threewayfight

Anti-capitalist perspectives on the Occupy movement

2012-01-24T21:27:00.002-05:00

The January issue of Insurgent Notes, an online left-communist journal, is devoted mainly to the Occupy movement, with a lead editorial, reports from Occupy campaigns in six U.S. cities, and an article on "class struggle in the US from the 2008 crash to the eve of the Occupations movement." Here's a quote from the editorial:

"The Occupy movement discovered the remaining central public space as the one place of visibility capable of reaching large numbers of people. 'Making shame more shameful still by making it public' (Marx) was an important part of what OWS and its spinoffs were about, after decades in which so much degradation and rollback had been suffered in atomized silence, buried by the trashy feel-good media and the enforced anonymity of people who suffered increasing job insecurity, the reality or threat of homelessness, ever-more expensive health care or no health care at all, useless diplomas and 'retraining' from dubious fly-by-night educational scams, downsizing, lengthening work weeks and declining real income with two and three precarious jobs, disappearing pensions, skyrocketing school tuitions, arbitrary week-to-week shift changes and scheduling (designed for no other reason than to tire, and demoralize, and fragment any potential workplace solidarity), electronic surveillance, and 'just in time' production methods. Like the Argentine piqueteros who realized the increasing limits of struggle focused on the factory, and expanded it instead to the supermarket, the hospital, the police station and the freeway blockage, OWS discovered a form of militant organization in which a thousand different grievances could be aired and made visible, not least through its often skillful use of new electronic media."

Also check out Hella Occupy!, a pamphlet distributed on December 12th with articles by Occupy activists in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Portland, Oakland, and Seattle. Hella Occupy! was "put together by revolutionaries from across the country. The purpose is to broaden and deepen our analysis of the Occupy Movement, and develop a deeper understanding of its potential beyond any particular city or location."

Conservatism studies: on the value and limits of academic history

2012-01-06T20:58:00.006-05:00

Not so long ago, respected historians and sociologists promoted the idea that right-wing politics was best understood as a kind of psychological problem: a form of collective irrationality, an expression of despair or a paranoid style, or a product of status anxiety among declining sectors of the middle class. The scholars who developed this view were Cold War liberals who needed a way to delineate their supposedly rational, measured anticommunism from the reckless, irresponsible anticommunism of Senator Joe McCarthy and his fans. (Michael Rogin pointed this out 45 years ago in his book The Intellectuals and McCarthy.) The right-wing-equals-irrational approach is pretty well useless for understanding political movements, but it persists in popular culture, largely because it makes liberalism (and the Democratic Party) look good.

Most academic historians, to their credit, have abandoned psychological theories of the right. This shift got seriously underway in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan's presidency made it clear that the right could no longer be dismissed as a declining or marginal force in U.S. politics. Since then, many valuable historical studies have been published, most of which concentrate on specific movements, locales, organizations, or people. The December 2011 Journal of American History features a helpful overview of much of this scholarship entitled "Conservatism: A State of the Field." (All page references are to this article unless otherwise indicated.) In this essay, Kim Phillips-Fein of NYU assesses academic work on modern U.S. conservatism over the past two decades, citing and commenting on dozens of books and articles, outlining broad trends, and offering suggestions for future work. (Unfortunately, the text of Phillips-Fein's piece -- and roundtable responses by six other historians -- is only available online by subscription to the journal, which excludes most of us outside academia. However, a detailed summary of the whole roundtable is available on the U.S. Intellectual History blog.)

A starting point of reference for Phillips-Fein is 1994, when Alan Brinkley wrote in the American Historical Review that historians had largely ignored conservatism. Since then, Phillips-Fein argues, conservatism has become "one of the most dynamic subfields in American history" (723). Her essay walks us through recent works on conservative intellectual history, the Christian right, women and conservatism, the role of business, regional studies, and the complex relationship between libertarianism and traditionalism. Overturning several older stereotypes, the new scholarship treats conservatism not as marginal but a thriving movement with diverse constituencies, not as a sudden backlash but a mobilization that developed gradually for decades, and not as backward or anti-modern but rooted largely in the suburban upper middle class of the Sunbelt and promoting modern business principles.

Looking forward, Phillips-Fein encourages her colleagues to "move beyond the closely focused studies of movement history that have dominated the scholarship thus far and to reconsider our ideas about the relationship of the Right to the broader trends of American political history" (724). "Instead of seeing a conservative movement springing from the ashes of World War II to counter a powerful liberal state, we might see a long tradition with deep historical roots, revitalized at different points in response to various challenges but nonetheless present throughout the century" (738). At the same time, citing some historians of the 1970s and 1980s, Phillips-Fein questions an overemphasis on conservative power in two ways. First, she argues that the recent conservative movement, "despite its obvious victories, was actually much weaker and less cohesive than historians have generally believed" (739), while liberalism and left activism persisted. Second, she suggests that conservatism's rise to power may largely reflect external factors such as political shifts within liberalism and the Democratic Party, the 1970s economic crisis that brought "a newly aggressive class politics" (740), and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Academia tends to see itself as synonymous with serious scholarship, and Phillips-Fein says up front that her overview excludes "popular works," whether journalistic accounts, books by conservative activists, or "polemical pieces from the Left." While anyone writing a literature review needs to limit its scope to keep things manageable, a historiography of U.S. conservatism is weakened if it omits non-academic treatments such as Susan Faludi's Backlash or Jeff Sharlet's The Family, or, for that matter, the work of conservative activists such as Justin Raimondo and Paul Gottfried. As Martin Durham points out in one of the more interesting roundtable responses to Phillips-Fein, Raimondo's and Gottfried's books challenge the hegemony of foreign policy hawks within the conservative movement (first National Review fusionists, then neoconservatives) and reclaim Old Right traditions of anti-interventionism going back to the America First Committee and the early libertarians. The clash between interventionist and anti-interventionist rightists is crucial for understanding recent U.S. conservatism, but Phillips-Fein never mentions it.

Leftist and liberal activists, meanwhile, have been doing solid research and analysis on all of the topics Phillips-Fein highlights as needing more attention from historians: the conservative movement's relationship with war and nationalism, antifeminism and opposition to gay rights, anti-immigrant nativism, the role of mass media, and the relationship between conservative economics and the politics of race and gender. (The Political Research Associates newsletter alone has covered almost all of these topics in feature articles over the past five years.) Anti-rightist activists have also done detailed work on conservatism's factional divisions, and the complex interplay between conservatism and the far right, which Phillips-Fein touches on only in passing.

Regarding Phillips-Fein's larger questions about the nature of conservatism and its relationship with broader political and social changes, some of the most useful work comes from people who combine academic scholarship with leftist analysis. For example, Phillips-Fein urges historians to explore the "apparent contradiction" between conservatives' stated libertarian values and their actual policies, which "dramatically expanded government in areas such as defense spending and in the war on drugs" (741). This discussion would benefit by revisiting a definition that Sara Diamond offered seventeen years ago: "To be right-wing means to support the state in its capacity as enforcer of order and to oppose the state as distributor of wealth and power downward and more equitably in society" (Roads to Dominion, 9). (A pioneer in studying the modern right, Diamond left the field, and academia, in 1998 because she was unable to find a full-time teaching position.)

Similarly, efforts to place the conservative movement in the context of "some deeper shift in American politics, economics, and culture" (740) would do well to consider Thomas Ferguson's work on the 1970s collapse of the pro-New Deal coalition within the business community (Golden Rule and, with Joel Rogers, Right Turn) and Michael Omi and Howard Winant's explication of the collapse of the "American Dream" during the same period (Racial Formation in the United States). These are just a few examples. The left has a lot more to offer than just polemics.

Stand up Against Racism and Transphobia!

2011-12-21T20:14:00.002-05:00

From the First of May Anarchist Alliance:

Defend CeCe McDonald!
Self-Defense is Not a Crime!
Stand up Against Racism and Transphobia!

An important case demands our support. Crishaun “CeCe” McDonald, a young Black transgender woman faces two counts of second degree murder for defending her friends and herself from physical attacks by a group shouting ugly racist and homophobic insults.

Please contact the Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman and demand he drop the charges against CeCe:

612-348-5540 fax * 612-348-2042 * citizeninfo@co.hennepin.mn.us

Occupy movement: Anti-capitalism versus populism

2011-12-06T13:16:00.003-05:00

Occupy Wall Street is one of the most exciting political developments in years, but like any social movement it has its contradictions. As I noted briefly at the end of my previous post, the Occupy movement is vulnerable to right-wing overtures to the extent that many progressive-minded activists lack clear anti-capitalist and anti-fascist politics. While some Occupiers have put forward a radical class analysis, others have voiced a sort of liberal populism, which identifies the problem as specific institutions, policies, or subjective behaviors rather than the capitalist system. Several leftists on other websites have addressed this political limitation and its unfortunate resonances with right-wing ideology. Here I want to summarize some of their main points, then offer an important counter-example of Occupy movement anti-capitalism – the plan by West coast Occupy movements to blockade ports on December 12th.

Against "corporate greed"
Bill Weinberg has urged Occupiers to take a clear stand against capitalism, rejecting the defensive slogan, "We aren't against capitalism, we're against corporate greed." Weinberg counters: "The assumption behind this response is that with enough public oversight or (in the more reactionary versions) if Wall Street brokers acted with greater patriotism, capitalism could 'work.'" Failing to target capitalism as a system, he argues, offers more room to "gold-standard crankery, Federal Reserve fetishism and other right-wing, pro-capitalist responses to the crisis" – including antisemitism.

Ross Wolfe similarly criticizes the tendency by many protesters to blame greed for the inequities of capitalism, arguing that this "mistakes an epiphenomenal characteristic of capitalism for something more fundamental" and "ignores the way that the capitalists themselves are implicated by the intrinsic logic of capital." Even the capitalist who enjoys the benefits of great wealth "is constantly compelled to reinvest his capital back into production in order to stay afloat." Thus "capitalism is not a moral but rather a structural problem." Wolfe further argues that blaming capitalist inequities on rich people's moral failings "ultimately amounts to what might be called the 'diabolical' view of society – the idea that all of society's ills can be traced back to some scheming cabal of businessmen conspiring over how to best fuck over the general public. (The 'diabolical' view of society is not all that far removed from conspiracy theories about the 'New World Order, the Illuminati, or 'International Jewry.'…)"

Glorifying the "real" economy
The Occupy movement's focus on banks presents a related pitfall, depending on whether banks are targeted as a major component of the capitalist system or as a parasitic growth on it. As BobFromBrockley points out in a wide-ranging discussion of Occupy, "the valorization of the good, honest, organic 'real economy' against the predatory tentacular finance capital is not just a feature of the Zeitgeist movement and antisemitic cranks," but has also been taken up, for example, by liberal Christians. Bob continues:

"The idea that capitalism would be fine if we removed all that smoke and mirrors finance stuff and got back to the 'real' production of stuff is both deeply reactionary (based on nostalgia for something that never existed, and with a close kinship to the 'socialism of fools' that thinks the problem is Jew-financiers) but also empirically nonsense. Sweatshops where adults and children labour for long hours in appalling conditions to make clothes and electronic components are part of 'the real economy'. As are the biofuel plantations that are eating up the rainforests that produce the air we breathe. As are the oil wells and oil pipes that poison our river deltas; the manufacture of weapons of torture and warfare; the coltan mines that central African child soldiers kill and are killed for; the soybean and rapeseed monocultures that we rely on for our daily meals, the beds we sleep on wrought from rainforest lumber; and so on. All wage labour involves exploitation, whatever part of the capitalist economy you’re in. The 'real economy' may be realer, but it is ultimately no better."

West coast port shutdown and class politics
In contrast with liberal populism, the plan by West coast Occupations to shut down West coast ports on December 12th defines the movement as confronting structural, class inequality. The action is specifically planned in solidarity with labor battles by port workers in Longview (Washington) and Los Angeles, but more broadly to "economically disrupt 'wall street on the waterfront.'" The website for the action declares, "U.S. ports have…become economic engines for the elite; the 1% these trade hubs serve are free to rip the shirts off the backs of the 99% who turn their profits." Occupy Seattle's port shutdown statement declares further that "the Occupy movement is part of the workers' movement," whether its members are union members or non-members, unemployed, students, or homeless. The Seattle statement also draws connections between corporate union-busting, government budget cuts that target working people, and police violence and harassment of Occupy activists worldwide. (Occupy Seattle organizers have issued an emergency fundraising request to help charter buses for the port shutdown. Donations can be made at https://www.wepay.com/donate/42135.)

Anti-capitalism versus liberal populism is only one dimension of the Occupy Wall Street movement. This issue doesn't capture the movement's dynamism or fluidity: the way it has opened up important new space for people to tell their stories and debate what is happening in the economy and society, and the way people's politics can shift and change – sometimes very quickly – when participating in mass activism or facing police repression. Critiquing capitalism as a system isn't a full recipe for radical change, but it is a necessary ingredient.

Rightists woo the Occupy Wall Street movement

2011-11-08T20:41:00.013-05:00

by Matthew N. Lyons

Most right-wing responses to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement have ranged from patronizing to hostile. Rightists have variously criticized the Occupy forces for--supposedly--copying the Tea Party; failing to target big government; being dirty, lazy lawbreakers; being orchestrated by pro-Obama union bosses and community organizers; having ties with radical Islamists; fomenting antisemitism; or failing to address Jewish dominance of Wall Street. (On the Jewish Question, the John Birch Society wants to have it both ways--arguing that antisemitic attacks are integral to the Occupy movement's leftist ideology, but also that the movement is bankrolled by Jewish financier George Soros, who is backed by "the unimaginably vast Rothschild banking empire.")

At the same time, some right-wingers have joined or endorsed Occupy events, causing some leftists and liberals to raise warning flags. Neonazis have shown up at Occupy Phoenix and been kicked out of Occupy Seattle, where leftists formed an antifascist working group to keep them out. The Liberty Lamp, an anti-racist website, has identified a number of right-wing groups that have sought to "capitalize on the success" of OWS, including several neonazi organizations, Oath Keepers (a Patriot movement group for police and military personnel), libertarian supporters of Texas congressmember Ron Paul, and even the neoconservative American Spectator magazine. Leonard Zeskind's Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights has warned against Tea Party supporters "who want to be friends with the Occupiers," including FedUpUSA, Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty, and conspiracist talk show host Alex Jones. The International Socialist Organization has focused on Ron Paul libertarians as a particular threat to the Occupy movement. In a related vein, the socialist journal Links reposted a detailed expose of Zeitgeist (aka the Venus Project), a conspiracist cult that has been involved in Occupy movement events, many of whose ideas are rooted in antisemitism or other right-wing ideology.

There is always a danger that some rightists will come to Occupy movement events to harass or attack leftists, or act as spies or provocateurs. More commonly, rightists see the movement as an opportunity to gain credibility, win new recruits, or build coalitions with leftists. When pitching to left-leaning activists, these right-wingers emphasize their opposition to the U.S. economic and political establishment--but downplay their own oppressive politics. In place of systemic critiques of power, rightists promote distorted forms of anti-elitism, such as conspiracy theories or the belief that government is the root of economic tyranny. We've seen this "Right Woos Left" dynamic over and over, for example in the anti-war, environmental, and anti-globalization movements.

Neo-fascists against financial elites

Rightists who support the Occupy movement aim to redefine and redirect Occupiers' discontent. Hoosier Nation (Indiana chapter of American Third Position) pledged to join Occupy Indianapolis as a "popular uprising against the financial elites" but criticized the rally organizers' call for human unity as "muddled thinking": "Not to quibble, but our races, religions, and identities do matter. Our identities aren't the problem, they're the solution.... The notion that we don't exist as families and nations but rather as autonomous individuals is a fiction perpetuated by our financial elites to topple the barriers standing in the way of exploiting us."

A cruder style of rhetoric comes from Rocky Suhayda's American Nazi Party, which champions the "White working class" against "this evil corrupt, decadent JUDEO-CAPITALIST SYSTEM." The ANP praised the Occupy movement as "a breath of cleansing air" and urged its supporters to get involved. "Produce some flyers EXPLAINING the 'JEW BANKER' influence--DON'T wear anything marking you as an 'evil racist'--and GET OUT THERE and SPREAD the WORD!" (Another fascist grouplet, the National Socialist American Labor Party, immediately repudiated the ANP's stance and denounced Occupy Wall Street as a Jewish Communist movement.)

The Lyndon LaRouche network, which offers a more esoteric version of fascist politics, has a long history of attaching itself to popular movements--as well as violence, spying, and dirty tricks against political opponents. LaRouchites have always denounced finance capital as one of the world's main evils, so it is no surprise that they have joined Occupy events in several cities. True to their current attempt to package themselves as Franklin Roosevelt liberals, the LaRouchites are pushing for reinstatement of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act's wall between investment banking and commercial banking, which was repealed in 1999. The LaRouchites take credit for supposedly making Glass-Steagall reinstatement "a leading demand" of the Occupy movement.

Attack the System's "Message to Occupy Wall Street"

A more sophisticated rightist overture to the Occupy movement comes from Keith Preston's Attack the System (ATS) network. Two ATS associate editors, RJ Jacob and Miles Joyner, have produced a YouTube video titled "Message to Occupy Wall Street: Power to the Neighborhoods." The 13-minute video is explicitly "tailored to the mainstream left" and contains many elements designed to appeal to leftists. Jacob and Joyner call for OWS to develop into a revolutionary insurgency against the American Empire and highlight their opposition to U.S. military aggression, state repression, global capitalist institutions, corporate welfare, gentrification, and other standard leftist targets. They also advocate a strategy of "pan-secessionism" to help bring about "a system of decentralized cities, towns and neighborhoods where all colors, genders, and political groups can achieve self-determination."

What Jacob and Joyner's video doesn't tell us is that their organization's vision of revolution would not dismantle oppression but simply decentralize it. ATS founder and leader Keith Preston believes that most people are herd-like "sheep" who will inevitably be dominated by a few power hungry "wolves." Although Preston calls himself an anarchist, he has no problem with authoritarianism on a small scale and has made it a priority to "collaborate with racialists and theocrats" against the left. White nationalists and Christian rightists are major players in the pan-secessionist movement that ATS and the Jacob/Joyner video promote. (For details on Preston and ATS, see my article "Rising Above the Herd.")

ATS elitism is reflected in "Message to Occupy Wall Street." In explaining what's needed to move toward revolution, the video puts a big emphasis on the development of "an intellectual and philosophical counter-elite." It is this counter-elite that develops revolutionary ideas, which then "trickle down into the ranks of the masses." No hint that "the masses" might develop a few ideas of their own.

"Message" also calls for a revolutionary movement that transcends left/right divisions. This is a standard theme for ATS (and many other far rightists), but the approach to it here is different from what I have seen in Preston's work. Jacob and Joyner argue that "counter-elites" on both the left and the right have contributed to developing a revolutionary movement--but in very different ways. The leftist counter-elites "have served as leaders of systems disruption, networked resistance, informational warfare, communications, and public intelligence." Meanwhile, "it is the counter-elites of the right who are developing an entirely new political paradigm in opposition to the state ideologies of the system." In other words, leftists are good at developing the technologies of revolution, but rightists are the ones with the actual vision for society.

Jacob and Joyner's list of important rightist counter-elites includes anarcho-capitalist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, paleoconservative Paul Gottfried, European New Rightist Alain de Benoist, and the ever-popular Ron Paul, among others. Their list of "leftists" who have influenced the Occupy movement is heavily weighted toward the technology/info-guerrilla side, with figures such as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, digital currency developer Satoshi Nakamoto, the Chaos Computer Club, and the hacker network Anonymous. The list also includes Ralph Nader and Kirkpatrick Sale, who among liberals have been two of the leading practitioners of left-right collaboration--Sale through the pan-secessionist movement, and Nader through the anti-globalization movement.

John Robb, open-source technocrat

The counter-elite figure who gets the most coverage in "Message" is John Robb, who runs the Global Guerrillas website, and he deserves attention here because of his murky politics and his interest in OWS. Robb is a former U.S. counter-terrorism mission commander turned independent military theorist and technology analyst. He has written about the rise of "open-source warfare"--characterized by decentralized networks of terrorists, criminals, and other non-state actors acting with a high degree of innovation and flexibility--and the hollowing out of traditional nation-states. In response to these and other trends--including economic and environmental crises--Robb promotes the development of "resilient communities," which are autonomous and largely self-sufficient in terms of energy, food, security, and other basic needs. Robb has praised the Occupy Wall Street movement as a pioneering example of "open-source protest" that is "constructing the outlines of resilient communities in the heart of many of our most dense urban areas."

Jacob and Joyner's video characterizes Robb as a leftist, and indeed many of his ideas, such as his belief that both capitalism and the nation state are breaking down and his emphasis on decentralized solutions, sound radical. But while I don't claim to fully understand where Robb is coming from, I am deeply wary. Robb himself avoids political labels, and Thomas Barnett has characterized him as "a serious technocrat who distrusts politics." According to his online bio, Robb has consulted extensively for government agencies such as the CIA, NSA, and Defense Department. And his anti-establishment friends seem to be found mainly on the right. For example, he has archived the former blog of fellow military theorist William Lind and features it prominently on the Global Guerrillas home page. Lind, whose theory of "fourth generation war" has a lot in common with Robb's ideas, is a hardline traditionalist conservative who spent many years at Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation.

Robb's writings are often reposted on right-wing websites such as AlternativeRight.com, The Occidental Quarterly, Occidental Dissent, and Attack the System. As far as I know, he has never tried to dissociate himself from these organs. Intentionally or unintentionally, his own work often resonates with rightist themes without invoking them directly, as when he writes about "the decline of the West" (echoing Oswald Spengler) or the virtues of building a "tribe" (echoing national-anarchists, among others). John Robb's relationship with the right merits more in-depth study, but he is no leftist.

So far, the effect of right-wing groups on the Occupy Wall Street movement has been limited. Yet the lack of clear anti-capitalist and anti-fascist analysis in much of the movement opens the door for rightists to spread radical-sounding propaganda rooted in oppressive politics. It is important for us to understand and expose this danger, in the Occupy movement and others that may follow.

State repression from Bush to Obama

2011-10-16T20:16:00.003-04:00

Only a few years ago, many people looked at the Bush administration's authoritarian policies (mass round-ups, endorsing torture and assassination, shredding due process, etc.) as a major reason for supporting the Democrats. But in a recent LA Times editorial, George Washington U. law professor Jonathan Turley argues that "President Obama not only retained the controversial Bush policies, he expanded on them" -- while almost completely neutralizing civil libertarians as an independent pressure group. Turley writes:

"Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay as promised. He continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals that denied defendants basic rights. He asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists. His administration has fought to block dozens of public-interest lawsuits challenging privacy violations and presidential abuses….

"As Obama and Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. have admitted, waterboarding is clearly torture and has been long defined as such by both international and U.S. courts. It is not only a crime but a war crime. By blocking the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for torture, Obama violated international law and reinforced other countries in refusing investigation of their own alleged war crimes. The administration magnified the damage by blocking efforts of other countries like Spain from investigating our alleged war crimes."

See also Turley's recent NPR interview, in which he rebuts some of the common rationalizations for Obama's policies (such as: he's privy to information we don't have, or the Republicans would be worse).

Paralleling Turley's argument, Obama has dramatically accelerated deportations of undocumented immigrants over and beyond President Bush's record.

I don't think the point of all this is that Obama is "worse" than Bush, or even that there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats on civil liberties. Rather, the two major parties have slightly different roles to play in the same oppressive system. Often (but not always!) Republicans are more aggressive than Democrats in expanding state repression. But just as often Democrats are the collaborators and consolidators -- and the ones who coopt and defuse most opposition from the left. The growth of state repression in the U.S. is a structural change that goes beyond party politics, and won't be solved by voting this or that official out of office.

ALEC: Tool of business interests, but which business interests?

2011-10-10T11:38:00.003-04:00

by Matthew N. Lyons

If you follow leftish exposés of money and politics, there's a good chance you've heard of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC is the powerful right-wing group that brings together capitalists, foundations, and state legislators to rewrite laws at the state level. ALEC wrote Arizona's anti-immigrant SB 1070 and strongly influenced the recent Wisconsin budget plan that gutted collective bargaining rights for public employees. Founded in 1973, ALEC has gotten increasing attention thanks to a series of investigative efforts by the National Resources Defense Council, the Progressive States Network, People for the American Way, and others. The Center for Media Democracy's SourceWatch and ALEC Exposed projects probably offer the most extensive information about the group's membership, organizational structure, goals, and activities. (Other useful discussions of ALEC have appeared in AlterNet, The Nation, and the Orlando Weekly.)

To some extent, ALEC operates as a massive pay-to-play scheme. For a generous fee, capitalists can sit with lawmakers in private and draft "model legislation" that benefits them directly: the Corrections Corporation of America gets prison privatization bills, Connections Academy (which runs a network of private and charter schools) gets school voucher schemes, tobacco companies get "tort reform" (which would limit class-action lawsuits), energy and chemical companies get plans for industry to regulate its own pollution, and so on. But the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Beyond these specific measures, ALEC pursues a broader, coordinated agenda to dismantle all vestiges of the welfare state -- reduce and delegitimize government regulation of business, privatize public services, cut taxes on corporations and the rich, and bust unions. This is anti-New Deal economic conservatism with a vengeance.

At first glance, ALEC seems to bolster the common-sense liberal assumption that corporate money always flows to the right. For one thing, ALEC's private enterprise board includes executives from some of United States' largest and most powerful companies -- firms such as Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, Altria (formerly Phillip Morris), AT&T, Pfizer, Coca-Cola, and State Farm Insurance. Couple that with the fact that ALEC's biggest backers include Charles and David Koch, the free-market ideologues who have been high-profile funders of the Tea Party and many other rightist initiatives. Other ALEC-affiliated firms with a history of right-wing activism include Coors Brewing, Amway, and duPont.

But it would be misleading to say that this picture represents something inherent in capitalists' political nature. We live in a period when the business community is weighted heavily to the right, but this has not always been true and won't always be true in the future. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society -- to name two of the U.S. government's most important liberal initiatives -- wouldn't have gotten very far without support from the most powerful factions of the ruling class. Even today, let's remember that Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign raised $745 million compared with John McCain's $368 million. You don't raise that kind of money just from small contributions and labor union PACs.

Capitalists support political initiatives that serve their interests -- Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, authoritarian and pluralistic, depending on the historical situation and the specific interests involved. To focus only on capitalists' rightist connections lets Democrats off the hook and masks the many ways that liberalism serves and protects an exploitative, unjust economic system.

Contrary to what liberal common sense might dictate, many of the corporations involved in ALEC are not committed to right-wing politics, but spread their political support opportunistically. And while ALEC's base in the business community is wide, it's not all encompassing. Looking at which sections of the business community tend to support ALEC and which don't may tell us something useful about U.S. capitalists' relationship with right-wing politics at this historical moment.

Using the information on SourceWatch.org, we can analyze ALEC's business support by industry. Among ALEC's business members, the industries most strongly represented are, in order, (1) energy (oil & gas, electrical utilities, coal), (2) pharmaceuticals, and (3) food/beverage, transportation, insurance, and communications/electronics in an approximate four-way tie. Other industries with lighter representation include non-food agribusiness (notably timber), retail, financial services (such as credit card companies), manufacturing, and commercial banking (mostly smaller firms).

Where do these industries fall on the political spectrum? One measure is provided by the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets website. The CRP rates each industry on a partisan political scale ranging from "strongly Republican" to "strongly Democratic," based on a compilation of political contributions over $200. Among the top six industries represented in ALEC we see the following:

energy -- strongly Republican
food/beverage -- leans Republican
transportation -- leans Republican
pharmaceutical -- on the fence
insurance -- on the fence
communications/electronics -- leans Democratic

This suggests that while ALEC-affiliated capitalists lean conservative on average, many of them are not ideologically committed rightists. The CRP data that is available for individual ALEC member firms is consistent with this picture -- in other words, ALEC doesn't just draw the most rightist firms within moderate-to-liberal industries. For example, most of the individual ALEC members on the CRP chart for pharmaceuticals -- Pfizer, Abbott Labs, Astrazeneca, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, and Eli Lilly -- are themselves "on the fence" between Republicans and Democrats. Among ALEC-affiliated communications/electronics firms, AT&T leans Republican, but Microsoft is on the fence, Comcast leans Democratic, and Time Warner is strongly Democratic. So some of the companies that have signed onto ALEC's right-wing anti-"big government" crusade are the same ones funding Democratic candidates for congressmember, senator, and president.

Further confounding common stereotypes about right-wing capitalists, two industries that are conspicuously under-represented among ALEC members are aerospace/military and securities/investment firms. While I'm sure there are other factors, this might have something to do with the fact that both industries depend so heavily on government money -- aerospace companies for military contracts, and brokers/investment bankers for federal bailouts to deal with periodic financial crises (as in 2008, but not only then).

These comments about the American Legislative Exchange Council aren't intended as any sort of definitive statement about business and right-wing politics. ALEC is only one organization, and the tools I've offered here for understanding it are fairly crude. There is a whole body of literature that analyzes capitalists' involvement in politics, relating political clashes between business factions to objective factors such as industry, region, markets, type of company, and so on. Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers's Right Turn and Ferguson's Golden Rule and apply this approach to U.S. electoral politics. Others authors who have written in the same vein include Mike Davis (Prisoners of the American Dream), David Gibbs (The Political Economy of Third World Intervention) and Ronald Cox (Power and Profits: U.S. Policy in Central America). A comparable study of ALEC and related business forces today hasn't been written yet. But if it's done well, it will almost certainly challenge standard liberal assumptions.

Anti-Racist Action Conference Coming to Chicago

2011-09-07T22:07:00.003-04:00

From South Side Chicago Anti-Racist Action:

Chicago is hosting the 17th annual Anti-Racist Action Network conference on September 17, 2011. This event is open to the public and includes workshops, caucuses and discussions. Come meet other activists and organizations involved in community struggles against racist terror and other forms of oppression.

Featured speakers:

Mark Clements (Campaign to End the Death Penalty, Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, Jon Burge torture survivor)
Daniel(Four Star Anarchist Organization) & Lash
Bernadine Dohrn (former SDS and Weather Underground members, co-author of Race Course Against White Supremacy)
Michael Novick (LA ARA/People Against Racist Terror)
Xloi and Becca of Bring The Ruckus (BTR)
More TBA

Jon Gaynor's "The New Integralist Conservatism" – A good discussion of counter-jihadism and fascism

2011-09-02T12:55:00.004-04:00

As a follow-up to my previous post about Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, I want to discuss a particularly good essay about the counter-jihadist movement in which Breivik's politics are rooted. "The New Integralist Conservatism: a briefing" appeared on libcom.org shortly after the July 22 massacre in Norway. Its author, Jon Gaynor, is a member of the Anarchist Federation in Britain. Gaynor argues that counter-jihadism is "expanding by filling an ideological gap on the far-right, which has been left open by an outmoded and unpalatable fascism reliant on biological racism and anti-semitism." Gaynor usefully outlines what the new movement and classical fascism have in common, as well as what sets them apart.

"Counter-jihadism" is a common label for the international Islamophobic network that includes the English Defence League (EDL), Geert Wilders's Party of Freedom, and authors such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Bat Ye'or (Gisele Littman). But instead of this label, Gaynor offers his own: integralist conservatism. The movement is conservative because "it has its origins in the fringes of the mainstream right, rather than fascist circles" and promotes themes that are common in the mainstream media and political discourse. It is integralist "not in the sense of fascist economic integralism, but rather the viewpoint which sees an essential, unitary nation corrupted by external conspiracy." This is helpful shorthand, although imposing a name on the movement from the outside seems at cross purposes with Gaynor's assertion that "this new right should be defined on its own terms."

Like fascism, in Gaynor's view, the integralist conservative movement (1) mythologizes the nation as a fundamental community that is under attack, and (2) "blurs together Marxism, a sinister ethnic-religious 'enemy' and, sometimes, finance capital" as conspiratorial partners in this "existential threat to the nation." Stated another way, both integralist conservatism and fascism promote "paranoid themes of national decline as a result of cosmopolitan decadence and mass immigration." Here Gaynor echoes Roger Griffin's argument that fascist politics centers on a myth of national "palingenesis," or rebirth out of a period of near-fatal decline or decadence.

Gaynor argues that integralist conservatism differs from fascism in rejecting biological (as opposed to cultural) racism and antisemitism, strongly supporting Israeli foreign policy, and advocating laissez-faire neoliberalism rather than monopolistic corporatism. Integralist conservatives rarely try to build centralized political parties in the classical fascist mold. Also, for integralist conservatives "the idealized, essential 'nation' being defended from the Muslim-Marxist threat is not the romantic, pre-industrial racist fantasy of neo-Nazis, but liberal democracy before the advent of mass immigration in the late 1950s."

Gaynor's approach is much more thoughtful and informative than most discussions of counter-jihadists' relationship to fascism. But I'd like to offer a couple of caveats. First, not everybody attracted to counter-jihadism disavows biological racism consistently – witness Breivik's manifesto or, apparently, some of the EDL splinter groups that Gaynor himself discusses. Second, fascist ideology is considerably more varied than Gaynor's essay implies. Italian Fascism, for example, was not particularly antisemitic (before 1938), enjoyed cordial relations with right-wing Zionists, and was much more overtly "modernist" in outlook than German Nazism. Among today's neofascists, some currents such as the LaRouchites and the Nouvelle Droite (European New Right) have rejected biological racism as thoroughly as any integralist conservative. Most counter-jihadists' emphasis on shaping discourse rather than building parties also closely parallels the Nouvelle Droite's "metapolitical" strategy.

But if fascist movements don't necessarily fit the standard profile (which is based primarily on German Nazism), that doesn't mean we should count integralist conservatism as one of them. Yes, the two have important points in common, as Gaynor argues, but there is still a line to be drawn. In my view, fascism is a right-wing revolutionary force that seeks to overthrow the established political order and impose its own ideological vision on everyone else, including the ruling class. It rejects pluralism and aims to subordinate all spheres of society to one doctrine, whether racial supremacism, cultural nationalism, or religious orthodoxy. As far as I can tell, Islamophic integralist conservatism simply doesn't go that far. It pushes the boundaries of established politics but, as Gaynor notes, it is still rooted in and very much interconnected with the mainstream. Maybe the Norwegian massacre will push part of the movement in a more revolutionary direction, or maybe it will have the opposite effect.

Noel Ignatiev on the fall of Gaddafi: "Their Disorder is Our Hope"

2011-08-26T09:41:00.002-04:00

In a recent blog post at PM Press, Noel Ignatiev has some good comments on the collapse of Gaddafi's government in Libya. Ignatiev criticizes those leftists who supported the NATO-backed rebels, and also those who, "in their zeal to oppose the NATO intervention, spread tales of the 'accomplishments' of the Gaddafi regime…"

Some more quotes:

"Why should the ordinary people of Libya lay down their lives in defense of an oppressive regime that never saw them as anything but pawns in its effort to cut a favorable deal with global capital?"

and

"Today all the forces preparing to fatten themselves on the flesh of the Libyan people, including the NATO powers, Russia and China, are stressing the importance of the orderly restoration of the authority of the new regime.

"Let us hope that they do not find it so easy."

Kathryn Joyce: A Feminist Who Reports on the Christian Right

2011-08-19T13:12:00.010-04:00

If you want to understand the U.S. Christian right's gender politics, Kathryn Joyce's writings are an excellent place to start. Joyce exposes the patriarchal, misogynistic nature of Christian right principles and practices, but she also writes with empathy about Christian right women and the choices they make under radically constrained circumstances. In addition, Joyce isn't afraid to go after liberal feminist icons like Hillary Clinton, whose Christian right connections run much deeper than most people realize.

Kathryn Joyce is a freelance journalist based in New York City, whose articles about the Christian right have appeared in Ms., The Nation, Newsweek, Religion Dispatches, Slate, and several other publications. (Newsweek has also published several fiction reviews by Joyce.) Many of Joyce's articles are available through her website at http://kathrynjoyce.wordpress.com/. Joyce's interest in religious-based politics goes back at least to her days as a grad student at NYU's school of journalism in the early 2000s. During that time, she and her friend and colleague Jeff Sharlet helped to found TheRevealer.org, a project of NYU's Center for Religion and Media that calls itself "a daily review of religion in the news and the news about religion," and Joyce served as the online journal's first managing editor, from 2003 to 2006. Today Joyce is best known for her 2009 book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (Beacon Press).

Women's oppression is a central concern in Joyce's articles about the Christian right, but it's by no means the only one. In "Christian Soldiers" she argues that Christian rightists' growing influence in the U.S. military has included denouncing Islam, harassing Jews, promoting conspiracy theories about Satanic forces within the U.S. government, even demonizing mainstream Protestants. (Joyce reports that evangelical and Pentecostal clergy have flooded into the armed forces since the 1970s and 1980s and now number about two-thirds of all military chaplains.) In "Can Mormon Glenn Beck Unite the Christian Right?" Joyce discusses international alliance-building between conservative evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, and even a few Muslim fundamentalists, for example through the World Congress of Families. In "The Anti-Gay Highway" she notes the efforts by U.S. Christian rightists such as Rick Warren and Scott Lively to promote aggressively homophobic policies in Africa--as well as the growing influence of conservative African evangelical leaders on church politics within the United States.

Unlike many critics of the Christian right, Joyce targets Democratic Party leaders as well as Republicans. "Hillary's Prayer" (co-authored by Joyce and Sharlet) highlights Hillary Clinton's longstanding involvement in the secretive Christian right network known variously as the Family or the Fellowship, whose mission centers on recruiting members of the global ruling class. (Sharlet's books The Family and C Street discusses this network in detail. See my review of The Family.) In "The Abandoned Orphanage," Joyce and Sharlet recount how Family leader Doug Coe brokered a "peace" between Clinton and Mother Teresa over abortion, in which "Hillary's support for abortion as a fundamental right [gave] way to an acceptance of it as a 'tragedy'--one that should be made as 'rare' as possible." As a token of their "common ground," Clinton also helped the arch-conservative nun set up an orphanage in Washington, DC. ("The Abandoned Orphanage" also notes that Mother Teresa's order has been accused of refusing to provide adequate medical treatment to its patients, while redirecting charitable donations away from their intended purposes into evangelism and lavish headquarters.)

To Joyce, the whole notion of common ground between defenders and opponents of abortion rights is a "mythical land." Efforts by Democratic politicians such as Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama to find such compromise amount to "appeasement" of the Christian right's sweeping attack on women's rights and have "shifted the frame of the debate" rightward. For example, when Obama called in 2009 for compromise in the abortion debate, the Family Research Council responded that if the president were sincere, he would support anti-abortion initiatives such as crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), which in Joyce's words "are characterized by deceptive and coercive antiabortion counseling meaures." In fact, the Obama administration does fund CPCs through its "National Fatherhood Initiative," as Sarah Posner points out in a more recent article. Joyce's "The Anti-Abortion Clinic Across the Street" details CPCs' unethical practices and close ties with both sidewalk "counseling" (harassment) of abortion recipients and physical violence against abortion providers.

The Quiverfull movement, topic of Joyce's book and many of her articles, offers a useful window into the Christian right as a whole. The term Quiverfull comes from Psalm 127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them." Quiverfull supporters are Christian rightists who reject not only abortion but any form of birth control (even the rhythm method) as contrary to God's authority, and promote a strictly patriarchal family model in which wives submit to their husbands. The image of children as arrows in a quiver embodies the movement's belief that raising a big, male-run family is an act of spiritual warfare, a counterattack against feminism and related evils. Joyce estimates that the Quiverfull movement numbers in the tens of thousands, yet the beliefs it lives by resonate much farther. In a March 2009 interview with Religion Dispatches, Joyce argues that Quiverfull "positions are becoming more mainstream, particularly through the growth of complementarianism or 'biblical manhood and womanhood' teachings in mainstream evangelical churches."

Quiverfull doctrine tells women that the desire to control their own bodies is selfish, sinful, and a revolt against God's will. Submit to God--and to men--and they will be cared for. Joyce documents the costs to women this bargain imposes, in loss of autonomy, unfulfilling relationships, financial hardship, loneliness, and psychological or physical abuse. In "Arrows for the War," for example, she writes, "An anonymous mother had written in to the Quiverfull Digest full of despair, saying she felt she was 'going to die." Her husband was older and unhelpful around the house, and she feared he would die and leave her to raise their six children alone and destitute. She wanted someone on the forum to give her a reason--besides the Bible--why one should be Quiverfull. The answers were quick and pointed. Apart from Scripture, there's no reason why one should be Quiverfull."

At the same time, Joyce seeks to understand why some women choose Quiverfull. Again in "Arrows for the War," she points, in particular, to the gap between the larger society's pretensions of gender equality and the limited options available to many women:

"For many Quiverfull mothers, [the financial struggle to care for a large family] is still preferable to the alternatives they see society offering working-class women--alternatives they see as the fruit of secular feminism. For poor women, the feminist fight for job equality won them no career path but rather the right to pink-collar labor, as a housekeeper, a waitress, a clerk. The sexual revolution did not bring them self-exploration and fulfillment but rather loosened the social restraints that bound men to the household as husbands and fathers. Even for women who stayed in the home, the incidence of women in the workplace led employers to stop offering a 'family wage' that could sustain both parents and children."

One of the reasons I think Quiverfull is important is that it combines two distinct forms of right-wing gender politics: on the one hand, the demand that women should submit to men within the family as daughters, wives, and mothers; on the other, the claim (sometimes called "natalism") that women have a responsibility to have babies not just for their husbands, but for something bigger: the community, the nation, or, in this case, God. These two doctrines don't always pull in the same direction. The Nazis, for example, sometimes encouraged unmarried German girls and women to get pregnant if it meant producing more Aryan babies for the fatherland. Less blatantly, claims that motherhood is a duty to the nation tend to centralize male power through the state or the church, which weakens the direct patriarchal authority of husbands and fathers. (What if he doesn't want to have kids?)

Joyce follows Quiverfull's natalist implications into the work of social scientists such as Allan Carlson and Phillip Longman, who argue for big families in secular policy terms, such as propping up the Social Security system. Carlson is a rightist and Longman a centrist at the New America Institute, but both say that patriarchal families a la the Quiverfull movement are vital to a healthy society. Carlson and Longman also join with Christian natalists at the World Congress of Families and the Population Research Institute in urging Europeans to embrace a Quiverfull-type family model. This campaign, Joyce writes, capitalizes on racist fears that Europe faces a "demographic winter" due to low birthrates (coupled with an influx of Muslim and non-White immigrants) as a way to spread the U.S. Christian right's influence abroad. Several commentators, such as Posner, have noted the connection between demographic winter fearmongering and the ideology of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian Islamophobe who took responsibility for the July 22, 2011 mass killings.

Kathryn Joyce's writings are rich in details about specific campaigns, conflicts, organizations, and people. She has not (so far) devoted the same attention to analyzing the Christian right as a movement in broader terms, or explored Christian patriarchy's relationship with broader social dynamics. Yet her work embodies a larger commitment to feminist principles--opposing women's subordination and documenting the complex realities of women's lives--that is pivotal to such analysis.

Anders Breivik, Mainstream Islamophobia, and the Far Right

2011-07-31T16:24:00.021-04:00

By Matthew N. Lyons

Anders Behring Breivik has been called a neonazi and a Christian fundamentalist. Both of these labels are misleading, although both contain elements of truth. Breivik is an Islamophobe and a right-wing conspiracy monger, but he does not promote Nazi-style Jew-hatred or call for imposing Biblical doctrines on society. His strongest political influences appear to be pro-Zionist, largely secular "counter-jihadists" who disavow traditional racism and maintain significant ties with political elites.

Understanding Breivik's politics not only helps us understand the July 22 massacre in Norway for which he has accepted responsibility, but also highlights important trends and interconnections in right-wing politics in Europe, the U.S., and beyond. This is a difficult task given the size and complexity of Breivik's 1,500-page manifesto/compilation 2083 - A European Declaration of Independence, not to mention his other writings. His work draws on many different political sources, which do not always agree with each other. For these reasons, any summation of Breivik's politics at this point needs to be tentative. So far I have only read bits and pieces of Breivik's writings and am relying here primarily on others' excerpts and interpretations. I hope that my efforts to pull the pieces together are useful.

The forces from which Breivik primarily draws inspiration include Geert Wilders's Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the English Defence League (EDL), and the Gates of Vienna blog; in the United States they also include neoconservative-oriented Islamophobes such as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, co-founders of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA). These and similar groups form a loosely affiliated "counter-jihad" movement. They are deeply hostile to Islam, Muslim immigration, multiculturalism, Marxism, and feminism, but they also endorse Israel, disavow traditional far right biological racism, and to varying degrees distance themselves from more anti-establishment (and often explicitly antisemitic) white nationalists, paleoconservatives, and neonazis.

Broadly speaking, these forces promote a harsher version of mainstream conservatism's Islamophobia and nativism, although their relationships with established elites vary significantly. Spencer and Geller, for example, have close ties with David Horowitz, who is a longtime fixture in the elite-sponsored network of neocon think tanks and publications. In contrast, the EDL is much more rooted in a "football hooligan" subculture of right-wing street violence. The EDL is a split-off from the fascist British National Party (BNP) but has defined itself as anti-racist and anti-Nazi, supports Zionism, and recruits Jews and people of color.

A counter-jihadist political orientation is evident in the compendium of Breivik's online comments about Islam and multiculturalism that was posted the day after the massacres. These are Google translations of Breivik's original comments in Norwegian. His references to the "Vienna School of Thought" apparently refer to the Gates of Vienna blog and to the defeat of Turkish (i.e., Muslim) forces in the 1683 Battle of Vienna:

"Ethnocentric movements that BNP [British National Party], National Front [in France] is not successful and will never be able to get over 10% support... One can not fight racism (multikulti) with racism. Ethnocentrism is therefore the complete opposite of what we want to achieve.

"We have selected the Vienna School of Thought as the ideological basis. This implies opposition to multiculturalism and Islamization (on cultural grounds). All ideological arguments based on anti-racism."

"To sums up the Vienna school of thought:
-Cultural Conservatism (anti-multiculturalism)
-Against Islamization
-Anti-racist
-Anti-authoritarian (resistance to all authoritarian ideologies of hate)
-Pro-Israel/forsvarer of non-Muslim minorities in Muslim countries
-Defender of the cultural aspects of Christianity
-To reveal the Eurabia project and the Frankfurt School (ny-marxisme/kulturmarxisme/multikulturalisme)
-Is not an economic policy and can collect everything from socialists to capitalists"

"Many kulturmarxister look at Israel as a 'racist' state. Cultural conservatives disagree when they believe the conflict is based on Islamic imperialism, that Islam is a political ideology and not a race. Cultural conservatives believe Israel has a right to protect themselves against the Jihad."

Breivik's profession of "anti-racism" is consistent with other counter-jihadists' efforts to distance themselves from the traditional far right. Despite this strategic orientation that defines the clash with Islam in cultural and political terms, Breivik also promotes more traditional racist ideology. As Sara Posner notes, he devotes several pages of his manifesto (pp. 1151-65 – all page references are to the pdf version of 2083 cited above) to denouncing "race-mixing" and discussing how to "prevent the extinction of the Nordic tribes" – passages that make him sound like a true white nationalist. Helen Highwater points out that (on p. 847) he also praises the Swedish Nazi singer Saga, who he claims (falsely) has moved away from Nazism. On the other hand, Breivik's manifesto repeatedly draws parallels between Nazism and Islam.

In the same section where he discusses race-mixing, Breivik denounces Hitler as "a traitor to the Nordic-Germanic tribes":

"Thanks to his insane campaign and the subsequent genocide of the 6 million Jews, multiculturalism, the anti-European hate ideology was created. Multiculturalism would never have been implemented in Europe if it hadn't been for the NSDAP's [Nazi Party's] reckless and unforgivable actions."

Apparently forgetting that Palestine was then under British control, Breivik continues, "Hitler had the military capabilities necessary to liberate Jerusalem and the nearby provinces from Islamic occupation. He could have easily worked out an agreement with the UK and France to liberate the ancient Jewish Christian lands with the purpose of giving the Jews back their ancestral lands…. The deportation of the Jews from Germany wouldn't be popular but eventually, the Jewish people would regard Hitler as a hero because he returned the Holy land to them (p. 1163)."

Unlike the Nazis (or neonazis today), Breivik supports Zionism (in hard-line form including the expulsion of all Muslim Palestinians from Israel) and does not demonize all Jews as a group:

"Jews that support multiculturalism today are as much of a threat to Israel and Zionism (Israeli nationalism) as they are to us. So let us fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all anti-Zionists, against all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists. Conservative Jews were loyal to Europe and should have been rewarded. Instead, [Hitler] just targeted them all… So, are the current Jews in Europe and US disloyal? The multiculturalist (nation-wrecking) Jews ARE while the conservative Jews ARE NOT. Aprox. 75% of European/US Jews support multiculturalism while aprox. 50% of Israeli Jews does the same. This shows very clearly that we must embrace the remaining loyal Jews as brothers rather than repeating the mistake of the NSDAP. Whenever I discuss the Middle East issue with a national socialist he presents the anti-Israeli and pro-Palestine argument. He always seem unaware of the fact that his propaganda is hurting Israeli nationalists (who want to deport the Muslims from Israel) and that he is in fact helping the Israeli cultural Marxists/multiculturalists with his argumentation (p. 1163)."

What about the description of Breivik as a Christian fundamentalist? Apparently this originated partly with comments by the Norwegian police shortly after the killings, and was picked up by many commentators. Breivik's writings include many references to defending Christianity as part of his cultural conservative program, and some of his ideas are certainly shared by Christian rightists, such as fears of a "demographic winter" among European Christians. Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates (with whom I co-wrote the book Right-Wing Populism in America) argues that Breivik's core conspiracy theory (that cultural Marxists have promoted multiculturalism in order to undermine western Civilization) is largely derived from Christian right sources – specifically the work of Paul Weyrich and William Lind of the Free Congress Foundation. Weyrich was a prime strategist of the U.S. "New Right" and Christian right in the 1970s and 1980s.

But it is misleading to say that Breivik is himself a Christian rightist or fundamentalist. Unlike Christian rightists, he places little priority on banning abortion or homosexuality, and he does not support any form of dominion theology, the belief that Christian men are called by God to take control of society. Posner quotes Breivik's manifesto: It is "essential to understand the difference between a 'Christian fundamentalist theocracy' (everything we do not want) and a secular European society based on our Christian cultural heritage (what we do want)" (p. 1361). This statement closely matches historian Nikki Keddie's distinction between "religious fundamentalism" and "religious nationalism." Religious fundamentalism, as a political movement, is about doctrinal purity and imposing a specific set of religious practices on society. Religious nationalism places little or no emphasis on doctrinal purity, but rather uses religious identity as a marker to exclude and vilify non-members. In these terms, the U.S. Christian right is a religious fundamentalist movement, but Breivik is a Christian nationalist -- not a fundamentalist.

Michael Altman also points out that Breivik's political vision is not exclusively Christian in focus. His manifesto describes "a utopia where the right wings of the world's religions defend one another against Islam and Marxism." In Breivik's vision for a new Europe, for example, a "Multi-Cultural Force Medal" would be awarded "for military cooperation with nationalist Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, and/or atheist forces (non-European) on Hindu, Buddhist or Jewish territory. These efforts must be directed against Jihadi or cultural Marxist forces, personnel or interests" (p. 1086). Breivik pays particular attention to India, including in 2083 an essay by Hindu nationalist Shrinandan Vyas about Muslim "genocides" against Hindus. "It is essential," Breivik writes, "that the European and Indian resistance movements learn from each other and cooperate as much as possible. Our goals are more or less identical" (p. 1475). This sentiment resonates with Hindu nationalists' efforts in recent years to build alliances with western Islamophobes, especially right-wing Zionists.

Efforts by left-leaning commentators to report on Breivik's politics have been mixed. The online magazine Religion Dispatches has done a particularly good job of presenting a rounded, complex picture of Breivik's writings. The pieces by Sarah Posner and Michael Altman cited above appeared on Religion Dispatches.

Many commentators on the right have responded to Breivik with defensiveness and denial. This has been particularly true among neocon counter-jihadists such as Geller and Spencer. More substantive analysis comes from a few rightist critics of neoconservatism and Zionism, such as Justin Raimondo. Editor of AntiWar.com, Raimondo is a paleocon-leaning libertarian who supported Pat Buchanan's presidential campaigns. Raimondo notes Breivik's debt to Weyrich but emphasizes his ties with the pro-Zionist Islamophobes of SIOA, David Horowitz's Frontpagemag.com, and the EDL. Breivik's video account of the Islamic threat, Raimondo writes, "is neoconservatism, of the old cold war variety, with the only difference being that International Islam has taken the place of International Communism as our unsleeping foe." Raimondo's criticism of Islamophobia is to be applauded, but unfortunately he doesn't mention that paleocons such as his old friend Pat Buchanan have been just as complicit as neocons in promoting Islamophobia. (Indeed, Buchanan's own commentary on the Norwegian massacre denounces Breivik as "evil" but maintains that "a burgeoning Muslim presence" is still the greater threat facing Europe.)

Kevin MacDonald, editor of the white nationalist and antisemitic Occidental Observer, also pinpoints Breivik's main orientation: "a Geert Wilders-type of cultural conservative, very opposed to ethnocentrism as a strategy, very positive about the Vienna School, pro-Israel, and also very hostile toward Muslims." As Leah Nelson writes on the Southern Poverty Law Center's blog, MacDonald applauds many elements of Breivik's analysis yet "is obviously perplexed by Breivik's professed support for Israel" and by his general failure to target Jewish elites. MacDonald speculates that this may be a tactical maneuver by Breivik.

Anders Behring Breivik doesn't fit the standard expectations for a right-wing terrorist. He is not a Timothy McVeigh or a Paul Hill – not a neonazi or a hardline Christian rightist. Although strongly influenced by white nationalism and Christian rightist conspiracy theories, his primary orientation is to a political network that is closer to mainstream conservatism and, at least in the United States, closer to established political elites. This doesn't mean that the line has disappeared between mainstream right and far right, but the interplay between them has become even uglier and more violent than before.

“We are not interested in a polemic,” -- but we got one anyway.

2011-07-06T08:21:00.002-04:00

TurningThe Tide has published a response to a previous article, Off the Nazis!...but how? We had previously linked to it and post this response here to continue the discussion.

A response to Bring the Ruckus

by Jerry Bellow

I read with interest the recent article from Bring the Ruckus (or The Brigade, presumably some subset of BTR, which is itself a multi-tendency organization) concerning the recent Anti-Fascist events in and around Trenton NJ. It is clear that the author(s) or their informants were intimately in the actual actions, as I was.

They seek to bring a critical perspective to what happened that weekend, and in some cases they are mostly dead on. With other conclusions, I feel as though they head in a direction that is dangerous to both the aboveground and underground portions of the movement.

BTR points out serious flaws in ARA’s organizing leading up the public mobilization in Trenton. I agree that much more time and energy should have been spent out in the community, meeting people, explaining who we are, what we do, why we are there, and why it would be fun to join in.

In the organizing for ARA I have done in the past in the Midwest (mostly Ohio), a lot of time was spent on this sort of activity, both in big cities and in very small towns. The small towns were harder to do this in, because you are organizing among poor rural white folks, and there was always that fear that someone you met might be the enemy or one of their sympathizers. But, We Go Where They Go even if it’s a space and place where their comfort level is much greater than our own.

Hub City ARA, which is the ARA Network chapter local to Trenton, didn’t do enough of this base-building type work in a place where one could be 100% certain that the fascists had no sympathizers one might encounter unknowingly by chance.

But each ARA chapter is autonomous, each has to organize permanently in its own community, and each has to deal with the political repercussions of its actions in the long term. How Hub City chose to turn a Neo-Nazi mobilization to its own local advantage is Hub City’s choice, not the choice of the network as a whole.

To Hub City’s credit, their local organizing leading up to the event centered on exposing the locations and (sex) crimes of local NSM members. Despite the overall lack of base building, the NSM now has zero chance of gaining a foothold or building a base in Trenton. We Go Where They Go, and Hub City ARA rooted them out and exposed them.

The other point BTR raises in their article, and the one I find problematic is this one:

“Doing the aboveground organizing in the same space and time as the underground organizing is strategically paralyzing and decreases the effectiveness of both the more and the less militant elements from pursuing their separate goals.”

The conceptualization therein is a straw man. “More Militant” and “Less Militant” elements within ARA and within the anti-fascist movement do not have separate goals.

They have one goal and that is to defeat and dismantle fascist organizations. “Elements” (or that is to say, people) are not more or less militant, tactics are more or less militant.

People, as individuals, have more or less military capability.

The formulation that BTR suggests we use essentially places the more militarily capable people within the organization in a separate political and organizing space from the more aboveground and “less militant” (although it takes a lot of work to carry out militant action in broad daylight downtown) people. This is an error.

The clandestine operation, the sudden strike by night, the essentially more illegal actions with high potential for physical violence (which is what I think BTR means by “more militant”) are tactics.

These tactics must be employed from time to time, and the capability to employ these tactics must be built, honed and maintained for the sake of both effectiveness and credibility. Clandestine activity however, is still only a tactical adjunct to the core work of Anti-fascism, which is mass organizing.

Separating these elements leads to disaster in the long term. Time and again, revolutionary organizations have separated their clandestine elements from their mass elements, or failed to build mass elements at all. This leads to a focus and fetishizing of clandestine activity at the expense mass organizing and mass militancy.

As the clandestine political operator slides further down this road she or he becomes more and more separated from the masses, from dialogue with mass political organizing, with the realities of day to day life. When the Red Army Faction disbanded itself in 1998, one of the key self-criticisms they cited was a failure to engage in any above-ground work. They wrote:

“It Was A Strategic Mistake Not To Build Up A Political-Social Organization Alongside The Illegal, Armed Organization

“...In no phase of our [RAF’s] history was an outreaching, political organization realized in addition to the political-military struggle. The concept of the RAF knew only the armed struggle, with a focus on the political-military attack.”

In light of this, and the experiences of many clandestine underground organizations, the fault of ARA in Trenton was not the failure to separate the clandestine from public, but the failure to better coordinate the two. ARA and other antifa failed to communicate WHY we chose the tactic of wearing black, WHAT the relationship of this or that corporate institution is to fascism or WHY some of us chose to target them along with the open nazis. We failed to communicate why the population of Trenton should support us, why they should join us in these actions.

Separation would not have helped with that. Searching for new methods of communication, integration and inclusion are the way forward.

Right-Wing Movements 101

2011-06-18T14:42:00.001-04:00

by Matthew N. Lyons

Presentation at a political study retreat in Monroe, New York, on 5 June 2011.

I'm going to try to give you an overview of right-wing movements in the U.S. and how they've developed over the past several decades. This is not going to be comprehensive. Instead, I'll focus on a few examples of specific movements and some of the kinds of issues and dynamics that I think are important for an overall understanding of the right. But before that, let me make a few general points about the right and how I approach it.

Rightward shift since the 1970s
The United States has seen a major upsurge of right-wing movements more or less continuously since the late 1970s -- from the so-called New Right and the Reagan Revolution of thirty years ago to the Tea Party and the anti-immigrant movement of today. Part of the impact of this upsurge is that it's helped to bring about a whole rightward shift in what people consider mainstream political discourse.

To help put this in perspective, here's a little exercise: Imagine a president who expands affirmative action, actively promotes school desegregation, enacts important new laws in social welfare, environmental protection, occupational health and safety, and consumer protection, supports comprehensive health insurance and a system of guaranteed income for all citizens, and whose Justice Department opposes the RICO Act on the grounds that it gives the government powers that are much too broad and sweeping for prosecuting criminals. In 2011, such a president would be considered far to left of Barack Obama and far to the left of almost everyone in Congress. Forty years ago, such a president was called Richard Nixon. That's the shift I'm talking about.

Signalfire post: "Homeland Security Department curtails home-grown terror analysis"

2011-06-11T07:42:00.002-04:00

The leftist blog Signalfire has an interesting post about the federal government's monitoring of domestic right-wing forces.

From the article:

"The Department of Homeland Security has stepped back for the past two years from conducting its own intelligence and analysis of home-grown extremism, according to current and former department officials, even though law enforcement and civil rights experts have warned of rising extremist threats.

"The department has cut the number of personnel studying domestic terrorism unrelated to Islam, canceled numerous state and local law enforcement briefings, and held up dissemination of nearly a dozen reports on extremist groups, the officials and others said.

"The decision to reduce the department’s role was provoked by conservative criticism of an intelligence report on “Rightwing Extremism” issued four months into the Obama administration, the officials said. The report warned that the poor economy and Obama’s election could stir “violent radicalization,” but it was pilloried as an attack on conservative ideologies, including opponents of abortion and immigration."

Liberalism’s Limits: A review of Burghart and Zeskind’s Tea Party Nationalism

2011-05-30T10:08:00.032-04:00

by Matthew N. Lyons

The Tea Party movement erupted largely as a backlash against Barack Obama’s election as president. Starting in February 2009, a series of local and then national protests invoked the anti-tax Boston Tea Party that foreshadowed the American Revolution. They denounced Obama and other Democratic leaders for promoting irresponsible government spending, high taxes, and government intrusion into people’s lives. A loose-knit network of Tea Party organizations quickly came together, oriented toward the right wing of the Republican Party. The new movement was fueled by anger at big government but also, as many liberals and leftists pointed out, anger at the election of the first black president of the United States, who was vilified on some Tea Party signs as an African witch doctor, a Muslim foreigner, or a monkey. Despite Tea Partiers’ denials, their movement was very much about race.

The October 2010 exposé Tea Party Nationalism represents both the strengths and the weaknesses of liberal anti-racism. The report offers valuable information about widespread racist tendencies within the Tea Party and how these tendencies relate to the movement’s origins, structure, and factional differences. But in focusing on Tea Partiers’ ties with white nationalist and Patriot/militia politics, the report presents racism as an ideology associated mainly with the political fringe – not as a core structural feature of U.S. society.

Tea Party Nationalism: A Critical Examination of the Tea Party Movement and the Size, Scope, and Focus of Its National Factions was written by Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind of the Kansas City-based Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (IREHR). Both Burghart and Zeskind have been studying and writing about white nationalism and related right-wing movements for many years. Zeskind, a 1998 MacArthur fellow, is also the author of the 2009 book Blood and Politics: The History of White Nationalism from the Margins to the Mainstream.

The report Tea Party Nationalism was published by the NAACP, which three months earlier had publicly called on Tea Party leaders to repudiate racist elements within their movement’s ranks. In a Democracy Now! interview about the report, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous claimed that Tea Party groups had responded to NAACP pressure by throwing out one racist and one anti-gay bigot. “And we’re saying, ‘Good. Those are good first steps. Keep on going. You’ve got to clean house. If you do so, you won’t just make this country better, you’ll make your own Tea Party better."

“A bright white line of racism”
While I doubt that Burghart and Zeskind intend their report to help “make the Tea Party better,” they do focus on one area of Tea Party politics rather than offer a general critique. Debunking claims that Tea Party groups concentrate only on fiscal issues or big government, Tea Party Nationalism argues that “a bright white line of racism” runs through the movement’s political ideology (p. 11). For example, the “abiding obsession with Barack Obama’s birth certificate [among many Tea Partiers] is often a stand-in for the belief that the first black president of the United States is not a ‘real American’” (p. 7). Many Tea Party groups have rallied behind Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB 1070 law or have argued that children of undocumented immigrants who are born in the United States (so-called “anchor babies”) should not be entitled to birthright citizenship, as stated in the U.S. Constitution. Islamophobia and antisemitism have also shown up repeatedly in the movement, as in calls to “take a stand against all Muslims” (p. 70) or claims that America is a Christian nation.

Burghart and Zeskind trace racist tendencies in the TP movement in several ways, from polling data to statements by TP leaders; from slogans on protest signs to organizational ties with white nationalist and Patriot/militia groups. They argue that while Tea Party groups number a few people of color among their members and spokespeople, and have sometimes repudiated specific racist statements by TP leaders, they have often responded to charges of racism with defensiveness and denial and have made no consistent efforts to address the problem.

Here are some of the examples of Tea Party racism that are cited in the report: The notorious March 2010 incident in which Tea Party protesters spat on and shouted racist and homophobic epithets at several congressmembers as they walked by on their way to the Capitol. “Vicious rants and explicit racism” by Tea Party Express chairman Mark Williams, who “has referred to President Obama as a Nazi, a half-white racist, a half-black racist and an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare fraud” (p. 51) and who dubbed Islam “a dangerous and savage culture” (p. 56). (Williams resigned abruptly at TP Express chairman in June 2010.) A former Ku Klux Klan “official supporter” who leads the Wood County Tea Party in Texas (p. 45). Another Tea Party Patriots local chapter, Help Save Maryland, that was formed in 2005 as an anti-immigrant group and continues to protest regularly outside an immigrant rights group headquarters (p. 46).

Burghart and Zeskind also list many examples of Tea Partiers endorsing or giving air time to racists from outside their ranks. 1776 Tea Party chairman Dale Robertson has promoted longtime antisemite Martin “Red” Beckman and Pastor John Weaver, a neo-Confederate who has spoken at Christian Identity gatherings (pp. 57-58). Several Tea Party events have given a platform to Richard Mack, a Patriot/militia movement activist who has declared, “The Reverend Jesse Jackson types and the NAACP have done more to enslave Afro-Americans than all the southern plantation owners put together” (p. 63). Tea Party Express lists as an official partner the group Free Republic, whose website has posted racist comments about Michelle Obama and her daughters (p. 53).

Mapping the movement
Alongside its treatment of racial politics, Tea Party Nationalism offers one of the most detailed portraits available of the movement’s organizational structure. Although the authors present this as central to their study, it has received much less media attention than the report’s discussion of racism. The first chapter traces the immediate factors, major players, and events that gave rise to the Tea Party in 2009. The following six chapters focus on each of the national Tea Party factions in turn, discussing each group’s membership, corporate structure, leadership, finances, political positions, and relationships with other groups.

These are the six national Tea Party factions (with approximate membership as of August 2010 given in parentheses):

1776 Tea Party (better known as TeaParty.org) (7,000)
FreedomWorks Tea Party (15,000)
Tea Party Nation (31,000)
ResistNet (apparently changed its name to Patriot Action Network in 2011) (81,000)
Tea Party Patriots (115,000)
Tea Party Express (not a membership organization)

As Burghart and Zeskind note, membership is only one measure of a faction’s influence. For example, although FreedomWorks has one of the smallest memberships among the six factions, it has the largest budget and paid staff.

In the course of laying out this organizational portrait, Tea Party Nationalism shows us that the Tea Party is a genuine mass movement based among regular people, in which both elite and grassroots interests play important roles. Thus the report implicitly debunks two common liberal myths about the Tea Party: that it is either a lunatic fringe phenomenon or simply an “astroturf” (fake grassroots) creation of wealthy Republicans. The report says that the Tea Party exists at three levels: (a) an inner core of 250,000 members, (b) “a couple of million” activists who go to meetings and protests and buy the literature, and (c) about 16-18 percent of the adult population that identifies as sympathizers in national polls (p. 8).

Burghart and Zeskind also clarify some of the salient differences between the TP factions and how they relate to broader rightist currents. This is a major strength of their report. Based on the information the authors provide (plus a quick look at the major Tea Party websites), we can begin to map the Tea Party in relation to the following specific branches of the U.S. right:

GOP/corporate establishment. FreedomWorks and Tea Party Express have the closest establishment ties among national TP factions. FreedomWorks is headed by corporate lobbyist and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, and publisher/politician Steve Forbes also sits on their board. Tea Party Express was founded by the California-based Our Country Deserves Better PAC, whose chair (Howard Kaloogian) is a former Republican leader in the California Assembly, and whose chief strategist (Sal Russo) is a former Reagan aide who has served as a political consultant to conservative forces in Nicaragua, Ukraine, and elsewhere. (A third establishment group with close ties to the Tea Party movement is the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, which as an “ancillary” organization receives only passing mention in Burghart and Zeskind’s report.)
Anti-immigrant movement. The 1776 Tea Party (TeaParty.org) has the strongest anti-immigrant ties, being largely run by two leaders of the vigilante Minuteman Project, Stephen Eichler and Tim Bueler. TeaParty.org’s list of “non-negotiable core beliefs” begins with “Illegal Aliens Are Here Illegally” – before anything about big government or taxes. Significant anti-immigrant sentiment is also spread across several other Tea Party organizations, especially Tea Party Nation and a number of local affiliates of both ResistNet and Tea Party Patriots.
Christian right. Tea Party Nation appears to be particularly close to the Christian right, as indicated by the tenor of events it has sponsored, especially a major February 2010 conference in Nashville. ResistNet’s new incarnation, the Patriot Action Network, also shows a pronounced Christian right orientation.
Patriot/militia movement. Several Tea Party Patriots local chapters either call themselves militia groups or are closely aligned with Patriot/militia ideology.
Libertarianism. Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty “has played a noteworthy role in the growth of the Tea Party movement, even if few CFL members have enrolled in any of the national Tea Party groups” (p. 15). The Libertarian Party of Illinois also helped to formulate the idea of the Tea Party in the winter of 2008-2009.

Internal tensions
These political subdivisions are somewhat fluid, as all of the Tea Party factions are influenced by more than one rightist current. (The two largest factions, ResistNet/PAN and Tea Party Patriots, are also the most decentralized, forming diverse ideological patchworks of local chapters.) But even an approximate political map can help us to understand some of the tensions that have developed within the Tea Party movement, which may eventually harden into clear strategic conflicts. For example, while FreedomWorks has provided pivotal training and technical support to most of the other national TP groups, it has also clashed with other factions over its establishment ties and relatively moderate position on immigration issues. FreedomWorks has also criticized Tea Party Nation, among others, for focusing too much on cultural issues associated with the Christian right (such as attacking homosexuality) -- a criticism that has been denounced by Christian rightists such as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

Burghart and Zeskind’s report does not address – but provides useful context for understanding – TP movement differences over U.S. foreign policy. As Medea Benjamin has noted, Tea Partiers are divided between an interventionist majority and an anti-interventionist minority, although so far this has not erupted into significant public conflict. Here the fault lines run differently than they do on cultural/religious issues. Groups influenced by major Christian right organizations are likely to share an interventionist (and pro-Zionist) orientation with the more secular FreedomWorks and Tea Party Express. By contrast, TP groups that identify with Ron Paul-type libertarianism or Patriot movement hostility to “globalist elites” will tend toward anti-interventionism.

Limitations of the report’s approach
While Tea Party Nationalism provides valuable information about racist tendencies in the Tea Party movement, the report’s approach to this issue has some serious limitations. For one thing, using racial politics as the main yardstick for comparing different TP factions could lead some readers to conclude that FreedomWorks is “less bad” than other factions, because it has focused more consistently on fiscal issues and big government and has taken a relatively moderate position on immigration. This leaves out other parts of the picture. The report doesn’t mention, for example, that FreedomWorks’ Dick Armey goes much farther than the majority of Tea Partiers in attacking Social Security and Medicare. (More on this below.)

Aside from the Freedomworks example, Burghart and Zeskind also say little or nothing about how other right-wing ideologies may work at cross purposes to white nationalism within the Tea Party movement. As an example, while many Tea Partiers have supported Arizona’s SB 1070, supporters of libertarian Ron Paul leafleted against the law at a recent Tea Party Patriots conference in Phoenix, on the grounds that the law would impose regulatory burdens and lead to Department of Homeland Security intrusion into people’s lives. Similarly, as Sara Diamond noted a few years before the Tea Party movement arose, many leading Christian right groups have been reluctant to support anti-immigrant measures, because they see Latino immigrants as a major pool of potential support.

A bigger problem is that Tea Party Nationalism presents racism mainly as a problem of harmful attitudes and ideas, which are latent in the white population but are being fomented by extremist political organizations. There is no discussion of racial oppression as a core structural feature of U.S. society, including liberal political institutions and the Democratic Party. We should remember, for example, that while right-wing coded racism had vilified “welfare queens” for decades, it was Bill Clinton -- not any Republican president -- who abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a cornerstone of the New Deal safety net. Similarly, while Barack Obama has opposed Arizona’s SB 1070, he has also increased deportations of undocumented immigrants to record levels -- beyond the worst of the George W. Bush years.

How does this relate to the Tea Party? Political scientist Lisa Disch argues that some liberals use the charge of racism to obscure the fact that they and the Tea Partiers share a stake in a limited welfare-state system based on white privilege. Disch cites polls showing that while nearly all Tea Partiers advocate small government, large majorities of them consider Social Security and Medicare to be “worth the expense” to taxpayers. This reflects the fact that these programs have been “framed as a just return for work and investment, characteristics that are stereotypically attached to white racial identity, and juxtaposed against social ‘welfare,’ which is characterized by qualities of dependency, wastefulness, and laziness that are attributed to the black poor.” (These qualities are also attributed to undocumented immigrants, we could add.) As Disch notes, Social Security rules initially made farm workers and domestic workers ineligible, effectively excluding most blacks from the program.

Disch agrees with Burghart and Zeskind that racial politics are central to the Tea Party agenda, but while they identify this agenda with “inchoate” white nationalism (p. 11), she highlights its underlying ties with mainstream institutions and the legacy of liberal reform. “At the core of [Tea Partiers’] belief system is not free-market capitalism but, rather, a sense that hard-working whites ought not to be made to finance rescue programs for underachieving blacks.” This outlook is reflected in Tea Party signs, such as “You are not entitled to what I have earned,” and “Redistribute my work ethic.” “It is not that Tea Party supporters are being seduced into embracing a social agenda that works against their economic interests,” Disch argues. “They are mobilizing to defend economic interests that liberal public policy in the US has fused with whiteness.”

None of this negates the useful information Burghart and Zeskind have compiled about racist tendencies in the Tea Party movement. But there is nothing in their report that challenges liberal assumptions about what racism is or where it comes from. By contrast, Disch’s approach pushes the discussion toward a more radical analysis.

Toward a broader analysis
While race politics is an essential part of the Tea Party movement, it’s not the whole story. The best general analysis of the Tea Party I have seen so far comes from the League for the Revolutionary Party, a Third Camp Trotskyist group. Without endorsing the LRP’s overall political line, I think they are on target with the following points:

The Tea Party is a mass movement of middle- and working-class whites whose political anger has been fueled not only by the erosion of traditional white privileges and social power, but also by long-term economic decline and capitalist attacks against all subordinate groups.
Although the Tea Party is decentralized and ideologically diverse, representatives of capital helped to create the movement and form the strongest power center within it. Neither independent citizens nor far right groups hold major countervailing influence. Largely for these reasons, the movement furthers the agendas of right-wing capitalists who want to intensify attacks on the working class and oppressed groups.
While racist attitudes pervade the Tea Party and are one of its driving forces, many movement leaders and members have worked to exclude blatant expressions of racism to avoid scaring away potential supporters (and Republican voters).
The failure of organized labor and other progressive forces to energetically protest the federal bailout of the financial industry in 2008-9 helped right-wing leaders to channel anti-elite resentment against Obama and the Democrats, and thus fueled the Tea Party upsurge. Many liberals’ contempt for Tea Partiers as uneducated “rednecks” does the same.
The Tea Party has some features of fascism (for example, scapegoating oppressed groups while also promoting a vague anti-elitism) but also differs from it in critical ways. (In my view a key difference is one that the LRP doesn’t mention: Fascist movements advocate a radical break with the established political order; the Tea Party, despite its insurgent veneer, does not.)

These points from the LRP, like Lisa Disch’s essay discussed above, offer the kind of framework that’s vital for understanding the Tea Party – and for building a radical alternative that combats the Tea Party’s ugly politics yet speaks to its followers’ legitimate grievances. I encourage people to read Burghart and Zeskind’s Tea Party Nationalism for valuable details about the movement’s racial politics and organizational structure, but don’t be satisfied with their analysis.

[Note: All page numbers given in this review are from Burghart and Zeskind, Tea Party Nationalism.]

On the potential and limitations of militant anti-fascism

2011-05-24T14:14:00.002-04:00

Bring the Ruckus has published a thoughtful discussion of a recent confrontation between neo-nazis and militant anti-fascists in Trenton, New Jersey. The article raises a number of important issues related to anti-fascist organizing.

From the article:
"The combative actions of Friday and Saturday were successful in many respects. The attacks not only confronted the fascists and challenged the police state that protects them but also cast a looming shadow of doubt on the ability of liberal democracy to effectively oppose the rising tide of militant white nationalism in the United States. In comparison to the usual counter-protests that collaborate with the police and amount to little more than sign waving and shouting matches, the actions of ARA [Anti-Racist Action] disrupted the actual logistical operations of the fascists.

* * *

"As it currently stands, those of us who identify as radical Anti-Fascists, or "Antifa," constitute an insular scene, not a social front. This is reflected in the fact that there was no strategy involving the community. The organizing and planning for the actions was entirely exclusive to ARA members, making it difficult for anyone outside of the circuit to usefully contribute or feel welcome at all. This was a major failure on our part. The planning meetings themselves entailed a contradictory balance between the fruitless planning of clandestine activities and organizing militant public protests. As a result, invited and vouched in newcomers as well as people with different levels of commitment felt very alienated and out of the loop."

A Wall is Just a Wall...

2011-05-15T21:35:00.002-04:00

Check out a new video mix by chicagoforthepeople featuring clips of the December 2010 Georgia prison strike, 1971 Attica rebellion, and the resistance to anti-immigrant racism in Arizona, set to the song "Jailer" by Asa:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3BtSr7X2tY

Between the Zeal of the Young and the Patience of the Old: Reflections on Seattle’s Recent Upheavals Against Police Brutality

2011-05-11T14:09:00.002-04:00

The following comes form friends at the Black Orchid Collective. While the article is particular to recent concersn and questions of orgaizing and strategy in Seattle, teher are broader dimenersions relevant to a range of the varied autonomous and radical anti-system organizing, including approaches to anti-racist and anti-fascist activity.

From the article,
"On February 15 2011, Seattle Police officer Ian Birk was let off the hook for the murder of Native carver J. T. Williams. On August 30 2010, officer Ian Birk had shot the partially deaf woodcarver 5 times within 4 seconds of ordering him to put down what was a closed, legal 3 inch carving knife that Williams used to produce his art. While Ian Birk wisely resigned from office, he will not be charged with murder. The news spread fast among the people of Seattle reaching network after network, individual after individual...

The 6 pm rally Facebook call was initiated by an anonymous individual, but it soon went viral with thousands of people invited. When someone asked who was leading it, an organizer responded, 'At this point, everyone'...

Questions run the gamut: Should we organize multi-racially and if so, how? Is leadership necessary, and if so what kind? What is the role of organization(s), if any? How do we build and maintain movements that can ensure killer cops don’t get away scot-free, and how does this relate to goals of bringing about revolutionary change? Should our actions be violent or non-violent? No one has perfect answers, but we are all learning fast by struggling with these questions."

Russian neo-Nazi gets life sentence for murdering lawyer and journalist

2011-05-11T13:52:00.003-04:00

We have followed the growing Russian fascist movement and its terror attacks for the last few years. Previously we commented on and posted a video featuring murdered Russian human rights lawyer and antifascist Stanislav Markelov and antifascist journalist Anastasiya Baburova. Below is a Guardian UK report on the recent conviction of the accused assassin. - C. Alexander

Conviction hailed as rare victory for justice by activists who say long sentences have brought down number of racist attacks

By, Tom Parfitt in Moscow for the Guardian UK: article

Human rights activists in Russia have hailed a rare victory for justice after a court in Moscow sentenced an extreme nationalist to life in prison for killing a prominent lawyer and a young journalist.

Nikita Tikhonov was jailed for shooting dead lawyer Stanislav Markelov, 34, and Anastasiya Baburova, 25, a trainee reporter at the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, in January 2009 on a side street in the Kropotkinskaya district of central Moscow.

Tikhonov's girlfriend, Yevgeniya Khasis, was also tried and sentenced to 18 years in a penal colony for helping co-ordinate the attack by mobile phone.

A jury at Moscow's city court found the pair guilty late last month after hearing they had targeted Markelov because of his work on prosecutions of neo-Nazis. At the time of his death the lawyer and Baburova were walking to a metro station after a press conference.

Tikhonov shot Markelov in the back of the head with a pistol from close range and then shot Baburova when she tried to grab his arm.

In contrast to the disputed trials surrounding other high profile murders such as those of journalists Paul Klebnikov in 2004 and Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, family and colleagues of the victims said they were satisfied with the outcome.

"The court process was honest, fair and carried out with dignity," said Baburova's mother, Larisa. "We are certain they were the killers; we have no doubt. They executed a terrible crime and must answer for their actions."

Sergei Sokolov, the editor in chief of Novaya Gazeta, told the Ekho Moskvy radio station the investigation had been "impeccable". He praised the judge in the case for putting the Tikhonov and Khasis – who "posed a real danger to society" – behind bars for a lengthy sentence.

Alexander Cherkasov, an activist with the Memorial rights group, said he and others had "studied the whole process very thoroughly, evaluated the evidence very critically, and come to the conclusion that the defendants on the bench were exactly the people who should be punished for the murders".

According to witnesses in the courtroom the killers laughed and smiled as the sentence was read. Tikhonov had initially confessed but both later claimed they were not responsible for the deaths.

During a trial lasting three and a half months, the jurors heard that Tikhonov, 31, and Khasis, 26, were involved with an ultra-right group called Russky Obraz. Tikhonov had a motive to seek revenge on Markelov because the lawyer represented the family of a 19-year-old antifascist activist who was murdered in 2006. A search warrant was issued for Tikhonov in connection with that killing and although he was not captured, three accomplices to the crime received heavy prison sentences as a result of Markelov's efforts.

Tikhonov and Khasis fell under police suspicion in autumn 2009 and officers bugged their apartment, recording the pair discussing the murder. They were arrested in November that year. Three pistols and a Kalashnikov were found in the apartment. One of the pistols, a 1910 Browning, matched bullets found at the murder scene.

Neo-Nazis have already written posts on online forums threatening the judge in the trial. However Natalya Yudina of Sova Centre, a group that tracks nationalist aggression, expressed hope the outcome would act as a deterrent.

"In the last year there has been an increase in guilty verdicts for neo-Nazi hate crimes and we've seen a corresponding drop in the number of violent racist attacks," she said.

"Long sentences undoubtedly have an effect, and today's court decision is one more step in the right direction."

Tikhonov and Khasis's lawyers have said they will appeal.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Does contemporary capitalism tend toward fascism?

2011-05-11T13:47:00.003-04:00

A recent discussion of William Robinson's article, Global Capitalism and 21st Century Fascism.

We have taken this from the website, Khukuri. A contributor, John Steele, introduced the article saying,

"We’ve had posts and discussions here on the existence, configuration and functioning of a transnational capitalist class (TCC), mostly on a fairly theoretical plane (as befits khukuri’s function). But, presuming we accept the TCC thesis, what are the effectson a more current-event and political level? Robinson’s essay sketches a series of theses along these lines.

We’ve published a couple of things (an interview and a co-authored paper) by Robinson previously. The piece below has appeared on Znet and Aljazeera.

'Under the conditions of capitalist globalisation the state’s contradictory functions of accumulation and legitimation cannot both be met. The economic crisis intensifies the problem of legitimation for dominant groups so that accumulation crises, such as the present one, generate social conflicts and appear as spiralling political crises. In essence, the state’s ability to function as a “factor of cohesion” within the social order breaks down to the extent that capitalist globalisation and the logic of accumulation or commodification penetrates every aspect of life, so that “cohesion” requires more and more social control.'

South Side Chicago Anti-Racist Action statement on three way fight politics

2011-05-10T20:40:00.002-04:00

The following statement was posted on South Side Chicago ARA's blog on May 9, 2011:

Anti-fascists vs fascism vs the state: a three way fight, not democracy in crisis

The state: The compulsory political institution of a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the use of force within a certain territory. It applies to the courts, the cops, the laws, the politicians etc…

Fascism: A grass roots revolutionary and self proclaimed anti-capitalist movement based on racial/religious or other superiority and a false sense of victimization. Fascism attaches itself to populist ideology, relies on political violence and deceit and often is void of a political platform. It seeks internal cleansing and external expansion.

Capitalism: An economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, especially as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth.

Rising Above the Herd: Keith Preston's Authoritarian Anti-Statism

2011-05-01T20:03:00.002-04:00

by Matthew N. Lyons

[The following article was published on the New Politics website on April 29, 2011.]

"Perhaps what I champion is not so much the anarchist as much as the 'anarch,' the superior individual who, out of sheer strength of will, rises above the herd in defiance and contempt of both the sheep and their masters."

-- Keith Preston, "The Thoughts That Guide Me: A Personal Reflection" (2005)

Introduction

Freedom from government tyranny has always been a central theme of right-wing politics in the United States. From the original Ku Klux Klan that denounced "northern military despotism" to the Tea Partiers who vilify Barack Obama as a combination of Hitler and Stalin, U.S. rightists have invoked the evil of big government to both attract popular support and justify their own oppressive policies. Witness the rise of so-called National-Anarchism (NA), an offshoot of British neonazism that has recently gained a small but fast-growing foothold in the United States. National-Anarchists advocate a decentralized system of "tribal" enclaves based on "the right of all races, ethnicities and cultural groups to organize and live separately." National-Anarchists criticize statism of both the left and the right, including classical fascism, but they participate in neonazi networks such as Stormfront.org and promote anti-Jewish conspiracy theories worthy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Anti-statism is a key part of National-Anarchism's appeal and helps it to deflect the charge of fascism.

Keith Preston, who calls himself a "fellow traveler" of National-Anarchism, is in some ways even more dangerous. Preston is a former left-wing anarchist who advocates a revolutionary alliance of leftist and rightist libertarians against U.S. imperialism and the state. Unlike many far rightists who claim to be "beyond left and right," Preston actually incorporates many leftist ideas in his political philosophy and apparently is still in touch with some actual leftists. An intelligent, prolific writer, Preston has established himself over the past decade as a respected voice in libertarian, paleoconservative, and "Alternative Right" circles. His "anarcho-pluralism" represents a sophisticated reworking of far right politics that is flexible, inclusive, and appeals to widely held values such as "live and let live." Unlike most rightist ideologies, it also has the potential to serve as a bridge between a wide variety of rightist currents such as white nationalists, Patriot/militia groups, Christian rightists, and National-Anarchists -- and even some left-wing anarchists, liberal bioregionalists/environmentalists, and nationalist people of color groups.

In this article I will outline the major features of Preston's political program, strategy, and underlying philosophy. Although Preston claims that implementing anarcho-pluralism would result in an expansion of freedom, in reality it would promote oppression and authoritarianism in smaller-scale units. Although Preston is an individualist who does not directly advocate the racial determinism and separatism of his friends the National-Anarchists, he has made it a priority to (in his own words) "collaborate with racialists and theocrats," claiming that leftists who oppose such collaboration are the true bigots. Digging deeper, Preston's opposition to the state is based on a radically anti-humanistic philosophy of elitism, ruthless struggle, and contempt for most people.

Preston offers a window into the larger issue of right-wing decentralism. This article will trace both the historical roots of the phenomenon and its various branches of recent decades, including libertarian, Christian rightist, neonazi, and Patriot movements in the United States. Preston blends these U.S.-based influences with ideas drawn from the European New Right, a decentralist offshoot of classical fascism, and from German Conservative Revolution figures of the 1920s and 1930s, who influenced but mostly stood outside of the Nazi movement. Preston's own relationship with fascism is much closer than he acknowledges. While he lacks fascism's drive to impose a single ideological vision on all spheres of society, he offers a closely related form of revolutionary right-wing populism. Above all, Preston and his rightist allies embody the main danger associated with fascism -- to preempt the radical left as the main revolutionary opposition force.

AlternativeRight.com: Paleoconservatism for the 21st Century

2010-09-10T19:33:00.012-04:00

Paleoconservatives don’t have a mass following or much in the way of institutional power these days, but they do have a fairly lively intellectual scene. The defenders of Western civilization offer a number of competently written, well-produced journals, websites, and blogs, and a whole cohort of younger writers along with older, more established figures. Some of what they have to say is the same old predictable poison, but there is also some genuine political ferment going on, with ideas from other sources (tribalism and national anarchism, the European New Right, black conservatism, even the Left) contributing to comradely debate.

To get a sense of this discussion, a good place to start is the new website AlternativeRight.com. Launched in March 2010, AltRight describes itself as "an online magazine of radical traditionalism, [which] marks an attempt to forge a new intellectual right-wing that is independent and outside the 'conservative' establishment." AltRight's founder and executive editor Richard Spencer comes to the project from editing gigs at The American Conservative and Taki's Magazine, both influential paleocon organs. Like Spencer, several of the contributing editors are in their early thirties or younger, but there are also two "senior contributing editors": Peter Brimelow (editor of the anti-immigrant VDare.com) and Paul Gottfried (one of paleoconservatism's founders and one of the movement's few Jews). In look and feel, AltRight's website is more professional than VDare.com but less academic than The Occidental Quarterly, another important paleocon publication.

Background on Paleoconservatism
Paleoconservatism's ideological lineage goes back to the anti-New Deal rightists of the 1930s and the America First isolationists who tried to keep the U.S. from joining the Allies in World War II. Paleoconservatism began to take shape in the 1980s as a reaction to the rise of the neoconservatives, who included many Jewish and Catholic intellectuals rooted in Cold War liberalism. Neocons, who gained many influential posts in and around the Reagan administration, emphasized an aggressive foreign policy to defeat communism and spread American "democracy" worldwide, coupled with limited social welfare programs and nonrestrictive immigration policies. Paleocons, who regarded the neoconservatives as usurpers and closet leftists, saw no-safety-net capitalism and the continued dominance of native-born white Christian men as vital for the health of the nation.

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-1991, the anticommunist glue that had held together different rightist factions began to fail. Paleoconservatives increasingly voiced sharp criticisms of U.S. military interventionism, free trade agreements, and support for Israel. Many paleocons also gravitated with increasing openness toward white nationalism, which advocates some form of distinct nationhood for white people based on claims that they are biologically distinct from and superior to people of color. These positions isolated paleocons from most ruling-class backing and put them at odds with the dominant trends in U.S. conservatism.

Nevertheless, during the 1990s paleoconservatism found significant popular support. It spoke to fears and resentments among a broad sector of white Americans, who were angered both by the power of economic and political elites above and the erosion of their own privileges over traditionally oppressed groups below. The paleocons expressed a backlash against recent social liberation movements, growing state power, and economic dislocations connected to capitalist globalization. Paleocons helped generate a resurgence of mass-based racial nationalism in the form of anti-immigrant campaigns and the neo-Confederate movement. They also influenced the Patriot/citizens militia movement, which exploded briefly in the mid-nineties around fears that secret globalist elites were plotting to impose tyrannical world government on the United States. Paleocon Patrick Buchanan ran for president in 1992 and 1996 and made a strong showing in many Republican primaries.

After the late 1990s, paleoconservatism lost some of its support and visibility as a result of several factors, such as the decline of the Patriot movement, Buchanan's 2000 decision to run for president on the Reform Party ticket instead of as a Republican, and the George W. Bush administration's close relationship with the neoconservatives. But the underlying dynamics that had helped paleocons connect with a popular base have remained strong, and the movement has continued to attract young intellectuals, as AlternativeRight.com indicates.

An intellectual crossroads
Like the paleoconservative movement in general, AlternativeRight.com occupies a sort of gray zone between those conservatives who want to intensify traditional oppressive structures within the existing political/economic framework and revolutionary rightists who want to sweep away the established order by force. As a result, while contributors sometimes call for profound changes to the U.S. social order, they are generally vague as to concrete goals and means. At the same time, blurring political boundaries enables AltRight to function as an intellectual crossroads, where a variety of rightist currents converge and interact. AltRight has published articles by national anarchist Andrew Yeoman advocating "a new Tribal America," black conservative Elizabeth Wright castigating the Tea Party movement for remaining "captive to PC," and French New Right founder Alain de Benoist advocating a revival of paganism against the "totalitarian" universalism of Judeo-Christian monotheism. Paleocon scholar E. Christian Kopff has written glowingly about Italian far right philosopher Julius Evola. Keith Preston's role as an AltRight contributing editor is significant in itself. A former Love and Rage member who still calls himself an anarchist, Preston advocates a revolutionary alliance of rightist and leftist libertarians against the U.S. empire and writes prolifically through his blog, Attack the System, and other rightist outlets such as Taki's Magazine.

On race and ethnicity
Some of the pieces in AltRight are more interesting and politically innovative than others. Consider the following two articles. In "Mind the Gaps: Why the Government Should and Can Not Make Us Equal," John Derbyshire argues that "racial differences in education and unemployment have their origin in biological differences between the human races.... They can't be legislated out of existence; nor can they be 'eliminated' by social or political action." To Derbyshire, "intractable differences between the human races" are simple, natural facts, grounded in both elementary rules of evolutionary biology and straightforward empirical evidence, such as disparities in test scores or "the extraordinary differentials in criminality between white Americans and African Americans." Essentially this is a rehash of "scientific" claims that racist intellectuals have been making since the nineteenth century. The only thing new and different about Derbyshire's argument is that he presented it on a panel organized by the Black Law Students' Association at the University of Pennsylvania.

Compare this with Richard Hoste's "Eurabia in Perspective," which reconfigures ethnocentrism in genuinely new ways. Countering the Islamophobia that is standard among conservatives (including many paleoconservatives), Hoste declares that "there is no Muslim threat in America, from the position of either terrorism or a building up of institutional power... [T]he West's problem is non-whites and enforced diversity, not Islam qua Islam..." And rather than try to expel Muslims from Europe, he argues, "we have to understand that the hostile minority in the heart of Europe is there to stay." In fact:

"more Europeans may convert to Islam as times goes by and the religion gains power... But most of them would be converting from Secular Humanism, not anything that can be called Christianity. It would be a mistake to believe that whites would be Muslims in the same way Pakistanis or Saudis are; the faith would be molded to conform with the biological characteristics of its adopters, or 'Europeanized' as Christianity was in the first place. I don't know what a Swedish Islam would look like, but it probably wouldn't be half as ugly as the feminist-communist dystopia that the country is today. The culture of that Nordic state repulses me a lot more than that of, say, Turkey."

Hoste's argument here represents a classic paleocon approach: a seemingly progressive position (rejection of Islamophobia) that's based on reactionary principles (biological racism plus hatred of Western liberalism).

A number of AltRight contributors also take issue with white nationalism as an ideological framework, while endorsing its racist premises. In "The Myth of the Old Republic," Andrew Fraser calls for abandoning not only "constitutional patriotism" but also white identity as too broad a loyalty. In this post-modern era, Fraser urges American WASPs to instead revive an Anglo-Saxon ethno-nationalism and -- borrowing a concept promoted by John Robb's Global Guerrillas blog -- to "reconstitute themselves as local, resilient communities." "The fact is that all 'white Americans,' of whatever ethnicity, will be better off if their own kith and kin manage to reconstitute themselves into socially cohesive tribal networks."

Coming at the same issue from a different angle, Keith Preston argues in "White Nationalism Is Not Enough" that "a resistance movement that defines itself exclusively, or even primarily, under the banner of race will be unnecessarily self-limiting." As an alternative, he proposes Conservative Revolution, a term which originally referred to a far right (but non-Nazi) intellectual movement in Weimar Germany. "'Conservative Revolution' is conceptually broad enough to accommodate an array of anti-liberal forces within a framework of respect for natural hierarchies... [I]t can accommodate tendencies ranging from fervent white nationalists to religious conservatives who are indifferent to race issues per se but oppose Cultural Marxist attacks on their faith and traditions to Jews and African-Americans who oppose mass immigration from the Third World."

On women
AltRight authors (almost all of whom are male) also vary significantly in their attitudes toward women. Scott Locklin typifies a type of old school conservative anti-feminism, which pretty much only pays attention to women in terms of how attractive and obedient they are to men. For example, his article "The Case For Open Borders: Foreign Replacements for American Women" complains that, compared with foreign women, most American women are unfeminine, overweight, acquisitive, and have a "weird relationship with sex." Further, "foreign women... rarely try to cut your metaphorical testicles off with ridiculous shaming language. American women, by contrast, don't seem capable of communication without bagging on some poor man." Citing "beautiful, feminine" movie stars of an earlier era such as Hedy Lamarr and Lilian Gish, Locklin jokes (sort of) that "they used to make them right here in America, back when Americans actually made things. Now we must make do with imports."

What is interesting is that AltRight also publishes pieces that reflect feminist influence. Andrew Yeoman, for example, lists "kryptonite to women" among the alternative right movement's eight major weaknesses. "Many women won't associate with our ideas. Why is this important? Because it leaves half our people out of the struggle. The women that do stick around have to deal with a constant litany of abuse and frequent courtship invitations from unwanted suitors. ...nothing says 'you're not important to us' [more] than sexualizing women in the movement. Don't tell me that's not an issue. I've seen it happen in all kinds of radical circles, and ours is the worst for it."

Keith Preston, in an interview about "Feminism, Women, & National-Anarchism" that received feature citation on one of the AltRight blogs, criticizes feminism on some counts but applauds it on others. "On the positive side historic feminist movements have gained greater legal, political, and economic rights for women, and greater opportunities in the professions and education, and have raised serious issues that were sometimes ignored or overlooked in the past. The problem has not been feminism per se..., but the particular form that Western feminism has taken since at least the 1960s,... where it has become aligned with Marxism, anti-Western and anti-European ethno-masochism, racism against whites, misandry, and its alliance with the state." In addition, "by seeking to eliminate sexual differentiation [feminism] has not only sought to defy basic biological science, but to devalue social and cultural roles traditionally occupied by women."

Preston advocates an "aristocracy of merit where everyone rises according to their efforts and abilities, including women, of course. I'd be very much in favor of a National-Anarchist movement where women were heavily represented among its leadership and public figures." While claiming that "women are naturally more drawn to helping professions and charitable activities than men," Preston argues that the movement should make such activities a major focus, as part of a move to replace the welfare state with a decentralized network of social institutions. In addition, "I think there's little doubt that women can often perform so-called ''man's work' like soldiering with a great deal of skill and talent."

On Jews
Recognizing that paleoconservatism's relationship with Jews has been a hot-button issue, AltRight invited three prominent paleocons to contribute to a "symposium" on the question, "Is the Alt Right Anti-Semitic?" Taki Theodoracopulos sums up the consensus with the first sentence of his response: "Yes, the traditional Right does have some anti-Semitic tinges, as it should." He and fellow respondent Srdja Trifkovic hold Jews as a group responsible for a number of "sins": Zionist attacks on anyone who criticizes Israeli policies, "Talmudic Judaism's insistence on Jews' racial uniqueness," and Jews' "disproportionate impact" on a number of political and intellectual movements harmful to Western civilization: "Marxism (including neoconservatism as the bastard child of Trotskyism), Freudianism, Frankfurt School cultural criticism, Boasian anthropology, etc."

It is left to Paul Gottfried, the only Jew among the respondents, to "add some shading to Srdja's and Taki's spirited and courageous assessment" of his ethnic group: Not all Jews everywhere have behaved badly, Jews' destructive actions are rooted in genuine if irrational fear of Christian society, and these actions succeeded only because many non-Jews cooperated. At the same time, Gottfried draws on historically antisemitic motifs in criticizing the neocons, describing them as a group of Jews who "poison the wells" for ideological rivals and who control the mainstream conservative movement through non-Jewish front-men. Even a major figure such as Bill Bennett (who is Catholic) is described not as a neocon but rather "a tool of neocon dominance."

Nevertheless, the type of antisemitism that AltRight promotes is more qualified and less manichean than the neonazi variety. It is ethnic bigotry, but not portrayal of Jews as the embodiment of absolute evil. Thus, in AltRight's antisemitism symposium, Srdja suggests that "the survival of the West, which is recognizably Christian in spirit and European in genes, is 'objectively' becoming the optimal survival strategy for the Jewish community as a whole, Israel included," and so Jews will in the long run increasingly support the traditionalist Right.

AltRight executive editor Spencer picks up on this in a follow-up piece entitled "An Alliance with the Jews." Spencer argues that Black and Latino politicians unsympathetic to Zionism will become increasingly powerful in the U.S., and that this may drive Israeli hardliners to seek a partnership with U.S. paleocons. Unlike "the ever-meddling Democrats and Republicans," a paleocon-led U.S. government would "extricate the U.S. military from the Middle East" and give Israel "a free hand" in the region. Spencer cites "Israel's fruitful relationship with the South African Apartheid government" as a model for such an alliance, and speculates that Israeli nationalists might even help finance the traditionalist Right in Europe and North America.

Conclusions
Since the collapse of Patrick Buchanan's presidential prospects a decade ago, paleoconservatism as a distinct political current has largely faded from public view. All too often, paleocons are either ignored, mislabeled as fascists, or subsumed under the nebulous category of "hate groups." But despite their small numbers, paleocons have important ties with the anti-immigrant movement -- one of the most dynamic sectors of the Right at present -- as well as Ron Paul libertarians, Patriot movement groups, and others. And as this brief sampling of writings from AlternativeRight.com shows, some paleocons are also listening to other movements and rethinking old ideas. The fact that many AltRight contributors are involved in a range of other publications and political initiatives indicates that this is not an isolated development. To varying degrees, this same political ferment can be seen on other paleocon websites such as Taki's Magazine and The Occidental Quarterly. More broadly, a dynamic interplay between paleocon and revolutionary forms of white nationalism can be seen on sites such as Attack the System, Occidental Dissent and American Third Position.

Why is this happening now? Although I'm not really in a position to answer this question, I'd like to suggest two broad factors -- one internal, the other external -- for further exploration. First, rightist movements sometimes experience ideological breakthroughs during periods of relative isolation, as they struggle to learn from past defeats and develop new strategies. Examples include the rise of fusionism among U.S. conservatives in the mid 1950s (uniting libertarian, cultural traditionalist, and anticommunist threads into one cohesive ideology), and the development of French New Right doctrine in the 1970s among former members of the traditional racist Right (offering a sophisticated new intellectual basis for fascist politics). It may be useful to compare current intellectual developments among U.S. paleocons with these and other historical examples.

Another factor to consider, of course, is the dramatic transformation that the capitalist world has been experiencing over the past few decades, with the end of the Cold War and collapse of Soviet-type socialism coupled with the rise of corporate globalization (a buzz-word that encompasses many forms of upheaval, restructuring, increased fluidity and movement, etc.). Political movements on both the Left and the Right have struggled to adapt to these changing circumstances, and paleoconservatives are no exception. The question is how to translate this generality into meaningful specifics.

AltRight's mixture of old and new ideas is significant here. Claims that rightists are trying to turn back the clock and reject modernity are usually oversimplified. As I wrote two years ago in "Two Ways of Looking at Fascism":

"In Europe and elsewhere, far-right politics is indeed largely a response to capitalist globalization, but this response is more complex than a simple backlash. For example, the Patriot/militia movement in the United States denounced 'global elites,' the 'new world order,' the United Nations, international bankers, etc. But their attack on government regulation, as People Against Racist Terror has pointed out, dovetailed with 'the actual globalist strategy of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to end all environmental and labor codes that restrict untrammeled exploitation.' In India, Hindu nationalists have denounced multinational capital and globalized culture, but the movement's dominant approach has been to seek a stronger role for India within the context of global capitalism. The BJP-led coalition government of 1998-2004 promoted privatization, deregulation, foreign investment, consumer credit growth, and expansion of the information technology sector. These policies are tailored to India's rising upper and middle classes, eager to participate more effectively in the global economy -- not historical 'losers' trying to gain back their old status by attacking the forces of change."[See original article for citations.]

Whatever the reasons that drive them, the discussions on AlternativeRight.com and related organs merit close attention. To assume that the traditionalist Right is isolated, intellectually stagnant, or stuck in the past would be a dangerous mistake.

Bringing the Elite to Jesus

2010-08-03T22:08:00.002-04:00

Review of Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2008)

By Matthew N. Lyons

This book review was published in New Politics 13, no. 1, Whole Number 49 (Summer 2010) and is reprinted with permission.

Since the "New Right" upsurge of the late 1970s, right-wing evangelical Christianity has established itself as one of the largest and most sustained political movements in U.S. history. From international media empires to living room prayer groups, from think tanks and lobbyists to rock bands and homeschoolers, the Christian Right encompasses a vast infrastructure and subculture with tens of millions of participants. Among opponents, stereotypes and myths about the Christian Right are common: that it represents a monolithic, fanatical fringe; that it's a backward-looking movement of people out of touch with the modern world; or that it's on the verge of collapse. In 1993, the Washington Post famously derided Christian rightists as "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command" (337). In reality, Sunbelt suburbanites are at the heart of the movement, and tens of thousands of its members have taken on grassroots leadership roles.

Starting with Sara Diamond's 1989 book, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right, a number of writers have challenged these stereotypes and presented thoughtful critiques of the Christian Right and, often, its interconnections with a larger oppressive social order. Jeff Sharlet's The Family is squarely in this tradition. Sharlet highlights "the almost sexual tension of [the movement's] contradictions: its reverence for both rebellion and authority, democracy and theocracy, blood and innocence" (345). He portrays not only the repulsive side of Christian Right politics--the authoritarianism, the misogyny, the callousness toward human suffering--but also the sense of excitement and vitality that have helped make it a mass movement. He shows rank-and-file Christian rightists not as mindless followers but thinking people who don't always agree with their leaders. And he emphasizes that "American fundamentalism," as he calls it, is not some recent aberration but something deeply rooted in U.S. cultural and political history. None of these are new ideas, but they are all worth repeating.

What's new and different about Sharlet's book is that he focuses on a major branch of the Christian Right that most previous writers have simply missed. "The Family" is a secretive evangelical network that has attracted a startling array of high-ranking political figures in the United States and around the world. Shortly after Sharlet's book came out, a series of sex scandals involving prominent Republicans brought the organization known as the Family to national attention and made the book a New York Times bestseller. But sex scandals are at most a side issue here. Sharlet lists ten current U.S. senators and several congressmen as members, along with deceased members such as Senator Strom Thurmond, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Overseas participants include Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi of South Africa. The Family's Youth Corps project, which grooms recruits for leadership roles in government and business, operates in over a dozen countries on four continents. The National Prayer Breakfast, the Family's one public activity, draws thousands of U.S. and foreign political and business leaders to the Washington Hilton each February. Under various names (the Fellowship, National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership, and others) the Family has been around since 1935.

Sharlet describes the Family as a vanguard of American fundamentalism, "a movement that recasts theology in the language of empire" (3). Strictly speaking, Christian fundamentalists believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, and I prefer this usage for reasons of clarity. But in this review I will follow Sharlet, who uses the term fundamentalism more broadly to denote those who believe in "a Christ of absolute devotion, not questions," "a story that never changes," and who want to "conform every aspect of society to God" (4-5). He calls this movement American "not because it is nationalistic but because it is a melting pot movement," which brings together "traditional fundamentalists and evangelicals, Pentecostals and Roman Catholics, Democrats and Republicansâ€¦in the service of an imperial ambition. Not the conquest of territory; the conquest of hearts and minds" (3).

Sharlet argues that American fundamentalism encompasses two major strands: populist fundamentalism, which includes most of the major Christian rightist organizations, such as Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, and Concerned Women for America; and elite fundamentalism, embodied in the Family. Both of these strands:

regard Jesus's divinity as absolute truth and all other belief systems as evil;
advocate expanded Christian influence on or control over public policy;
promote a hierarchical social order, including patriarchal gender roles, heterosexism, European ethnocentrism, and "free market" capitalism; and
regard the United States as the greatest country in the world and promote U.S. global dominance.

But within this shared framework, the contrasts between the two strands are striking. Populist fundamentalism has focused on a core set of domestic social issues, notably opposition to homosexuality and abortion rights, as tools for recruiting millions of supporters and thereby amassing political power. Most Christian Right groups have carved out a sharply defined political niche on the right wing of the Republican Party; many have embraced a loud, confrontational style.

The Family is different. Its strategy centers not on building a mass base, but forging ties with powerful political figures--regardless of their religious or political beliefs. Although closest to conservative Republicans such as Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, the Family is also happy to work with moderates or liberals of both major parties, such as Hillary Clinton, who in 2005 participated regularly in Family prayer events, or Al Gore, who has publicly referred to Family head Doug Coe as a "friend." The Family operates mostly behind the scenes and approaches conflict with a genteel subtlety geared toward cultivating elite unity. "The big Christian lobbying groups push and shout; the Family simply surrounds politicians with prayer cells. They don't try to convert anyone. They don't ask for anything. They're as patient as a glacier" (259).

Compared with most Christian rightists, the Family is also less focused on enforcing so-called traditional values and much more concerned with bolstering capitalist rule and U.S. global power. The Family began as a union-busting initiative, and it operates today largely as a religious adjunct to American empire--arranging prayer meetings, for example, between representatives of authoritarian regimes in Asia, Africa, Central and South America, and Eastern Europe, and top officials of the U.S. government.

The Family is all about power. It believes that the wealthy and powerful are chosen by God, and its mission as an organization centers on bringing them to Jesus, bringing them into a spiritual "covenant" of total unity with each other. "Hitler made a covenant," Doug Coe is apparently fond of saying. "The Mafia makes a covenant. It is a very powerful thing" --all the more so when it is based on submission to Jesus (54). The Family teaches that those who hold worldly power, as long as they pledge obedience to Jesus, can kill, torture, rape, steal, and lie on a mass scale with no moral constraints whatsoever. This, too, sets the Family apart. Christian rightists generally present themselves as defenders of civic morality. However twisted or hypocritical that claim may be in practice, it's a far cry from the Family's absolute repudiation of ethical principles.

The Family's orientation toward bolstering worldly power has helped it maintain a low profile. "It so neatly harmonizes with the political shape of worldly things," Sharlet notes, "that it's nearly indistinguishable from secular conceptions of social order" (57). Almost, but not quite, indistinguishable. As Sharlet writes of the elite religion promoted by Family founder Abraham Vereide, "In one sense, it was nothing more than a defense of the status quo. It neither challenged power nor asked for anything from the powerful but their good intentions. In another, it was the most ambitious theocratic project of the American century, 'every Christian a leader, every leader a Christian,' and this ruling class of Christ-committed men bound in a fellowship of the anointed, the chosen, key men in a voluntary dictatorship of the divine" (91).

Sharlet traces the roots of elite fundamentalism to the eighteenth-century New England revivalist Jonathan Edwards, who fostered intense religious zeal among his followers (to the point that some of them committed suicide in order to wipe out sin and be closer to God), but blended it, in Sharlet's reading, with "an adoration of power, divine and worldly" (61):

His religion was radical, available to all classes and even to slaves, an inspiration to the nascent sense of individual liberty that would become the American Revolution, but his politics were warlike and controlling. Empire struck him as an ideal vessel for the Gospel. He preached often against envy, but named as envy only that feeling which filled those of lesser wealth, or lesser land, or lesser status, who determined to band together to wrest power from above (69).

Jumping forward, Sharlet relates how Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant, founded the Fellowship (the organization now known as the Family) in Seattle in 1935, in direct response to a wave of militant strikes along the West Coast. First regionally and then nationally, business leaders rallied to Vereide's prayer circles as a way to inject a new spirit of purpose and unity into their fight against organized labor and the New Deal. With the Cold War, Vereide's "International Christian Leadership" spread to western Europe, notably West Germany, where it helped to rehabilitate a number of former Nazis into anticommunist respectability. (Sharlet describes Vereide's relationship with fascism as "weirdly ambivalent" [124]. He cultivated Nazi sympathizers Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh and recruited at least one genuine fascist, Merwin K. Hart, to the Fellowship board, but was ultimately more at home with conservative Republicans than far right rabble rousers such as Father Coughlin.) In the 1960s, Coe succeeded Vereide as organizational leader and made two important changes: Following the trajectory of U.S. Cold War policy, he shifted the Fellowship's international focus away from Europe toward Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and he took the organization "underground," moving it out of the public eye as much as possible, as a protective measure against sixties radicalism and upheaval.

Over the past seventy-five years, the Family has been remarkably successful at embedding itself in the U.S. and international power structure. Using prayer events and quiet meetings, it brings together politicians, businessmen, and military leaders in configurations of its own choosing. Sharlet sees the Family's influence in a wide range of diplomatic initiatives. In the 1960s, it brought members of Congress together with dictators from Brazil, Indonesia, and South Korea; in the 1980s, it organized face-to-face meetings between Salvadoran and Honduran generals and Reagan administration officials. In domestic politics, a Family-groomed bureaucrat oversaw President George W. Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, which drove "irreparable cracks into the wall of separation between church and state" (383).

From the standpoint of political and business elites, the Family appears to perform several useful functions. Its international network offers a convenient way to make contacts and cut deals away from public scrutiny. Like some weird throwback to the divine right of kings, its ideology enables members of the ruling class to justify their power--not to those they rule over, but to each other and to themselves. Offering a belief system specifically for elite consumption, it also fosters a sense of class unity--one that is rooted in a specifically American culture but accessible to any dictator, general, or CEO anywhere in the world who is willing to pray to Jesus.

Some members of the elite are drawn to this "covenant" more than others, for reasons of both culture and self-interest. Allowing for individual variations, it would be useful to explore this in structural terms: Which specific capitalist sectors has the Family cultivated most successfully? This is beyond the scope of Sharlet's work, but he does offer helpful bits and pieces, as when he notes traditionally strong ties between the Family and the oil and aerospace industries (19), or Family-organized seminars for executives in oil, defense, insurance, and banking (22). All of that is broadly consistent with previous accounts of capitalist support for the Christian Right. (See, for example, Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, or Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics, both published in 1986.) But do the differences between elite and populist fundamentalism translate into any differences in their elite connections?

Sharlet's approach to historical narrative, which makes up a good half of the book, presents certain problems. The account of the Family and its forerunners draws on extensive primary and secondary sources, including the Family's organizational records archived at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. Sharlet has dramatized this material into an engaging story, but it's not always apparent which parts are documented and which are his interpretation or inference, especially when he gives us historical figures' dialog, thoughts, or feelings.

Sharlet's narrative approach also makes it difficult to answer a key question: Given that the Family has adopted a strategy of swimming with the ruling class current, to what extent has its involvement actually altered the course of events? The answer is not always clear, and by depicting history through the lens of the Family's role, Sharlet sometimes risks exaggerating its impact. In the deepening Cold War of the late 1940s, Vereide and his associates helped legitimize a number of former Hitler supporters in West Germany, but so did major sections of the U.S. government, military, and intelligence services. In the early 1980s, the Family opened doors at the Pentagon for Somali dictator Siad Barre, but the Reagan administration began funding him as a counterweight to Ethiopia, which had recently allied itself with the USSR. Sharlet's discussion of these and other policy moments doesn't include enough about other actors to let us clearly assess the Family's influence.

In focusing on elite fundamentalism, Sharlet also misses a number of important points about the larger Christian Right. He offers a thoughtfully nuanced portrait of the movement's "sexual purity" campaign, but never addresses the fact that this is the first mass movement in U.S. history to put male supremacy and heterosexism at the center of its program. (For more on the movement's gender politics, see Kathryn Joyce, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement [2009], or Jean Hardisty, Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the Promise Keepers [1999].) Sharlet also underplays populist fundamentalism's elite dimension. In the late 1970s, the movement's big national boost relied on the Moral Majority's top-down direct mailings more than the grassroots organizing Sharlet emphasizes (which came into its own only gradually over the following decade). In the 1980s, major Christian Right groups put a lot of energy into foreign policy (aiding counterrevolutionary forces in Asia, Africa, and Central America) not just domestic policy. And mass-based Christian Right groups have attracted significant capitalist support and spawned leaders who are major business figures in their own right.

At the same time, in describing the Christian Right as "a cultural front without a politics" (289), Sharlet also neglects tendencies within that movement that challenge the established order at a systemic level. Although most Christian Right groups work within the existing political framework, a hard-line minority aims to sweep away all pluralistic and secular institutions and impose its version of biblical law on all areas of society. The clearest expression of this tendency is Christian Reconstructionism, which Sharlet ambiguously labels "a defunct but subtly influential school of thought" (347). Reconstructionists helped build the paramilitary wing of the anti-abortion rights movement, which assassinated several abortion providers in the 1990s, as well as the Constitution Party and sections of the Patriot movement. More broadly, Reconstructionism has helped foster and intensify theocratic tendencies throughout the Christian Right.

Fundamentalism's relationship with its political opponents, while not a central focus of the book, helps to frame the story Sharlet is telling. "The lesson of elite fundamentalism" in its battle with secularism, he writes, "is that the sides are not just blurry, they're interwoven" (288). Sharlet astutely criticizes secular liberals for both complacency ("Our refusal to recognize the theocratic strand running throughout American history is as self-deceiving as fundamentalism's insistence that the United States was created as a Christian nation" [367]) and complicity ("The Cold War liberalism that led to American wars and proxy warsâ€¦ran parallel with elite fundamentalism's sense of its own divine universalism" [288]). These comments are a welcome contrast to those critics of the Christian Right who demonize "religious extremism" while mythologizing a supposed democratic center.

More problematic is Sharlet's effort to portray fundamentalism as the mirror image of the radical left, as when he labels mass-based Christian Right groups "the popular front" or titles a chapter "The Romance of American Fundamentalism," referring to Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism. Yes, there are resonances and interconnections to be explored, such as the Family's stated admiration for Lenin and Mao or its adoption of a Communist-inspired cell structure. But Sharlet doesn't explore them far enough and at times sounds uncomfortably like a centrist of the "radical left equals radical right" school. He is simply wrong when he claims that in targeting secularism, the Christian Right is "rail[ing] against the same familiar enemy" as 1930s labor organizers did when they identified capitalism as their opponent (289). There is a basic difference between blaming your problems, even crudely, on class exploitation and blaming them on disrespect for God's law.

Despite its limitations, Jeff Sharlet's The Family is a valuable book that enriches our understanding of right-wing politics, elite networks, and the role of Christianity in U.S. society. Exposing politicians' sex scandals is easy; tracing the underlying dynamics of ideology and power takes work.

Call to Action Against Racism and Fascism July 31, 2010

2010-06-11T13:14:00.000-04:00

“During the early morning hours of March 27th, a Portland, Oregon anti-racist activist was shot in what appears to be a well orchestrated attack. It is suspected that the attackers were members of the neo- Nazi movement…

The March 27th shooting occurred within a backdrop of growing Right wing, racist, and emerging fascist organizing and activity. There has been a dramatic escalation of rhetoric and action from the broad Right. While all sectors of the working classes and poor face economic and social uncertainty, the racists, the Right wing, and the smaller but significant sections of the neo-Nazi and fascist movements are looking to divide our class and peoples…

We propose Saturday July 31, 2010 as a Call to Action Against Racism and Fascism. We want to use the CA to both engage the broad, independent, and radical anti-racist/anti-fascist movements… we argue for a maximum of creative and independent initiative… to use the CA as a means to increase collaboration between our forces and work in a popular manner to highlight the need for a mass, radical response to racist and fascist organizing.”

Read the entire Call to Action:

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ARA Presents: The White Power Movement on the West Coast...

2010-04-23T10:38:00.000-04:00

In Portland, a long-time anti-racist is targeted for assassination in the downtown area. In Vancouver, BC, an anti-fascist activist's house is bombed. In Los Angeles, the National Socialist Movement rallies and is opposed by hundreds. In the Northwest, the Aryan Nations faces resistance as it searches for a community to base its new compound.

* How are white supremacists organizing in Portland? On the West Coast generally? Should neo-Nazis just be ignored?
* How have communities responded to white supremacist activity, and what can we learn? Are there lessons from Portland's own history?
* Is neo-Nazi organizing connected to anti-immigrant movements? The Tea Party phenomenon? How?

We are hosting a panel discussion and community speak-out to address these and other questions. Our goal is to bring people together who are interested in this topic, provide broader context & resources, as well as to kick-start conversations about building responses. Please bring your ideas and enthusiasm for the efforts ahead. We look forward to seeing you there!

Saturday, April 24, 7PM-9PM
First Unitarian Church, Buchan Reception Hall
1226 SW Salmon Street, Portland
FREE educational event (donations accepted)

http://rosecityantifa.org
phone / vm: 971.533.7832

Local Anti-Racist Shot in Downtown Portland

2010-04-23T09:50:00.000-04:00

Shortly after midnight on Saturday, March 27, a man was brutally attacked in the heart of downtown Portland. His attacker shot him and left him lying in the street. He is currently in the Intensive Care Unit in an area hospital, fighting to overcome extensive injuries.

It is no secret that this man, Luke Querner, is a long-time anti-fascist activist. He has devoted over a decade of his life to opposing the most vicious elements of our city's white supremacist movement. Rose City Antifascists, the Portland chapter of the Anti-Racist Action Network, believe that the local neo-Nazis whom Luke has opposed for years attempted to murder him on Saturday morning.

Luke is proud to be an anti-racist skinhead. The true skinhead movement has always been anti-racist, tracing its origins to the cultural intersection of Jamaican immigrants and working class whites in England during the 1960s. After racists and the far-Right attempted to hijack the skinhead movement in the late 1970s and '80s, a movement known as SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP) emerged in 1987 to reaffirm the anti-racist roots of the subculture. As with many other anti-racist skins, Luke is deeply committed to racial equality and social justice. This commitment has caused Luke to be targeted in the past.

Rose City Antifa believes that the most recent attack was planned and committed by an element within Portland's neo-Nazi underground. This is the most logical explanation for such a vicious act, for several reasons:

1. Local neo-Nazi organizations and cliques have the capability to carry out such an act. Several organizations, including the Portland-centered Volksfront International, are tightly-organized, disciplined, and command significant loyalty from adherents and sympathizers. Their members have experience committing violent acts, including murder.

2. Luke was a prime enemy of organized racists. Luke and his community have been violently targeted by Volksfront in the past. The recent shooting echoes the sentiments expressed in the song "SHARP Shooter" by the old Volksfront-affiliated rock band, Jew Slaughter.

3. Local fascist groups have spent recent months uniting despite organizational differences. Volksfront as well as National Socialist Movement affiliates hosted a series of social events that have likely emboldened individual fascists. One recent point of unity between local neo-Nazi cliques and groups?whether they be Volksfront, the Northwest Front, the National Socialist Movement or Hammerskins?has been common targeting of anti-racists and the Left.

4. Given the overall resurgence of the radical Right in recent years (see Southern Poverty Law Center report), neo-Nazis have expressed more urgency in their propaganda, expecting a race war in the near future.

Luke is an entrenched and beloved figure in the anti-racist community and well known by local fascists. Saturday's shooting was an intentional message that those standing up for equality are in mortal danger.

Portland has a long, violent history of racist organizing that continues to this day. In the late 1980s, Portland became notorious as a hotbed of white supremacist activity. Many organizations, such as the Aryan Nations, declared the Pacific Northwest to be a future white homeland. The groups that would go on to comprise Volksfront and other formations, swelled in numbers. The 1988 murder of Ethiopian student Mulugeta Seraw and trial of the three neo-Nazi culprits represented the high water mark of Nazi terror at that point. Concerted community efforts, as well as a high-profile civil suit, drove many local neo-Nazis underground. Unfortunately some of these white supremacists are still here, always struggling to re-emerge.

The attempted killing also reminds us of the 1998 executions of Lin "Spit" Newborn and Dan Shersty--who were also anti-racist skinheads--by neo-Nazis in the desert outside of Las Vegas, Nevada.

Rose City Antifa believes that this shooting is of particular significance, representing a neo-Nazi attempt to reclaim the streets and apply their white supremacist agenda through force and terror. This seems to be tied to the larger context of a nationwide mobilization of the radical Right.

We criticize the Portland Police response to this tragic attack, which appears to be further victimizing the survivor and his community. This police approach reflects the Department's institutional biases regarding race and racial hate, apparent in the recent police bean-bag shotgun assault on a 12-year-old African American girl, and their killing of an unarmed African American man two months ago. Despite the fact that Luke's shooting was an unprovoked attack with a fairly obvious motive, the police appear to be treating the victim as the problem. The police released Luke's name to the media on the Sunday after the shooting, in total disregard for his safety and security.

We feel it is extremely important to clarify the nature of this situation, given that the information released so far has generally situated this event in the same category as an unrelated shooting about 50 minutes earlier in Portland, reportedly related to violence between rival gangs. Treating Luke's shooting as a gang related event obscures the political implications of the attack, and utterly misses the point. The racist overtones of much of the online commentary on the coverage is particularly appalling given that Luke was someone that spent his entire adult life fighting white supremacy. Portland Anti-Racist Action vigorously challenges any assumptions that the ambush was performed by people of color, which may have been suggested by prior media coverage. This was not a fight that got out of hand. There was no fight. It was an assassination attempt.

Luke is currently looking at a mountain of medical bills. The Anti-Racist Action Network is currently hosting benefits from coast to coast to raise funds. In addition, the ARA network has set up a PayPal account to send Luke donations.

As always, Rose City Antifa is looking for any and all information related to fascist organizing in our town. Contact us at fight_them_back@riseup.net or leave a voice mail message at 971.533.7832. We will not rest until we see some measure of justice for Luke.

Donate:https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donations&business=luke%2esolidarity%2efund%40gmail%2ecom&lc=US&item_name=luke%2esolidarity%2efund&item_number=123456654321&currency_code=USD&bn=PP%2dDonationsBF%3abtn_donateCC_LG%2egif%3aNonHosted

Portland Anti Racist Action Media Release

2010-04-01T14:33:00.000-04:00

MEDIA RELEASE

For immediate release: April 1, 2010

Contact: Portland Anti-Racist Action

fight_them_back@riseup.net 971.533.7832 (voicemail)

*Portland Anti-Racists: Downtown Shooting was Likely a Neo-Nazi Ambush*

*Anti-Racist Targeted in Saturday Morning Attempted Murder*

Portland, Oregon – In a city that still remembers the 1988 beating death of Mulugeta Seraw by three racists, a recent downtown shooting may thrust the issue of white supremacist violence into the forefront of public consciousness once again.

A local anti-racist organization claims that the early morning shooting in downtown Portland on March 27, whose survivor remains in Intensive Care, was most likely an attempted murder by one or more neo-Nazis. The victim of the shooting, Luke Querner, is an entrenched and beloved figure in the anti-racist community. He has devoted over a decade of his life to opposing Portland’s white power movement.

Luke Querner was shot at approximately 12:20AM on Saturday morning, in an unprovoked attack on SW 5th Avenue, between Stark and Washington Street.The shooting appears to have been well-orchestrated; the assailant concealed his identity, fleeing at least initially by foot in a closely-surveilled area.

The attempted murder of Querner occurs in the context of escalating activity from a racist underground that believes it can operate with impunity. The past half year has been one of increasing audacity from local white supremacists, with organizations such as Volksfront, the Northwest Front and the National Socialist Movement drawing closer together. Members of these and similar organizations--as well as cliques on their periphery--share information about anti-racists and the Left, and have been increasing their actions against such targets.

Portland Anti-Racist Action believes that the attempted murder of Querner was a political act, most likely by neo-Nazis. To treat this violence as gang-related obscures its political context and almost certainly misses its point. The shooting seems designed to send a message and to intimidate anti-racists. Portland ARA criticizes the police’s choice to release

Querner’s name on Sunday, placing him at further risk. The organization also questions the police portrayal of the shooting, which frames the incident as near-random, rather than as an act of political terror and attempted assassination. Querner was shot because of his convictions, the group believes.

“The Portland Police aren’t telling the whole story” states Alicia of Portland ARA, “They have not mentioned the most obvious motive for the shooting. We fear that they are more interested in smearing the victim than in uncovering the truth. Our thoughts go out to Luke right now.”

An expanded statement with further details surrounding the shooting is available on the website: rosecityantifa.org. Information on how to contribute to Querner’s medical bills and related expenses may also be found on this site. Portland Anti-Racist Action continues to be interested in any and all information related to white supremacist organizing in Portland and its vicinity.

For more information, please contact Portland Anti-Racist Action at

fight_them_back@riseup.net or 971.533.7832 (voicemail.)

updates from Moscow Anarchist Black Cross

2010-03-22T11:26:00.003-04:00

Andrei Mergenyov is imprisoned in Saratov after a fight with a Nazi in June 2007. Recently we received a following letter from him, and we translated it just to remind you about one of the less known Russian anti-fascist prisoners.

Address of Andrey (note that this is a new address!):

Andrey Mergenyov

Saratovskaya oblast G. Engels,

FBU IK-13

3 otryad 413116

You may also write address in cyrillic (if your e-mail interface does not
render cyrillic letters correctly, visit http://avtonom.org/node/9627):

Мергеневу А.К.
Саратовская обл, г Энгельс, ФБУ ИК-13, 3 отряд, 413116

Hi this is Taiwan writing. I have 11 more months to do, not too much. I have
already done 2 years and 7 months, and I feel like only yesterday I was
running after Nazis with a bottle of beer in my hand. I have received plenty
of letters - from Moscow, Ufa, Petrozhavodsk, Minsk and Vladivostok, I even
got two letters from London. I am working at prisoner's club, playing bass
guitar, from time to time we perform to other prisoners. I am doing sports
and qualified for a new profession of a painter, now I am studying to become
a crane operator of bridge cranes. Friends and family are visiting me. Thanks
for writing me, I would be happy to receive another letter from you, I will
answer for sure.

Bye,

Taiwan 11th of January 2010

More on case of Andrey: http://wiki.golosa.info/en/index.php/Aleksey_Bychin

Also, Aleksey Bychin, who is doing five year sentence for a fight with a Nazi
who was a police officer off-duty, was recently moved to another subsection
in his colony. Please fix his address, as letters sent to right subsection
will make it to him faster - new address is

FBU OIK-2 IK-7 otryad No. 12

ul. Karnallitovaya d. 98

g. Solikamsk Permskiy Kray

618545 Russia

More info about case of Aleksey:

And at last, a bit of a good news - Yura Mishutkin, who killed a Nazi in self
defence in Vladivostok in November of 2008, was handed a new sentence 4th of
March, after relatives of Nazi made an appeal against his previous
probational sentence. New sentence is 1.5 years probational sentence and
around 1.5 million roubles (50 000 USD) of compensations for the relatives.
This is more harsh than the previous sentence, but still it is great news
that Yura does not have to go to jail.

ABC Moscow

abc-msk AT riseup D net

http://www.avtonom.org/abc

http://www.myspace.com/abcmsk

P.O. Box 13 109028 Moscow Russia

(source: http://avtonom.org/node/9627)

South Side Chicago Anti Racist Action organizing against planned nazi march

2010-03-14T19:11:00.001-04:00

Callout to Confront INSF ‘White Pride World Wide’ March in Chicago

UPDATE: Download the flyer: (English JPG, Spanish JPG, or Quarter-page Printable PDF) and also call the hotline at 773-980-6013 for day-of updates about the action.

On March 21st, 2010 the Illinois National Socialist Front is planning to march in Chicago for what they call “White Pride World Wide”. South Side Anti-Racist Action is making plans to confront the march to let them know that they are not welcome in our city.

Student and worker struggles

2010-03-14T18:59:00.002-04:00

two new posts from our friends at Gathering Forces:
March 4th Student Strike Wrap Up &
March Fourth Seattle by Mamos

excerpts,
"So what approach should we have to social democratic union and student government leaders in the meantime? I don’t think we should needlessly antagonize them or call them out just for the sake of calling them out even though we have obvious disagreements about whether change comes from above or from below. I think what we can do is push them as far as possible to implement their social democratic tendencies because doing this further exposes all of the contradictions I’ve laid out here. We can encourage them to keep mobilizing the rank and file to fight the cuts and can hold them to their word, trying to explain to them the limitations of trying to make the bureaucracy more progressive. Every action they call we can use as an opportunity to flyer, talk to workers and students, and to build up independent rank and file fighting organizations. At some point some of them will have to go back on their word and they’ll start opposing these actions and then we should call them out and continue to organize independently. If this happens, other social democrats will probably want to continue fighting and they will realize the need to rely on rank and file power as they start to clash with the bureaucratic higher ups… this could open up cracks in the bureaucracy and makes it easier for rank and file workers and students to seize the initiative. In any case, we need to maintain our organizational independence from progressive union officials while working in a friendly united front coalition with them against the cuts"

and later

"There are forms of spontaneity that fail to advance the struggle and forms we would oppose; in the case of March 4th Seattle though, the spontaneity we experienced helped bring new layers of students into the struggle. It is crucial to emphasize that spontaneous militancy and direct action here is coming from everyday students and workers, many of them women and people of color; it is NOT coming from the insurrectionist “occupy everything, demand nothing” tendency because that tendency is not very widespread in Seattle, at least not yet. I hope that as militancy increases we can start to cohere a different tendency, independent of the liberals and bureaucrats on the one hand and independent from the insurrectionists on the other hand. What happened on March 4th points in this direction.

The debate going on in California about whether or not the insurrectionists should have occupied the highway in Oakland is very different than the debate here about whether we should have blocked I-5. Here, the drive toward the highway was not the result of organized insurrectionists breaking off from a larger march. It was something that emerged from what was (at least at one point) a majority of the crowd. If anything, those who backed the idea of the freeway occupation are the student counterpart to the furstrated social democratic workers I mentioned earlier, folks who are tired of following labor laws that are stacked against them and are starting to consider wildcat (unauthorized) strikes as a viable option. So too are students open to taking risks to advance the struggle. Folks who would previously have been trying to push the Democrats to the left are getting fed up with how unresponsive the system has been do their efforts and now have only one place left to go: into the streets, where they are joining radicals and revolutionaries in mass, democratic direct action"

A New Fascism? A Dead Imperialism?

2010-03-12T10:21:00.007-05:00

Below are reposts from an older exchange between Stan Goff and Don Hamerquist. The original discussion was posted on a version of the Bring The Ruckus!(BtR) website that is no longer in use. For reasons of extending the discussion, or at least some concepts within, we are now putting the exchange up on 3WF. We have attempted to date the posts as they became public. These discussions predate the launch of this blog by just a few months and helped shape the basis for what we were aiming for in terms of movement debate and anlysis.

Below is the introduction from BtR, Goff's original article with subsequent exchange. We then include some related comments.

A New Fascism? A Dead Imperialism? An Exchange between Stan Goff and Don Hammerquist

...debate between veteran revolutionaries Stan Goff and Don Hammerquist on fascism and global capitalism is now available on the Bring the Ruckus web site. In it, Hammerquist more fully develops his definition of fascism and his argument for why Al Qaeda and other movements should be understood as posing a revolutionary fascist challenge to global capital. He also argues that the present capitalist system should not be considered "imperialist."

"The fact is that [American] neoconservative policies may well jeopardize economic and political stability in the metropolis. They are willing to risk, not only popular living and working conditions in the imperial center, but also the relative power and influence of the specifically U.S. sections of capitalism. This is why it is so problematic to identify neocon strategy with a resurgence of U.S. imperialism. They would risk the very basis of American global power to protect and advance what they call freedom.?

"Contemporary neo-fascism involves two elements. First there is a rapidly expanding social base. This base is composed of the declassed and marginalized, a huge population that has been permanently defined as non-productive and redundant by capitalist development... The second element is the assortment of reactionary groups, with no necessary connection to each other, that more or less consciously try to organize this social base against the established structure of power, a structure which they see as corrupt, decadent and fundamentally wrong."

Nov 10, 2004
There's No There There: Debating a Neocon

Dec 15, 2004
Responding to Stan Goff's, Debating a NeoCon

Jan 13, 2005
Continued discourse on article, Debating a NeoCon. Goff responds to Hamerquist

Feb 15, 2005
Hamerquist on dilemmas for Capital and further outlines of the content of the resistance movements.

March 1, 2005
Matthew Lyons comments on Hamerquist Goff exchange

March 31, 2005
Hamerquist Responds to Matthew Lyons

Michael Novick responds to Thinking and Acting in Real Time and a Real World

2010-03-05T20:02:00.004-05:00

Comments to Thinking and Acting in Real Time and A Real World

Thanks, Don and TWF for this, and for the link to Kali Akuno's piece. I do know Kali and value his work and am surprised that I wasn't aware of this; we have printed others of his pieces in "Turning the Tide: Journal of Anti-Racist Action, Research & Education," (available in pdf format on-line at www.antiracistaction.org, click on 'publication'). Kali has done some important work around Katrina, the election campaign of Chokwe Lumumba in Mississippi, and many other causes. Although I have had a lot of unity with him in the past, and had many disagreements with Don in the past, I find myself agreeing with Don's assessment that his general strategic line formulation towards a popular front with liberal and progressive forces "against fascism" is really inadequate (even though his general political orientation is strong enough that much of predictive material he penned in November 2008 has come to fruition, such as the inability of Obama and the Democrats to deal with the crisis, and the resurgence of the Republican right).

However, both Kali's piece, and Don's (which has some great strengths, including its insistence on the explosive potential in human consciousness of the current and enduring crisis of the empire) have a couple of critical weaknesses regarding both war and fascism. The insurmountable internal contradictions of capitalism and colonialism, as well as the irreconcilable contradiction between capitalism/colonialism and the people it exploits and oppresses mean that war -- international, intra-capitalist war -- is inevitable. The culmination of the current imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the military activity and threats against Iran, Venezuela and in Africa, are part of a strategic campaign of encirclement being carried out against China by US-led imperialism. The war on terror, which the other comment, citing Mike Davis, correctly relates to long term counter-insurgency warfare in global and internal slums, is also a prelude to a military conflict with China (notwithstanding, or perhaps more properly, exactly because of) US dependence on China. The US and China are already engaged in vigorous cyber-war.

The citation of the Trilateral Commission, particularly the 'excess of democracy' elements, in the other note is also welcome. The US is still extremely actively engaged in the process of "spatial deconcentration" (removal of the Black, indigenous/Mexicano and other poor people from the urban core) that is necessary for such urban slum warfare to be tactically possible in the US (where, unlike the Third World or global south, the poor to a certain degree still occupy the city center rather than the outskirts). The gentrification of New York, where Harlem has become a predominantly European-descent area, the depopulation of New orleans, and the eradication of Detroit are part of this ongoing process since the Empire was forced to battle in the cities of the US.

Regarding fascism, as I have struggled with Don and others on TWF in the past, the colonial and settler colonial nature of the US state and society means that elements of "fascism" have always been part of the social and political fabric. This doesn't mean it's a "tactic" of the bourgeoisie, it means that (settler) colonialism has always been a cross-class project, with independent (armed) action by various classes and strata, and that the very concept of a "working class" as envisioned by Marx and Marxists (or anarchists) needs to be modified by an understanding of the importance of land, particularly private property in land, to the nature of Capital and its social relations. One of the things that the current crisis of capitalism should have made manifest, but apparently still hasn't, is that the capital 'market' in 'real estate (land, housing, etc) far exceeds industrial, or even financial capital. The bursting of the housing bubble should have helped identify to all one of the irreconcilable and unresolvable contradictions of capitalism -- that whether or not a particular house is "under water," the totality of mortgage debt, principal and interest, far exceeds the value of the property which "secures" it. The ballooning of such debt into "securities" only served to magnify the overhang. At the same time, the value of energy, water, and agricultural productivity (and the costs of waste disposal and/or decontamination) absorbed into capital by the private expropriation of land, nature and the commons of water and air, have helped to precipitate an enormous and catastrophically expensive (in life and dollars) environmental crisis which, like the economic crisis, manifests the not merely moribund or parasitic but necrotic nature of the Empire. The intersecting economic and environmental crises will not be solved by cap and trade, 'green jobs,' or health care reform, let alone the stimulus; but they may serve to provoke the kind of insurrectionary transformation of consciousness that Don is musing about. In that regard, both Don and the commentator miss the point about the struggles developing in "Latin" America -- the indigenous movements are not the resurrection of "national liberation" but its supercession by people standing on its shoulders and capable of overcoming its Euro-centric limits and definitions.

--Michael Novick
antiracistaction_la@yahoo.com

Barack, Badiou, and Bilal al Hasan

2010-01-24T16:30:00.014-05:00

I wrote a draft of this in early December that had some limited circulation. This version moves the focus away from criticisms of the left responses to the Obama Afghanistan policy towards the policy itself. In some ways it’s a restatement of arguments I made about Iraq five years ago that tries to incorporate the impact of a global economic crisis and of a different political face for the ruling class. I hope to open up two discussions: the first concerns the origins, objectives, and implications of the policy - particularly with respect to the ruling class flexibility to reconsider and change it. The other concerns the development of a more useful conceptual framework for the left. - D.H.

Barack, Badiou, and Bilal al Hasan

Obama has made his speech on Afghanistan and we should think about what it entails and implies.

The majority of the U.S. left looks at these issues in the context of classical conceptions of imperialism, emphasizing the interests of U.S. capital in maintaining and extending its dominant position: in the first place against popular anti-imperialist movements; but with increasing frequency also against purported imperialist rivals.

Two examples:

“... this war is not about “defending the American people” — but establishing a stable U.S. domination over a highly strategic arc reaching from Iran...to Pakistan...It is a war for consolidating U.S. domination in large parts of the world.” Ely, Kasama (12/2)

“All this ... is about oil. But not just oil, but all other resources, and not just resources, but the control of those resources and the fear of a rising multi-polarity being led by the Chinese with accompaniment by a renewed belligerence of Russia and the rising economic power of Brazil and India among others (the BRIC nations).” Miles, Znet (12/4).

I realize these short excerpts don’t adequately express Ely and Miles’s complete positions. However, taking them as they stand, whatever their other merits, neither helps explain why Obama is implementing this particular policy and not another – potentially quite different - one.

“...Protecting the U.S.”; establishing an “...arc of domination” in SouthWest Asia; acting against a, “...rising multi-polarity” within the global capitalist system, may or may not point to some of the motivations that underlie U.S. policy in general, but they are hardly sufficient to explain this particular policy. The goal of “U.S. domination” could arguably be implemented through policies which were quite different. Non-military interventions could be pursued rather than costly and unpromising wars. A concentration on mounting problems closer to the “homeland” could be prioritized to ensure there there actually was a more “stable” base from which to expand “U.S. domination”.

The other day I ran across this in a column by Tom Friedman, perhaps the best known publicist for global capitalism. It illustrates my point:

“Frankly, if I had my wish we would be on our way out of Afghanistan not in, we would be letting Pakistan figure out which Taliban they want to conspire with and which one they want to fight, we would be letting Israelis and Palestinians figure out on their own how to make peace, we would be taking $100 billion out of the Pentagon budget to make us independent of imported oil...” Port Angeles Daily News. (In my local paper it appeared on Jan. 18. and Jan. 17 in the N.Y. Times.)

There is no question whether Friedman would prefer a stable U.S. domination over this section of the world - this “strategic arc - of course he would. There is no question that he is worried about the weakening of U.S. economic power relative to its capitalist competition and to the challenges it faces – he’s written a number of irritating books on the subject. But there is also no question that he doesn’t like the current Obama policy and supports a substantially different approach. This possibility for substantially different ruling class policies from sectors of the class that share a substantial agreements on assumptions and objectives, should motivate us to look beyond our own generic ‘explanations’ for what is happening. This is particularly true when, as is the case here, these explanations are firmly rooted in the political categories of a past where we didn’t do all that well.

So what “facts” support these postulated U.S. imperialist objectives in Afghanistan? Do the gas pipelines, the narcotics trade, the copper mining proposals and similar factors create a clear interest for U.S. capital that is appropriately pursued by this grotesquely asymetric use of military force? Which U.S. ruling class factions have organized to promote these interests? Where is the trail of influence from these alleged interests to the adopted policy?

Exactly how does a more consolidated domination emerge out of increasingly destabilized territories and regimes? If the goal in Afghanistan actually is that of “consolidating U.S. domination”, one obvious objective would be establishing a friendly and stable pro-capitalist regime. The institutionalized and protracted external domination suggested by the Obama policy will make Afghanistan and the region less friendly and a whole lot less stable, not more so. It is hard to see a, “stable consolidated U.S. domination” developing out of these policies under the best conditions. If it is assumed that U.S. policy will also confront a “rising multi-polarity”, based in rival centers of capitalist power looking to gain some relative advantage, it is impossible. This leaves us with a goal – stable consolidated domination – that would be completely at odds with the means – military conquest and occupation with limited forces. My firm belief is that the ruling class does not subject itself to stress tests that it has every reason to believe it cannot pass.

Let’s look a little closer at the “rising multi-polarity” interimperialist conflict, argument presented by Miles. There is no doubt that there are inter-imperialist conflicts and contradictions in the region, but what is their relationship to this Afghanistan policy? Does any potential inter-imperialist conflict over resources in Afghanistan (U.S/NATO. vs. BRIC is the one Miles proposes) outweigh the historic conflicts in the region - between Russia and China, between China and India, between India and Pakistan? Does it outweigh all three country’s counterparty status or the dependence of the BRIC states on inter-imperialist coordination to maintain stability in the international financial and commodities markets? Does it outweigh their common interests in managing internal populist unrest – perhaps with Chinese Uighers and Russian Chechens – or threats to Russia’s interests in the formerly soviet ‘stans’? Does it outweigh the common interests of these rivals in combatting “terrorism”, such as that flowing from Naxalite peasant insurgency, newly marginalized Chinese workers, or neo-fascist tendencies in the ruling Hindi elites and among the Russian National Bolsheviks. I’d say no, inter-imperialist contradictions don’t outweigh these factors, and if they did we wouldn’t be in Afghanistan in the way that we are – nor in Iraq, for that matter.

(Thomas Barnett’s essay of a few years ago, “Recasting the Long War as a Joint Sino-American Venture”, provides a good picture of ruling class approaches to such issues and makes it pretty clear that they are well integrated into the discussions of alternative policies in ruling class circles.)

In short, most left explanations of the underpinnings and objectives of Obama’s Afghanistan policy can’t provide an adequate explanation of the concrete policy: of the specific changes it involves; of the adaptations it might undergo in the future; of the policy alternatives to it that may or may not be viable – such as Friedman’s. Actually they are worse than inadequate because, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by default, they contribute to the widespread left common sense that it is not really important to look for coherent explanations of specific ruling class policy. Perhaps because, as Kolko has said, there are no such explanations because policies are just an incoherent resultant of the interplay of the most immediate and crass motives of economic and political self and sectoral interest. Other analyses come to similar results without utilizing this chaos theory. They see U.S. capitalism being pushed towards desperation making it prone to fundamentally illogical, even irrational, positions – to ‘mistakes’.

Such positions were more popular and more explicit during the previous administration – particularly with respect to Iraq policy. The Bush regime was easy to picture as ignorant and venal, mistake-prone and even incompetent from a ruling class perspective. It was easy but, I think, essentially wrong. This mindset contributes to a dumb left optimism in which analyses of ruling class motives and perspectives are regarded as unproductive and unnecessary. And in the process it typically muddies the distinctions between a radical and a liberal opposition to ruling class policies. For a case in point, it also was easy, but wrong, to overestimate the potential differences in the policies that a supposedly more clear-headed incoming Obama administration might pursue. Many on the left went this route and are still scrambling to catch up.

In fact, except for some unimportant, largely cosmetic, trappings, Obama is much the same as Bush. In Afghanistan, Obama hopes to apply some lessons and experiences learned from Iraq and in doing so is incurring very real domestic costs and taking significant risks just as Bush did, most notably in Iraq. These common priorities in both administrations can be explained as a rational pursuit of capitalist class interests, but only if these interests are seen as global, not national. That is, only if they are understood as capitalist interests in which the political, economic and social stability in the U.S. is not the primary point of reference. Therefore, despite much public rhetoric to the contrary (particularly from the remnants of the Bush camp now that it is removed from policy-making), the policy directions chosen by both administrations can quite possibly place the hegemony and domestic stability of the U.S., the “sole superpower”, at risk, but still be a rational attempt to defend and extend the hegemony of global capital.

How might global capitalist interests be operative in Obama’s Afghanistan policies? A full answer, including the structural elements of the current economic crisis is beyond this argument. However, clear hints of a partial answer are in the language that Obama used to present his policy at West Point - especially when it is augmented by the language he used a few days later in Oslo when he accepted his bizarre award of a “Peace Prize”.

Obama said that the policy towards Afghanistan was part of a strategic response to a “real danger” from; “...disorderly regions, diffuse enemies; and ‘failed states’.” In the Nobel speech he stressed in Bush-like phrases; “I deal with the world as it is...(and)...There is evil in the world”. I wrote down the former phrase at the time I heard it, but I’ve seen no reference to it in the commentary on that speech. Hopefully, at least some of the Fourth Generation War websites will eventually pick it up. I’m sure that the invocation of evil in the Oslo presentation was not missed, but without the earlier passage as a context, it becomes a rhetorical flourish and loses much of its practical significance. These phrases point towards a rationale for Afghanistan policy that makes some sense for a global ruling class facing a secular crisis, but not for a national U.S. ruling class, focused on its internal stability and economic health and on maintaining its relative position in a classically imperialist structure. Consequently, unlike Tom Engelhardt, I do not find Obama’s pursuit of a very expensive Afghan policy instead of a, “...reasonable jobs program at home...”, to be a “...strange wonder of the world..” ZNet 12/6.

This Obama statement opens some important questions: What is the danger in Afghanistan? Who is responding to this danger? What is the nature of the response? Focusing on these questions, not the logical errors and factual irrelevancies, and the bloated patriotic rhetoric which filled both the West Point and Oslo speeches, will open some possibilities to place what is happening within the context of global capital and international class struggle.

I’d suggest three working hypotheses, recognizing that their validity is provisional:

1. At the end of the last century, the global capitalist system rapidly extended the penetration of what used to be called the ‘second’ and ‘third’ worlds. It now faces an growing difficulty profitably utilizing the labor that it has ‘freed’ and endowed with new needs and demands. This increasingly marginalized labor force is also increasingly mobile. This is one underpinning of a general populist threat to global capital that has both liberatory and reactionary elements.The problems and conflicts, the social turmoil that this process entails, cannot be quarantined even under the best of circumstances and it now affects the entire system, including the capitalist core areas.

A variety of political projects with a diverse array of antagonisms and accomodations to the global capitalist system are attempting to organize this growing base of fundamental discontent. Global capital sees the populist threat as the major current challenge to its continued dominance and is focused on developing a response to its jihadist components. This is a real priority, acknowledged by and acted on by virtually all national segments of capital. It is not a pretext or a facade to provide space and resources to pursue other goals although it will certainly be used in these ways if and when the opportunities arise.

2. The collapse of the global financialization system and the serious cyclical crisis that is related to it have exposed structural limitations on capitalist accumulation. The growing problems maintaining profitability and cultural hegemony within the core areas of the capitalist system are compounded by the emergence of the issues of the gap in the core. This has increased the awareness within capitalist elites of the need for major structural adjustments, but this awareness is confronted with an increasingly limited flexibility for material and incorporative concessions to the working classes in the core as well as growing limitations on the tools, particularly the non-military tools, available to deal with political challenges in gap regions - such as Afghanistan.

These factors are combining to undercut the ruling class confidence that capitalist development has sufficient flexibility and momentum to deal with the complex of emerging threats and instabilities. Certainly it has eroded any confidence that these challenges can be dealt with simultaneously. In place of a generalized confidence that capitalism can incorporate all potential futures, there is a recognition that history may not have ended, and that securing the future prospects for capitalism requires a major restructuring of its disciplinary apparatus and a risky reordering of political and economic priorities.

3. There are major issues with the organization and the content of capitalist power. To efficiently advance the interests of capital, global political and economic considerations should determine the rational use of power, but this power is politically organized within, and limited by an increasingly dysfunctional nation state framework. This is a problem at the top when military capabilities become inflexible and unwieldy - not properly oriented to asymmetric non-state threats where specific and rapidly changing political factors must outweigh technical military considerations. At least potentially it is also a problem from below when the structures of privilege and subordinated participation through formal parliamentarism that have provided some stable national bases for capitalist power in the core don’t work in the ways that they have historically.

I intend to say a few things about how I see these three points in play in Afghanistan policy. First, although it may already be apparent, I should make it explicit that these points assume the essential validity of one of Negri’s central arguments in ‘Empire’:

“The United States does not, and indeed, no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project.” (Empire, p. xiv)

A fundamental point. It will be less obvious, but they diverge significantly from another Negri position:

“The guarantee that Empire offers to globalized capital does not involve a micropolitical and/or microadministrative management of populations. The apparatus of command has no access to the local spaces and the determinate temporal sequences of life...” (Empire, p. 344) This is a mistaken and dangerous assumption, I think. In my opinion this is exactly what is being developed and with some success.

In distinction to Negri, who places minimal weight on any elements of consciousness and organization – obviously including those that relate to ruling class policies, I think there is an emerging global capitalist project – in this case a project lurking beneath the Obama pronouncements – and it is important that we understand it. I want to speculate about this in two areas: – one with implications for the gap, and particularly the “non-integrating” seams in the gap; and another with implications for the core. (I’m assuming some familiarity with these gap/core categories from Thomas Barnett, but in any case their meaning should be obvious from the context).

Remember a few short decades ago when Carter and Breszhenski schemed to bring down the Soviet union by giving it “its own Vietnam” in Afghanistan. I believe that one distinctive feature of the current situation is that no rival national centers of capitalist power are oriented towards entangling the U.S. in Afghanistan this way. This certainly cannot be explained by a fear of U.S. military and economic power which has demonstrated increasingly clear limits. I find the best explanation to be that, in contrast to the talk of “a rising multi-polarity”, the global ruling elites increasingly subordinate inter-imperialist rivalries to an appreciation of common enemies and common risks. This emergent sense of an over-riding common interest is reflected in the virtually universal support of every state for what is called a called a “war on terror”. It is reflected in the generalized cooperation to regain some equilibrium in global financial systems and commodities markets.

Afghanistan is both a specific problem and a manifestation of more general ones in an important regional zone of disorder. For global capital, Afghanistan is an opportunity to experiment with new ways to discipline increasingly unruly populations while maintaining and even extending capitalist control over global flows of capital and labor. It is an opportunity, as well, to develop better techniques to disorient and demobilize emerging challenges to capital’s global disciplinary regime. At its core I believe that the Obama “surge” is such a test of new methods and new tools. It is a concrete project in which most sections of global capital share definite common interests. Of course, it is not a project that represents an overt ruling class consensus. There are remaining conflicts and contradictions on important issues that are sometimes quite evident in policy differences – particularly on questions of tactics. But, I think, the underlying perception of a common interest is pretty clear.

I’d like to argue for and explain this view with a few specific points in two distinct areas – the gap (warzone) and the core (homeland).

(First, however, a parenthetical note of caution: It is hard to raise issues of ruling class policy without implying that it is more consciously calculated and coordinated than the available evidence shows. What I say here will be subject to this interpretation. So from the outset I want to be clear that I don’t mean to deny that there is, and will always be, a range of contradictory factors; elements of controversy and indeterminacy, not to mention incompetence, that go into the formation of ruling class policy. I hope what I say doesn’t lead to the substitution of assumed conspiracies for a concrete investigation of actual processes. This can lead to a host of political problems that frequently end in passivity and defeatism.

However, in this case I’m more worried about the opposite problem – the underestimation of the extent and impact of the organization and planning that goes into maintaining capitalist power. The fact is that any approach to radical political organizing will have to choose some operating assumptions on these questions when the investigations that could establish their respective validity have barely begun and the most pertinent results are still not generally available. I think that it is prudent to adopt the protective principle of ecological science in this situation and work from the assumption of the worst case. Considering the massive resources the capitalist state devotes to its defense, presumably producing some usable product, this is probably not only the prudent course, but the wise one as well. As Mao might have learned before leaving the scene, its very important to avoid any tendency to underestimate the enemy – and that means strategically, not just tactically.)

To me it seems that the Afghanistan surge is not premised on a victory over the Taliban, the eradication of Al Qaeda, or any type of nation building. The force structure focused on Afghanistan is clearly unable to achieve a traditional military victory and that should indicate to us that it is probably not meant to do so. I think that “winning” in Afghanistan is not about establishing a relatively stable pro-capitalist nation state that is a more docile part of a U.S. sphere of influence (a completely utopian objective under any scenario). Instead, consider Afghanistan as Obama described it; a “failed state”, in a “disorderly region” containing “diffuse enemies”. Afghanistan is the archetypical disorderly region, and it is not insignificant that it has many features placing it on the dark side of the establishment’s manichaean discourses on Evil.

A more likely goal of this policy is that it is a test, oriented towards developing and controlling balkanized enclaves through direct relations with empowered reactionary elements of civil society and bypassing centralized governmental structures, including compradorial ones. This involves an attempt to relate directly to all sides of all existing social divisions, hoping to gain effective control over the resources of the underground and illegal economy and to fragment any potential nationalist or internationalist resistence, particularly anything with an anti-capitalist aspect to it. And in doing this it tacitly assumes that the “disorderly region” will remain disorderly and that these methods of domination that are being worked out are for the long haul and will have more than a provisional and local significance.

Notably the surge discounts the significance of the imperialist initiated “national” borders – with Pakistan, with the ex-Soviet stans, with Iran – while building up centrifugal pressures towards micro states and ethnic fiefdoms with their accompanying internal borders – both geographic and social. In implementing this segmenting project the surge will utilize organizational forms and policies that are as transnational as those of the Jihadis, but that provide an effective deniability of the blood trail back to the actual originators of the policy.

This approach can be detected in what was said and what was not said in the speeches. Note the careful reference to direct contact with local officials and leaders bypassing the Kabul central authority; note the careful reference to the surge of “civilian” experts on agricultural (sic) policy and other sensitive issues; note the careful lack of reference to the surge of “civilian” and military contractors – which is equal or greater numerically and certainly in the breadth of function to that of the formal military forces - and to the ethnic limitations of the current central government that make further military training of its forces beside the point. Note the lack of mention of any public accountability, benchmarks or timetables for contractors, either military or “civilian”, or for the operation of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC, McChrystal’s last gig) which functions covertly throughout the region, well beyond the feeble political oversight that nominally constrains the CIA. Finally, note well the absense of any mention of who and what is involved in the expanding operations in Pakistan.

What is emerging out of this is a secret privatized intelligence gathering system and a privatized military capability – all of which is profit-making. This objective has been pursued actively by elements of the U.S; ruling elite (with clear international connections) since the mid-twentieth century, and the pursuit has intensified since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of new forms of Muslim insurgency.

DYNCORP, L-3, FLUOR, XE Systems, etc., all of whom are acknowledged players in Afghanistan, are such assets for capital; able to circumvent the limitations on state militaries and provide deniability to actual policy makers; sufficiently flexible and robust to respond quickly to shifting needs while bypassing the bureaucratic parliamentary filters.

This looks something like a rerun on a global scale of the Pinkertonized class warfare of the nineteenth century in this country. But it is more than that. There is a particularly modern character to these formations: they are operating within the context of a global capitalism, not a national state; and they are confronted with structural limits on capitalism that were not a factor in the period of Molly Maguires or the Moyer, Pettibone, Haywood trial.

The functions of this privatized force structure goes beyond repression and suppression of external (to the U.S.) populisms and their supporters. The capacities being developed will ultimately be used to influence and distort the character and objectives of all oppositions, internally as well as externally, class-based as well as populist. These emerging oppositions have become less susceptible to a gradual evolutionary political incorporation within the framework of capitalist expansion and there is a growing ruling class recognition that they are essentially impossible to eliminate by traditional military or police methods because their social preconditions are constantly regenerated by essential dynamics of capital accumulation. To repeat, such oppositions will not necessarily always be outside of the core – or even the homeland.

I think that we must assume that the privatized – multinationally staffed - contractors that are doing the targeting for the drones and the hit squads in Pakistan and elsewhere are also developing the networks of covert operatives and agents of influence that will enlarge their potential uses in the future, if they haven’t already – think Haiti. If these groupings can develop sufficient information to accurately target jihadist leaders, they can also affect the tactics of the resistance more fundamentally through systematic penetration and an increasingly tight encapsulization. One likely result will be more anomalies in the mold of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia - more of those “terrorists” most likely to demoralize a revolutionary population and expedite an expanded counter-insurgency. If capital develops these capacities with respect to jihadists, there will be ramifications shortly down the road for anti-capitalist movements with radically different agendas and perspectives.

These new tools do not and will not operate autonomously. Their oversight may be strategic rather than operational, but there is not much doubt who will ultimately provide the money and determine the jobs. It will not be any state apparatus that is remotely accountable, you can bet on that...but it will be elements and appendages of the global ruling class, you can bet on that as well.

To recap, capital currently faces a real danger from populism in the gap, and the gap is increasingly less defined and limited by geography because of the mobility of populations and the increasing access to information and new forms of communication. Moreover, the gap is not shrinking in any real sense, as the current crisis confounds the capitalist triumphalism of the Barnetts and the Friedmans (T. not M.). The challenges to global capital from this populism will become more, not less pressing.

Afghanistan is one of the regions of the world where for the historical moment global capital has some flexibility to respond to these dangers experimentally without worrying that much about issues of moral standing or legitimacy in the exercise of power. However, such operations would hardly aim to achieve a social equilibrium in Afghanistan in any meaningful time frame and they are even less likely to rapidly achieve successful results on a broader scale. The likelihood is that the more effective these new methods prove to be, the more they will make themselves needed - and the more expensive, economically and politically, they will become. This points to a major linkage between the issues in the gap and emerging questions of capitalist hegemony in the core. The economic and cultural cushions that have supported hegemony in the core are wearing thin even while the actual and prospective actions in the gap are becoming more costly, and now with significant elements of the costs in blood - that is the problem for capital. As more resources have to be directed at fundamental instabilities in the gap and their actual and potential spill overs into the core, it becomes more difficult to preserve an adequate reservoir of hegemonic flexibility at home.

The global dominance of capital rests on its hegemony in stable nation states in the core. For a variety of historical reasons, these are regions where the ruling class must be concerned with maintaining legitimacy in the exercise of power and avoiding the collateral damages from an excessive reliance on repression. This approach to both maintaining and disguising capitalist rule has been built on a network of incorporative privileges which are increasingly hard to sustain, politically or economically, under the existing circumstances – and it is impossible to expand them significantly except in the most localized conditions.

The functional needs of capitalism change as a range of tensions emerge between the globalized pursuit of surplus value and its nation - based system of rule. In the current crisis, the benefits and losses of one nation tend to find their zero sum reflection elsewhere, and increasingly elsewhere means other nations in the core. Certainly in this country it is almost hopelessly hard for capital to politically explain the rescue of multi-national and foreign financial institutions while sacrificing Detroit; the borrowing of billions to finance wars that make no sense while a pathetic health care “reform” must be deficit neutral. If it happens as it well may, it will be hard to explain bailing out Spain, Greece, and Austria rather than California.

To avoid a general spiral down towards the pit, capitalist priorities cannot be limited within national borders and overly influenced by nationalist sentiment. Increasingly they will be set by larger issues of global power and profit but there is no accepted procedure for adjudicating the resulting conflicts. There is no clear framework of legitimacy for a global capitalist perspective.

Any general resort to reliance on repressive methods has its own risks. The maintenance of political equilibrium in the core nations depends on an essential passivity which contains grievances within an official structure of legitimacy that undercuts the capacities for mass collective resistance. Many aspects of capitalist discipline and control are obscured by this accepted subordination, more accurately a repressive self-discipline that limits natural resistances to oppression and authority. This culture is a major part of capitalist strength and resiliency, it is not an advantage that will easily be surrendered. Consequently, major increases in repression, and, particularly, overtly imposing elements of a repressive authoritarian “world government” in the U.S. or elsewhere presents unacceptable risks – at least for now.

This leaves capital struggling to develop more effective methods to discipline new populations and regions, while facing increasing problems maintaining social cohesion and a non-police centered discipline in its traditional centers where material conditions are deteriorating. One possible general response of capital to this dilemma, the one that I believe will eventually predominate, is what has been called global social democracy. (Following Walden Bello, although he appears to have recently backed away from his conception.)

Since the vision of shared prosperity has become a pretty threadbare joke and significant improvements in material conditions are not a general possibility, the Fordist wage/consumption path to class collaboration must be replaced. And it is not hard to see what will be central to any such alternative. It will be fear:

“Fear is the ultimate guarantee of the new segmentations.”(Negri, Empire, p. 339).

The primary fear is of an enemy that might emerge from the populist reaction to capital. An enemy consisting of “fanatics who hate us and our freedom” to paraphrase from the house of George. An enemy pictured as anti-modern, anti-liberatory and neo-fascist – a picture that has plausibility because it does accurately describe significant elements of the existing mass populist movements. An enemy that is mainly in the gap, but that be expected to materialize in the core as well.

This fear will be generated from capital’s recognition and popularization of actual dangers from the right o its continued hegemony. It will also be generated by a ruling class appreciation of the utility of a new set of fabricated enemies for the reconstruction of a popular narrative to replace the “communist danger”. (It’s beyond the scope of this argument, but I think that another fabricated element of this popular “fear” will emerge through the manipulation of the ecological crisis to confine alternative responses within an essentially Malthusian assumptions. The ecological problem seen as too many “other people”.)

We had a major historical experience in WWII with a repressive right wing structure of authoritarian rule in this country. This was not just a manifestation of imperialism at war. It was part of a global response from capital to a perceived threat from a transcapitalist fascism and a potential threat from communism. It was a framework that incorporated the willing participation of the overwhelming bulk of the left and progressive forces under the rubric of a popular front against fascism. Despite its repressive content, the process presented itself and is still viewed as a continuation of the social democratic momentum of the New Deal.

Currently, big sections of the near left – at least in this country and probably throughout most of the other “developed” areas – are more than open to a refurbished variant of the same structure. The other side of this possibility, and, in a sense, the proof of its reality, lies in the lack of a militant anti-war movement after a decade of exquisitely rotten wars; in the lack of class conscious anti-capitalist militance, solidarity and internationalism at a time of capitalist crisis that is increasing exploitation, marginalization, and oppression around the world.

What I have argued above is sketchy and tentative, but I am relatively confident of some points. To think seriously about revolutionary politics we must challenge some left presuppositions and develop new categories of strategic analysis that fit the qualitatively changed circumstances of the present period. We are living in the aftermath of an extended revolutionary process that had its debatable successes. But these were rapidly transformed into limits that now constitute obstacles to a more basic struggle against capital. While we cannot deal with new political questions, without a clearer understanding of the struggles of the past century, an understanding that avoids both nostalgia and meaningless recriminations, we are going to have to act, moving ahead with whatever intellectual, moral, and material resources are available to us even before we have an adequately grounded and workable political perspective.

I’d like to finish this piece with a more explicit treatment of attempts to refurbish one of the old categories – that of anti-imperialist national liberation. Given the emergence of important populist movements in the gap, it is logical that there would be a renewed interest in the revolutionary potentials of mass struggles of oppressed peoples against external political and economic domination.

A recent discussion on a more limited topic on the Gathering Forces website raised a point that I think is a good starting place:

“...we need to revisit the Third Worldist imagination – not the politics of the national bourgeoisie (radical or otherwise), but the masses who resisted and provided a potential alternative to capitalist Bandung modernization – the “third revolution”.”(mlove, comment on Economic Crisis in the Third World, 11/09)

I certainly agree that this “third revolution” should be revisited in light of the current conditions. But it should be clear from the outset that yesterday’s potentials are not easily resurrected. It is an illusion to think that the movement for national liberation can be rebuilt and produce different and better outcomes, if only some obvious mistakes are not made a second time. The weight of the past including its failures, combines with transformed present circumstances to qualitatively change what can and should be done in the future – closing some possibilities and opening others. I’m sure that mlove would agree that the revisiting of the “third revolution” should start from a critical reconsideration of whether it still might provide a “...potential alternative to capitalist Bandung modernization...” –or if it ever did.

Here again I want to begin with a passage from Negri; although with the usual ambivalence because he offers so much else with which to disagree.

“From India to Algeria and Cuba to Vietnam, the state is the poisoned gift of national liberation.” (Empire, p. 136, Negri emphasis)

Cross class coalitions in oppressed nations, challenging imperialist power and demanding national independence and socialism were the most important element of the international struggle against capital for much of the last century. But I agree with Negri that they will not play that role going ahead. We aren’t confronting Lenin’s Imperialism, which for the benefit of the censors he called capitalism’s highest stage while actually thinking it was its end point – just a step short of international working class revolution. This conception of imperialism is no longer strategically relevant, and neither is its antithesis, anti-imperialist national liberation. That set of possibilities is historically exhausted. It will not be revived by the new populisms which appropriate some of its characteristics, not even when this goes beyond rhetorical posturing to a rejection of some elements of global capital - as it does at times.

The historic national liberation struggle was indelibly marked and is increasingly limited by the specific context in which it developed – a context which has been decisively modified. This changed context has two important and related elements: First; classically, imperial domination was a relationship between a developed capitalism and an exploitable “outside” as Luxembourg conceptualized it. Imperialism was an external force over the “Third World”, and the class alignments and attitudes in both metropolis and periphery reflected this. The most powerful imperialist states essentially pillaged and destroyed non-capitalist societies by appropriating their surpluses and dumping their economic and social problems on them.

The economic side of this process and its essentially transitional character are forecast in the well known passages in the Grundrisse (p. 408-410) about the tendency of capital towards the creation of a world market. Now this transition is essentially complete and these ex-colonial societies for the most part have been thoroughly incorporated into global capitalist production and thoroughly penetrated by capitalist institutions and ideologies. While they have developed into capitalist societies that are very different than those in the core, they are still part of capitalism and no longer constitute an outside to its global system. Here it should also be noted that this capitalist system has now quite clearly also subsumed the “Second World” and is scavenging the carcasses of “actually existing socialism”.

The social classes of these post colonial regions have interfaced with globalized ruling and ruled class structures. Little remains to anchor a progressive multi-class front against a clearly defined imperialist oppressor nation. Instead, a progressive momentum requires coalitions of working classes and marginalized strata in the gap with a more concrete anti-capitalist and internationalist orientation; an orientation that that aims for solidarity with all similar forms of resistance, and that opposes all the forms in which domestic and foreign capital is manifested particularly those in which they are combined into unified ruling structures and policies - states and quasi-states.

Second, during the classic period of anti-imperialist struggle in the mid-twentieth century, it was widely accepted that “socialism”, as embodied the so-called socialist bloc, was a real alternative path to modernization and economic development. Despite its problems, it was held that socialism potentially challenged both capitalist markets and capitalist culture. The more progressive and radical anti-imperialist movements all specified that their political objectives included national independence and socialism. When this “actually existing socialism” proved illusory for the global working class struggle, it likewise disappointed the movements for national liberation. Any possible progressive trajectory for a cross-class anti-imperialist movement looking towards gaining state power in an independent nation and joining a socialist camp was rapidly eroded. No socialist camp; meant no sustainable alternative to the capitalist world market which translated to little genuine sovereignty and power from formal “national independence” and even less “liberation” from the “victories” of national liberation movements.

Again I will use a (heavily excised) passage from Negri to illustrate the point:

“It is strange now to have to recall this amalgam of ideological perversions that grew out of the ... democratic hopes of socialist representation... And while we say our farewells we cannot but remember how many ideological by-products, more or less fascist, the great historical experiences of socialism were condemned to drag in their wake, some merely useless sparks and others devastating infernos..” (Negri, Multitude, P. 255)

This dual historical failure of both ‘socialism’ and ‘anti-imperialism’ left more than political vacuums. They left a disillusionment and cynicism that provide a social base for the anti-capitalism of the right as well as for secessionist orientations that seek special solutions and unique benefits for some in the context of a general worsening of conditions for most.

In his late 2008 presentation; “Is the Word ‘Communism’ Forever Doomed?” (see Kasama, 9/30), Alain Badiou has presented a framework that I think is helpful in settling accounts with our collective past. I’m a newcomer to Badiou and certainly don’t have an adequate understanding of his recent positions, much less his earlier ones. However, what I do think I understand I like a great deal and it will be the basis of the rest of what I write here.

“Our problems are much more the problems of Marx than the problems of Lenin...” (Badiou, “Is the Word ‘Communism’ Forever Doomed”, p. 18, Kasama, 9/30)

The “problems of Lenin”, according to Badiou, fit within an extended phase of the revolutionary process; “...from 1917, the Russian Revolution, to 1976, the end of the Cultural Revolution in China... ” This is a phase that has ended with a generally acknowledged string of failures to achieve the fundamental stated objective – a rapid transition from local seizures of state power to an inclusive stateless communist society. As I have said above, I think that the massive upsurge of the national liberation struggle, the reason why it contained much greater revolutionary potential than the earlier nationalisms of the 19^th century, is inextricably linked with this phase of the communist project and similarly tied to its failures.

We are left with the problem placed by Bilal al Hasan in a more limited context:

“...the question here is what comes after the end of a revolution and its failure.” Bilal al Hasan (this was part of a commentary on the Palestinian movement on the Gathering Forces website. G.F. 11/09).

Badiou argues for a conceptual return to the standpoints of the 19^th century, but not on the premise that a simple class polarization can be resurrected through some act of political will. He is concerned with an issue of philosophical stance – with posing the idea of communism in terms of the “conditions of its identity” – a 19^th century problem – and not as a question of “...the victory of the communist hypothesis” – the problem of Lenin and the party/state and of the revolutionary movement for most of the past century.

This line of argument is relevant to the revisiting of third world revolution. Badiou indicates the elements of the communist hypothesis in the nineteenth century as combining, “...the idea of communism as a popular mass movement with the notion of savior of all.” (P. 15). The original conception of communism was that of a multiform struggle that would embody and culminate in universal emancipation through, the “...process of the Decline of the State.” (P.14)

In my opinion the core element in this conception is the inseparable linkage of the notion of, “savior of all”, stressing the universality of the project, with the destruction of the state – a state that is sometimes defined inclusively by Badiou as; “...all that limits the possibility of collective creation” (P. 14). The vanguard parties and revolutionary blocs characteristic of the 20^th century had a different orientation. In Badiou’s terms they were party/state formations which might seize and hold power locally but could not transform social relations because their essential character incorporated features of a state. Thus they inevitably became the antagonist of the mass “Communist movement” (Badiou’s term). But only through such a movement, that is necessarily, “beyond the state” (Badiou), can communism be achieved.

It is quite clear that even the best of the national liberation fronts were essentially party/state formations. They functioned even more as shadow governments than did the vanguard parties. The discipline they enforced was more overtly military and not subject to even the more or less hypothetical democratic forms of vanguard parties or to the objective limits that are inherent in a defined class base.

These movements were nationalist, (including some more hopeful pan-nationalist and ‘continental’ formations that were of limited temporal and geographic duration) and, at their best, treated liberation as more a matter of autonomy and expanded rights of self determination, than of internationalism and solidarity. This is demonstrated indirectly by the uniqueness of the Guevara experience, and was supported in an ultimately damaging way by the Maoist version of Marxism when it elevated the conception of self-reliance over that of internationalism.

These issues emerge currently around questions of the character of the populist resistance to global capital, particularly, but not exclusively, in the gap. To what extent do these developments project a fascist, rather than a liberatory, alternative to global capital? To what extent are they contained or containable within neo-colonial limits. I’ve written on these issues elsewhere and regard myself as within the Threeway Fight tendency. However, no general recognition of contradictory potentials should substitute for concrete evaluations of specific cases. And our goal in such evaluations should always go beyond clarity on the problems and limitations and also attempt to discover and build on the best possibilities.

That said, we should also be categorically clear that universal liberation is not to be achieved through structured movements that limit creative participation as an element of their ‘self determination’ and cultural autonomy. This is particularly relevant concerning the role and status of women and the attitudes towards the use of force and violence. I will leave these points as they stand for now, but feel obligated to confess that I’ve been around long enough to have made major mistakes on all conceivable sides of these questions.

Don Hamerquist 1/20

Call for Solidarity and Funds for the Working People of Haiti!

2010-01-14T20:05:00.004-05:00

01/14/09- A natural disaster has descended upon Haiti whose scope we only are seeing the surface of at this time. The Haitian people will be struggling to rebuild their lives and their home possibly for decades in light of unprecedented collapse, both physical and social. Yet despite the unpredictability of earthquakes, this disaster is unnatural, a monstrosity of our time. The extent of the damage of the earthquake is part of the cost of unrestrained exploitation which at every step put profit above the health, safety, and well being of the Haitian people. While the world watches on ready to help, power is being dealt an opportunity. The Haitian workers and peasants have been fighting for their rights to even the most basic level of existence for decades, while the UN-occupying force, the state, and the ruling elites maintain the social misery without relenting. Now as Port-Au-Prince is in rubble, new opportunities arise for rulers to rebuild Haiti in their own interests, and likewise for the Haitian workers and peasants to assert their right to their own Haiti, one where they will be not be forced to live in dangerous buildings, and work merely to fill the pockets of elites, foreign or domestic.

As we move from watching in horror to taking decisive action, progressives can offer an alternative. There is a strong and beautiful desire to do something, to help others in this time of need. Our actions are strongest when we organize ourselves, and make a concerted effort in unity. Right now we can have the deepest impact by committing ourselves to act in solidarity with the autonomous social movements of Haiti directly. They present the best possible option for the Haitian people, and are in the greatest need. At the same time, we are in the best position to help them out our common interest as people engaged in struggling against a system that works to exploit us all. We are calling for solidarity people-to-people engaged in common struggle. It is not only a question of money for AID but also an autonomous and independent act of international solidarity that illuminates the bankruptcy of the occupying forces, multinational corporations, and Haitian elites that are primarily responsible for the decayed state of Haiti. There will be aid flowing and money givenas a form of charity until the next disaster. Our act of solidarity should, in no shape or form, be solely an act of humanitarian aid. It should not be an apolitical act, and we shouldn't give the green light to those that wish to capitalize on the suffering of others. It should be an act of solidarity to the struggling people of Haiti and their organizations while at the same time rejecting the totally inept Haitian elites and their state apparatus for bankrupting Haiti. The earthquake is a natural disaster, but the state of Haiti, the abject poverty of the masses and the vile injustice of the social order, are unnatural.

We have a relationship with one organization, Batay Ouvriye, and are putting our resources and time into helping Batay Ouvriye to help rebuild from the catastrophe and maintain the struggle for a better Haiti and a better world. Batay Ouvriye is a combative grassroots worker and peasant’s organization in Haiti with workers organized all over Haiti, especially in the Industrial sweatshops and Free Trade Zones. We have set up a means to send money to Batay Ourviye. If others wish to send money to Batay Ouvriye, please DONATE HERE or mail checks payable to “Miami Workers Center” with a note “for: MAS/BO” in the memo line to the following address:

Miami Workers Center
6127 Northwest 7th Avenue
Miami, FL 33127-1111

Miami Autonomy & Solidarity and Batay Ouvriye Haiti Solidarity
Network

BATAY OUVRIYE is an organization that regroups factory unions and committees, workers’ associations and militants, all struggling in Haiti for the construction of an independent, combative and democratic union movement, and to organize wage-workers, self-employed workers as well as the unemployed for the defense of their rights. Theorganization is an alternative to the traditional bureaucratic, corrupt union movement that upholds the dominant classes’ power amongst the exploited masses of Haiti. Not only does it take the initiative of developing spontaneous direct issue struggles, but also it incites the working class to fight and to organize themselves to defend their independent interests. Batay Ouvriye also links these particular struggles with those, more wide-ranging, of the people. In this sense, it takes part in all types of popular democratic struggles by encouraging the involvement of workers.

http://www.batayouvriye.org/

Minutemen and Klansmen

2009-12-21T06:40:00.001-05:00

from blog Imagine 2050
By Joel Olson

I recently reviewed The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan by Rory McVeigh (University of Minnesota Press 2009) for the academic journal American Studies. The book is a little dry, but there were some notable lessons in it for understanding anti-immigration organizations today.

The Klan originated after the Civil War to restore white supremacy by terrorizing ex-slaves and antislavery whites during Reconstruction. This generation of the Klan ended when Reconstruction did in the 1870s. McVeigh’s book studies the second generation of the KKK, which started in 1915 (coinciding with the release of D.W. Griffith’s famous pro-Klan movie The Birth of a Nation) and exploded in growth from 1920-1924, with a membership of over four million people at its peak.

McVeigh argues that this version of the Klan emerged as a white Protestant response to the rise of large-scale manufacturing and retail, which squeezed small businesses and farms, diminished the political influence of the heartland, and strengthened the power of the cities—and the ethnic communities that lived in them. Klan organizers successfully mobilized White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) by playing on their fears of losing their economic, political, and social power as a result of these economic and political changes.

McVeigh argues that while the 1920s Klan was racist, its focus was not primarily on anti-Black terrorism like the Reconstruction-era KKK. Rather, the 1920s Klan was essentially an anti-immigration social movement. Most social movements, he notes, seek to win power and status for the powerless. But right-wing movements “act to preserve, restore, or expand rights and privileges of a relatively advantaged social group” (38). The 1920s Klan is an example of this. They used a populist rhetoric that attacked industrial elites above them for manipulating labor markets and the “rabble” below them (i.e. ethnic, Catholic working class communities) for flooding these markets and for being culturally alien. The top and bottom of American society, they charged, conspired to squeeze the virtuous, hard-working, upright, white Protestants in the middle.

The KKK argued that “true Americans” were losing ground to immigrants, that immigrants burdened public resources, and that they degraded American culture. The Klan mobilized anxious WASPs by presenting itself as a “one-hundred percent American” organization that promised to restore their status. The fears of these relatively privileged WASPs, combined with effective mobilization techniques by the Klan, led farmers and middle class white Protestants to join the KKK in droves.

These arguments—and many of the quotes McVeigh provides from Klan papers—could have come from the Minutemen today.

What this suggests is that the key to understanding today’s anti-immigration movement—as well as anti-Obama organizing such as the “tea parties”—is to see it as a “virtuous middle” movement. In other words, these are movements whose members see themselves as a virtuous middle—religious, moral, hardworking, patriotic and truly American—who face the threat of losing their relatively privileged social status. They fear that they are under attack by a bewildering global economy and unscrupulous corporations that are moving their jobs overseas. Even more, they feel they are being attacked by cultural elites—Harvard and Hollywood, the universities and pop culture—who undermine the moral values of this virtuous middle with moral relativism and sexual permissiveness. They also fear that they are under attack by the rabble below them—lazy people who live off public benefits paid for by the virtuous middle’s tax dollars (these folks are often secretly coded as black) and illegal aliens who are flooding the country, stealing jobs and degrading American culture (these folks are often coded as brown). The virtuous middle fears that cultural elites from above and the black and brown rabble from below are conspiring —now with the help of a black president!—to undermine their social status and by extension the moral, political, and economic foundations of America. The fall into Sodom is right behind.

This fearful “virtuous middle” (or the “silent majority,” to use Nixon’s term in the 1970s) is a commonplace in American history. Jacksonian Democrats used it in the 1830s to attack corporate elites and slaves (but not masters), populists used it in the 1890s to attack corporate elites and defend segregation, the Klan used it in the 1920s to attack economic elites and Catholics and immigrants, Nixon used it in the 1970s to attack cultural elites and Black and student protestors, and now the anti-immigrant right is using it today.

From the perspective of participants in the anti-immigration movement, this is an effective strategy that should be continued, for it has often worked in U.S. history. From the perspective of those who support immigrant rights, it seems to me that the task is to convince this middle that their true interests lie in a united front with the black and brown “rabble” below them against the capitalist elites above. That would be hard, but it would also make for interesting times.

Joel Olson is the author of The Abolition of White Democracy (University of Minnesota 2004). He is a member of the Repeal Coalition, a grassroots organization that seeks the repeal of all anti-immigrant laws in Arizona.

new antifa blog: Nomattimen

2009-12-21T06:16:00.002-05:00

Nomattimen is a new blog. Lots of news and has an international perspective.

However, while its cool to give a nod to the Indigenous/First Nations, it's puzzling to see the antifas at nomattimen calling out for an anti-fascist "brotherhood".

Assuming that the comrades at nomattimen agree that the struggle against fascism is a struggle premised on a joint work that is not limited to and infact seeks to undermine "brotherhood", then why the emphasis?

The history of antifascist struggle is rich in cross gender, gender bending, and non-male idetified partisans and militants.

An element of fascism is determining strict gender roles. The revolutionary and anti-capitalist antifascism that our side advocates is about identifying and promotring opposition to the current values of this class-patriarchical society and developing new human relations and expressions, both individual and collective. Brotherhood aint what this struggle is about.

With that said, we welcome nomattimen and look forward to engagement with 'em.
..................................................................................................................................

Nomattimen is a word in the ancient Native American Algonquian language. It means "we are brothers".

In this blog we support the anti-fascist brotherhood.

http://nomattimen. wordpress. com

RIP Ivan “Kostolom” Hutorskoy!

2009-12-21T06:08:00.001-05:00

November 17, 2009...05:20

RIP Ivan “Kostolom” Hutorskoy! Moscow Antifascist murdered by Nazis

Yesterday, on November 16 we lost our friend.

Ivan Hutorskoy, also known as “Kostolom”, was an Antifascist and he died for his beliefs.

Ivan was one of the founders of Russian militant Antifascist movement.

He was one of those few kids who stood up against the Neo-Nazi hordes, dominating the Russian punk/hardcore scene in the 90-s and early 00-s.

While the majority of the scene was compromising with Nazi assholes, Kostolom and his closest friends started to kick the fascists out of the gigs. Soon Ivan became the founder and respected leader of Moscow RASH (Red And Anarchist Skinheads).

Throughout the years he was fighting Nazis on the streets, organizing the security of punk/hardcore gigs, taking part in countless demos, training kids in martial arts.

Neo-Nazis hated Ivan, always scared of him as one of their most dangerous enemies. His photos, address and death threats to him were posted on countless Neo-Nazis web-sites.

He had been attacked many times, ambushed near his house, always jumped by numerous opponents packed with knifes, bats and screwdrivers. He used to spend weeks in hospitals, often balancing on the edge between life and death. But he always stayed true to his beliefs and ideals.

Always on the front line. Always ready to fight any enemy, even when outnumbered. His nickname – Kostolom (“Bonecrusher” in Russian ) spoke for itself.

Ivan was ambushed near his apartment. The cowards shot him twice in the back of his head, too scared to face him even with a gun in their hands.

He lived his life like a warrior and died like a true hero.

Rest in peace, uncle Vanya! You are in our hearts forever! Never forget!

November 17th, 2009: 26-year-old antifascist skinhead Ivan Khutorskoy murdered

2009-12-21T05:58:00.003-05:00

Anti-Fascist Youth Activist Killed In Moscow

A member of an anti-fascist youth group in Russia has been shot dead in Moscow, according to investigators.

Violent clashes between activists have become more common in Russia's capital
The young man died from head wounds after being shot during a clash with ultra-nationalists in eastern Moscow on Monday evening.

It is reported that he was the informal leader of a committee called Collective Action and is the sixth anti-fascist to be killed in the capital since 2006.

A spokeswoman from the committee identified the victim as 26-year-old Ivan Khutorskoy during an interview with a Moscow-based radio station.

Mr Khutorskoy's role in the group included organising security at anti-fascist rock concerts and he also ran free-style fighting tournaments.

He was nicknamed "Bonebreaker" and had reportedly taken part in street battles with Russian nationalists.

This was not the first time Mr Khutorskoy had been attacked by nationalists.

It is thought he had survived attacks involving a knife, a baseball bat and a screwdriver on three previous occasions.

Fascist gangs have become a growing problem in Russia in recent years and as a result anti-fascist youth groups have raised their profiles.

The fascist gangs typically target non-Slavic migrants and people they perceive as anti-Russian.

Confrontations in Moscow have become increasingly common and violent.
Experts have linked the killing to the arrests earlier this month of two nationalists suspected of the high-profile shooting of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova in January.

Russian anti-fascist activist shot dead in Moscow

* Death follows arrests of ultra-nationalists

* 26-year-old campaigner died on spot

MOSCOW, Nov 17 (Reuters) - An anti-fascist campaigner was shot dead in Moscow, investigators said on Tuesday, in what a fellow activist said may have been revenge for the arrests of ultra-nationalists earlier this month.

A man opened fire on an "active member of the anti-fascist movement" on Monday evening in the Russian capital, state investigators said in a statement. He died on the spot.

Local media reports identified him as 26-year-old Ivan Khutorskoy.

"Various motives are being explored, including that he was murdered for his involvement in the anti-fascist movement," the investigative branch of the Prosecutor-General's Office said in a statement posted on their website, sledcomproc.ru.

Earlier in November, two ultra-nationalists were arrested for the murder of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and opposition reporter Anastasia Baburova, who were gunned down in broad daylight near the Kremlin in January.

In 2006, Markelov represented the mother of an anti-fascist campaigner who he said was killed by neo-Nazis.

A fellow anti-fascist campaigner, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters Monday's murder could be out of spite: "Ivan (Khutorskoy) knew Markelov. His murder was either revenge, or a challenge to the authorities following the arrests."

Leftist political website ikd.ru wrote: "For the majority of Ivan's friends, it's clear that his murder was carried out by Russian Nazis."

Russia suffers from a high number of street attacks on its migrant workers, mostly dark-skinned Muslims who come from former Soviet countries, that are widely blamed on neo-Nazis. (Reporting by Amie Ferris-Rotman; Editing by Charles Dick)

Leader of Russian anti-fascist skinheads killed in Moscow

Ivan Khutorskoy, one of the leaders of the Russian left-wing skinhead movement was shot dead in Moscow on Monday evening. The victim’s friends and relatives see political motives behind the murder.

Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda reports that 26-year-old Khutorskoy was killed with two pistol shots in the back of the head in the stairwell of the apartment building where he lived.

According to several Russian leftist skinhead websites, Ivan Khutorskoy was one of the leaders of the movement in Russia. His activities included providing security at concerts and organizing mixed fights among young leftists and anarchists. Khutorskoy survived three attempts on his life over the past four years. In 2005, several attackers slashed his head with a razor. Later he was repeatedly stabbed in the neck with a screwdriver and beaten with a baseball bat, and he was stabbed in the stomach with a knife in January this year.

The “Collective Action” website wrote on Tuesday that all Khutorskoy’s friends and comrades blamed the murder on Russian neo-Nazi groups.

The website also reminded that this was the sixth time an anti-fascist activist has been killed in Moscow over the past 5 years. Police have solved one such case, after which several activists of right-wing skinhead groups were sentenced to prison terms.

Antiracists and far-right youths battle in Moscow

2009-12-21T05:53:00.002-05:00

November 18, 2009

By MANSUR MIROVALEV and STEVE GUTTERMAN (AP)

MOSCOW — A simmering confrontation between far-right youths and ant-racist activists has erupted into Moscow's streets after the fatal shooting of an anti-racist activist known as the Bonebreaker.

The violence stems from deep animus between two aggressive camps with starkly different visions of Russia's future — neo-Nazi skinheads who rank in the tens of thousands and militant anti-racist groups that call themselves Antifa, short for anti-fascist.

Former punk rocker Ivan Khutorskoi, 26, provided security for meetings of antifascists. He also was known for organizing underground bare-knuckle boxing matches among them, and taking part in violent attacks on ultranationalists.

Khutorskoi was gunned down in his apartment building on the city's outskirts Monday night. A day later, dozens of masked men pelted the headquarters of the pro-Kremlin youth group Young Russia with stones, trash and steel rods, Young Russia's leader said.

Kremlin critics say Russia's leadership created Young Russia and similar youth organizations to keep its political opponents in check and provide support, and sometimes muscle, on the streets. Anti-racist groups claim they have close ties with the ultranationalists they call fascists or Nazis.

Nobody was hurt in the attack late Tuesday on the office of Young Russia. But its message, delivered first with projectiles and then over the Internet, seemed clear.

"If no one but us tries to stop Nazis and those who provide cover for them, we will act by all means necessary," blogger Anarcho Punk wrote Wednesday. Other anti-racist bloggers said the attack was retaliation for what they claimed were the group's links to Russian neo-Nazis. They "dedicated" the assault to their leader, Khutorskoi — an outsized figure and a role model among antifascists, who say he had survived three previous assassination attempts. He was shot twice in the back of the head near the door to his apartment on Moscow's eastern outskirts, police said.

Khutorskoi sometimes provided security at press conferences of Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer hated by ultranationalists — but not at the one last January after which Markelov and a journalist were fatally shot on the street.

Antifa groups have been rapidly adding to their ranks in Russia in recent years, said Galina Kozhevnikova, the director of Sova, a respected independent hate-crime watchdog monitoring group. She said their ideology attracts leftist-minded youth and people concerned about persistent hate crimes and xenophobia in today's Russia.

"The army of ultranationalists is definitely bigger, as the movement is much older," Kozhevnikova said.

Pro-Kremlin youth groups like Young Russia are also a significant force. Experts believe their emergence was a Kremlin response to the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, where youth groups played a key role in street protests that ushered a pro-Western presidential candidate to power.

Young Russia is known for street rallies and pranks against anti-Kremlin politicians. The group has also been involved in attacks on anti-government protesters and opposition youth activists.

Young Russia's leader, Maxim Mishchenko, said about 80 masked men attacked the office in central Moscow. A 22-year old attacker was seized by Young Russia activists and handed over to police, he said.

Anti-fascist bloggers claimed Mishchenko, a Russian parliament member with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, has close ties with Russky Obraz, a radical ultranationalist group that antiracists claim was behind Khutorskoi's killing.

Mishchenko denied the allegations, calling them "as absolute lie."

A spokesman for Russky Obraz, Yevgeny Valayev, told The Associated Press that the group had "no Kremlin-appointed supervisors" but had cooperated with Mishchenko on several initiatives, including an extreme nationalist march in Moscow early this month.

National Socialist Front members ambushed by antifa in Chicago

2009-12-21T05:29:00.003-05:00

The National Socialist Front (NSF) is an offshoot of the dying American National Socialist Workers Party (ANSWP). The ANSWP was started by Bill White after he was expelled from the National Socialist Movement (NSM).

The ANSWP is attempting to recruit from a wide range of nazi groups including former NSM and WCOTC/Creativity members.

The organizations HQ appears to be out of Peoria, Illinois ( former location of Matt Hale's WCOTC).

They have carried out a few agitation actions including a flier distribution at the annual South Side Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade (see video at bottom of post) and have several websites and youtube channels. The NSF appear to be in competition to the NSM and both are attempting to gather together whatever nazi elements still exist in the face of a general collapse of many organized Nazi groups.

The following was forwarded to 3WF.

.....................................................................................................................................................

November 23, 2009

A post by the National Socialist Front, based in northwest Chicagoland, describes two members fighting off six antifa after an attempted ambush on November 23.

Like most other neo-nazi reports, that's not how we heard it.

Piecing together overheard rumors and reading between the lines of the NSF report, it seems the NSF wasted several months communicating with someone claiming to be interested in starting a chapter within Chicago itself. The two neo-nazis met with this person at a restaurant on the southside, but at some point they realized what was going on and either flashed or drew a knife. The restaurant owner noticed this and called the police as a brawl broke out. One antifa may have been stabbed, but the injury was minor.

The police arrived and detained, possibly arresting the NSF members for their weapons. Either way, the neo-nazis probably had to ask the cops for a ride home after discovering their disabled or damaged vehicle.

The NSF was probably looking to start a new chapter to become more public and more aggressive in preparation for their announced "White Pride Worldwide" march, scheduled for March 21, 2010, apparently in Chicago proper. Though based in the burbs, some of their members were seen at a Christian Identity meeting held on Chicago's northwest side several months ago; in the wake of the arrest of Bill White and the collapse of the IL ANSWP, the NSF could be positioning themselves as a dominant faction of the Chicagoland white power movement.

Hopefully, this will cause some hesitation and confusion as the NSF tries to grow, as there are probably a few more false relationships budding under their noses. It shouldn't be long before this WP group devours itself, just like many before it.

................................................................................................................

Video: Illinois National Socialist Front Distributes Lit and Cds at Chicago's South Side Irish St. Patrick's Day Parade March 15, 2009

David Irving Website's HACKED!

2009-12-21T05:22:00.003-05:00

November 13, 2009

http://nyc.indymedia.org

By New Yorkers Against David Irving

Well, the crack forces used to guard David Irving's websites FAIL at doing the only thing asked of them. On the afternoon of November 13th, both http://fpp.co.uk and http://www.irvingbooks.com were hacked, the files, backups, databases, and emails destroyed. We can only imagine his tour is not going as well as he planned.

Neo Nazi David Irving's New Jersey speaking event is cancelled

2009-12-21T05:18:00.001-05:00

Friday, November 13 2009

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20091113153002775

New Jersey Residents Against David Irving (NJ-RADI) is pleased to
announce that American Legion post 174 (not 175 as a previous release
said) has agreed to cancel David Irving's planned speaking engagement
tonight.

After being informed by NJ-RADI that the person who had booked the
event, Elizabeth Meyer, was in fact a supporter of Mr. Irving's, and
being filled in on what exactly Mr. Irving's views are, ALH Post 174
attempted to contact Ms. Meyer to confirm. When she refused to return
any calls they canceled the event.

NJ-RADI is comprised of New Jersey residents who have come together to
oppose David Irving's tour of hate-speech and "historical revisionist"
nonsense. His meetings serve as both a fundraiser and a networking
event for Irving and other neo-nazi scum. We REFUSE to sit idly by and
allow our state to be used to these ends.

David Irving talk disrupted on Chicago northwest side

2009-12-21T05:12:00.003-05:00

11.24.2009

David Irving talk disrupted on NW side
Updated: A speech by Holocaust denier David Irving at the Edelweiss restaurant, 7650 W Irving Park, was disrupted and shut down by antifascists Monday night. 5-7 persons entered into the restaurant disrupting the event.

new antifa blog: On The Prowl

2009-12-21T05:00:00.001-05:00

On The Prowl was a publication formerly distributed by the Anti-Racist Action chapter in Toronto. In tribute, we have used the name for this blog (and for an accompanying yet to be published print version).

On The Prowl was initiated to report on international anarchist news with a focus on anti-fascist and anti-racist organizing in the Mid-Atlantic states. We hope to serve as a center of information on organizing and action in our region against racism and for a just, liberatory world. If you are interested in getting involved in organizing for this kind of world in our region (especially in the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and Delaware) please get in touch with us! We would love to have you involved in the fight against racism in our region.

-On The Prowl News

ontheprowlnews.wordpress.com <http://ontheprowlnews.wordpress.com>

Teabag America: When the Right Rises, What’s the Left to Do?

2009-11-22T06:50:00.008-05:00

An Interview with Quentin Williams by Matthew Lyons

"Quentin Williams" is a community organizer who has been tracking the anti-tax, anti-Obama Tea Party protests for the past several months.

ML: Please give us a little background about your political work and how you got interested in understanding the Tea Party movement.

QW: I came up in the global justice movement that took shape during the mass mobilizations of Seattle and their after effects around the year 2000. Those movements had a strong critique of the state and capital as the engines behind the isms we face. It was a “we are the people” against “them” type fight. But when I moved to Cincinnati, the Klan (which wasn’t the government or big business) still had a public display on the town square every holiday season and still marched on rare occasion.

My early political foundation didn’t account for another set of “the people” that was further to the right than and also in opposition to the state and capital. Instead of viewing Klan activity or that like it as an active political element on the landscape, most of my northern and city-living friends discounted them as irrelevant stuck-in-the-pasts. But that didn’t sit right with me.

Reading books like Making Race and Nation I understood that a major task of the state is to establish a nation loyal to it so that it may be productive. Since the U.S. started as a settler colony, that project of nation-building took on the trend of appeasing intra-white conflict at the expense of people of color (and at the expense of creating a more just society.) European-American conflict was avoided by providing former indentured servants with land in exchange for expanding the frontier by murdering indigenous inhabitants or as compensation for manning slave patrols. After the rise of factory work, this took on the form of two-tier wage systems and an inflated domestic standard of living compared to the Third World where the resources (and underpaid labor) that supported that standard came from.

The book Settlers by Sakai criticizes the U.S. labor movement and examines how white workers are an active participant in this compact. Whether it’s the New York City Draft riots in response to conscription during the Civil War, or the rise of the Klan and Jim Crow in response to Reconstruction, or Samuel Gompers’s imperial unionism, U.S. white workers have been willing to accept the extra spoils of U.S. imperialism and white supremacy in exchange for violently excluding people of color from the kitty.

Having rooted myself in immigrant worker struggles for the last six years, I’ve experienced this first hand. Long before the housing crisis put economic instability on the map, we were witnessing a shift to a new economy that globally decentralizes the spoils of capital and the required enforcement to elites in nations across the globe. The change is capital breaking its former compact with U.S. white workers and thus abandoning the most favorite nation agreement it had with the U.S. settler nation.

We’ve seen the standard of living for people within the U.S. decline and corporate ransacking such as Enron, WorldCom, etc. rise. Meanwhile the production that remains in the U.S. is drawing on labor pools from the largest migration of humans in history while government has gutted most of its regulatory institutions that could enforce standards.

We’re at a crossroads in this country where we won’t be living fat off the post World War II dominance the U.S. enjoyed for the past fifty years. Instead as scarcity creeps into people’s consciousness, we’ll have a choice of joining with those who have faced those conditions far longer or to turn to the historic resolution of crisis in a settler nation, increased opportunity through policing and repression in communities of color and a rigid narrowing of the definition of who belongs to the nation.

In 2005, the Minutemen were an early sign of that. Blaming undocumented migrants for overcrowded schools and overcapacity hospitals, they volunteered to do the job they decided government had failed to do, adequately patrol the border. The volunteer squads quickly spread across the country with a 600% increase in grassroots anti-immigrant activity in 2006/2007 to the point where places like Chicago had three different Minutemen chapters.

It was there, doing work to promote labor law enforcement and police accountability among immigrant workers, that I started to take the threat they posed more seriously. Mainly because, well, they were sending my organization and me in particular serious threats.

The Tea Party movement is even more alarming to me.

ML: Where have you encountered Tea Party activism and what have you observed?

QW: Last Spring, we saw a blip on the radar when small Tea Party rallies were held across the country to protest the failures of the stimulus package and what they saw as the excess of government spending. Those groups built momentum over the summer disrupting town halls and sinking the prospects of health care reform that could provide for people’s needs. Driven by talk show personalities with significant air time, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, they held a 50,000 to 75,000, 99% white “National Taxpayer March” on September 12th, 2009 in Washington, DC. I went to take video.

Gathered around the Capitol were tens of thousands of people framing Obama as both a fascist and a socialist, praising Joe Wilson, the Congressman who yelled “you lie” during Obama’s address to Congress, and hailing capitalism and the free market as solutions.

The Right had found their umbrella issue, government spending, that could tap into a public sentiment and mobilize opposition without even mentioning race, gender, sexuality, immigration or any of the things that get them tangled up in accusations of bigotry. This was people wanting “liberty” plain and simple. There to defend their grandchildren against a government run amok and mortgaging their future. What could be more noble?

ML: How does this compare with other right-wing activity you've encountered?

QW: What’s most alarming to me is that this was not a hard right mobilization. People who get involved in Minuteman activity, for example, tend to already have solidified their position. Lines are clearly drawn. This however, was a recruiting opportunity for the far Right. Most people I encountered were participating in their first political activity. On the mall, they met groups like the American Patriot Committee that stood on a corner doing anti-government spiels, handing out cards, and signing people up forty at a time. The veil of government spending acted as a gateway where white conservatives could encounter bigger badder right-wing activity and actively march on in that direction.

ML: The dynamic you’re describing reminds me of the Patriot movement of the mid-1990s – the folks who organized “citizen militias” to defend themselves against a supposed globalist plot to seize control of the United States. At the time, some leftists warned that the Patriot/militia movement was essentially a front for neo-nazi propaganda and organizing, while other leftists said, no, these aren’t nazis or racists, they’re just anti-government activists who are a little too caught up in conspiracy theories. That debate often missed the key point, which was that the Patriot movement was an ideological hodge-podge, a meeting ground for neo-nazis and other folks. It was in fact the first truly mass movement in the U.S. since World War II that brought fascists and non-fascists together in coalition. And that was its most important and most dangerous feature.

The Tea Party movement certainly isn’t a carbon copy of the Patriot movement, but it has some of the same qualities, including (a) the driving force behind it seems to be coming largely from outside of established political elites, and (b) it is a political mish-mash that brings together conservatives, far rightists, and a lot of people whose politics is not clearly defined. As with the Patriot movement fifteen years ago, a lot of leftists and liberals have this impulse to oversimplify what is going on, to reduce it to one political current. In particular, the idea that the Tea Party movement is essentially an “Astroturf” phenomenon – fake grassroots activity orchestrated by the GOP leadership – seems to me to be a drastic and dangerous oversimplification. Same for the claim that this is essentially a reincarnation of the Christian Right. Christian Rightists are one element in the mix, but just one of many.

By contrast, one of the best commentaries I’ve seen on the Tea Party movement is Glenn Greenwald’s piece “Glenn Beck and left-right confusion”: “These ‘tea party’ and ‘9/12’ protests are composed of factions with wildly divergent views about most everything. From paleoconservatives to Ron-Paul-libertarians to LaRouchians to Confederacy-loving, race-driven Southerners to Christianist social conservatives to single-issue fanatics (abortion, guns, gays) to standard Limbaugh-following, Bush-loving Republicans, these protests are an incoherent mishmash without any cohesive view other than ‘Barack Obama is bad.’ ... Many of these people despised the Bush-led GOP and many of them loved it.” Greenwald emphasizes that many of the themes that Glenn Beck and his comrades are promoting cut across standard left-right lines – like hostility to Wall Street and the national security state – but it’s the Republicans who are exploiting this energy and anger. I would add, just because the Republicans are exploiting it doesn’t mean they control it, and it wouldn’t take much to tip a large part of that dynamic into far-right radical opposition mode.

One last question: How do you think leftists should respond to the Tea Party movement?

QW: So we know we’re in trouble when people are more drawn to a movement that publicly describes itself as “teabaggers” than to any left formation, but look.

U.S. history is partly defined by a minority violent white street-force threatening to destabilize the Union during eras of social reorganization. The Left, specifically Northern and urban, ignores or dismisses right populism as the crazies. Doing so assumes a certain civilized or evolved character of the U.S. state. It doesn't account for the heart of the country being up for grabs. Doesn't recognize a force to the right of government and corporation and that the institutions of power are in play answering to those forces.

We buy into our own illusions of American exceptionalism and assume that far-right activity is outside the realm of possibilities. As a result, our organizations don’t take internal security as seriously as we should. ACORN’s recent sting ought to correct that for all of us. And we don’t establish a pole of opposition to pull government to the left.

Hegemony is in favor of the right. It’s no wonder that the right populist groups are drawing on legacies of the Revolutionary War like minutemen and patriot committees and teabaggers. Because our communities were in chains, servitude, or at war with U.S. colonialism, we can’t draw upon the dominant mythologies to mobilize.

At the same time, we keep attempting to argue our positions rationally within the framework of the right, which is a losing battle. Karl Rove told a New York Times reporter that liberals study reality while he creates it. Rationality and sound argument had no place at the Teabagger mobilization. It was about emotion and imagery and straight-out lies (like Obama is a Muslim Marxist in the service of Al-Qaeda).

That’s not a position you attempt to present your arguments to. the Right is not concerned with presenting the scientific argument of anti-gay, anti-immigrant, or anti-socialist policies. They hit you with the hardest exaggerated punch possible so that you’re scrambling to get back to Center and the best you’ll do is retreat a few steps from the pole they stake.

When it comes to public sentiment its not about the right answer, it’s about the answer that resonates. Since there have always been two histories of the U.S., of dominance and resistance, there are also two sets of mythologies to draw from. Attempting to make policy gains by not challenging the assumptions of power, we lose the opportunity to draw upon the (counter) hegemony that exists within communities of color where there’s no debate about whether Glen Beck is racist, for example. As a result, we are ineffective within the white political sphere and uninspiring within the communities we attempt to mobilize.

When the Right so publicly rears its head, there’s a temptation to place major energies into explicit counter-right organizing. Doing so, however, continues to focus the debate on their terms and our energies in their direction. We lack more than clear ways of framing the issues. Rather than overemphasizing the place of such mobilizations, their stepping up should be a call to escalate our own work. Instead of focusing on that mobilized minority, how do allies imagine organizing the potential base of the right in a left direction? For those doing direct organizing, when the Right is talking revolution or secession on the steps of the Capitol, how do we raise the stakes of our own organizing beyond the technocratic policy-based campaigns to something as big and bad and threatening? That, to me, is the question to address today.

Minneapolis, MN - Oppose the neo-Nazi N.S.M. this Sat. Oct 3rd

2009-10-01T10:11:00.000-04:00

***Please Forward Far & Wide***
Minneapolis, MN - Oppose the neo-Nazi N.S.M.

Defend Our Neighborhoods!
Defend Anti-Racist Organizing!

10:00 am Saturday
October 3rd 2009
Lake Street & 22nd Ave
(outside the Midtown YWCA)

This Saturday, October 3rd, 2009, the neo-nazi National Socialist Movement
(NSM) has threatened to demonstrate against an anti-racist workshop being
held at the YWCA on East Lake Street in Minneapolis. The NSM has declared
the anti-racist organizers "traitors" to white supremacy.

This provocation also has a wider goal: The NSM has been holding racist
anti-immigrant rallies in southern Minnesota, and now they are seeking to
establish a presence inside the City of Minneapolis. For years Minneapolis
has been a virtual "no-go" area for organized racist activity, due to the
efforts of young anti-racist organizers.

In the wake of the racist attacks in Brooklyn Park last week, the nazis'
threat cannot be ignored. They plan to bring their racist, homophobic,
anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic message of division and hate right into the
heart of the city. They must not go unopposed!

10:00 am Saturday
October 3rd 2009
Lake Street & 22nd Ave
(outside the Midtown YWCA)

Solidarity Against Racism!
No to the Nazis!

The legitimate critical review

2009-09-26T18:45:00.001-04:00

excerpted from, Lenin, Leninism and some Leftovers

"The legitimate critical review

The fact that this was (the Russian Revolution) an immense struggle under extreme conditions and with major limitations on understanding and resources doesn’t adequately explain, and certainly doesn’t justify, the eventual outcomes. The historical fact is that with dismaying speed, fetishized and mystified organizational forms swallowed emerging capacities to elaborate a revolutionary practice. Instead of facilitating the emancipation and liberation of the oppressed and exploited, monumental piles of shit in Russia and around the world were the result. This outcome was not the unavoidable collateral damage from the struggle against “class enemies,” real and fabricated, and it was not the inevitable consequence of any “objective conditions.” To a significant degree, it was the result of policies and approaches which had available alternatives, and, while the mere existence of other options does not prove they would have been more successful in either the long or the short run, could the outcomes have been much worse?

To me it seems undeniable that responsibility for the degeneration of the Russian revolution rests on Lenin. Particularly on the Lenin that is not the insurrectionist revolutionary of 1917, but the architect of the revolutionary party in 1903 and the theorist of the worker’s state in 1921 and the NEP in 1922. This full legacy is complex and ambiguous, but only apologists and ignorant people deny that it has elements that undermine the democratic and autonomous popular movements and institutions that must be the substance of the struggle for communism. But this darker side of Lenin is also relevant to our current problems and potentials – relevant to many important questions where none of us have been inoculated against screwing up, and, in fact, have become quite good at it. Accordingly this side of Lenin’s legacy does not subtract from his historical significance, it provides additional reasons to take it seriously...

...So I want to deal with two partial strands of the history. In one, the distinctively Leninist elements are in opposition to the future Bolshevik degeneration. In the other, his positions are a significant contribution to the process. The first strand relates to inner-party life, specifically the issues of debate and criticism that are codified under the heading of democratic centralism. The second theme I take from the anarchist, Larry Gambone (apologies if I get any of it wrong) who stresses Lenin’s conflation of the concepts of centralization and unification, in a way that facilitates a reliance on mechanical and instrumental management techniques rather than the expansion of popular participation in a more organic and (dare I say it) more dialectical approach to the revolutionary process. I’m dwelling on these issues, not only because they have substantial intrinsic historic interest, but because I believe the questions involved and the range of inadequate answers to them, still plague us."

Sketchy Thoughts: Drawing Lessons from Our Past - Lenin and Leninism

2009-09-25T20:39:00.004-04:00

What can we draw from the past? And how do we draw things from the past? These questions, when you get down to it, are key to our project.

Lenin is a figure whose historic role was so major, that to think about him in isolation is impossible. We contextualize him whether we want to or not, in ways both conscious and unconscious. For some comrades he "has to be" one of history's good guys, for others he "has to be" one of its villains.

Atttempting a more nuanced view, and an appraisal of what we can learn - both good and bad - from the Leninism experience, Don Hammerquist has written an important length discussion of the Russian revolutionary and his legacy. Hammerquist has more experience than most of us in that regard, having been an important figure in the Sojourner Truth Organization in the 1970s. As Michael Staudenmaier tells us, STO was a

revolutionary group based largely in Chicago during the 1970’s and 1980’s. STO, as it is commonly known, created a small but vibrant political tendency around the concepts of challenging dual consciousness, opposing white supremacy, supporting extra-union organizing in factory settings, defending anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles, and building an internal culture of intellectual rigor and sophistication.

Over the next little while, i will be posting Hammerquist's discussion of Lenin, and responses from other comrades, on this blog and as PDFs on the Kersplebedeb website. To follow the discussion, just follow the Leninism label.

Don Hamerquist: Lenin, Leninism, and some leftovers

Tom Wetzel's Reply to Hamerquist

Noel Ignatiev: C.L.R. James on the Marxist Organization

Dave Renney: Scattered thoughts on the Leninist Party and Don’s Paper

White supremacists, protesters stick to different parts of the city

2009-09-03T02:01:00.002-04:00

"GREENSBORO — The white-supremacist National Socialist Movement held a daylong business meeting Saturday in a location kept secret from counter-demonstrators who decried the movement’s racist ideology in a largely peaceful gathering downtown.

The movement’s “regional conference” occurred at a hotel in western Greensboro. The News & Record is not identifying the location at the request of city police, who fear violence if the group’s more aggressive foes learn where its members are staying through this morning...

Though small, the National Socialist Movement is like a number of other white-supremacy or white-separatist groups that are trying to attract new members from people who avoided extremist groups in the past but now are perturbed by the election of the nation’s first African American president, the economic downturn and such issues as illegal immigration"

read more

Health Care Mobs

2009-09-01T18:57:00.001-04:00

From the Rustbelt Radical

The “reform” on offer goes nowhere to meet the concerns of advocates of genuine national health care and yet too many of the promoters of single-payer seem content to “fight the right” without realizing that means Obama. Obama’s “reform” proposals do much more to stop real reform than the idiocy of Rush since it silences advocates of meaningful reform by placing them in a camp they do not agree with; a camp whose proposals will codify many of the worst aspects of our health care system while claiming to be change.

read more

"Black National Socialism is No Utopia"

2009-08-30T03:32:00.002-04:00

From the Huffington Pos t

Race-based attacks and criticism of President Obama have been on the rise during the dog days of August. And they're not just happening at health care town hall protests.

A reader sent over a picture of a group of protesters camped outside Rep. Susan Davis's (D-Calif.). "Neighborhood Day" event this past week, brandishing signs calling the president a Black Supremacist and suggesting he's a Nazi disciple.

"Black National Socialism Is Not Utopia," reads one poster.

Another has a picture of Obama's former preacher, Jeremiah Wright, juxtaposed with a picture of Adolph Hitler and one of picture of Obama and Wright together. "Obama's Church: Black Supremacist," it reads.

Toxic to Democracy: Conspiracy Theories, Demonization, & Scapegoating

2009-08-30T03:11:00.002-04:00

By Chip Berlet
Political Research Associates

Charged with the fatal shooting of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in a church in Wichita, Kansas, last Sunday morning, Scott Philip Roeder is a regular consumer of conservative talk radio, television, and websites. But did Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck—or any other commentator whipping up an audience with overheated demonizing rhetoric—actually help pull the trigger?

It’s not that simple, explains Chip Berlet, senior analyst for the independent think tank Political Research Associates (PRA), in a new study entitled Toxic to Democracy: Conspiracy Theories, Demonization, and Scapegoating. “They are not legally culpable for the assassination of Dr. Tiller, says Berlet, “but they must share some portion of moral responsibility for creating a dangerous environment."

According to Berlet:

"Right-wing pundits demonize scapegoated groups and individuals in our society, implying that it is urgent to stop them from wrecking the nation. Some angry people in the audience already believe conspiracy theories in which the same scapegoats are portrayed as subversive, destructive, or evil. Add in aggressive apocalyptic ideas that suggest time is running out and quick action mandatory and you have a perfect storm of mobilized resentment threatening to rain bigotry and violence across the United States."

Read the entire Media Release Here