Editor’s Prefatory Note:

Karl Marx: rarely read and less understood, but vehemently hated by millions. Whence this animosity? Could it be..manufactured? [CC BY by erdquadrat]

The Greanville Post does not wish to engage in yet another polemic on Marxism, the “evils of Stalinism,”  or communism in general, but a few points need to be made in our view to make this essay as clear and effective as it deserves.
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It scarcely needs saying that we find this article provocative, powerful, and useful, hence our publishing it.  Berman—a “Marxian humanist” associated with “democratic socialist” circles such as Dissent Magazine— is a well established academic and political scientist.  The text, however, presents us with a subtle problem common in democratic socialist commentary which we think important enough to mention: In his presentation Berman—perhaps accidentally— besides using cliché anti-communist tropes like “police states”, perpetuates the notion that the regimes in the former Soviet Union and China under Mao, as well as elsewhere (i.e., Cuba) were “[fully mature] Communist systems”, which, of course, they weren’t.  In our view, such regimes, up until the moment they were dissolved or drastically altered to favor market  “solutions” were stunted processes, in large measure for exogenous reasons.
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This finetuning of the focus is important for reasons I lay out below. First, some contextualization. The label “democratic socialism” carries unpleasant Cold War connotations, associated with the ugly anti-communist, pro-imperialist role played by many liberals during that period. The term seems to concede a rightwing trope, that true socialism admits only of two variants: one “democratic” (as judged by American bourgeois standards, of all things!), the other inherently tyrannical. We find this distinction spurious, cowardly, and intellectually dishonest. In this historical phase of capitalist hegemony, the regimes ruling the world in practice, whatever their theoretical formulations, exhibit a bewildering array of manifestations, ranging from “democracy” as we understand it in the United States, to outright dictatorship. It bears noting here for those who only ascribe “undemocratic” tendencies to socialism that the world has seen and continues to see many capitalist nations with brutal, authoritarian regimes in power, where the capitalist class, merrily allied with the state, thrives in an atmosphere where democracy is non-existent.
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The same can be said for abject poverty. Haiti, again worth noting, is a thoroughly capitalist nation. In fact, the so-called “capitalist periphery” with dozens of countries in a state of perennial underdevelopment, seems to produce chiefly “failed states,” with torrents of poverty (and oppression) in direct proportion to the purity of its free market ideology. The more laissez faire the capitalism, the more desperate the situation of the masses.  This is indisputable. Hence the measurement of capitalism vs. socialism requires extra care.
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After the turn of the 19th century, and the exhaustion of the Napoleonic wars (which should be seen as an effort by the ancien regime to contain the spread of egalitarian ideas issuing from the by then moribund French revolution, a form of proto anti-communism), capitalism developed largely unmolested by the remnants of the old order. We must ask: Why did the feudal forces collapse so conclusively after the bourgeois revolutions?
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Again, this is not the place to discuss this kind of issue in depth, let alone the technical differences, but one argument seems obvious: capitalism, the challenging system, was not that terribly different in its apparent social effects from feudalism. At the core, there was much congruency and continuity in the value systems defining how the new industrial magnates and the old nobles chose to live.  Not surprising, then, that after a couple of generations, and often much sooner, capitalist tycoons were marrying their daughters to impoverished nobles. This was perfectly logical.  Leaving aside the temporary contempt felt by the old aristos for the parvenus, both feudals and capitalists saw nothing wrong with outrageous wealth concentration and inequality, nor with the full enjoyment of accumulated riches. Both deeply believe that class divisions are not only natural but a good thing, that the masses (“the rabble”) are incapable of sound self-government, and that in consequence rank and hierarchy are inevitable. Indeed, both feudals and capitalists consider luxurious living, and the requisite armies of servants, employees, and exploited labor in all its forms a natural condition of civilization. Communism, which took equality and popular democracy seriously, clashed head-on with that arrangement. No wonder it elicited such a fierce and determined resistance.
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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he above compels a good measure of caution in judging the good and bad of systems;  if nothing else, we must always heed with fairness the historical context, something that in history is as rare as the Unicorn. It’s worth recalling that capitalism, emerging over centuries from the womb of feudalism, overthrew the old order through a series of bourgeois revolutions and independence movements, which, while promising democracy and egalitarianism for all, delivered the fruits primarily to the top layers of the coalescing new society, namely the rising mercantile-industrial elites that today constitute the world’s corporate superclass. America and France provide the best known examples of these bourgeois republican revolutions, but Britain also had a similar shakeup in the 17th century civil wars, a tumult that ended with a regicide and Cromwell at the helm of the nation, representing the triumph of the “middle class” (the term used for businesspeople and trades in feudal setups).  The fact the British later reinstated the monarchy does not cancel the actual shifts in power. And even in nations where a powerful monarchy survived into the 20th century, i.e., Russia, Austro-Hungary, or Germany, the capitalists met few hurdles in their path.
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By the end of WWI, capitalism had won, and it proceeded to extend its tentacles worldwide with little if any feudal opposition. More significant, by the time the first challenges to capitalism began to sprout up, the product of its own predatory nature, first in the form of utopian socialism, later as scientific or Marxian socialism, capitalism was already a mature system. All the above is only meant to underscore the necessity to weigh these and many other factors when evaluating the performance of socialism on the global stage. The trajectory of socialism can’t be measured against the trajectory of capitalism as if they were equivalent phenomena. Socialism never had a chance to develop properly, relatively free from internal and external hostility. In fact, neither the Soviet Union nor Maoist China could be understood as the culmination of the natural and unperturbed evolution of communist construction, as capitalism can. Instead, as history played its cards, these were mutant societies, in transition, badly deformed from birth by the constant and unrelenting blows dealt by the much more powerful capitalist world, a system of organized hostility chiefly led after World War II by the United States. That’s why, for example, the advent and consequences of Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, etc., with all their real and imagined flaws, can’t be judged solely as the product of “socialism’s inherent tendencies toward tyranny, a police state,” and all the other horrific vices ascribed to communism in practice by the apologists of capitalism. When we take full account of the impact of these constant wars imposed on these tentative societies emerging from centuries of backwardness and long years of civil war and gruesome dislocations (the Soviet Union alone lost more than 26 million people in the war against fascist Germany, the equivalent of wiping out of the entire populations of Texas , New York, and California in the US at the time, plus incalculable damage to her industrial infrastructure) a different, far more balanced picture emerges. But for that to happen we must be prepared to look at the adduced shortcomings of these experiments in non-capitalist social engineering with honesty and compassion, something that is rather scarce or non-existent among capitalist critics (to be expected) but also common among many soi-disant socialists (regrettable if not abominable).—Patrice Greanville

The following essay is the introduction to the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the Communist Manifesto, published this March.

By Marshall Berman

M. Berman

TODAY, IN the early-twenty-first century, the Communist Manifesto is far less read than it once was. It is hard for people who are just growing up to grasp the way in which, for most of the twentieth century, Communist governments dominated much of the world. Communist educational systems were powerful and successful in many ways. But they were twisted in the way they canonized Marx and Engels as official patron saints. It is hard for people who have grown up without patron saints—Americans should not be too hasty to include themselves—to grasp this idea. But for decades, all over the world, any candidate for advancement in a Communist organization was expected to know certain passages and themes from Marx’s writings by heart, and to quote them fluently. (And expected not to know many other Marxian ideas: ideas of alienated labor, ideas of domination by the state, ideas of freedom.)

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the communist political system came apart remarkably fast. All over Central and Eastern Europe, Marx and Engels monuments were torn down. Pictures of people doing this were page-one material for a while. Some people noted skeptically that tearing down public monuments requires lots of organization, and wondered who was doing this organizing. Whatever the answers, it seems certain that, at the end of the twentieth century, there were plenty of ex-citizens of Communist police states who felt that life without Marx was liberation.

Ironically, this thrill was shared by people who were most devoted to Marx. Readers who love writers do not want to see them erected as Sunday-school sages. They can—I should say we can—only be thrilled by this loss of sanctity. Marx’s canonization after 1917 by Communist governments was a disaster. A thinker needs beatification like a hole in the head!

Intellectuals all over the world have welcomed this end-of-the-century crash as a fortunate fall. One of my old bosses at City College, who had grown up under Communist governments in Eastern Europe, said now that the Wall was down, I shouldn’t be allowed to teach Marx anymore, because “1989 proves that courses in Marxism are obsolete.” I told him today’s Marx, without police states, was a lot more exciting than yesterday’s patron saint. Now we could have direct access to a thinker who could lead us through the dynamics and contradictions of capitalist life. He laughed then. But by the end of the century, it seemed that the thrill had caught on. John Cassidy, the New Yorker magazine’s financial correspondent, told us in 1997 that Wall Street itself was full of study groups going through Marx’s writings, trying to grasp and synthesize many of the ideas that are central to his work: “globalization, inequality, political corruption, modernization, impoverishment, technological progress…the enervating nature of modern existence….” He was “the next great thinker” on the Street.

What are Marx’s connections like? First—and startling when you’re not prepared for it—is praise for capitalism so extravagant, it skirts the edge of awe. Very early on, in “Part One: Bourgeois and Proletarians,” Marx describes the processes of material construction that it perpetrates, and the emotions that go with them. He is distinctive in the way he connects historical processes and emotions. He highlights the sense of being caught up in something magical, uncanny:

The bourgeoisie has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways…clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of he ground—what earlier century had any idea that such productive powers slumbered in the womb of social labor?

Or, a page before, on an innate dynamism that is spiritual as well as material:

This first section of the Manifesto contains many passages like these, asserted in major chords. Marx’s contemporaries didn’t miss them, and some of his fellow radicals, like Proudhon and Bakunin, saw his appreciation of capitalism as a betrayal of its victims. This charge is still heard today, and deserves serious response. Marx hates capitalism, but he also thinks it has brought immense real benefits, spiritual as well as material, and he wants the benefits to be spread around and enjoyed by everybody, rather than monopolized by a small ruling class. This is very different from the totalitarian rage that typifies radicals who want to blow it all away. Sometimes, as with Proudhon, it is just modern times they hate: they dream of golden-age peasant villages where everyone was happily in his place (or in her place just behind him). For other radicals, from the author of the Book of Revelation to Thomas Müntzer to Joseph Conrad’s Verloc to the Unabomber, it goes over the edge into something like rage against reality, against human life itself. Apocalyptic rage offers immediate, sensational cheap thrills. Marx’s perspective is more complex and nuanced, and hard to sustain if you’re not grown up. On the other hand, if you are grown up, and attuned to a world full of complexity and ambiguity, Marx may fit you better than you thought.

Marx is not the first communist to admire capitalism for its creativity. This attitude can be found in some of the great “utopian socialists” of the generation before him, like Robert Owen and Saint-Simon and their brilliant followers. But Marx is the first writer to invent a style that brings this creativity to light before the early-twentieth century. (In French, with Baudelaire and Rimbaud, poetic language was a few decades ahead.) For readers who have grown up on T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and their successors, it shouldn’t be a problem to see how the Manifesto is a great piece of poetry. It throws together an enormous range of things and ideas that no one ever thought to throw together before. If you can get a feeling for Marx’s horizon, it will help to make the modern world make sense.

We could call the Manifesto’s style a kind of expressionist lyricism. Paragraphs break over us like waves that leave us shaking from the impact and wet with thought. This prose evokes breathless momentum, plunging ahead without guides or maps, breaking boundaries, piling up and layering things, ideas, experiences. Catalogues play a big role for Marx—as they do for his contemporaries Dickens and Whitman. Part of the enchantment of this style is the feeling that the lists are never exhausted, the catalogue is open to the present and the future, we are invited to pile on things, ideas, and experiences of our own, to pile ourselves on if we can find a way. But the items in the pile often seem to clash, and sometimes it feels like the whole aggregation could crash. From paragraph to paragraph, Marx makes readers feel like we are riding the fastest and grandest nineteenth-century train through the roughest and most perilous nineteenth-century terrain, and though we have splendid light, we are pushing through to where there is no track.

ONE FEATURE of modern capitalism that Marx most admires is its global horizon and cosmopolitan texture. Many people today talk about the global economy as if it had only just come into being. Marx helps us see the ways in which it has been operating all along.

The need for a constantly expanding market chases the bourgeois over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

Manifesto ends, is addressed to the “workers of all countries.”

One of the crucial events of modern times has been the unfolding of the first-ever world culture. Marx was writing at an historical moment when mass media were just developing. Marx worked in the vein of Goethe, who in his last year, speaking to Eckermann, described it as “world literature.” Writing more than a hundred and fifty years later, I think it is legitimate to call the new thing “world culture.” Marx shows how this culture evolves spontaneously from the world market:

In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants requiring for their satisfaction products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property…and from the numerous national and local literatures, there rises a world literature.

Marx believed that Shakespeare, writing at the very start of modernity, was the world’s first thoroughly modern writer. As a student, he learned many Shakespearean plays by heart. He didn’t realize, in the 1840s, how deeply involved with the English language he would become. After the failed 1848 Revolution in Germany, he spent about half his life in exile in London. He wrote hundreds of articles through the years, at first translated by Engels but increasingly in English, especially for the New York Daily Tribune, as “Our European Correspondent.” And he never stopped working on Capital, a book with footnotes from different languages and cultures on every page. In London his wife Jenny became a drama critic, writing for German papers about the London stage. His daughter Eleanor, the first English translator of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, and one of the inventors of “community organizing,” remembered growing up with the whole family on Hampstead Heath on Sundays, acting Shakespeare out. Meanwhile they were broke, desperate, evicted from apartments, unable to go out in the winter because so many of their clothes were in the pawnshop. But they kept on inventing the world.

Marx’s vision of world culture brings together several complex ideas. First, the expansion of human needs: the increasingly complex world market at once shapes and expands everybody’s desires. Marx wants us to imagine what it might mean in food, clothes, religion, love, and in our most intimate fantasies as well as our public presentations. Next, the idea of culture as “common property”: anything created by anyone anywhere is open and available to everyone everywhere. Entrepreneurs publish books (and e-books), produce plays and concerts, display visual art, and, in post-Marx centuries, create hardware and software for movies, radio, TV, and computers, in order to make money. Still, in this as in other ways, history slips through their fingers, so that people can possess culture—an idea, a poetic image, musical sound, Plato, Shakespeare, a Negro spiritual (his whole family learned them in the 1860s)—even if they can’t own it. If we can think about modern culture as “common property,” and the ways in which popular music, movies, literature, and TV can all make us feel more at home in the world, it can help us imagine how people all over the world could share the world’s resources someday.

This is a vision of culture rarely discussed, but it is one of the most expansive and hopeful things Marx ever wrote. In the last century or so, the development of movies, television, video, and computers have created a global visual language that brings the idea of world culture closer to home than ever, and the world beat comes through in the best of our music and books. That’s the good news. The bad news is how sour and bitter most left writing on culture has become. Sometimes it sounds as if culture were just one more Department of Exploitation and Oppression, containing nothing luminous or valuable in itself. At other times, it sounds as if people’s minds were empty vessels with nothing inside except what Capital put there. Read, or try to read, a few articles on “hegemonic/counterhegemonic discourse.”

The Manifesto occasionally makes some version of this claim. But it offers what strikes me as a much more trenchant indictment, one that holds up even at the top of the business cycle, when the bourgeoisie and its apologists are drowning in complacency. That indictment is Marx’s vision of what modern bourgeois society forces people to be: they have to freeze their feelings for each other to find a place in a cold world. Bourgeois society “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment.” It has “drowned every form of sentimental value in the icy waters of egotistical calculation.” It has “resolved personal worth into exchange-value.” It has collapsed every idea of freedom “into that single, unconscionable freedom—free trade.” It has “torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” It has “converted the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers.” “In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” It forces people to degrade themselves in order to survive.

For more than 150 years, we have seen a huge literature that attacks the brutality of a class where those who are most comfortable with brutality are most likely to succeed. But those same social forces are also pressing on the members of that immense group that Marx calls “the modern working class.” This class has always been afflicted with a case of mistaken identity. Many of Marx’s readers have always thought that “working class” meant only men in boots—in factories, in industry, with blue collars, with calloused hands, lean and hungry. These readers then note the changing nature of the workforce: increasingly educated, white-collar, working in human services (rather than in growing food or making things), in or near the middle class—and they infer the Death of the Subject, and conclude that the working class is disappearing and all hopes for it are doomed. Marx did not think the working class was shrinking: in all industrial countries it was already, or in the process of becoming, “the immense majority.” Its swelling numbers, Marx thought, would enable it to “win the battle of democracy.” The basis for his political arithmetic was a concept that was both simple and highly inclusive:

The modern working class developed…a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These workers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are commodities, like every other article of commerce, and are constantly exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition and the fluctuations of the market.

Marx understands that many people in this class don’t know their address. They wear elegant clothes and return to nice houses, because there is great demand for their labor right now, and they are doing well. They may identify happily with the owners of capital, and have no idea how contingent and fleeting their benefits are. They may not discover who they are, and where they belong, until they are laid-off or fired—or outsourced, or deskilled, or downsized. And other workers, lacking credentials, not dressed so nicely, may not get the fact that many who push them around are really in their class, and, despite their pretentions, share their vulnerability. How can this reality be put across to people who don’t get it, or can’t bear it? The complexity of these ideas helped to create a new vocation, central to modern society: the organizer.

One group whose identity as workers was crucial for Marx was his own class: intellectuals.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to in reverent awe. It has converted the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers.

This does not mean that these activities lose meaning or value. If anything, they become more urgently meaningful. But the only way people can get the freedom to do what they can do is by working for capital. Marx himself had to live this way. Over a forty-year span, he wrote brilliant journalism. Sometimes he was paid, often not. Marx was brilliant in figuring out how workers could organize, and how their capacity to organize could make nineteenth-century life a great deal more human than it had been in the 1840s, the days of the Manifesto, when he was just starting out. But nobody then had figured out how the creators of culture could organize. When Marx, and every other writer and artist of those days, went up against capital, he went alone.

Manifesto might be prophetic. Most people I spoke with said China had no class system, no stratification, so Marx’s categories were meaningless there. A few suggested that no one believed this, but that today as in the past, Chinese people knew what they had to say.

Students told me, sadly, that my paper was being left out of the conference proceedings. Some said they would love to read Marx if they could. I told them the crucial idea was that they too were part of the working class, and the working class had the capacity to organize. I gave them some titles and websites, and wished them well. Now, in 2010, a collection has appeared in which not only am I included, but, more important, Marx is included. I saw this as a sign that Chinese workers had probably begun to organize and to act on a large scale. Who knows with what success? But it may be that another front in “the battle of democracy” has opened up.

MARX SEES the modern working class as an immense worldwide community waiting to happen. Such large possibilities give the history of organizing a permanent gravity and grandeur. The process of creating unions is not just an item in interest-group politics, but a vital part of what Lessing called “The Education of the Human Race.” As workers gradually come to learn who they are, Marx thinks they will see they need one another in order to be themselves. Workers will get it eventually, because bourgeois society forces them to get smart, in order to survive its constant upheavals. Learning to give yourself to other workers who may look and sound very different from you, but who turn out to be like you in depth, delivers the soul from dread and gives a man or a woman a permanent address in the world.

This insistence on free development, rather than development enforced by the market, is a theme that Marx shares with the smartest and noblest liberal of the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill. Like Marx, Mill came to see “free development” as a basic human value. But as he grew older, he became convinced that the capitalist form of modernization—featuring cutthroat competition, social conformity, and cruelty to the losers—blocked its best potentialities. The world’s greatest liberal proclaimed himself a socialist in his old age.

Ironically, the ground that liberalism and socialism share might be a problem for both of them. What if Mister Kurtz isn’t dead after all? What if authentically “free development” brings out horrific depths in human nature? Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud all forced us to face the horrors. Marx and Mill might both say that until we have overcome social domination, there is no way to tell how deep our inner degradation goes. The process of reaching that point—where Raskolnikovs won’t rot on Avenue D, and where Svidrigailovs won’t possess thousands of bodies and souls—should be enough to give us all steady work. And even if we do reach that point, and come to see our inner bad guys will never go away, we will have learned how to cooperate for our mutual defense. Trotsky in the 1920s came to believe that psychotherapy was a revolutionary right, to protect us from ourselves.

Communist Manifesto. At the dawn of the twenty-first, there may be even more who are ready to live with it.

Marshall Berman teaches political theory and urbanism at CCNY/CUNY. He is the author of, among other books, Adventures in Marxism.

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By Ted Rall—
Stifling Liberal Dissent Under Obama

Rall

NEW YORK–After they called the presidency for Obama, emails poured in. “You must be relieved now that the Democrats are taking over,” an old college buddy told me. “There will be less pressure on you.”

That would have been nice.

In the late 1990s my cartoons ran in Time, Fortune and Bloomberg Personal magazines and over 100 daily and alternative weekly newspapers. I was a staff writer for two major magazines.

Then Bush came in. And 9/11 happened.

The media gorged on an orgy of psychotic right-wing rhetoric. Flags everywhere. Torture suddenly OK. In a nation where mainstream political discourse was redefined between Dick Cheney on the right and libertarian Bill Maher on the not-as-right, there wasn’t any room in the paper for a left-of-center cartoonist. My business was savaged. Income plunged.

My editor at Time called me on September 13, 2001. “We’re discontinuing all cartoons,” she told me. I was one of four cartoonists at the newsweekly. “Humor is dead.” I snorted. They never brought back cartoons.

McCarthyism–blackballing–made a big comeback. I had been drawing a monthly comic strip, “The Testosterone Diaries,” for Men’s Health. No politics. It was about guy stuff: dating, job insecurity, prostate tests, that sort of thing. They fired me. Not because of anything I drew for them. It was because of my syndicated editorial cartoons, which attacked Bush and his policies. The publisher worried about pissing off right-wingers during a period of nationalism on steroids.

Desperate and going broke, I called an editor who’d given me lots of work at the magazines he ran during the 1990s. “Sorry, dude, I can’t help,” he replied. “You’re radioactive.”

It was tempting, when Obama’s Democrats swept into office in 2008, to think that the bad old days were coming to an end. I wasn’t looking for any favors, just a swing of the political pendulum back to the Clinton years when it was still OK to be a liberal.

This, you have no doubt correctly guessed, is the part where I tell you I was wrong.

I didn’t count on the cult of personality around Barack Obama.

In the 1990s it was OK to attack Clinton from the left. I went after the Man From Hope and his centrist, “triangulation”-obsessed Democratic Leadership Council for selling out progressive principles. Along with like-minded political cartoonists including Tom Tomorrow and Lloyd Dangle, my cartoons and columns took Clinton’s militant moderates to the woodshed for NAFTA, the WTO and welfare reform. A pal who worked in the White House informed me that the President, known for his short temper, stormed into his office and slammed a copy of that morning’s Washington Post down on the desk with my cartoon showing. “How dare your friend compare me to Bush?” he shouted. (The first Bush.)

It was better than winning a Pulitzer.

It feels a little weird to write this, like I’m telling tales out of school and ratting out the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. But it’s true: there’s less room for a leftie during the Age of Obama than there was under Bush.

I didn’t realize how besotted progressives were by Mr. Hopey Changey.

Obama lost me before Inauguration Day, when he announced cabinet appointments that didn’t include a single liberal.

It got worse after that: Obama extended and expanded Bush’s TARP giveaway to the banks; continued Bush’s spying on our phone calls; ignored the foreclosure crisis; refused to investigate, much less prosecute, Bush’s torturers; his healthcare plan was a sellout to Big Pharma (and the Big Health Insurance Mafia); he kept Gitmo open; expanded the war against Afghanistan; dispatched more drone bombers; used weasel words to redefine the troops in Iraq as “non-combat”; extended the Bush tax cuts for the rich; claiming the right to assassinate U.S. citizens; most recently, there was the forced nudity torture of PFC Bradley Manning and expanding oil drilling offshore and on national lands.

I was merciless to Obama. I was cruel in my criticisms of Obama’s sellouts to the right. In my writings and drawings I tried to tell it as it was, or anyway, as I saw it. I thought–still think–that’s my job. I’m a critic, not a suck-up. The Obama Administration doesn’t need journalists or pundits to carry its water. That’s what press secretaries and PR flacks are for.
Does Obama ever do anything right? Not often, but sure. And when he does, I shut up about it. Cartoonists and columnists who promote government policy are an embarrassment.

But that’s what “liberal” media outlets want in the age of Obama.

Obama has been a terrible disappointment to the American left. He has forsaken liberals at every turn. Yet they continue to stand by him. Which means that, in effect, they are not liberals at all. They are militant Democrats. They are Obamabots.

I can’t prove it in every case. (That’s how blackballing works.) The Nation and Mother Jones and Harper’s, liberal magazines that gave me freelance work under Clinton and Bush, now ignore my queries. Even when I offered them first-person, unembedded war reporting from Afghanistan. Hey, maybe they’re too busy to answer email or voicemail. You never know.

Other censors are brazen.

There’s been a push among political cartoonists to get our work into the big editorial blogs and online magazines that seem poised to displace traditional print political magazines like The Progressive. In the past, editorial rejections had numerous causes: low budgets, lack of space, an editor who simply preferred another creator’s work over yours.

Now there’ s a new cause for refusal: Too tough on the president.

I’ve heard that from enough “liberal” websites and print publications to consider it a significant trend.

A sample of recent rejections, each from editors at different left-of-center media outlets:

· “I am familiar with and enjoy your cartoons. However the readers of our site would not be comfortable with your (admittedly on point) criticism of Obama.”

· “Don’t be such a hater on O and we could use your stuff. Can’t you focus more on the GOP?”

· “Our first African-American president deserves a chance to clean up Bush’s mess without being attacked by us.”

I have many more like that.

What’s weird is that these cultish attitudes come from editors and publishers whose politics line up neatly with mine. They oppose the bailouts. They want us out of Afghanistan and Iraq. They disapprove of Obama’s new war against Libya. They want Obama to renounce torture and Guantánamo.

Obama is the one they ought to be blackballing. He has been a terrible disappointment to the American left. He has forsaken liberals at every turn. Yet they continue to stand by him. Which means that, in effect, they are not liberals at all. They are militant Democrats. They are Obamabots.

As long as Democrats win elections, they are happy. Nevermind that their policies are the same as, or to the right of, the Republicans.

“So what should I think about [the war in Libya]?,” asks Kevin Drum in Mother Jones. “If it had been my call, I wouldn’t have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I’d literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he’s smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted.”

Mr. Drum, call your office. Someone found your brain in the break room.
Barack Obama and the Democrats have made it perfectly clear that they don’t care about the issues and concerns that I care about. Unlike Kevin Drum, I think–I know–I’m smarter than Barack Obama. I wouldn’t have made half the mistakes he has.

So I don’t care about Obama. Or the Democrats. I care about America and the world and the people who live in them.

Hey, Obamabots: when the man you support betrays your principles, he has to go–not your principles.

Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com

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By Steve James, Political analyst, wsws.org | 17 May 2011

The British Queen in Ireland: Honored by good Irish lads...What does it really mean?

A huge security operation is being rolled out to protect Queen Elizabeth and her husband Philip during their four day visit to Ireland beginning today. The measures will be extended for the visit of US President Barack Obama just three days later.

The royal tour is the first visit by a British monarch to the Republic of Ireland since the creation of the Irish Free State and independence from Britain. It has been described as an historic moment, with Taoiseach Enda Kenny hailing it as “symbolically a healing of the past” and President Mary McAleese as a “signal of the success of the peace process” and a sign that Ireland and Britain were forging a “new future, a future very, very different from the past, on very different terms from the past”.

The queen will be taken around a number of locations with historical associations with the struggle for Irish independence. There, much in the manner of then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s 1997 apology for the 19^th century potato famine which killed 1.5 million people, some carefully crafted expressions of “official remorse” will be made. Prime Minister David Cameron has already paved the way by personally apologising for the British army’s murder of 13 people on Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972.

The visit has long been desired, as proof of the successful outcome of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which was endorsed by referendums in the north and south. The Agreement put an end to armed conflict in the North by establishing power-sharing between the Unionists and Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, with the backing of Britain, Ireland and the United States. The broader aim was to secure bilateral relations with the republic, to further investment and trade.

Since then relations between London, Washington and Dublin have become ever more closely intertwined.

The back-to-back visits of the queen and Obama are a reward for Ireland’s role as a trusted ally of two of the most predatory imperialist powers on the planet. As well as serving as a major base for financial parasitism and a cheap production location for transnationals seeking entry to the European Union, Ireland has despatched troops to Afghanistan. Shannon airport is a mid-Atlantic staging post for the US military and CIA extraordinary rendition flights.

In addition, after the 2008 financial collapse, Ireland has spearheaded the drive by European governments, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund to dump the huge losses run up by the financial speculators onto the backs of working people. Some €70 billion in tax-payers’ funds has been transferred to Ireland’s banks, around 45 per cent of the country’s annual gross domestic product. Much of this is to be taken from the government pension fund.

This has been accompanied by the most stringent austerity measures—that have seen unemployment shoot over 13 percent and still rising—policed by the Irish trade unions.

What would the great James Connolly think of all this? The Scottish-Irish hero, killed by the British during the Easter Rebellion (1916) remains an example for true socialists around the world.

The aim of this massive subvention of public monies is to protect the wealth of the super-rich and Europe’s major banks and financial institutions. Of these vast sums, around £140 billion of Irish debts are held by leading British banks. Lloyds Banking Group recently announced that of its £27 billion worth of loans to Ireland, some 60 per cent was impaired. RBS loans of £52 billion in Ireland were by March this year producing some £7.3 billion worth of losses.

Defending these massive loans was the primary consideration behind the British government’s offer of over £7 billion in line with the EU/IMF “bailout” offered to Ireland to prevent a debt default last November.

The royal visit, the proof desired by Ireland’s wealthiest layers that all differences with the former colonial power were ancient history, was finalised the same month.

The visit also reflects the broader mutual interests between the capitalists in both countries. Agricultural and manufacturing imports, exports and inter-company trade flow between Britain and Ireland, worth some £43 billion in 2008. Sixteen per cent of all Irish exports are destined for Britain, while 7 per cent of British exports stop in Ireland. British direct investment in Ireland the same year was worth £23.4 billion, while Irish investment in the UK amount to £10.1 billion. British-based companies export more to Ireland that to China, Russian, Brazil and India combined.

Numerous leading British companies have a high profile in Ireland and vice versa, while 60 Irish companies are listed on the London Stock Exchange—more than anywhere else. Over 40,000 directors of British companies are listed as having been born in Ireland. A British and Irish Chamber of Commerce is set to open this month. The exploitation of the working class on both sides of the Irish Sea is a joint project by an increasingly integrated capitalist class in Britain, the Irish Republic and the British controlled North.

These fundamental considerations account for the unanimous support for the visit from the Irish political and trade union establishment. The tour was agreed by the Fianna Fail/Green coalition, implemented by its Labour/Fine Gael successor and endorsed by the leadership of Sinn Fein. Martin McGuinness, now sitting in Stormont alongside the Democratic Unionist Party, advised that any protests would be “a mistake”.

On Friday, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams issued a statement. Adams, who for years refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the British monarch and was barred from taking his elected seat in Westminster, expressed his hope that the royal visit would improve relations between the two countries. He said the visit would “be a matter of considerable pleasure, not just for her Majesty, but for the rest of us as well”.

In a country where the constant invoking of nationalism and Ireland’s colonial past is the screen by which political and social realities are concealed from the masses, the visit offers a moment of clarity. All the major parties claiming adherence to one or another form of Irish republicanism have united in order in the interests of the ruling elites.

Some 6,000 garda (police), special-forces and intelligence operatives from Britain, Ireland and the US will be deployed in Dublin and Cork. Hundreds of houses, shops and offices are being inspected for concealed weapons and secured by bomb disposal teams. Surface to air missile defences are being set up at Casement Aerodrome, while armed officers will patrol the Liffey river and Dublin’s canals in inflatable dinghies. Snipers are to be deployed as well “saturation” policing using massive numbers of plain clothes and uniformed police, soldiers and US-trained rangers.

An Irish army riot control platoon will be on standby in Dublin. Riot control vehicles armed with water cannons are being borrowed from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Domestic surveillance both by Garda Special Branch and the G2 Covert Intelligence Unit is being massively intensified.

The ostensible targets for such “security” arrangements are republicans opposed to the power-sharing agreement. But this is out of all proportion to the tiny numbers of such “dissident” forces. As workers face the most savage attacks on wages, welfare and social provisions in the history of the Irish state, there is a clear element of political intimidation involved in such a naked display of state power. More than anything else, the extraordinary level of security testifies to a shared commitment of the British and Irish financial elite to enforce unpopular austerity measures demanded by the financial oligarchy against any and all opposition.

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The “Nabka” protests turn bloody as Israel uses lethal force to repel demonstrators. (See video below)

Bill Van Auken |  17 May 2011

Nabka Day protest, on the Lebanese border.

The Obama administration’s reaction to Israel’s massacre Sunday of unarmed Palestinian protesters on its borders underscores the hypocrisy of those ascribing “humanitarian” motives to Washington’s predatory policy in the region.

Israeli troops opened fire with live ammunition and, in one case, tank fire on Palestinians who demonstrated on Israel’s borders with Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. Tens of thousands joined in the protests, which were called to commemorate the 63^rd anniversary of the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the term used by the Palestinians for Israel’s declaration of independence and the wholesale ethnic cleansing that drove three-quarters of a million Palestinians from their homes in 1948.

THE EVENTS ON THE GOLAN HEIGHTS
The shooting is clearly audible

In the intervening years, the population of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons has grown to 7.1 million people living without rights or citizenship in neighboring Arab countries, under Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, or as worse than second-class citizens in Israel itself.

The demonstrators were directly asserting the “right of return” to their homes and lands. This a right that Israel, backed by Washington, has categorically ruled out, and that the bourgeois nationalist leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has made clear it is more than willing to bargain away.

On Sunday, Israeli troops opened fire at the border fence near Maroun al-Ras in Lebanon, killing 10 Palestinian refugees and wounding another 80. Five more Palestinians were killed and at least 30 injured in the Syrian border village of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Another Palestinian was killed and at least 86 civilians wounded when Israeli troops opened fire with small arms and tanks on a border protest in Beit Hannon in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. Police and troops also attacked protests in Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron. In all, 16 people were killed and over 400 wounded, some of them critically.

Asked for President Barack Obama’s response to this savage repression, chief White House spokesman Jay Carney mouthed a pro forma declaration of “regret” for the “loss of life” and then issued a blanket defense of Israel’s killing spree.

“Israel, like all countries, has the right to prevent unauthorized crossings at its borders,” said Carney. “Its neighbors have a responsibility to prevent such activity.”

Any sentence containing the words “Israel, like all countries” and “borders” is by definition a lie. Unlike other countries, Israel’s borders are constantly shifting as a result of military aggression, on the one hand, and the malignant spread of Zionist settlements on the other. Those who died on Sunday were, in any case, inside Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.

Carney went on to place the principal blame for Sunday’s bloodletting not on the Israeli government or military, but rather on Syria.

“We’re also strongly opposed to the Syrian government’s involvement in inciting yesterday’s protests in the Golan Heights,” he said, adding, “such behavior is unacceptable and does not serve as a distraction from the Syrian government’s ongoing repression of demonstrators in its own country.”

This line of reasoning echoes the filthy rationalizations made by the Israeli government itself for the killing and wounding of unarmed protestors, the majority of whom died on the Lebanese border, not the Syrian.

Whether the government of Bashar al-Assad facilitated the passage of Palestinian refugees through the militarized Golan Heights border area to divert attention from its own bloody crackdown on internal opposition is hardly the decisive issue in Sunday’s events.

The heroism and determination shown by young Palestinians braving tanks and gunfire to demand their rights is of a piece with the recent revolutionary upheavals by workers and youth in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and elsewhere in the Arab world. In confronting the Israeli state, they were acting equally in defiance of all the Arab bourgeois regimes that have repeatedly repressed and betrayed the Palestinians.

In Lebanon on Sunday, Lebanese troops also opened fire on the Palestinian protesters to drive them from the border. And in Egypt, the military-dominated regime sent troops and police against thousands who assembled outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo in solidarity with the Palestinians. Firing tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition, the security forces left hundreds wounded.

The reality is that Washington supports this repression by reactionary Arab regimes and, above all, backs Israel in its systematic violence and oppression against the Palestinian people.

The shameless duplicity and hypocrisy of US policy in the Middle East will be on full display in the coming week. Obama delivers a speech Thursday proclaiming his sympathy for the “Arab spring”—and no doubt denouncing the regimes of Gaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria for their repression.

This will be followed by a White House meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday and then a speech to the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), the main Zionist lobby in the US, in which one can be certain there will be no condemnation of turning automatic weapons and tank fire on unarmed refugees approaching the Israeli border. As the White House spokesman put it, the theme of the AIPAC speech will be, “the unshakeable bond between the Israelis and the Americans and the importance of that relationship.”

It is self-evident that where and when Washington decides to invoke concerns over “human rights” is determined not by some universal moral principles, but rather by definite imperialist interests.

If a country whose policies are at odds with the geostrategic aims of US imperialism carries out internal repression—as in Libya—it becomes the pretext for imperialist intervention aimed at imposing a regime more subservient to Washington and asserting more direct American control over oil reserves.

If another country, one that is aligned with US interests, bloodily suppresses unarmed civilians, as in Bahrain, or, for that matter, Israel, it receives tacit or even explicit support from Washington.

Despite the fact that “human rights” has long served as the most hypocritical and deceitful justification for imperialist war, it is precisely on this basis that a whole layer of self-defined “liberals” and “lefts” in both the US and Western Europe have swung behind the US-NATO intervention in Libya.

Prominent among them is the University of Michigan professor, Juan Cole, who has used his Informed Comment blog to promote the so-called “rebels” based in Benghazi and celebrate the military actions of their sponsors—the Pentagon and NATO.

On Monday, Cole posted a comment headlined “The Arab Spring Comes to Israel,” which described the border killings, reviewed the historical crimes of 1948 and condemned the current policies of the Israeli government. What was glaringly absent, however, was a single word about the massive US military and financial support for Israel that makes its crimes against the Palestinians possible.

Nor did he explain how the US could be defending “human rights” in Libya while backing mass killings and repression in Israel.

Having spent the last two months vigorously defending the US-NATO imperialist intervention in Libya, Cole and his ilk lack either the credibility or the inclination to oppose Washington’s policies elsewhere in the region.

Palestinian working people and youth are now entering a decisive new stage in their long and bitter struggle. They will find allies not among these so-called “lefts” and “liberals,” who have cast off their “antiwar” past to align themselves with imperialism, but rather among the workers coming into struggle throughout the Middle East—including in Israel—and in the American and international working class.

Bill Van Auken is a senior political analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.

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Why They Hated Dominique—

And now let’s be grateful for small favors

By MIKE WHITNEY | May 16, 2011

Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Rotten to the core but better than the alternative? This is beginning to sound familiar.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn is effectively finished as a political force, even if he doesn’t draw a guilty verdict in New York, where a 32-year-old maid says she was attacked and forced to perform oral sex on him.  He’s finished as IMF chief and his candidacy against Sarkozy also looks to be in ruins.

The IMF chief certainly has enemies in high places who will be cheering his predicament. He had recently broke-free from the “party line” and was changing the direction of the IMF. His road to Damascus conversion was championed by progressive economist Joseph Stiglitz in a recent article titled “The IMF’s Switch in Time”. Here’s an excerpt:

“The annual spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund was notable in marking the Fund’s effort to distance itself from its own long-standing tenets on capital controls and labor-market flexibility. It appears that a new IMF has gradually, and cautiously, emerged under the leadership of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Slightly more than 13 years earlier, at the IMF’s Hong Kong meeting in 1997, the Fund had attempted to amend its charter in order to gain more leeway to push countries towards capital-market liberalization. The timing could not have been worse: the East Asia crisis was just brewing – a crisis that was largely the result of capital-market liberalization in a region that, given its high savings rate, had no need for it.

That push had been advocated by Western financial markets – and the Western finance ministries that serve them so loyally. Financial deregulation in the United States was a prime cause of the global crisis that erupted in 2008, and financial and capital-market liberalization elsewhere helped spread that “made in the USA” trauma around the world….The crisis showed that free and unfettered markets are neither efficient nor stable.” (“The IMF’s Switch in Time”, Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate)

So, Strauss-Kahn was trying to move the bank in a more positive direction, a direction that didn’t require that countries leave their economies open to the ravages of foreign capital that moves in swiftly–pushing up prices and creating bubbles–and departs just as fast, leaving behind the scourge of high unemployment, plunging demand, hobbled industries, and deep recession.

Strauss-Kahn had set out on a “kinder and gentler” path, one that would not force foreign leaders to privatize their state-owned industries or crush their labor unions. Naturally, his actions were not warmly received by the bankers and corporatists who look to the IMF to provide legitimacy to their ongoing plunder of the rest of the world. These are the people who think that the current policies are “just fine”  because they produce the results they’re looking for, which is bigger profits for themselves and deeper poverty for everyone else.

Here’s Stiglitz again:

“Strauss-Kahn is proving himself a sagacious leader of the IMF…. As Strauss-Kahn concluded in his speech to the Brookings Institution shortly before the Fund’s recent meeting: ‘Ultimately, employment and equity are building blocks of economic stability and prosperity, of political stability and peace. This goes to the heart of the IMF’s mandate. It must be placed at the heart of the policy agenda.’

Right. So, now the IMF is going to be an agent for the redistribution of wealth…. (for) ‘strengthening collective bargaining, restructuring mortgages, restructuring tax and spending policies to stimulate the economy now through long-term investments, and implementing social policies that ensure opportunity for all’”? (according to Stiglitz)

Good luck with that.

Check this out from World Campaign and judge for yourself whether Strauss-Kahn had become a “liability” that had to be eliminated so the business of extracting wealth from the poorest people on earth could continue apace:

“For decades, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been associated among anti-poverty, hunger and development activists as the poster child of everything wrong with the rich world’s fiscal management of the rest of the world, particularly of poor nations, with its seemingly one-dimensional focus on belt-tightening fiscal policies as the price of its loans, and a trickle-down economic philosophy that has helped traditional wealthy elites maintain the status quo while the majority stayed poor and powerless. With a world increasingly in revolution because of such realities, and after the global financial crisis in the wake of regulatory and other policies that had worked after the Great Depression being largely abandoned, IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has made nothing less than stunning observations about how the IMF and the world need to change policies.

“In an article today in the Washington Post, Howard Schneider writes that after the 2008 crash led toward regulation again of financial companies and government involvement in the economy, for Strauss-Khan ‘the job is only half done, as he has been leading the fund through a fundamental rethinking of its economic theory. In recent remarks, he has provided a broad summary of the conclusions: State regulation of markets needs to be more extensive; global policies need to create a more even distribution of income; central banks need to do more to prevent lending and asset prices from expanding too fast. ‘The pendulum will swing from the market to the state,’ Strauss-Kahn said in an address at George Washington University last week. ‘Globalization has delivered a lot . . . but it also has a dark side, a large and growing chasm between the rich and the poor. Clearly we need a new form of globalization’ to prevent the ‘invisible hand’ of loosely regulated markets from becoming ‘an invisible fist.’”

Repeat: “…a fundamental rethinking of economic theory”…. (a greater) “distribution of income”…(more) “regulation of financial companies”,  “central banks need to do more to prevent lending and asset prices from expanding too fast”.

Are you kidding me? Read that passage again and I think you'll agree with me that
Strauss-Kahn had signed his own death warrant.

There’s not going to be any revolution at the IMF. That’s baloney. The institution was created with the clear intention of ripping poor nations off and it’s done an impressive job in that regard.  There’s not going to be any change of policy either. Why would there be? Have the bankers and corporate bilge-rats suddenly grown a conscience and decided to lend a helping hand to long-suffering humanity? Get real.

Strauss-Kahn has been replaced by the IMF’s number 2 guy, John Lipsky, former Vice Chairman of the JPMorgan Investment Bank. How’s that for “change you can believe in”?

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com

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