent expenditures. In either case, this was the first post-Citizen United Presidential campaign, meaning that money was flowing into this election like a flood after a dam bursts. Republican so-called Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs) went all out to defeat President Obama.

Third, the Republicans engaged in a process of what came to be known as “voter suppression” activity. Particularly in the aftermath of the 2010 midterm elections, the Republicans created a false crisis of alleged voter fraud as a justification for various draconian steps aimed at allegedly cleansing the election process of illegitimate voters. Despite the fact that the Republicans could not substantiate their claims that voter fraud was a problem on any scale, let alone a significant problem, they were able to build up a clamor for restrictive changes in the process, thereby permitting the introduction of various laws to make it more difficult for voters to cast their ballots. This included photographic voter identification, more difficult processes for voter registration, and the shortening of early voting. Though many of these steps were overturned through the intervention of courts, they were aimed at causing a chilling impact on the voters, specifically, the Democratic electorate.[1]

So, what happened?

Prior to the election, we argued that what was at stake in the 2012 elections was actually the changing demographics of the USA (along with a referendum on the role of government in the economy). What transpired in the elections was very much about demographics.

The percentage of white voters dropped from 74% to 72% between 2008 and 2012. Romney received 59% of the white vote.

Yet something else happened and it took many people by surprise. Despite the intimidation caused by the voter suppression statutes—and the threatened actions by right-wing groups—African Americans, Latinos and Asians turned out in significant numbers, voting overwhelmingly for the Democrats.[2] 93% of African Americans went with Obama, as did 71% of Latinos (which represented an increase over 2008) and, despite the fact that Asians are only 2-3% of the electorate, they went 73% in favor of Obama (which was a jump from 62% in 2008). The youth vote, by the way, increased to 19% of the electorate, over 18% in 2008, and went overwhelmingly for Obama. Labor union members went for Obama at a rate of 65%, and unions themselves played a major role in many key states in terms of voter mobilization. By the strategic mobilization of these voters in a well-organized ‘ground game,’ Obama won 332 Electoral College votes compared with Romney’s 206. Obama’s popular vote total was also 2.6% head of Romney.

The Romney/Ryan camp was entirely unprepared for this. While it is the case that the popular vote total was not overwhelming for Obama, there was nothing particularly unusual in US history for such a result. The bottom line is that Obama clearly won both the Electoral College vote and the popular vote and, as such, can claim a mandate for his next steps.

It is important that one understands that the African American/Latino/Asian turnout, along with the long-lines waiting to vote (including in the days of early voting) represented an audacious defiance of the forces that sought to suppress the vote. This audaciousness also represented a response to the increasingly racist attacks on Obama, attacks that were taken very personally by people of color generally and African Americans in particular.[3]

What was equally interesting about the November 6th elections were those in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Contrary to many expectations, the Democrats not only held onto the Senate, but slightly increased their margin of control. Within that expansion was the election of Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts to the seat once occupied by the late Teddy Kennedy. Warren, who gained a strong reputation in the fight to control Wall Street, promised actions on behalf of working people. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist in Vermont, also decisively won reelection.

In the House of Representatives, Democrats increased their totals, but Republicans still dominate. This is mainly the result of the gerrymandering carried out by Republican state legislators during redistricting. The legacy of this gerrymandering may last at least a decade, part of the fallout which resulted from lower voter turnout combined with the Republican mobilization in the 2010 midterm elections.

Of particular note in the elections was the increased presence of women, especially progressive women, being elected to office, including the first openly gay Senator (from Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin). The state of New Hampshire now has women in all of the top governing positions.

Additionally several progressive ballot initiatives passed in various states, including on same-sex marriage and the decriminalization of marijuana. An interesting initiative in the state of Michigan to alter the state constitution in order to protect the right of workers to collective bargaining was defeated after a major and concerted attack by pro-employer groups.

What to make of the elections?

We return to our earlier conclusion, i.e., that what was at stake in 2012 was not Obama’s record but instead 2012 was a referendum over demographics and the role of government with the far right. Some on the Left found this assertion worthy of ridicule rather than introspection, and dismissed it, claiming that of course Obama’s record was central to the debate.

The results of the election conform much more to our conclusions. The vote for Obama, particularly by people of color, could not possibly have been the result of the conclusion that Obama’s record made him the great leader. Certainly his record was better than the interpretation projected by Romney/Ryan, but it was also the case that Obama’s record was complicated if not problematic. After all, we had witnessed an economic stimulus that, while significant by historical standards, was insufficient to the task; a healthcare reform package that, while bringing healthcare to millions, was based on a corporate model first elaborated by Mitt Romney when he was Governor of Massachusetts; a failure to close Guantanamo; the continuation and escalation of the Afghanistan/Pakistan war, including the usage of drone strikes; and the failure to adopt a clear policy to address systemic racial injustice in the USA. While there were a number of reforms that were introduced that were of significance, this was all far less than most of Obama’s supporters had hoped would be introduced.

So, what then could one say motivated the vote? We return to demographics and the role of government. Obama’s very existence represents the problematic future for the political Right; it’s not that he’s an individual whose birthplace is alleged by them to not be in the USA. This insane propaganda from the Birther movement is designed to distort the point entirely. The Birthers[4] and their off-spring hate Obama not because of where he was born but because he was born here. His very existence illustrates the changing demographics of the USA and its move away from being a ‘white republic’ governed by a broad ‘white’ front. Instead, we are moving more towards something else, toward a more openly multi-ethnic/multi-racial society, if not politically then at least numerically.

The election thus represented a repudiation of the right-wing irrationalists seeking to turn the clock back, and not just on race, but gender and class as well. In this sense it was not so much about what Obama had accomplished as it was about what sort of society 61 million people did not want. That retrograde society, which was rejected, was a neo-apartheid order of domination that condemned at least 47% of the population (according to Romney’s calculations) to marginalization, and condemned at least 90% of society to continued economic distress and submission.

Romney was proposing to reduce the role of government even further, at least when it came to supporting something approaching a social safety net. 61 million people recognized the barbarism contained in his message and program, and responded accordingly.

In sum, the November 6th elections were not a referendum challenging Obama’s course from the Left, but rather rejecting a challenge from the Right, since there was no viable Left alternative. At the same time there was an additional interesting feature of the elections as identified in various opinion polls: Democratic voters, while not as starry-eyed as many were in 2008, are looking for Obama to fight for them, or at least fight on their behalf. Frustration with Obama’s premature compromising in the name of so-called bi-partisanship wins the President few accolades within his base. The electorate is looking for something very different.

The Left in the elections: Building mass organizations vs. the mouths that screeched

Contrary to those who suggest that no Left exists in the USA, it is better to understand that there are two and a half Lefts in the USA. There is the organized Left, which takes the forms of very small political organizations, some of them calling themselves political parties, which are anti-capitalist and generally for some sort of socialism. There is also what Chilean Marxist Marta Harnecker would describe as the “social movement Left,” which are forces involved in left-leaning mass organizations and non-profits, more often than not single-issue or based within a specific sector. There is finally what we could term the ‘half’ Left, that is, the ‘Lone Rangers,’ the rather large number of independent individuals who self-identify as leftists but are unaffiliated with any left-wing project, with the possible exception a job with social impact, such as writers or teachers or health care workers. In each case these individuals and formations are anti-capitalist and seek a social transformation of the USA, but with varying degrees of organization, insurgency and effectiveness.

The US Left has historically had a difficult time addressing electoral politics. There are several reasons--the complications that arise from the undemocratic nature of the US electoral system; the size of the USA; the lack of attention to strategy; and most important, ambivalence when it comes to race. As a result the Left frequently sways back and forth between what could, perhaps, be described as apocalyptism on the one hand (i.e., waving the red flag so that the masses see us before the whole system collapses and, therefore, they know where to go), to reformist/incrementalism, on the other (i.e., believing that the best that can be done is to submerge into the Democratic Party and help move change until the system reaches a point where quantitative change morphs into qualitative change).

There is currently no significant and unified effort within the Left(s) toward building a self-conscious, broad radical Left project that has the objective of winning power. The bulk of the US Left does not think politically. Rather it engages in ideological or moral struggle and often thinks that ideology or morality is identical to politics. Rather than conceptualizing a protracted struggle for power based on the need to build a majoritarian bloc, too many individuals and organizations on the Left remain trapped in a self-satisfying world of small sects and Facebook tirades rather than the hard work of building the alliances of grassroots groups necessary to win.

The limitations of the Left’s approach to the fight for power can be illustrated in any number of places, but, for the moment, let’s reflect upon the electoral realm. Consider the following. In 1920 Eugene V. Debs ran, for the fifth time, for the Presidency. Though in jail at the time (as a result of political repression), he received nearly one million votes. In the famous 1948 campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, the candidate received 1,157,328 votes and no Electoral College votes. In the same election, Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond received more popular votes and 39 electoral votes.

Now, in 2012, Green Party candidate Jill Stein received 402,125 votes. This is going the wrong way. But it reflects, more than anything, not the character of Stein or her supporters but the approach toward electoral politics taken by the Green Party and many of their followers.

Independent presidential candidacies in the modern era reflect what can be described as a flag-waving/protest mode rather than a struggle for power/bloc-building mode. In other words, they aim to express both outrage and reasoned critique at the system and frustration with the toxicity of democratic capitalism. They have no hope of gaining power either because they do not believe in struggling to gain power or because they believe that power is gained when the ship sinks and we, on the Left, are positioned in the proper lifeboats prepared to save the mass of distressed passengers.

This is only on the electoral side. The various small organizations of the organized Left which do not engage in electoral politics in their own names seem relatively content being small and of little consequence. In the absence of an effort at building a majoritarian bloc they can remain comfortable in their particular niche(s) and not feel the cold winds that often accompany entering into unexplored demographic or geographic territories. They remind us of the old Clifford Odet’s play, ‘Waiting for Lefty.’

At the same time, over the last 5-10 years there has developed a new interest in electoral engagement in the social movement Left. Sprouting up in different parts of the USA have been progressive—rather than explicitly Left—political formations that have either engaged in what has come to be known as “civic engagement” work, i.e., voter registration, education, voting rights, electoral law reform, and/or actual electoral engagement. The strength of this work is that its orientation can be described as left/progressive in that these are mass-based projects attempting to reach out to a broad array within our natural base.

Organizations ranging from Progressive Democrats of America to the Virginia New Majority and Florida New Majority fall into this camp, though the list is quite a bit longer than just these organizations.

In the lead up to the 2012 elections the Left was badly divided over how to respond. One segment, which we will describe as the “mouths that screeched” were adamant that Obama had betrayed progressives; that he was not progressive; that he represented the empire; and therefore not only should not be supported but that it was ideological treason to suggest any level of support or even just to give him a vote without any implied support.

The vitriolic attacks coming from this sector masked the fact that this segment of the Left is actually becoming irrelevant. They had no visible impact on the elections and their protests were largely ignored. Unfortunately, one of the key things that this segment missed was the racial element of the 2012 elections and the need for voters of color, along with a good number of white allies, to push back at the ‘demographic’ attacks that were underway from the political Right. By focusing on all that Obama did incorrectly, this segment of the Left ignored, as well, that the Left and progressives are on the strategic defensive in the USA and that they need alliances that will provide some level of space within which we can operate.

The segment of the Left that actually made a difference was those within the organized Left and the social movement Left who engaged their mass organizations and non-profits in electoral activity.[5] Whether it was voter registration; voter education efforts; electoral infrastructure work; or Get Out The Vote efforts, many of these organizations proved themselves to be very effective campaign organizations. They appear to be in the process of laying the groundwork for the sorts of progressive alliance building that will be necessary to respond to the next electoral realignment that hits the USA.

What is missing entirely, however, is a coherent, self-identified Left, taking either the form of a united front, alliance, or political organization that can serve as a pole for independent, radical yet grounded Left politics. The mass base for such an effort exists. The opinion polls that demonstrate that roughly one third of the population are open to directions other than capitalism means that approximately 90 million people are seeking alternatives. Consider that 90 million figure when you review the stats for the Green Party’s votes in 2012. The Occupy Movement also evidenced a political fissure that is certain to widen as the class struggle intensifies, though admittedly Occupy did not result in the formation of one or several credible Left organizations (no criticism implied).

Moving forward

The challenge for the Left then becomes two fold. One, there must be a self-identified, self-aware, mass radical Left formation that openly and unapologetically advocates against capitalism and for environmentally friendly socialism. Whether such an organization is called a political party, alliance or some other name is secondary to what it must do and what it must avoid. What it must avoid is the idea that it can or should compete in the electoral realm on the presidential level at this time. That is a no-win scenario. What it can do, however, is to unite and train the existing leaders in mass movements and develop an anti-capitalist program and ultimately an anti-capitalist project. We term this notion of a new, self-conscious and organized Left—inspired by the approach taken by and expression used by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci—to be the “Modern Tecumseh.”[6] Second, the Left can also help to build a progressive front—perhaps a popular front against finance capital that unites disparate forces—that gains electoral expression in the form of an organization (rather than a third party) that runs candidates within the Democratic Party or, runs them independently if conditions exist (such as in Vermont where the candidacy and leadership of Senator Sanders needs to be supported).

As long as the progressive forces in the USA are on the defensive there will be tactical alliances that take place that are not satisfying but are nevertheless necessary. These should not be treated as matters of principle but rather as expressions of necessity of the moment. Further, we on the Left must pay much greater attention to what is transpiring among the people themselves. The fact that so many on the Left would have focused on Obama’s record and virtually ignored the intense racist offensive against Obama (and its broader implications) demonstrated that many of our friends are out of touch with reality.

Reality, however, is a good and necessary starting point if one ever wishes to build a majoritarian bloc and win power. We fully expect to see an intensification of class struggle in the near term. We need to assert a new culture of organizing capable of meeting the demands it will place on us, and now is the time to begin.

[1] The issue of voting rights remains critical since there are cases before the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge critical features of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, features that were part of the Department of Justice’s arsenal to overturn certain voter suppression legislation.

[2] It is important to note, however, that voter turnout was down in comparison to 2008 except for nine states. As of this writing it is not clear as to the sources of the decline.

[3] Attacks such as Donald Trump’s insulting demand that President Obama turn over his college transcripts. The suggestion of such an action is almost unbelievable. Nothing along those lines would have been tolerated when it came to former President George W. Bush, an individual who was not half the student that was Obama in college.

[4] The right-wing, irrationalist political movement that asserts that Obama was not born in the USA and is, therefore, not the legitimate president of the USA.

[5] To be clear, not all forces in the organized Left or the social movement Left engaged in left/progressive electoral organizing. We are simply noting that there were forces from within these sectors that did, in fact, choose to engage.

[6] Tecumseh: Shawnee leader in the first decade of the 19th century. Recognized that Native Americans would never defeat the USA by fighting as individual tribes or fighting through the creation of a confederation. He was the advocate for a Native American nation-state, i.e., uniting the tribes and fusing their efforts. He was killed in 1813 at the Battle of the Thames in Canada.

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/how-left-can-become-true-political-force-be-reckoned

Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/bill-fletcher-jr
[3] http://www.alternet.org/authors/carl-davidson
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/election2012
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/left-0
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/politics-0
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Middle East: The Next Four Years

Conn Hallinan — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 06:11:00 -0500

Dispatches From The Edge

Nov.11, 2012

Over the next four years the U.S. will face a number of foreign policy issues, most of them regional, some of them global. Dispatches From The Edge will try to outline and analyze them, starting with the Middle East.

Syria

The most immediate problem in the region is the on-going civil war in Syria, a conflict with local and international ramifications. The war—which the oppressive regime of Bashar al-Assad ignited by its crushing of pro-democracy protests— has drawn in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Iran, and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf, in particular Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The U.S., France and Great Britain are also heavily involved in the effort to overthrow the Assad government.

The war has killed more than 30,000 people and generated several hundred thousand refugees, who have flooded into Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq. It has also badly damaged relations between Turkey and Iran. The former supports the insurrection, the latter supports the Assad regime. Pitting Shite Iran (and to a certain extent, Shite Iraq and the Shite-based Hezbollah in Lebanon) against the largely Sunni Muslim opposition has sharpened sectarian tensions throughout the region.

The war itself appears to be a stalemate. So far, the regime’s army remains loyal, but seems unable to defeat the insurrection. The opposition, however, is deeply splintered and ranges from democratic nationalists to extremist jihadist groups. The US and Britain are trying to weld this potpourri into a coherent political opposition, but so far the attempts have floundered on a multiplicity of different and conflicting agendas by the opponents of the Assad regime.

Efforts by the United Nations (UN) to find a peaceful solution have been consistently torpedoed, because the opposition and its allies insist on regime change. The goal of overthrowing the government makes this a fight to the death and leaves little room for political maneuvering. A recent ceasefire failed, in part, because jihadist groups supported by Qatar and Saudi Arabia refused to abide by it and set off several car bombs in the capital. The Sunni extremism of these groups is whipping up sectarian divisions among the various sects of Islam.

There are a number of things the Obama administration could do to alleviate the horrors of the current civil war.

First, it should drop the demand for regime change, although this does not necessarily mean that President Assad will remain in power. What must be avoided is the kind of regime change that the war in Libya ushered in. Libya has essentially become a failed state, and the spinoff from that war is wreaking havoc in countries that border the Sahara, Mali being a case in point. In the end, Assad may go, but to dismantle the Baathist government is to invite the kind of sectarian and political chaos that the dissolution of the Baathist regime in Iraq produced.

Second, if the US and its allies are enforcing an arms embargo against Assad’s government, they must insist on the same kind of embargo on arms sent to the rebels by Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Third, China and Russia should be asked to negotiate a ceasefire and organize a conference aimed at producing a political settlement and transition government. China recently proposed a four-point peace plan that could serve as a starting point for talks. A recent Assad government controlled newspaper, Al Thawra,suggested the Damascus regime would be open to such negotiations. A key aspect to such talks would be a guarantee that no outside power would undermine them.

Palestinians

The conflict that will not speak its name—or at least that is the way the current impasse between Israel and the Palestinians was treated during the 2012 US elections. But as U.S. Gen. James Mattis, head of U.S. Central Command, the military formation responsible for the Middle East, said last spring, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a “preeminent flame that keeps the pot boiling in the Middle East, particularly as the Arab Awakening causes Arab governments to be more responsive to the sentiments of their populations” that support the Palestinians.

Rather than moving toward a solution, however, the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently announced yet another round of settlement building. There are approximately 500,000 Jewish settlers currently on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, although all such settlements are a violation of international law. While Netanyahu says he wants negotiations, he continues to build settlements, which is like negotiating over how to divide a pizza while one of the parties is eating it.

Proposals to annex the West Bank, once the program of far-right settlers, have gone mainstream. A conference this past July in the West Bank city of Hebron drew more than 500 Israelis who reject the idea of a Palestinian state. The gathering included a number of important Likud Party officials and members of the Knesset. Likud is Netanyahu’s party and currently leads the Israeli government.

“Friends, everybody here today knows that there is a solution—applying sovereignty [over the West Bank]. One state for the Jewish people with an Arab minority,” Likud Knesset member Tzipi Hotovely told the audience.

Conference organizer Yehudit Katsover put the matter bluntly “We’re all here to say one thing: the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people. Why? Because!”

A major argument against absorbing the West Bank is that it would dilute the Jewish character of Israel and threaten the country’s democratic institutions. “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish or non-democratic,” Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak argues. “If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

But right-wing conference goers dismissed that argument because they reject that there is a demographic threat from the Palestinians. According to The Times of Israel, former ambassador to the US, Yoram Ettinger, told the crowd that estimates of the Palestinian population are based on “Palestinian incompetence or lying” and that there are actually a million fewer than the official population count.

Legal expert Yitzhak Bam said he expected there would be no fallout from the Americans if Israel unilaterally annexed the West Bank, since Washington did not protest the 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights from Syria. Both areas were conquered in the 1967 War.

The Times reporter Raphael Ahern writes that that the conference reflects “The annexationists are growing in confidence, demanding in outspoken fashion what they always dreamed of but have never dared to say quite so publically.”

The expanding settlements are rapidly making the possibility of a viable two-state solution impossible. Eventually there will be no pizza left to divide.

The Obama administration has dropped the ball on this issue and needs to re-engage, lest the “pot” boil over.

First, the Tel Aviv government needs to be told that all settlement expansion must cease, and that failure to do so will result in a suspension of aid. At about $3.4 billion a year, Israel is the US’s number one foreign aid recipient.

Second, the US must stop blocking efforts by the Palestinians for UN recognition.

Third, negotiations must cover not only the West Bank and Gaza, but also the status of East Jerusalem. The latter is the engine of the Palestinian economy, and without it a Palestinian state would not be viable.

Iran

The immediate danger of a war with Iran appears to have slightly receded, although the Israelis are always a bit of a wild card. First, the Obama administration explicitly rejected Netanyahu’s “red line” that would trigger an attack on Teheran. The Israeli prime minister argues that Iran must not be allowed to achieve the “capacity” to produce nuclear weapons, a formulation that would greatly lower the threshold for an assault. Second, there are persistent rumors that the US and Iran are exploring one-on-one talks, and it appears that some forces within Iran that support talks—specifically former president Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani— are in the ascendency.

Netanyahu continues to threaten war, but virtually his entire military and intelligence apparatus is opposed to a unilateral strike. Israeli intelligence is not convinced that Iran is building a bomb, and the Israeli military doesn’t think it has the forces or weapons to do the job of knocking out Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Polls also indicate overwhelming opposition among the Israeli public for a unilateral attack. This doesn’t mean Netanyahu won’t attack Iran, just that the danger does not seem immediate. If Israel should choose to launch a war, the Obama administration should make it clear that Tel Aviv is on its own.

US intelligence and the Pentagon are pretty much on the same page as the Israelis regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Even with its powerful military, US generals are not convinced that an attack would accomplish much more than delaying Iran’s program by from three to five years. At least at this point, the Pentagon would rather talk than fight. “We are under the impression that the Iranian regime is a rational actor,” says Gen. Martin Dempsey, chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Polls also indicate that nearly 70 percent of the American public favors negotiations over war.

In short, a lot of ducks are now in a row to cut a deal.

However, the US cannot make uranium enhancement a red line. Iran has the right to enhance nuclear fuel under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and as long as inspectors are in place—as they currently are—it is virtually impossible to create bomb-level fuel in secret.

Not only has intelligence failed to show that Iran is creating a nuclear weapons program, the country’s leader has explicitly rejected such a step. “The Iranian nation has never pursued and will never pursue nuclear weapons,” says the country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, calling nuclear weapons “a great and unforgivable sin.” The Iranian government has also indicated that it will take part in a UN-sponsored conference in Helsinki to create a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.

The Obama administration should endorse this effort to abolish nuclear weapons in the Middle East, although this will force it to confront the only nuclear power in the Middle East, Israel. Israel is not a NPT signatory and is thought to have some 200 nuclear weapons. Such a monopoly cannot long endure. The argument that Israel needs nuclear weapons because it is so outnumbered in the region is nonsense. Israel has by far the strongest military in the Middle East and powerful protectors in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). While Egypt and Syria did attack Israel in 1973, it was to recover territories seized by Tel Aviv in the 1967 war, not an attempt to destroy the country. And that was almost 40 years ago. Since then Israel has invaded Lebanon twice and Gaza once. Countries in the region fear Israel, not visa-a-versa.

While the White House has recently eased restrictions on the sale of critical medicines to Iran, the sanctions are taking a terrible toll on the economy and the average Iranian. So far, the US has not explicitly said it will remove the sanctions if talks are showing real progress. Since no one likes negotiating with a gun to the head—in this regard Iranians are no different than Americans—there should be some good faith easing of some of the more onerous restrictions, like those on international banking and oil sales.

Lastly, the option of war needs to be taken off the table. Threatening to bomb people in order to get them not to produce nuclear weapons will almost certainly spur Iran (and other countries) to do exactly the opposite. A war with Iran would also be illegal. The British attorney general recently informed the Parliament that an attack on Iran would violate international law, because Iran does not pose a “clear and present danger,” and recommended that the US not be allowed to use the British-controlled island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to launch such an attack.

The Gulf

Because US relies on the energy resources of the Persian Gulf countries, as well as strategic basing rights, it is unlikely that the Obama administration will challenge the foreign and domestic policies of its allies in the region. But then Washington should not pretend that its policies there have anything to do with promoting democracy.

The countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council, led by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are monarchies that not only suppress dissent but also systematically oppress women and minorities and, in the case of Bahrain, the Shite majority. The extreme jihadist organizations that the countries of the Gulf fund and arm are destabilizing governments across the region and throughout Central Asia. Washington may bemoan extremism in Pakistan, but its Gulf allies can claim the lion’s share of the credit for nurturing the groups responsible for that extremism.

The Gulf Council is not interested in promoting democracy—indeed, political pluralism is one of its greatest enemies, nor does it have much interest in the modern world, aside from fancy cars and personal jet planes. This past summer Saudi Arabia executed a man for possessing “books and talismans from which he learned to harm God’s worshippers,” and last year beheaded a man and a woman for witchcraft.

Lastly, the Obama administration should repudiate the 1979 Carter Doctrine that allows the US to use military force to guarantee access to energy resources in the Middle East. That kind of thinking went out with 19^th century gunboats and hangs like the Damocles Sword over any country in the region that might decide to carve out an independent policy on politics and energy.

The Worst Didn't Happen; Now another Danger Lurks

Carl Bloice — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 19:21:00 -0500

"Keep in mind that these folks spent millions and millions of dollars - and played just as many dirty tricks - to defeat Obama and a host of other Democratic candidates, and that money wasn't spent, nor were those dirty tricks played, in the hope that Republicans might emerge victorious,' wrote Detroit Monster on The Black Liberal Boomer Blog on the eve of the vote. "This was an all-out, go-for-broke campaign that was not supposed to lose. They had successfully cleared the decks in 2010 to make way for a flood of rightwing Tea Party affiliated candidates, they had engaged in massive demonstrations of voter suppression right up to the day of the vote, they had a bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court majority who had handed a stolen presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 come to the rescue once again when they gave the thumbs-up to Citizens United, enabling super wealthy individuals and the corporations who love them to swallow America whole."

Alas, for the most part it didn't come to pass. The divisiveness, the smears, the racism, the attempted voter suppression, the obscurantism, and outright lying didn't work. The reactionary rightwing suffered a clear setback and for that the nation and the world can be thankful. But danger lurks from another quarter.

The "bipartisan" financial elite has always been determined to get its way no matter who was headed for the White House next year. While the nation has been preoccupied with who would run the government for the next four years, the austerity lobby has been quietly mobilizing its forces. It has been augmented by powerful corporate interests who are prepared to spend as much a $100 million on a campaign to make the 99 percent of us pay the
major costs of overcoming capitalism's latest crisis. They are intent on making sure that the greatest sacrifices are borne by working people, retirees and the poor.

This is how it goes down.

If a proposal to undermine Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid comes before the new Congress, all the members of that body will have to show where they stand. Although it will be easier now that the election is over, that will still be a political problem. And so, under the banner of "deficit reduction," and a threatened "fiscal cliff," a drive is underway to cut a backroom legislative deal. When the secret horse-trading is over, a package will be presented for approval and for which no one will take responsibility for any of its individual parts. It's called a "grand bargain."

The incoming administration has no mandate to do anything but uphold Reid's pledge.

The people of the country do not want to reduce the economic security and well being of seniors, or to sharply reduce healthcare provisions for low-income people and the disabled. That's why the matter was never debated during the campaign. Now the thinking is that this can be accomplished between the "lame duck" period now and when the new Congress convenes January 3. It's a strange view of democracy, wherein if you can't get enough of the peoples' elected representatives to approve of something, you extort it out in a backroom somewhere in Washington. Of course, it's all justified in the name of "bi-partisanship" and "compromise."

"Poll after poll has shown that the public rejects the millionaire-oriented, tax-cutting, government-slashing austerity plan known as "Simpson Bowles," Richard (RJ) Eskow of the Campaign For America's Future, wrote last week. "And yet politicians in both parties keep trying to force it through the legislative process under the banner of a `Grand Bargain.' Word is they're going to try again, either during the lame-duck session or when the new Congress convenes in January."

"Brace yourself for one of the most aggressive corporate lobbying campaigns of all time," Sarah Anderson and Scott Klinger wrote on AlterNet.org October 26. "And one of the most hypocritical."

On October 4, Financial Times economic writer, Gillian Tett, wrote that sometime last year she heard Erskine Bowles, "the wisecracking Democrat who has campaigned for bipartisan fiscal reform, throw down a gauntlet to American business." Speaking to an audience of corporate executives, at Harvard Business School, she wrote, he had "begged them to support his efforts to forge a practical deal - and argued that this corporate voice was crucial to breaking Washington gridlock." Tett rued the fact that, as she put it, "the appeal fell on deaf ears; chief executives have been missing in action (MIA) - or missing from the political fiscal action - in the past year."

"But could this finally be about to change?" wrote Tett because "a quiet new initiative has recently got under way to co-opt those MIA corporate leaders into the fiscal fight."

"Most notably, under the framework of a group known as The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget - led by people such as Maya MacGuineas with the spiritual leadership of Mr. Bowles and Alan Simpson - Washington and Wall Street players are trying to persuade those CEOs to support a campaign for bipartisan action," wrote Tett. "So far, about 100 CEOs have signed up, including Jamie Dimon (of JPMorgan), Lloyd Blankfein (of Goldman
Sachs), Jeff Immelt (of General Electric), and Mr. Cote himself."

"The group has raised more than $30m, and expects to raise more, to fund lobbying and public debate, via conferences, advertisements and social media (Mr. Bowles, as it happens, is on the Facebook board.)," reported Tett. (The mogul list also includes Steve Ballmer of Microsoft).

According to Tett, between now and the end of the year, this big business will advocate a "preliminary deal" to get past the so-called "fiscal cliff", and then, in the first six months of next year, they will launch "a serious drive to hammer out a grandiose fiscal plan." By this time, she suggests, it will be easier to strike a bargain since none of the bargainers will be up for re-election.

This big business super lobby is proceeding under the slogan "Fix the Debt".

"This is yet another project supported by Wall Street investment banker Peter Peterson," wrote economist Dean Baker. "For the last two decades Peterson has used his fortune to bankroll a number of organizations that were ostensibly pushing fiscal responsibility, but always had the same punch line: cut Social Security and Medicare."

If anything, the economy needs more public spending to get us out of a deep slump "The irony is that CEOs in the coalition's leadership have been major contributors to the national debt they now claim to know how to fix," wrote Anderson and Klinger. "These are guys who've mastered every tax-dodging trick in the book. And now that they've boosted their corporate profits by draining the public treasury, how do they propose we put our fiscal house back in order? By squeezing programs for the poor and elderly, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid."

"There really is no shame," commented Bernie Sanders (Ind- Vt). "The Wall Street leaders whose recklessness and illegal behavior caused this terrible recession are now lecturing the American people on the need for courage to deal with the nation's finances and deficit crisis. Before telling us why we should cut Social Security, Medicare and other vitally important programs, these CEOs might want to take a hard look at their responsibility for causing the deficit and this terrible recession."

"Our Wall Street friends might also want to show some courage of their own by suggesting that the wealthiest people in this country, like them, start paying their fair share of taxes" continued Sanders. "They might work to end the outrageous corporate loopholes, tax havens and outsourcing provisions that their lobbyists have littered throughout the tax code - contributing greatly to our deficit."

A clear indication that the big business operatives have been gearing up for a big campaign was the appearance on the day before the election of a full- page advertisement in the New York Times titled, "The Fiscal Cliff and America's Future." It was paid for by 11 firms and funds, including the online stockbroker TD Ameritrade, the investment firm Morningstar, the multinational investment management corporation, BlackRock and AK Steel.
The ad called for a "bipartisan response" to what it referred to as a pressing need "to steer our nation away from this rapidly approaching fiscal cliff and towards a credible, sustainable deficit reduction plan."

The big business ad repeats the canard that businesses are holding off from investing the funds they have on hand because of the "uncertainty" about the economic future.

"The Fix the Debt campaign, much like the Bowles-Simpson Commission and the propaganda of the Peterson Foundation generally, contends that the projected national debt is depressing business willingness to invest now" wrote American Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner October 30. "Presumably, businesses are worried about inflation and uncertainty. But the government can fund ten-year bonds at less than 2 percent interest and thirty-year
bonds at less than 3 percent. So investors don't seem worried about inflation. It's not lack of confidence in deficit reduction that's depressing business investment but lack of confidence in consumer purchasing power."

"If anything, the economy needs more public spending to get us out of a deep slump brought to you by the very people behind this campaign," continued Kuttner. "Cutting the deficit prematurely will only depress purchasing power and deepen the slump. That's the real lesson of Greece, Spain, Portugal, et al."

It is important to recognize what the so-called fiscal cliff is all about. The Republicans "want something" says economist Paul Krugman, and it is "making all the Bush tax cuts permanent" and, not having the necessary votes in Congress, they are "holding America hostage, saying - more or less explicitly - that if they can't have what they want but can't pass, they'll tank the whole economy."

According to former Treasury Secretary and White House economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, President Obama "has embraced the principles, though not all the details, embodied in the Simpson-Bowles commission report on budget deficits" and "Like the group of chief executives who made a major statement on deficit reduction last week he insists that achieving sustainable finances means both containing spending especially on entitlements and raising revenue" and "he has made clear that in talks with willing partners to conclude a deal, he is prepared to go beyond his budget proposals to ensure that debt accumulation is contained."

Repeatedly during the Presidential campaign, Republican Mitt Romney was sharply and correctly criticized for advocating a step reduction in taxes while refusing to specify which current deductions he would alter to achieve his goal. He steadfastly refused to say when asked. A similar demand should have been made to Obama; which of the "details" of the scheme advanced by Simpson and Bowles does he have reservations about? Nobody asked and he never said.

Last week, Kuttner, wrote ". on Wednesday morning, a struggle begins within the Democratic Party to save him (and us) from himself - to keep him from agreeing to a budget deal that will only slow growth, needlessly sacrifice Social Security and Medicare, and make the next four years much like the last four years."

"What a waste, what a pity," concluded Kuttner. "Progressive Democrats should be resisting the economic lunacy and political sway of an extremist Republican Party. Instead, they will be working to keep their own president from capitulating to fiscal folly."

Before the election, Eskow, of the Campaign for America's Future, observed, "It's unfortunate that the President isn't clearer and more forceful on this issue, but one thing's for certain: While he mentions `Simpson Bowles' often, he's not running on an unequivocal program of cuts to Medicare and Social Security, drastic reduction in other forms of government spending, and lower taxes for the wealthy."

"And that is Simpson Bowles."

"Nobody - nobody - is running on a straight Simpson Bowles ticket," wrote Eskow. "That's because it's as toxic politically as it would be economically, were it to become law. It would make a mockery of the democratic process to impose this austerity plan on voters who were never given the chance to vote for - or against - it." "As far as Social Security, my opponent is on record as wanting to privatize Social Security," says Senate Majority leader Harry Reid. "I am opposed to that. There is a reason that FDR passed Social Security in 1935. That's because older Americans, after they retired, they had no income, no way to survive, and their life expectancy was cut short. Same thing with Medicare. There was a reason in 1965 that we passed Medicare. Older Americans were dying and it wasn't of old age. They were dying for lack of healthcare. So now we've created Medicare, created Social Security, I am going to stand and fight for both of these programs. They are very important to seniors and future generations of seniors."

"I will promise you without fear of contradiction, I will do everything in my power to strengthen and protect Medicare and Social Security and it's going to be a cold day in the middle of August in the Nevada desert before I do anything that's going to harm those two essential programs," said Reid.

In her acceptance speech Tuesday night the new Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren pledged to defend Medicare and Social Security.

We didn't get a chance to express ourselves on this matter in the voting booth; the two major candidates wouldn't discuss it (the minor party candidates might have made it more of an issue but didn't). But
the incoming administration has no mandate to do anything but uphold Reid's pledge. To do otherwise is to spit in the eyes of a major and important section of its "base." Unions, senior advocacy groups and progressive organizations would do well to express their opinion on this right now and prepare for battle.

I know. Thanksgiving is upon us and Christmas, Hanukkah and New Years are near and we would like to forget about politics for a while. The problem is, matters of great importance to the well-being of a lot of working people in our country could be decided over the next seven weeks or so. On the sly.

_________________

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Carl Bloice, is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union

We Won! The American People Speak and Act With Strength and Determination

Stewart Acuff — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 17:54:00 -0500

Though many of the state margins were narrow President Obama ran the table winning every swing or battleground state with the possible exception of Florida where votes are still being counted as of 5:30 this morning.

President Obama also won the popular vote by 2 million votes. The President won 303 electoral votes to 206 for Romney. We knew about 11 pm that the President had won when Ohio was called for him.

Democrats also held the Senate. Elizabeth Warren won with a good margin in Massachusetts. Claire McKaskill won in Missouri beating Akin--he of the legitimate rape comment. Joe Donnelly also won in Indiana beating Republican Mourdock. Warren won by eight percentage points. Donnelly won in Indiana by 6 percentage points. Sherrod Brown won re-election. Tammy Baldwin won becoming the first openly gay Senator. Democrats picked up seats in the Senate.

Progressives like you worked their hearts out all over America for our people, our country, our president, and progressive Democrats. We fought and beat the Tea Party, the oligarchs and massive rich, Karl Rove's strategy, ALEC, the Koch Brothers, and all those who would tear down democracy and destroy the middle class and the labor movement. Women spoke strongly. Latinos spoke strongly. The LGBT community spoke strongly. And AFRICAN-AMERICANS fought back against the neo-poll taxes and disenfranchisement.

And as always our labor movement provided the President a foundation of support, energy, and strong presence.

The truth for progressives is that we are slowly winning the battle of ideas, future constituents, policies of justice. This election was won with progressive constituencies and a PROGRESSIVE AGENDA.

The President won with huge healthcare reform that we must continue working on and commitment to the middle class and acommitment to workers and unions and collective bargaining.

Republicans wake up this morning scratching their heads realizing they have lost 5 of 6 Presidential popular votes.

Now we must begin to think about how we build on this great victory to build a big struggle on America's biggest issues--inequality, investment in America and jobs (the agenda Dr. Levins and I laid out in Getting America Back to Work), collective bargaining, honoring workers, respect for every person in America.

We in the labor movement must continue to protect and expand collective bargaining--and to lay the foundation for the opportunity to create a struggle and perhaps a movement that addresses the economic issues of the middle class and THE POOR. We have to think outside our membership and act like the voice of all Working Families embracing new forms of organizational structures that work when the all or nothing NLRB fails or is irrelevant. We must act with boldness. NOW IS THE TINE TO END 35 YEARS OF WAGE STAGNATION and TO PUSH HISTORY FORWARD.

Democracy comes out on top on Nov. 6

Sam Webb — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 17:47:00 -0500

After a long and bitterly contested battle, the forces of inclusive democracy came out on top yesterday. The better angels of the American people spread their wings, as they went to the polls.

An African-American president was re-elected to the office of the Presidency, the Democrats unexpectedly strengthened their hand in the Senate and House, and victories, including big ones for marriage equality, were registered at the state level.

Moreover, the balance of forces - that is, the ground on which people fight going forward - has shifted in a progressive direction. And thanks in large measure goes to what might be the most notable development in this election - the emergence of a multi-racial, male-female, working-class-based electoral coalition that has the potential to transform America in the years and decades ahead.

The Communist Party said a year ago that the 2012 elections would be the main front of the class and democratic struggle, and subsequent events have confirmed that fact.

Indeed, we argued (and not everyone on the left agreed and probably still don't) that defeating right wing extremism was the key to moving the whole chain of democratic struggle forward in the coming period.

Conversely, we said that a victory by right-wing extremism would set into motion a far-reaching assault on the people's living standards, rights, and organizational capacities, the likes that we've never seen.

Had Romney won the Presidency and the Republicans the Congress, it would have accelerated to warp drive a capitalist class counterrevolution - a reversal of seventy years of social progress. In a matter of three months time, the entire body of social legislation dating back to the New Deal could have been expunged.

But that won't happen due to the fact that voters - new as well as old - in their majority rejected Romney, a host of right-wing extremist candidates, their ideology, and their model of governance.

While many things went into last night's victory, what was notable was the ability of the democratic movement to turn back Republican efforts to suppress the vote; what was history-making was the determination of the people's movement (with labor in the lead) to reach, educate, and turn out tens of millions of American voters on election day; what was not surprising was the continuing, strategic, and sometimes underappreciated role of the African-American people (93 percent voted for the president) in the front ranks (at the head in many instances) of struggle for progress and democracy.

What was heartening was the readiness of millions of white workers and trade unionists to stand with the President even in a weak economy and in the face of unrelenting and savage racist appeals, especially in the battleground states; what was of fundamental importance was the full-throttled entry of the Latino people onto the national political stage; what was extraordinary was the turnout of the Asian and Pacific Islander people; what was encouraging was the enthusiasm with which young people again supported the president; what was no surprise was the skill with which the president contrasted his views and values from those of Romney; what was critical was the capacity of the American people to sift through the myriad of lies and deceptions that came from the Republican side.

Above all, what was decisive was the unmistakable election imprint of a rainbow working-class based electoral coalition, which has the potential to effect a process of long-term political renewal and realignment the likes of which we haven't seen since the New Deal coalition of the 1930s.

The Republicans say that no sweeping mandate emerges out of this election, but if we think about it more deeply, we arrive at quite a different conclusion: the vote, and here I include more than a sliver of Romney supporters, is an insistent call for governmental action on the most pressing problems facing the working class and people.

This was not a vote for savaging social programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; or rolling back domestic spending; or resolving the budget crisis on the people's backs.

It was instead a vote for jobs, housing relief, withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan, an end to U.S.-led wars in the Middle East, the preservation of the package of benefits and rights that the American people now enjoy, equal pay for women, health, and reproductive rights, infrastructure renewal - an issue that took on greater forces in the wake of Sandy - marriage equality, a larger commitment to public education, a tax system in which the wealthiest families and corporations pay a much larger share, reform of our punitive and anti-democratic immigration laws, a reduction in the unconscionable inequality that sets us apart from other advanced capitalist countries, and, not least, an America that stands for fairness, tolerance, and decency.

As I mentioned, the Republicans are not on board with this assessment. Too many act as if nothing has changed.

But in some ways, the bigger problem at this moment is that politicians on both sides of the aisle, major opinion makers, and the corporate elite are saying that a "Grand Bargain," is the order of the day, beginning with spending cuts for people's needs, a weakening of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with some extra revenue collected in the form of a tax increase on the wealthiest Americans. Otherwise the country, the "grand bargainers" claim, will fall off a "fiscal cliff" threatening the economic recovery, global markets, and the long term viability of existing social programs.

But the conventional wisdom in this case is problematic. Many mainstream economists correctly say that the real crisis is not a fiscal one, but a jobs and growth crisis.

Once people get back to work and once economic activity picks up, they go on to argue, the nation can turn its attention to reeling in deficits without endangering economic recovery, but along very different lines than proposed by too many politicians on both sides of the aisle. On the table must be cutting military spending, ending corporate subsidies, and increasing corporate taxes.

Without catching its breath, the AFL-CIO and its allies are organizing actions against a bipartisan resolution that falls on working people. But organized labor can't do it alone.

The coalition that mined the country for votes over the past several months and the rainbow electorate that elected the president and defended democracy yesterday must spring back into action. Tens of millions must be mobilized. Diverse forms of struggle must be employed. Not everyone has to be an Obama voter. The fight to get the anti-austerity message heard above the din of the major media is a real challenge. But it can be done.

Whatever the outcome of this immediate battle, the struggle to put the people's needs and nature before corporate profits and war spending will be a long one. This still- emerging multi-racial, working-class based coalition will experience victories, like we did on Election Day. But it will also encounter defeats. The main thing is that it never lose sight of the necessity of deepening and extending its reach, unity, and multi-racial, class-based character.

The task isn't to replicate the movements of the 1930s and 1960s, but today's activists would do well to draw the lessons from those movements and adapt them to current conditions.

Both have much to teach, but given the concentrated corporate economic and political power that the American people are up against, today's movement has to eclipse them in terms of scope, depth, and class and anti-racist understanding and unity. We are at the dawn of a new era.

Photo: Democrat Elizabeth Warren takes the stage after defeating incumbent GOP Sen. Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race, during an election night rally at the Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel in Boston, Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012. Michael Dwyer/AP

Foreign Policy Implications of the November 6 General Elections in the United States

Emile Schepers — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 17:33:00 -0500

The re-election of President Barack Obama on November 6, and the results of the congressional election also, can be seen as a positive development for the international working class and humanity.

Many on the left, both here in the United States and worldwide, will not agree with this. There is widespread, and justified, disappointment and anger with the foreign policy of both the Obama White House and the Clinton State Department. There is not space here to list all the things that have gone wrong or must be criticized, but an essential few would include:

*The continual U.S. hostility toward socialist Cuba, manifesting itself in the failure to end the trade blockade or make any headway in the release of the four remaining members of the Cuban 5 who are still imprisoned.

*The hostility of U.S. policy toward the leftward movement of governments and peoples in Latin America. Rather than taking the advice of Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and returning to Franklin Roosevelt's “Good Neighbor Policy” of the 1930s, of equal economic partnership and non-interference, http://www.ihavenet.com/World-Mexico-A-Way-Out-of-Mexico-Morass-FPIF.html the current administration has butted heads with progressive regional leaders and intrigued with their right wing opponents. In the case of two recent coups d'état, in Honduras in 2009 and in Paraguay this year, the Obama administration has, in the first case, connived with the coup plotters so as to allow them to consolidate their rule, and the second case has not spoken out as the government resulting from the coup has intrigued with U.S. based transnational corporations to prevent a return to democracy. The continual support of “the war against drugs” in both Colombia (Plan Colombia) and Mexico (Merida Initiative) are utter failures which have cost tens of thousands of innocent lives.

*The “pivot to the East”, in which the U.S. has been working to limit Chinese influence in Asia, combined with egregious rhetorical China-bashing in the electoral context, also does not contribute much to world stability and peace.

*In Afghanistan, the Middle East and North Africa, heavy handed actions carried out in cooperation with NATO and local reactionaries have had disastrous results. The continued war in Afghanistan, the intervention in Libya, and the current support for right wing Arab and other regimes which are contributing to the escalation of the violence and suffering in Syria is a matter for great worry and urgent action. Economic sanctions against Iran only hurt ordinary working people, and are sharply criticized by the Iranian left. Worrisome, too, is the increased U.S. military involvement in Africa.

*Though the Obama administration has been more critical of Israeli policy than some of its predecessors, which has inspired venomous attacks on Obama by Prime Minister Netanyahu, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/terrorism-security/2012/0911/Netanyahu-criticizes-US-refusal-to-draw-a-red-line-on-Iran it remains to be seen whether it will do anything to prevent an Israel-Iran war or to pressure the Israelis to bargain in good faith with the Palestinians. The pattern over several decades has been for U.S. administrations, both Democratic and Republican, to get frustrated with Israeli intransigence, but in the end to go along with the status quo, leaving the Palestinian people holding the bag.

*There are many other things that could be criticized, but I will close by mentioning the atrocious policy of “drone strikes” which have killed numerous innocent people in Pakistan and Yemen, and have probably driven far more people into the arms of the Salafist jihadists in the process. http://www.peoplesworld.org/civilian-deaths-mount-as-u-s-drones-strike-pakistan/

All of these are extremely serious negative features of the current administration's foreign policy. However, the election of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney would have made things far worse, as would a Republican majority in the Senate, or the increase of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

Romney attacked the Obama administration from the right on foreign policy as well as everything else. This was not just electoral demagogy, although there was a lot of that in this election, as always. It also reflected the links and networks that Romney, Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan and others close to them in the Republican Party have built up over the years with specific major corporate and political actors within the United States and worldwide. Of course, the Democrats have such links also, but those of the current crop of Republican politicians are particularly dangerous.

The Romney-Ryan forces are politically very close to groups within the United States such as the Neocons http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/bush-all-over-again-mitt-romney-trojan-horse-neocons and the Cuban exile right. They also link internationally with right wing networks in other countries, especially in Latin America, as well as with the most intransigent right-wing factions in Israeli politics.

Romney's financial ties in Latin America include investments in his company, Bain Capital, by people close to fascist circles in Central America, especially in El Salvador. http://peoplesworld.org/romney-s-bain-capital-connected-to-salvador-death-squads/These are the people who, in tandem with U.S. neo cons such as former Reagan and Bush II official Elliot Abrams, former Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton and Republican foreign policy figures such as John Negroponte, Roger Noriega and Otto Reich, have brought us such things as the Contra Wars in Central America and the Iraq War also. Had Romney and Ryan won, these individuals and their ilk would have been in charge of U.S. foreign policy, both conceptualization and implementation. This would have been no improvement over the Obama-Clinton approach.

The voters also sent the political class a message, not for the first time, that they are not enthusiastic about bellicose approaches to international policy.

In the Senate and House of Representatives, none of the group of about 80 congresspersons who stand for a less bellicose, more peacefully oriented U.S. foreign policy were punished for it by being defeated at the polls, with the sole exception of California Democrat Laura Richardson, who was defeated by another Progressive Caucus member, Janice Hahn--they were thrown against each other in the same district because of redistricting. There is also no hint that Richardson was defeated on foreign policy issues. The rest of this group, who in the House constitute the majority of the Progressive, Black, Hispanic and Asian-Pacific Caucuses, were all reelected. Several new Senators and House members elected on November 6 are likely to join this group in terms of support for a peaceful foreign policy, including no more wars and a normalization of relations with Cuba and other countries with which the United States has picked fights.

As final election results come in, it appears that Congresspersons who have played a role in questioning the hostile U.S. policy toward Cuba were all re-elected unless they did not choose to run. A major voice in opposition to an aggressive U.S. foreign policy, Congressman Alan Grayson, had been defeated for re-election in 2010, but came storming back this year, defeating his Republican opponent by a margin of 62.7 percent to 37.5 percent to get back his old Florida seat. California Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee, the only person in the House to vote against the war in Afghanistan when it started and a major player in efforts to change U.S. policy on Cuba, was reelected without opposition.

We can also say goodbye to Joe Lieberman, the Independent, former Democratic senator from Connecticut who has been a major promoter of right wing policies on the Middle East and also on Cuba. He is replaced by a progressive Democrat, Chris Murphy, who will be much more likely to take reasonable positions on foreign policy.

On the other hand, few of the most anti-Cuba members of House and Senate lost their seats either, with the exception of Republican Congressman David Rivera of Florida, who was defeated by a moderate Democrat, Joe Garcia. Rivera went down to defeat because of an electoral fraud scandal; time will tell what kind of attitude Garcia takes. He is also Cuban-American and actually was, for a time, the Executive Director of the anti-Revolution Cuban-American Foundation, but his views have since become more moderate. Another enemy of Cuba, Florida Representative Connie Mack, tried for a Senate seat but was defeated by the incumbent Democrat, Bill Nelson, who is certainly no friend of Cuba either http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-11-06/news/sns-rt-us-usa-campaign-florida-senatebre8a60aj-20121106_1_nelson-ranch-florida-senator-bill-nelson-third-term. Very bad news is the election of Republican Ted Cruz to the Senate from Texas; he will definitely be a hard line supporter of reactionary foreign policy. And the tendency of even progressive Democrats to avoid any appearance of a conflict with Israel will probably continue.

There are also indirect, but no less real, reasons to think that the November 6 election was a victory for a saner foreign policy. A major goal of the Republican Party was to destroy the U.S. labor movement. They failed, and organized labor emerges from the election politically strengthened, and also with a greater tendency to speak out independently on international and foreign policy issues. Examples of this latter tendency include the outstanding role U.S. trade unionists have been playing in opposition to U.S. policy toward Colombia, http://www.aflcio.org/Press-Room/Press-Releases/Statement-of-the-AFL-CIO-On-Colombian-Labor-And-Huand in favor of a peaceful solution to that country's civil war. U.S. unions have also been active in solidarity with beleaguered independent left-leaning unions in Mexico and elsewhere. http://peoplesworld.org/mexican-miners-fight-back-an-interview-with-napoleon-gomez/ Weakening of U.S. unions would have greatly harmed those important solidarity initiatives. Now they are strengthened.

Nothing much positive is going to happen legislatively in the immediate future. The Republicans lost a few seats in the House of Representatives, but still have a majority there. The Democrats slightly increased their majority in the Senate, but the problem of the filibuster is not solved, and not all Democrats take even relatively progressive positions on foreign policy issues. And above all, there is no indication that because of the dynamics of the election, the Obama administration is going to make a sudden left turn on international affairs. Rather, what was good about the results of the election was that they headed off a major effort to move foreign policy to the right. Secretary of State Clinton has said she is going to step down, and there is speculation about who might replace her, or what kinds of political views such a person might have. It is premature to get into a whole discussion about this, but progressive people should be ready to speak out when things are further along.

But one thing is clear: We can not rely on the initiatives of even the best Democrats to create changes in U.S. foreign policy. Quite independently of the party identity of the occupant of the Oval Office or who controls the House and Senate, U.S. based transnational corporations, including most specifically finance capital and also the oil and mining interests and the military-industrial complex, exercise tremendous power within our state and in our elections. To provide a counterweight to these influences, we have to organize at the base, working with organized labor, civil rights, and other democratic forces to create a permanent mass lobby for a foreign policy that emphasizes peace and that is respectful of the national sovereignty of other nations, and of the right of all peoples to seek security, prosperity and dignity, whether international monopoly capital likes it or not.

And we have to teach our people not to be deceived by the game of “humanitarian interventions”. The American people do not, as a whole, approve of aggressive interventions in other countries; for them to accept such actions, they have to be dressed up as acts of humanity. Only better mass level education on foreign affairs can stop that game.