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FORWARD! POPULAR THEORY & PRACTICE
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[If] indeed we succeeded in reaching the point when all, or at least a considerable majority, of the local committees, local groups, and study circles took up active work for the common cause, we could, in not the distant future, establish a weekly newspaper for regular distribution in tens of thousands of copies throughout Russia. This newspaper would become part of an enormous pair of smith's bellows that would fan every spark of the class struggle and of popular indignation into a general conflagration... That is what we should dream of! V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done
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CONTRIBUTORS J . F. P O I N T O N
FORWARD! FOUN DE R & E D I TO R
J.F. Pointon CREAT I V E DI R EC TO R & E D I TOR
Daniel A. Clark E DI TO R I AL B OA RD
Nate Reed Liz Estrem Austin A. Austin James Brian Griffith Ben Stahnke X Eros Ember Kelley Natasha Red Wolf Mao Wan-Zhang S P O NS O RS
Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute
Founder of Pravda Media, Editor for Forward!, a nd General Secretary of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. EMBER KELLEY Christia n Communist Theologia n, Member of the Tra ns Issues Committee of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute a nd Contributing Editor. IAN GOODRUM Ia n Goodrum is a writer a nd journalist whose work has appeared in the Iowa City Press-Citizen a nd Interrogating the Reel. He is a digital editor for China Daily.
B E N STA H N K E Copyright Š 2017 by Pravda Media All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotation in a book review or scholarly journal. First Printing: 2017 ISBN <Enter your ISBN> Pravda Media 3180 W Greenwood St. Box 28 Springfield, MO 65807 www.pravda-m.com ORDERING INFORMATION Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, educators, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the above linked address. U.S trade bookstores and wholesalers; please contact Pravda Media Tel: 1-417-374-1966
Ph.D. student at Antioch University, Editor for Forward!
SHANE CREEPINGBEAR Sha ne Creepingbear is the associate director of admission for a ntioch college in Yellow Springs, OH. Sha ne spends his free time orga nizing locally, raising four Daughters, a nd is a blue belt in Brazilia n jiu jitsu.
K I M B E R LY MILLER Kimberly Miller doctoral student studying geopolitical economy, US imperialism, Asia n immigra nt a nd black America n sociocultural encounters.
CHRISTOPHER COSTELLO Marxist-Leninist activist, contributor to The Forge News, writer at writetorebel.com.
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FORWARD! is dedicated to establishing a space for discussion of the essential questions of today’s revolutionary socialism. We seek to publish rigorous analysis of current events, practical lessons of everyday political activity, and new developments in socialist theory. In the process, we aim to arm our readers with a rbadical understanding that furthers the liberation struggles of all working and oppressed peoples. History has shown socialism to be the only successful path toward human liberation, with a proven record of ending poverty and improving people's livelihoods. Socialists have been at the forefront of every movement against exploitation and oppression, from the earliest
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attempts at workers' power, to the anti-colonial revolutions in Asia, Africa and the Americas, to the struggle for women's and LGBTQ liberation. Now, the need for a consistent, unapologetic socialist position has never been more important. We believe our duty as revolutionaries is to seek the greatest possible development of socialist practice. That is, to change the real world. We hope that through sincere effort and collaboration, FORWARD! will be a principled source for readers, and a rallying point for revolutionary socialists throughout the world to express a unified voice. In solidarity with all who struggle against capitalism and imperialism — This is FORWARD!
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THE SANDERS SHUFFLE
MISTER LIES • GUEST CONTRIBUTOR
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enator Bernie Sanders, standard-bearer for the left wing of the Democratic Party, was in the New York Times on Friday marshaling the long march back into national relevance for the Democratic Party. His attempt to recapture the public imagination comes with heaps of Trumpist populism and Clintonian authority. The nation cries out for political guidance, and Bernie will play Pied Piper in the coming years to bring a younger generation back into the fold of the parties responsible for that outcry.
Bernie has proven deft at harnessing class-conscious rhetoric toward the ends of bourgeois politics. He correctly asserts that “[o] ver the last 30 years, too many Americans were sold out by their corporate bosses,” failing to mention that in the last 30 years, Democrats have held the Presidency for a slim majority of the time. He neglects to lay blame on the Clinton administration for its lopsided multinational trade deals (exacerbated under Bush II), or
"Will he have the courage to stand up to Wall Street, work to break up the 'too big to fail' financial institutions and demand that big banks invest in small businesses and create jobs in rural America and inner cities?"
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summer 2017 — for Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the financial reform act which enabled the 2008 financial collapse. Bernie is yet another false prophet, pushing the gospel of opposing the establishment while representing one flank of it. Had Trump conceded, a similar op-ed with his byline would likely have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, or at least on Breitbart. Bernie issues direct challenges to the Trump administration in this masterpiece of willful-absentmindedness: “Will he have the courage to stand up to Wall Street, work to break up the “too big to fail” financial institutions and demand that big banks invest in small businesses and create jobs in rural America and inner cities? Or, will he appoint another Wall Street banker to run the Treasury Department and continue business as usual? Will he, as he promised during the campaign, really take on the pharmaceutical industry and lower the price of prescription drugs?” Ever lovable, if forgetful, Sanders makes no mention of the fact that Obama’s Treasury
Promises of change come as readily before each national election as the status quo afterward returns. Secretaries have been neoliberal alumni of Citigroup and the International Monetary Fund. That Obama broke up no banks deemed too big
to fail and indeed signed a financial regulatory law, Dodd-Frank, which explicitly enshrines their existence. He fails to mention that Obama’s health care reform has brought and continues to bring Big Pharma many billions in new revenues thanks to the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying. Bernie evades entirely the plight of the rural poor under the watchful eye of President Obama. This reality fuels the extant racial animus of many rural whites against a President whom Glenn Beck famously claimed “has a deep-seated hatred for white people.” And to add injury to insult, Sanders continues the long tradition of liberal capitulation to fascism, saying, “I will keep an open mind to see what ideas Mr. Trump offers and when and how we can work together.” Perhaps Bernie has also forgotten the previous 18 months of Trump’s vitriol regarding women, minorities, immigrants, and other marginalized groups. The ideas are already out. Promises of change come as readily before each national election as the status quo afterward returns. Obama’s revolutionary promises became reformist policies, indistinguishable from Bush II, if not heightened in their class character. Obama's agenda reveals all we need to know of what Clinton II might have delivered. None of this is to forgive the blatant sins of the Republicans, who have elevated a neofascist strongman to the level of godhead. His promises decidedly populist, his rhetoric undeniably oppressive, Trump's policies will only benefit the capitalists and bourgeoisie as assuredly as the last four Republican Presidents’ did. After the humiliation of the Clinton campaign’s tactical and strategic errors, and decades of the Democratic and Republican Parties failing
10 — forward! to meaningfully address the concerns of marginalized communities, we must look for answers elsewhere. We will find these answers in revolutionary theory, and certainly not in the runner-up to the runner-up, lest we fall into the trap the Democrats are now laying for us. “In the coming days, I will also provide a series of reforms to reinvigorate the Democratic Party,” Bernie emptily promises. It is clear in this phrase that the ideas are meant to revitalize a Party and recoup its losses. Not to revitalize the working class, but to re-empower the political class. These ideas will certainly sound nice coming from a Party with no power to enact them, just as Trump’s outsider perspective sounded soothing when not rooted in political ability. Now is the time for those who wish to see change in our political system to recognize the abject failure of Democrats and Republicans to live up to their continual promises to workers, and for workers seeking an outsider perspective to look away from insiders portraying outsiders, as Bernie and Trump unbelievably attempt. As assuredly as President-elect Trump will gut the social safety net and deliver huge tax breaks for his wealthy peers, so too will the Democratic Party continue to serve the interests of Wall Street, pharmaceutical companies, large insurers, and energy companies, who gatekeep their path back to power. Democrats will not bite the hands that feed them – even if Bernie spends four years promising they will, finally, this time, hold them accountable. The time is ripe for workers, long left in both parties’ distant rear view, to band together outside the machine that manufactures false hope. Do not join, or rejoin, the Democratic Party, no matter what their curmudgeonly spokesman sells you. They are failing, and in
their absence the Republican Party will doom itself by governing as it sees fit. Workers should abandon the Republican Party's proud plutocrats to govern like business-owners - they will lose all popular support in doing so.
To build real, antiestablishment power, join a socialist organization and develop solutions outside the bourgeois system. Study revolutionary theory and tactics.
Develop solutions to protect the marginalized people whom Trump’s administration (and followers) will target openly, just as Obama’s administration (and followers) targeted undocumented people and foreign citizens without admission. Build solidarity in your own community, rather than listening to the supposed-saviors of the working class hoping to lure us into a four-year struggle to elect the next Clinton, or Obama, or Sanders, or Bush, or Trump.
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SEE ING RED It’s time to quit shying away from a positive communist politics. Turning away from the past only gives our opponents ammunition. IAN GOODRUM • GUEST CONTRIBUTOR
There’s a pandemic loose among the left.
It’s dangerous, and spreading fast. If we don’t act now, it might be too late to contain it before it throttles this nascent socialist wave in the crib. Luckily, the symptoms are easy to spot. Just ask any self-described communist or
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Pavel Filonov, GOELRO (National Plan for the Electrification of Russia), 1930.
“leftist” about the socialist experiments of the last century: the USSR, Cuba, China, Vietnam, DPRK and so on. If they’re a carrier, it should be simple to tell; their head will drop, they will avert their eyes and begin stammering something about failures and mass deaths and suddenly that leftist will start to sound a lot like a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society. If these folks are to be believed, the past is the past and the socialist politics of the future will avoid the errors of those countries — and if this person is afflicted, the errors will be all they can talk about — through unexplained wizardry, usually technological advances. With allies like these, willing to toss aside the entire 20th century to appease the mildest questioning, is it any wonder people see the left as impotent? Democratic socialists correctly point to a need to develop a positive politics in response to neoliberalism’s collapse — a vision of what a better world can specifically do for people. Inevitably, what this ends up looking like is a repackaging of Scandinavian social democracy, which does no Muslims or non-whites many favors in the convincing department. When pressed about
the states presided over by communist parties, the dissembling begins. “Sure, they had good ideas,” they’ll say. “But,” they continue, everything fell apart, nothing good happened, it’s time to try something totally new with zero cues from history. Compelling stuff. What we as Marxist-Leninists must develop is a positive politics of our own. The Norsephiles are quick to use programs of universal health care and free education as a model for the United States, and that’s enough for some to be convinced. But there’s more to socialism than a tepid imitation of Sweden. We sorely need a similar shorthand that goes even farther, and uses examples from those countries the afflicted members of the broader left would have us forget. It goes without saying a new communist program would include free health care and education. Yet under socialism, universal rights to material security don’t end there, the way they do in social democracy. Ruling parties enshrined in their constitutions the sorts of rights capitalist countries have yet to codify into law, nearly a century after the
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ON MARXISM AND ELECTIONS
CHRIS COSTELLO • GUEST CONTRIBUTOR PART ONE: The Electoral Path to Socialism
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here has been much debate about how radical political actors should engage with electoral politics. Some, like anarchists, argue that the correct tactic is to ignore electoral politics entirely, focusing on what they see as the more useful path of direct action or “propaganda by the deed” 1. Among those who identify as Marxists, thought on this topic is generally more varied. Some parties have chosen to confine themselves entirely to the electoral sphere, attempting to win socialism through the ballot box. Others have boycotted elections and embarked upon a “people’s war” of armed struggle with the state and capital. The point here is that there is no one Marxist theory of elections. This is partly because elections themselves are a vastly different from place to place. The electoral system in Britain, for example, is quite different from the one in Peru. As such, it is impossible to approach elections in a vacuum. Marxists understand that tactics must be based on the material conditions of the struggle, so attempting to craft a platonic plan of action in the electoral sphere is useless. In the essays that follow, I will not attempt to craft such a theory. This is not a manual
or a blueprint for Marxist organizations. What I want to do here is sketch out, in broad terms, an analysis of electoral politics from a Marxist perspective. This is simply my opinion of the topic, and I caution readers not to trust in it blindly. It is important to conduct concrete social investigation of every issue rather than simply reading about it. We must, in the words of Mao, “oppose book worship” 2. In this first section, I want to refute the idea of “voting our way to socialism.” This strategy has been a failure nearly everywhere it has been attempted. I am firmly in favor of a revolutionary road to socialism, based on smashing the existing state and building new organs of worker’s power where it once stood. It is important to note that the social democratic parties-that is, parties whose main goal is to win socialism through elections rather than revolution-have failed to abolish capitalism even once. This is especially egregious in the context of Western Europe, where many of these parties have enjoyed media backing and majorities in parliament. These parties have not only failed in their aims to bring about socialism peaceful-
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summer 2017 — ly, however. In many cases, they have actually become parties of the bourgeois elite or the labor aristocracy. Across the region, social democratic parties have implemented dramatic cuts in social spending, as well as a host of reforms designed to boost the position of capital at the expense of workers. In Greece and Italy, proposed or recently passed budgets will reduce spending over the coming years by about 29 billion dollars 3. In Germany, this number is as high as $96 billion. This figure constitutes the largest collection of spending cuts in this country since World War Two 4. Cuts will also total as much as one billion dollars in France 5. Planned or approved reforms in this region include a host of anti-worker measures. This involves a three-year increase in the age at which French workers can retire 6, the elimination of payments into the pensions of the unemployed in Germany 7, and changes to Spain’s labor laws which will make it cheaper and easier for employers to lay off workers 8. These attacks have, predictably, been met by a great deal of militancy from workers. Many will have heard of the mass strikes and violent protests opposing catastrophic austerity plans in Greece 9. I bring all of this up because they tell us quite a bit about the nature of social democracy, or “socialism through the ballot box.” As I said above, Western Europe has traditionally been a hotbed of reformist socialism. Many of these parties still exist across the continent. At one point, they hoped to slowly implement reforms culminating in the transition to socialism. This view stood opposed to that of revolutionaries, who sought a sharp, rapid overthrow of the system 10. After the Second World War, however, many of these parties gave up even this goal. They instead settled on a program of slow
progressive alterations to capitalism, offering piecemeal improvements in the lot of workers within the bounds of a “managed capitalism” 11. They focused on creating welfare institutions, extensive public sector employment, and government support for unions. All of these measures, meager though they are, have been or are being destroyed. In many cases, this destruction is being spearheaded by the same parties that instituted them in the first place. This gets at the real problem with reformism. Because reformist socialist parties want to work within states designed to uphold the rule of capital, they will forever be bound by the laws of capitalism. This means that any reforms they win will be subject to market forces and cut back at the first opportunity. We can never hope to win socialism by passing one reform after another, because these reforms will always be fragile. The capitalist class will seek to cut public services and benefits so that they can better exploit their workers. A socialist party working within a capitalist state will also find themselves subjected to this pressure. This is why social democratic parties have, in many places, become a vehicle for the set of profree-market, anti-worker policies often grouped under the banner of neoliberalism. In Greece, Germany, and elsewhere, it is social democratic governments or coalitions pushing these measures 12. Even outside of government, reformist socialists have led no sustained or comprehensive attempts to resist the neoliberal order. How has it happened that in Europe, where the power and influence of social democratic parties has been greater than anywhere else, social democrats have not only failed in their original mission of abolishing capitalism in the electoral sphere, but have largely come to serve the interests of capital against labor? Perry
28 — forward! war would mean imprisonment of leaders and the outlawing of the organization entirely. This, of course, would have eliminated their electoral strategy altogether and jeopardized the progress they had made in that arena. While their actions are understandable, they also reveal the strategic problem with focusing on elections. By engaging exclusively in legal modes of struggle, we subject ourselves to the whims of the law. Since the judicial system is part of the state, this means that we put ourselves at a disadvantage. By acting openly in the electoral sphere, and leaving open no other avenues of struggle, repression of the Party would have meant the complete downfall of the movement. Not diversifying our tactics, as the experience of the SDP shows, can only mean death [16]. Given this experience, it is understandable that some revolutionaries could develop a complete aversion to political elections under capitalism. It is understandable that some would argue that we should not partake in elections under any circumstances. I would, of course, argue against this view. Lenin and the Bolsheviks engaged in a similar debate as a result of the 1905 revolution. In response to mass upheaval, the Russian Tsar granted the creation of a parliament called the Duma. He did not do this because his mind had been changed by the masses, but rather because he knew that the revolutionary movement was most dangerous in the streets. If he could redirect it to legal channels, the pressures of the parliament would render it ineffective. The Duma, because it was stacked with pro-tsarist forces, could easily control and neutralize the revolutionary struggle. For the Tsar, the establishment of the Duma was not matter of principle. It was a purely tactical consideration based on an actual assessment of a particular
situation. It is important to note at this juncture that even our enemies are aware that there is no electoral road to socialism [17]. When standing for elections, we must be ever vigilant and on guard, ensuring that we do not get caught up in the spectacle of anti-worker politics. If our enemies utilize bourgeois democratic institutions in a tactical manner, we must also understand them in this way. Initially, the Bolsheviks organized an active boycott of the election. They recognized that it was a trap and chose to focus their energy on harnessing the rising struggle in the streets. In this context, this was the correct line. The point that we need to take away from this is that we ought not use elections as a substitute for struggle, but neither should we swear them off completely. Whether we intervene in the electoral sphere at a given moment should be dependent on a rigorous analysis of the concrete material conditions of struggle. This is how the Bolsheviks understood this question as well. In 1906, when it was clear that the struggle was turning towards a period of reaction, the Bolsheviks changed their position on the Duma [18]. This was the result of a long theoretical and practical debate in the Party. The Bolsheviks understood that at that particular point, the forces of reaction had vastly outnumbered the forces of progress. In order to rally the workers behind the Party, it was necessary to unify them around a program and a “face.” Elections here functioned, as I said above, as a “broadcasting unit” capable of carrying the struggle forward. Lenin also published a pamphlet called “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder” in which he put forward another argument for participation in the Duma. He argued that, while revolutionaries understand that the electoral
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summer 2017 — system is set up to serve the people in power, the masses have not necessarily drawn this conclusion. If the electoral arena garners the political attention and focus of the working class, if the masses believe that the government can serve them, then revolutionaries must play an active part in it. This is part of how we relate to the masses, shift their consciousness, and win them to revolution. This theoretical point reflects an understanding of the mass line, which Leninists argue should be the primary method of work of the Party. The mass line begins when we meet the people where they are at. We cannot run ahead of the masses. If we do so, we risk alienating them and dooming the Party to isolation [19]. The Bolsheviks, based on this understanding, participated in the Duma and eventually won six delegates (which they called Deputies) to it. In the same vein as the Marx-Engels attitude outlined above, the Bolshevik Deputies were used as a tactic in pursuit of a wider strategy of raising the revolutionary consciousness and combativity of the masses. The elections were not an end in and of themselves, but rather a means to an end. For this to be possible, the Deputies had to engage in activity outside the Duma as well as inside it. They needed to have strong, intimate connections with both the workers and the rest of the Bolshevik party. Unlike capitalist politicians, the deputies were not divorced from the real conditions of working people and subject to the totalizing influence of the bourgeoisie and their lackeys. Nor could they be like the German socialist representatives mentioned above. They were not put on a pedestal and divorced from
32 — forward! To reiterate, socialism cannot be handed down from above, but must be a product of the self-activity of the workers and their party. Revolutionaries cannot simply win seats in parliament and cloister themselves off from the struggle. They must remain in contact with the masses every step of the way. Elections are merely one path by which to do this. Putting this electoral strategy into action not only increased the self-activity and consciousness of the masses, it also gave the Bolsheviks a thermometer through which they could measure the mood of the masses and tailor their practice to fit that mood. This helped them win the masses over to their program with much greater expediency than if they had abstained from elections entirely. Ultimately, in 1917, it was by assessing their elections to the soviets that allowed the Bolsheviks to ascertain whether they had enough support to wage an armed revolutionary struggle [27]. If you think back to the strategic perspectives put forward by Marx and Engels in 1848, all of this should sound familiar. Elections were not the be-all and end-all of socialist practice. They were a tool to be utilized as part of a greater strategy of winning the masses over to revolution and organizing them to take power. Of course, there are some significant dif-
ferences between where we are as a movement today and where we were in 1848 or 1917. Just like the Bolsheviks debating whether or not to boycott the Duma, all strategy and tactics need to be based on as accurate an assessment as possible of the concrete situation. They must be based on our weaknesses as well as our strengths, on what we think we can accomplish. Above all, however, we must always return back to the central question every revolutionary should ask: what will it take to increase the consciousness, combativity, and organization of the workers and the oppressed? In short, what will it take to win? Elections ought to be subordinate to this goal, but they can play an important role in catalyzing and sustaining revolutionary struggle. In the United States particularly, one of the major factors holding back the progress of the worker’s movement is the Democratic Party. Unlike in other countries, where workers have their own political Party, the American working class is tied to an organization that, although it claims to support their interests, is actually bound up with the interests of capital. Election law in this country is rigged against third party challenges. Unlike in Europe, where seats in parliament are dictated by the proportion of the vote a party receives, the United States has a winner-take-all system.
what will it take to increase the consciousness, combativity, and organization of the workers and the oppressed? In short, what will it take to win?
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The American political system offers little in the way of real democracy; workers feel that they only have two choices at the ballot box [28]. Their choice is of the Republican party, which openly supports the rich and powerful, and the Democratic party, which offers a more clandestine form of moneyed repression. Although the Democratic party attempts to hijack the rhetoric of the left, history has shown that they can never be any more than liberaldemocratic defenders of the status quo. By dishonestly and hypocritically giving voice to
vaguely left politic, a dynamic is created in which the workers, no matter how frustrated they are with the Democrats, feel compelled to vote for the “lesser of two evils.” Every four years, there is pressure on the worker’s movement to put militant organizing on pause and focus on making sure a Republican is not elected into office. When Democrats feel like the have the working class vote on lock, there is nothing to stop them from shifting further and further to the right once they actually get into office. This was never clearer than in the Obama presidency. On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama said he was going to “put on his walking shoes” and walk picket lines with workers [29]. He was nowhere to be found when Democrat Rahm Emanuel attempted to smash the teacher’s strike in Obama’s hometown of Chicago [30]. This strike was waged for better working conditions and against racist school closures. It is easy to
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IT IS RIGHT TO
REBEL AN ANTI-IMPERIALIST THEOLOGY OF CLASS
EMBER KELLEY • Editor SECTION ONE: Context
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he year is 1950, and the United States has assumed the mantle of leading the capitalist powers following World War 2. The country feels that it is important to position itself against various communist movements and the Soviet Union. One rising popular communist movement was that led by Kim Il Sung in Korea, where the people had recently overthrown Japanese Occupation. The United States had agreed with the Soviet Union to divide influence in Korea, with a communist North and a capitalist South. By 1950, tensions had boiled over to the point of war. With the communist forces of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea gaining a quick upper hand in the conflict, the United States came to the aid of the capitalist forces of the Republic of Korea. Thus began “the first ‘hot’ war of the Cold War”1. In the United States, this war is known as the Korean War, and is not often discussed with much depth.
However, if we do not analyze this war and subsequent United States actions, we will fail to see how the United States developed into a global imperialist power. Writing for The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan offers this insight into this need for unveiling forgotten history, How many Americans, for example, are aware of the fact that U.S. planes dropped on the Korean peninsula more bombs — 635,000 tons — and napalm — 32,557 tons — than during the entire Pacific campaign against the Japanese during World War II? How many Americans know that “over a period of three years or so,” to quote Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, “we killed off … 20 percent of the population”?...
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summer 2017 — According to LeMay, “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea.”... How many Americans have heard of the No Gun Ri massacre, in July 1950, in which hundreds of Koreans were killed by U.S. warplanes and members of the 7th U.S. Cavalry regiment as they huddled under a bridge? Details of the massacre emerged in 1999, when the Associated Press interviewed dozens of retired U.S. military personnel. “The hell with all those people,” one American veteran recalled his captain as saying. “Let’s get rid of all of them.” How many Americans are taught in school about the Bodo League massacre of tens of thousands of suspected communists on the orders of the U.S.-backed South Korean strongman, President Syngman Rhee, in the summer of 1950? Eyewitness accounts suggest “jeeploads” of U.S. military officers were present and “supervised the butchery.” Millions of ordinary Americans may suffer from a toxic combination of ignorance and amnesia, but the victims of U.S. coups, invasions, and bombing campaigns across the globe tend not to. This violent and oppressive history is not made part of the narrative of the Korean War in the United States. The United States used Korea as a testing ground for the two key strategies that it would use to establish imperial hegemony around the world in the following decades- military intimidation and politico-economic domination.
This pattern has continued since the Korean War. The Republic of Korea was ruled by a rotation of United States backed politicians and military leaders. Important among these was Park Chung-hee who “seized power in 1961 and ruled with an iron hand until he was assassinated in 1979”. Under his leadership, the economy be-
came focused on “export-led economic growth”. This move was largely beneficial to the United States importing products, while in Korea it meant repression of unions and low wages. It was not until 1987 that progress was made in living out democratic principles. While economic conditions have improved in the Republic of Korea and the people have been granted some autonomy, the United States still has “28,500 troops in South Korea” The United States has also recently installed a new missile defense system despite popular and political opposition to its placement. The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea in the North initially had economic success as part of the Soviet bloc. However with the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s, they lost their major economic partners and became increasingly isolated. The United States has since worked “to isolate north Korea from the world’s financial system” and apply military intimidation through annual war games in the region. George W. Bush even named the country as part of his Axis of Evil so as to connect them with the modern War on Terror. Turning to the effects of these systems in the United States, this imperialistic culture has led to systemic dehumanization. This can be seen in popular media, with both Team America World Police (2004) and The Interview (2014) featuring racist humor and plots of assassination of political leaders. There seems be bipartisan consensus on the need to continue intimidation. In the 2016 Vice Presidential Debate, Governor Pence advocated “peace through strength” while Senator Kaine advocated for “extensive sanctions”. There seems to be little care for the people of Korea, but rather for United States power on the world stage.
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THE LIMITATIONS OF
IDENTITY POLITICS
SHANE CREEPINGBEAR • Guest Contributor
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here was a time when conversations about privilege and identity-based oppression were strong and important tools towards defining political movements. In particular, these conversations were often used in higher education to get white people to talk about whiteness, as a 101 conversation towards a broader understanding of oppression. Understanding how your interactions and the unchecked ways you can marginalize people you are interacting with in social, professional and classroom settings is undeniably important, but not as an end unto itself. The end is the liberation of all nationally oppressed peoples. Unfortunately, privilege discourse has become its own, nearly ubiquitous political line, its hamster wheel politics. Its the same conversations over and over again. Its constant struggle with no progress. Talking about privilege is a legitimate method to catalog some of the ways
some individuals tend to benefit over others, but it can’t go much further than that. While we should recognize the importance of a basic understanding of identity-based oppressions, it's also important to understand the limitations of the discourse. Framing identity-based oppression as the main political line does not allow for the adequate deconstruction of oppressive structural issues built to maintain white supremacy and disrupt national liberation of the oppressed. Identity discourse alone cannot fix structural problems because rather than opening up to a wider critique, it atomized the issues to their smallest level: the individual’s responsibility to “check themselves” when they marginalize another person from a “more oppressed” identity group. These privilege politics have observably stalled progress towards breaking down white supremacy.
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summer 2017 — It’s time to stop centering our discourse around identity-based privilege politics. Call-out culture and privilege-checking, as political tools, ultimately amount to little more than a series of underwhelming interpersonal confessions. Discussion of skin privilege, for example, places whiteness at the focal point; the discourse of identity politics will group as many people into the category of white as possible, which is in no way a new phenomenon. This is largely where the term “white passing” has developed— and although this wasn’t a term used until recently, the discourse around it is very similar to how grouping as many indigenous peoples as white was used as a tool for colonial and cultural genocide. In many cases when someone uses the term “white passing,” they are actually describing a situation of colorism or shadeism, although not necessarily accurately. These terms are prescribed to any discriminatory behavior anywhere in the world, as long as it has to do with skin tone. There is a paper by Solomon Leong that explores the notion of “fair skin” and its social construction in Hong Kong as a basis of a social hierarchy that gave birth to the design and marketing of skin
whitening products. In the paper Leong describes skin tone as “as a visual agent in defining the boundaries of cultural identity, and in identifying a person's place in a local social hierarchy." The acute reality is that there are benefits to being lighter skinned, but this is not “white privilege.” “White privilege” cannot and does not exist monolithically and as such is an inadequate framework for analysing whiteness, a concept that varies drastically based on context. “White privilege” is a moving target that cannot discern geographic location, socioeconomic status or the effects of colonialism and settlerism. Ironically, it’s the same homogenous definition that settler scumbags have been wielding for hundreds of years to justify the theft of land and resources from Indigenous peoples. Four hundred years of European colonization in the Americas has widened the gene pool, allowing for native peoples with the possibility of lighter skin, hair and eye color. Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. president, used that effect as justification for the removal of Cherokee peoples from their lands, saying they were now really “white” and hence their lands were not entitled to them.
Natives Americans were valued for their land so it makes sense from a colonial lens to group as many to be as white as possible. This is a good example of how privilege rhetoric becomes increasingly confusing and obfuscating. People describe privilege with rubrics that say things like, “you do not get followed around in stores,” or “no one questions you when you get a great job.” This understanding of privilege becomes a way to selectively describe oppression as interpersonal discrimination, a kind of idealistic reductionism that gets nowhere near the real
The issues at play are structural, not individual. issue. The issues at play are structural, not individual. Colorism is real—light skin does come with its benefits—but both colorism and racism were born out of white supremacy, the structural basis for a huge portion of the oppression that exists in the United States today.
50 — forward!
Radical History, Reactionary Erasure Remembering Communist Yemen
KIMBERLY MILLLER • GUEST CONTRIBUTOR YEMEN, THEN AND NOW 1980 postages from the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen show powerful images celebrating the 110th anniversary of the birth of revolutionary Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, or drawings of Yemeni women scrupulously writing and reading together. It is a stark contrast to the images the West is usually fed of Yemen, conceiving the country as hapless and impoverished, irrelevantly situated on the southern end of the Arabian peninsula. Lately, when Yemen is discussed in the media it is within context of dire poverty, ‘harboring extremism,’ being a launch-
ing pad for Saudi Arabian military aggression, the site of geopolitical proxy warfare between Gulf state hegemony and Iranian ascendency, or a dehumanizing United States’ drone strike destination. Starving children, mass civilian casualties, dilapidated buildings, and destroyed infrastructure exacerbated by a two year war of unconscionable Saudi aggression, plaster left media, with occasional orientalist stories about ‘child brides’ from western feminists. But often Yemen gets reduced to only these aspects of its existence. This reductionist approach downplays the complex dynamics that come to shape Yemen’s current tumultuous political climate. It also minimizes the historical significance of
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summer 2017 — being the first explicitly Marxist state in the Middle East. This piece is an overview of Yemen’s radical leftist history and national liberation that speak to larger themes of resistance, sovereignty, internationalism, and anti-colonialism, while challenging the historical erasure of revolutionary movements and struggle. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND South Yemen had a Marxist revolutionary government that lasted from 1967 to 1990, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was formed in the throws of anti-imperial resistance to British colonialism. Yemen’s National Liberation Front successfully defeated British forces in 1967. South Yemen’s 1971 Constitution proudly proclaimed the land had “striven valiantly… to oust the invaders” and that the NLF actively fought against “colonialism, feudalism, and the rule of the Sultans from South Yemen.” Yemen's leftist government made gains in literacy, education, women's advocacy, nationalized land, and pushed back against reactionary regional forces such as dynastic religious elitism from the north. They fought for self-determination and were internationalists, aligning with anti-colonial struggles and progressive movements in Palestine, Cuba, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Moreover, Yemen’s leftist government engaged different groups in South Yemen to encourage a versatile civic and nationally cultural identity to avoid sectarian division or insular kinship factionalism. Furthermore, South Yemen’s strategy for addressing class struggle and religion did not go unnoticed by imperialists. The United States Special Operations forces set for South Yemen astonishingly and boldly asserted, “Islam and Marxism are diametrically opposed from both the
Islamic and Marxist viewpoints. In South Yemen however, this condition has existed since 1967,” and noted South Yemen has a “unique blend of Islam and Marxism” and that this hybrid would be a specific challenge to “pro-Western Arab governments and United States interests in the region.” South Yemen clearly posed a threat to imperialist hegemons. SOUTH YEMEN AND INTERNATIONALISM In the Marxist-Leninist tradition of internationalism and oppressed nations, South Yemen is no exception to the rule. Communist Yemen made strategic alliances with other Marxist governments and left movements in Cuba, East Germany, and the Soviet Union while supporting Palestine against settler Zionist repression. Cuba under the impassioned leadership of Fidel Castro sent hundreds of troops to South Yemen to instruct and train Yemeni armed forces against possible invasion from the north or imperial destabilization plans from the west. Additionally, in enacting the Soviet Union’s “Third World Strategy,” East Germany’s National People’s Army would provide tactical support and solidarity aid to South Yemen, bulking up their defenses and infrastructure. Moreover, material assistance to Palestine affirmed South Yemen’s stance on national liberation struggles and anti-imperial resistance to Israeli aggression. National liberation is how South Yemen came into existence and would influence its relationship to other oppressed nations. Internationalism connected South Yemen to a larger global community exploited and subordinated by the same structures they were-capitalist imperialism. Internationalism acted as transnational resistance, eroding highly militarized colonially inscribed border divisions that stymied engage-
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LAND RELATIONS AND LANDOWNERSHIP AN EXCERPT FROM A NEW PRAVDA MEDIA PUBLICATION
"A World After Its Own Image" BEN STAHNKE • Editor
“T
he right of landownership,” wrote a young Karl Marx, “has its source in robbery.” This robbery, we might speculate, has existed since time immemorial. History itself might be conceived as a series of unending robberies; lapping waves of violent displacement. We might imagine that these waves of displacement, these unending movements of taking and taking-back, are natural. And indeed, we can begin from this hypothesis: land is held through a natural violence, or a threat of violence. When one becomes incapable of holding on to a space of land, another, stronger, comes in to take ownership. Violence, in the case of the domination of land, can take both material and ideological forms. The threat of physical violence, an idea of violence, is often enough for an individual, or a social class, to maintain land holdings. What happens when a species-group remains local to a geographical space for years— hundreds or thousands of years, even? Can we assert that, over time, a land relationship develops which influences not only the individual
species-being and her material efforts, but the species’ resultant cultural, legal, and political superstructure as well?
How intricately is the land itself woven into the social consciousness of society? “As individuals express their life,” Marx and Engels noted, “so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and how they produce it.” In other words, there occurs, in actu, an ontological identity not only between the individual and her action, but also between the species and its material resource-environment. An individual, as species-being, cannot exist but in intimate relationship to matter—to land. Hegel, in The Philosophy of History, commented on this intimacy, stating that: It is not our concern to become acquainted with the land occupied by nations as an external locale, but with the natural type of the locality, as intimately connected with the type and character of the people which is the offspring of such a
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summer 2017 — soil. This character is nothing more nor less than the mode and form in which nations make their appearance in History, and take place and position in it [emphasis added].
A locality for Hegel does two things: 1. it is categorizable—able to be considered distinctly by its natural type, or category—and 2. it produces offspring-species, including people, who also have a type and a character which are both intimately influenced by the locale itself. In other words, people and land share an identity. Following Hegel, we can thus, rather safely, assert the first premise of our argument: individuals engage in a (productive) material-psychological relationship with the land upon which they dwell, and in turn the character of this relationship is shaped by the distinctness of the land. In our view, this can be asserted without any great leaps in logic. Foregoing some traumatic split, for example, individuals tend to dwell fondly upon memories of hometowns, local parks, forests, and beaches. At the root of this fondness is, in our view, an intrinsic relationship to land itself—a specialized fondness. Over time, we can imagine, the relational ways in which lands are occupied, cultivated, and utilized for sustenance might tend to coalesce around a material status quo, thus becoming, simply, the ways by which things happen. It is at this point that material ways soon anabolize into ideas; ideas which quickly ossify as ideology; ideas which reinforce ways. Ideas, in situ, are always linked to ways; ways which have, historically, been managed by social stratification—a social positioning for resource access. And, as such, the relationship of humanto-land is always mediated, in society itself, by relationships of power. Dominant social classes emerge to control the best portions of land, and
class-controlled states quickly evolve to codify their rule. In The State and Revolution, Lenin observed that, “The state is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises when, where and to the extent that class antagonisms cannot be objectively reconciled.” In other words, states represent the exercising (and centralization) of public power by the various apparatuses of the extant dominant class. This public power, Engels noted, “exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men, but of material appendages, prisons and coercive institutions of all kinds.” Here, coercion implies threat of repression, or the idea of violence. Land-alienation, an idea which separates a species-being from its environment by way of legality, economy, or politics is the exercising of a violent idea by one social class over another; a purposeful weakening of the land-bond of the subordinate class. What then is the nature of the land-bond? It is nothing other than the dialectic of the productive mode as it conditions social life; productive relations as they condition the status quo of ideas; and the ideas of social life as they then inform how the species-being interacts with material reality. In essence, it is the economy of material reality conditioning man’s response to material reality itself. In his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx wrote: The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that
64 — forward! Serving the People A question the cadres (and the future party) must pay particular attention to is the well-being of the masses; cadres must fight for the well-being of the people in their locality and see to it that their needs are met. Currently, the revolutionary workers’ movement lacks an organic link with the masses. The masses fail to see a future for themselves in revolutionary socialism for revolutionary militants have failed to give the people answers to problems in their daily lives. During the Chinese Revolutionary War, Mao Zedong
said: “If we want to win … we must do a great deal more. We must lead the peasants’ struggle for land and distribute the land to them, heighten their labour enthusiasm and increase agricultural production, safeguard the interests of the workers, establish co-operatives, develop trade with outside areas, and solve the problems facing the masses– food, shelter and clothing, fuel, rice, cooking oil and salt, sickness and hygiene, and marriage. In short, all the practical problems in the masses’ everyday life should claim our attention.
If we attend to these problems, solve them and satisfy the needs of the masses, we shall really become organizers of the well-being of the masses, and they will truly rally round us and give us their warm support.” We must only look at the recent history of the revolutionary workers’ movement in the United States to see this theory validated. During the late 60’s and 70’s, the Black Panther Party was truly the vanguard of the oppressed of the nation. Historical analysis shows that many things point to the reason why the BPP rose to such a position (an entire book can be written on it, in fact, it has) but one reason for certain was their focus on the question of the well-being of the masses. Where chapters were located, the Panthers organized free breakfast programs, medical clinics, day care facilities, schools, committees for the self-de-
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summer 2017 — fense of their community (including armed patrols) to combat police brutality and abuse. These programs were so successful in rousing the support of the people that they became a central focus of the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program. Today, we must see to it that cadres are providing answers to questions of the people in their locality, they must serve and pay attention to the well-being of the masses. There are many ways to go about doing so. Cadre members can take active roles in already organized community advocacy and defense groups, or form their own. Many radical community programs have already
Electoral Patricipation
been organized around the country and have shown to be a success: anti-eviction campaigns, language classes, day-cares, anti-slumlord campaigns, etc (We cannot help but give a shout out to the Philly Socialists, whose model of serving the people deserves to be emulated.) Cadres must work in these programs, recruit, propaganize, conduct ideological struggle, etc… By struggling with the masses and providing them with guidance, answers, assistance, etc. cadres — and above all revolutionary socialism — may be realized as the voice of the people.
The Marxist-Leninist approach to participation in bourgeois elections is simple; it is impossible to rid the democratic republic of bourgeois control through the ballot box, but at the very same time it must not be ruled out as a tool for revolutionary struggle. Lenin wrote in State and Revolution that, “A democratic republic is the best possible politi-
To completely ignore electoral work is one-sided, incomplete, and non-dialectical. A balance must exist between the two, determined always by the present conditions. Cadres must seek to cement an
cal shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.”
And in “Democracy” and Dictatorship, “[Y]ou must take advantage of bourgeois democracy which, compared with feudalism, represents a great historical advance, but not for one minute must you forget the bourgeois character of this “democracy”, it’s historical conditional and limited character. Never share the “superstitious belief” in the “state” and never forget that the state even in the most democratic republic, and not only in a monarchy, is simply a machine for the suppression of one class by another.”
alliance of the most class-conscious and politically active workers within a locality who can begin to run independent, working class candidates who will fight for the immediate gains of the workers and their class allies. However, we must first ask some important questions in order to ensure that the use of elections as one tool in the revolutionary struggle does not degenerate into vulgar elector-
70 — forward!