Chris Hedges’ counter-revolutionary advice for revolution

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Rainer Shea
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Dateline: November 30, 2019

Hedges: The reluctant revolutionist, or is he?

We think the author is spot on with this critique of Hedges. For a long time we too have watched with mounting frustration Hedges spout fiery revolutionary rhetoric invariably laced with wild denunciations of communism and Marxism redolent of rightwingers, mainstream liberals and crafty anticommunists. Like Chomsky, who shares some of these traits, and most left-liberals, Hedges is excellent at describing the evils  of capitalism, but disgraceful when it comes to viable tactics and strategies. (In the 1970s Chomsky even declared that, due to its exceptionalism, capitalism could be eliminated in the US through the ballot box.) In Hedges case, maybe the muddle-headedness and praxis shortcomings stem from his apparent religious temperament, after all he's a graduate of Harvard's Divinity School, one of the more esoteric and elegantly anachronistic schools in that temple of bourgeois privilege and underhanded reaction. Whatever the reason, Hedges remains stuck on a paradox: he seems to want revolutionary change and the elimination of capitalism, but he cannot bring himself to embrace precisely the only —or shall we say the only historically-tested—tools that can make that future possible.—PG

The quality of Chris Hedges’ strategic advice about how to defeat capitalism reflects the quality of his commentary about communism. This is because communism is the primary force behind history’s anti-capitalist movements, and therefore how well one assesses it equates to how well they grasp the tools for defeating the bourgeoisie. Naturally, the following parts from Hedges’ writings about communism provide good insights into how he views our present task of revolution:

The cult of the gun was disastrous. It distorted reality…[there has been] incalculable damage caused by this cult, including the doomed attempt in 1967 by Che Guevara to form a foco in Bolivia, an effort that would cost him his life. The cult of the gun saw most third-world liberation movements, such as the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria, devolve into squalid military dictatorships when they took power.-from “The Cult of Violence Always Kills the Left


Lenin in power, like Leon Trotsky, was an opportunist who made promises, such as “all power to the soviets,” that he had no intention of keeping. He employed political terror, widespread arrests and executions to crush the autonomous, self-governing soviets and workers committees. He led a centralized, autocratic ruling elite...Stalinism was not an aberration. It was the natural heir of Leninism.-from “The Dilemma of Vladimir Lenin


Armando Iannucci’s movie “The Death of Stalin,” a brilliant black comedy, captures what happens when self-interested narcissists, buffoons and gangsters make the laws and rule a state. Once power is based solely on blind personal loyalty and whim, anything, including wholesale murder, becomes possible. Rights are transformed into privileges that can be instantly revoked. Lies replace truth. Opinions replace facts. History is erased and rewritten. The cult of leadership replaces politics.-from “Creeping Toward Tyranny

Of course these statements contain a lot of false and misleading details. Hedges’ attempt to claim that Che Guevera’s Bolivian revolutionary project was an objectively foolish act, and to then claim that Che’s death was a symptom of a nebulous “cult of the gun” that’s also somehow singularity created a widespread dynamic of Third World despotism, is very bizarre. During his efforts to keep the revolutionary government strong and unified, Lenin didn’t restrict the workers from having a say-he restricted the former bourgeoisie and religious institutions. Hedges’ referencing the film The Death of Stalin is a remarkably weak rhetorical move on his part; The Death of Stalin is filled with historical errors, and it uses these distortions of the truth to reinforce its highly biased retelling of the exaggerated flaws in the era’s Soviet leadership.

But these dishonest claims are no doubt all seen as truthful by Hedges, because they serve to legitimize a line of thinking that Hedges sees as undeniably truthful. Like the creative liberties that were taken to create the propagandistic Death of Stalin, these and Hedges’ other attacks on communist movements and leaders are ways of subtly nudging people towards accepting a larger worldview. In the case of The Death of Stalin, this worldview is one of basic Russophobia. In the case of Hedges’ lectures and writings, it’s one of blanket hostility towards the efforts from history’s communists to put power into the hands of the proletariat.

characterized as a perpetrator of “campaigns of genocide and mass extermination” who advanced “totalitarian systems” that were comparable to Nazism.

It’s unsurprising that Hedges has taken up this line of anti-communism. In a telling paragraph from his 2009 essay Liberals Are Useless, Hedges admitted that he’s a liberal, writing: “I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member.” stated that “I'm not a Marxist, nor am I a serious scholar of Marx in any way.” As a result of Hedges’ wariness of Marxism and outright hostility towards Leninism, his advice for getting to a socialist society lacks the strategic clarity which Marxism-Leninism provides.

Perhaps the closest Hedges has gotten to detailing a practical plan for making America socialist is contained in his article Extinction Rebellion, where he calls for people to use civil disobedience to “empower an independent citizens committee to oversee the termination of our 150-year binge on fossil fuels.” This action plan of his, which presumably also consists of the citizens committee enacting the reforms that would make America socialist, will face many obstacles even if the civil disobedience efforts are well organized.

After the bourgeoisie momentarily has their power over the state compromised, they’re no doubt going to greatly step up their resistance efforts to stop themselves from losing their power. In such a scenario of crisis, the capitalists are going to employ paramilitary violence, arrest as many of their opponents as possible, and (as we saw in Bolivia this month) attempt to carry out coups against any socialists who gain positions of power.

Hedges is well aware of these methods that the capitalists have for countering opposition. Yet instead of calling for the only strategy that will drive out the capitalists, which is the overthrow of the state and the creation of a proletarian-led military and law enforcement apparatus, Hedges only speculates that we’ll need a “citizens commission” without acknowledging the great instruments of force that such a commission would require in order to be effective. In this paragraph from his book America: The Farewell Tour, Hedges seems to imply that he believes this commission will succeed in spite of the bourgeoisie still being in power:

Fear is the only language the power elite understands. This is a dark fact of human nature. It’s why Richard Nixon was our last liberal president. Nixon was not a liberal personally. He was devoid of empathy and lacked a conscience. But he was frightened of movements. You do not make your enemy afraid by selling out. You make your enemy afraid by refusing to submit, by fighting for your vision. It is not our job to take power. It is our job to build movements to keep power in check.

At this point you can probably see just how messy and incoherent Hedges’ advice for revolution is. Does he actually want the proletariat to take power, or does he simply hope the proletariat will try to scare bourgeois politicians into making America socialist? Despite his rightful repudiations of social democratic reformists like Bernie Sanders, does Hedges think that socialism can be achieved by reforming our current government? Given his vilifications of communist governments, does he even want to remove pro-capitalist leaders from power over the state, or does he not prefer such an outright overthrow effort because it might result in a repeat of the “autocratic” Leninism?

This contradiction between Hedges’ desire for defeating capitalism and his hostility towards the proven methods for defeating it comes from his wariness towards taking the drastic steps that a real revolution would require. Liberalism comes from the belief that advancing liberty and upholding moral virtues are sufficient for improving society-and that anyone who challenges any types of liberties, or violates morality as defined by the liberal bourgeoisie, is a bad actor. 

A major revolutionary practice that liberals oppose for this reason is political violence. Hedges is a liberal who’s attacked not just communists like Guevara for engaging in violence, but has directed a special amount of ire towards physically confrontational American anti-fascist groups like Antifa and Black Bloc. In addition to Hedges’ offensively inaccurate claim that Antifa “mirrors” the violent neo-Nazi groups, Hedges’ attempts to vilify these types of leftists have often involved absurd and even dangerous contortions of reality. As Occupy Wall Street organizer David Graeber wrote in response to Hedges’ attacks against the militant factions of Occupy:

I feel compelled to respond to your statement “The Cancer in Occupy.” This statement is not only factually inaccurate, it is quite literally dangerous. This is the sort of misinformation that really can get people killed….The reason I say this is because, whatever your intentions, it is very hard to read your statement as anything but an appeal to violence….if a group is made up exclusively of violent fanatics who cannot be reasoned with [as Hedges claims], what else can we really do? This is the language of violence in its purest form. Far more than “fuck the police.” To see this kind of language employed by someone who claims to be speaking in the name of non-violence is genuinely extraordinary.

By applying his familiar dishonest framing tactics to demonize militant anti-capitalist strains in modern America, Hedges is trying to undermine the strains of our society that seek to carry out practical steps towards revolution. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie, especially in the highly militarized United States, will require some amount of violent struggle. As Lenin concluded while he was participating in an actual anti-capitalist revolution, “The replacement of the bourgeois by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution.” But Hedges attacks both those who acknowledge the necessity of violence, and those who seek to apply Lenin’s other lessons for building proletarian power.

Hedges is useful for America’s proletarian liberation movement only in that he provides good indictments of capitalism. His disturbing vendetta against militant revolutionaries and his opposition to all of the coherent strains of anti-capitalism (even including Trotskyists and anarchists, who oppose Marxist-Leninists) makes him a reactive figure who tears down those who offer detailed solutions. He doesn’t want to pick a definitive side in the struggle, he only wants to decry the evils of our current system while harping on the real or perceived flaws of the anti-capitalist movements. The one specific political faction that he has recently endorsed is Extinction Rebellion, which isn’t anti-capitalist by any stretch.

The anti-capitalist movement needs to rid itself of the liberal attitudes that have driven Hedges to take up this harmful approach. We need to focus on learning more about revolutionary theory, equipping ourselves for militancy, and building the communist institutions that can see us through towards defeating the bourgeois state. And as Che Guevara believed, the works of demonized revolutionaries like Stalin are what can guide us towards victory. Guevara wrote:

In the so called mistakes of Stalin lies the difference between a revolutionary attitude and a revisionist attitude. You have to look at Stalin in the historical context in which he moves, you don’t have to look at him as some kind of brute, but in that particular historical context. I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rainer Shea uses the written word to deconstruct establishment propaganda and to promote meaningful political action. His articles can be found on his personal blog at https://rainershea.com

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How to Maliciously Smear Your Critics (and Not Get Away with It)

By CJ Hopkins


[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he life of a professional political satirist is many things, but it is certainly never boring. Last week, for example, was particularly not boring. OK, I wasn’t called before a Senate committee to testify against a rapey nominee to the highest court in the United States, or smeared by the right-wing media for doing so, nothing that dramatic or consequential. No, while most Americans were parsing every “he said” and “she said” of the Kavanaugh hearings, I was embroiled in my own little sordid drama involving “going public,” and smears, and my colleagues attempting to assassinate my character, and so on.

What happened was, I got the kiss-off from CounterPunch (where I had been a contributor for over two years) by CounterPunch’s Red-Brown Putin-Nazi hunting squad. That, or the editors just overlooked my submissions, or they decided not to run them, or they were going to run them, after having overlooked them, but then decided not to run them, because I’d already run them, after they didn’t run them … or something. I can’t keep all their stories straight.


This kiss-off (or confusion, depending on who you believe) happened after I submitted a piece, Putin-Nazi Paranoia, responding to a featured essay in CounterPunch smearing a number of leftist writers (and me by extension) as “far-right shills.” Smearing leftist writers they do not approve of has become a standard feature of CounterPunch. As far as I recall, it began in earnest in the Summer of 2017, when they accused Caitlin Johnstone of Red-Brown activities, i.e, promoting an unholy union of ultra-far-right and ultra-far-left movements (or “neo-Strasserism,” for you Putin-Nazi scholars).


Caitlin Johnstone: Counter-punched.

This was an extremely ignominious episode, as Johnstone documented at the time, and followed up on about a year later. Featured essays in CounterPunch by Yoav Litvin and CounterPunch editors Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair either openly claimed or insinuated that Johnstone was a Red-Brown infiltrator who was calling for an alliance with white supremacists, which, of course, was a load of paranoid nonsense. Diana Johnstone (no relation to Caitlin) also covered this brouhaha in her essay about the CounterPunch Red-Brown hunter squad (which, in addition to Litvin, St. Clair, and Frank, include other characters like Anthony DiMaggio, author of the above-mentioned “far right shill” piece, Eric Draitser, the official team cheerleader, and Alexander Reid Ross, who is a bull goose loony. Sadly, Diana left out Louis Proyect, the notorious “unrepentant Marxist” creep, who, although not technically a CounterPunch editor, appears to have quite a lot of influence at the magazine … I have never really understood why that is.

In any event, after I announced that CounterPunch had stopped running my pieces, and asked for help spreading them around on the Internet, they promptly began smearing me as an anti-Semite (or continued smearing me as an anti-Semite, because Louis Proyect had already been trying his best to smear me as an anti-Semite). They base their smears on the fact that my essays have been re-posted by The Unz Review, which the CounterPunch Red-Brown hunting squad have become increasingly obsessed with lately. (For the record, my essays have also been re-posted by outlets like ColdType, The Greanville Post, OffGuardian, Entelekheia, Le Grand Soir, ZeroHedge, Dissident Voice, Black Agenda Report, and other such outlets, and people’s personal blogs. I do not work for any of these outlets. They have simply been kind enough to re-post my essays, each of which originally appeared in CounterPunch, until the last two essays in question. Weirdly, the CounterPunch editors do not appear to be concerned about these other outlets, nor even, consistently, about The Unz Review, as they just featured this essay by Michael Hudson, which had been featured two days earlier by The Unz Review, where Hudson is listed as a columnist.)
But I’m not going to defend The Unz Review, or Michael Hudson, or any of the many other writers, whether left or right, that are posted, or re-posted, on that site. Nor am I going to defend myself against the smears leveled at me by the CounterPunch editors. Why, you probably want to know, am I not going to do that?

OK, I’ll tell you.

Because that is precisely how the smear game works. The way it works is, the smearers bait the smearee into defending himself against the defamatory content of the smears. Once the smearee has done that, the smearers have him. From then on, the focus of the debate becomes whether or not the smears are accurate, rather than why he’s being smeared, how he’s being smeared, and who is smearing him. This is the smearers’ primary objective, i.e., to establish the boundaries of the debate, and to trap the target of the smears within them. If you’ve followed the fake “Labour Anti-Semitism” scandal, you’ve witnessed this tactic deployed against Corbyn, who unfortunately fell right into the trap and gave the smearers the upper hand. No, the only way to effectively counter a smear campaign (whether large-scale or small-scale), is to resist the temptation to profess your innocence, and, instead, focus as much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as possible. It is difficult to resist this temptation, especially when the people smearing you have significantly more power and influence than you do, and are calling you a racist and an anti-Semite, but, trust me, the moment you start defending yourself, the game is over, and the smearers have won.



With that in mind, and for those readers who are tempted to just take the word of an established leftist magazine like CounterPunch over that of minor author who they may not have ever even heard of, I am posting the following email exchange between Jeffrey St. Clair, Joshua Frank, and myself (and a journalist and a colleague, whose names I’ve redacted, who wrote to St. Clair for clarification after reading conflicting reports on the Internet), for the purposes of criticism and review. CounterPunch readers, my readers, and others who swim these rather rarefied waters can judge the facts, and the quality of everyone’s character (and our motives) for themselves.

I hope that readers will also take the time to peruse the links I’ve provided for reference, in particular my collegial exchange with Joshua Frank and Louis Proyect on the Facebook, and Diana Johnstone’s Consortium News piece. Smearing one’s critics is an ugly business, but it’s a widespread and often very effective business. It is not going out of style anytime soon. So it’s essential to understand how it works, and to maintain an attitude of healthy skepticism toward anything defamatory you hear about anyone … and to know how to respond if it happens to you.

Oh, and please feel free to share, tweet, re-post, re-blog, or otherwise disseminate this essay, regardless of your politics.

***

The following email exchanges took place on September 21, and 24 and 25, 2018. The emphasis (underlined) is mine. Otherwise, they are reproduced verbatim.

1.

Colleague: [sends St. Clair an image of my tweet to ask, “what’s going on?”]

Jeffrey St Clair: No idea. We didn’t stop running him. We missed one column, because I’d been out for most of the week attending to the new grandkid. God forbid, I take a week off in 5 years before some shithead begins slandering me online. In any event, he does publish his stuff on a site which just try to claim Alex as a “Holocaust denier,” so it’s not as if he’s going without an audience.

2.

Journalist: Has [CJ] really been kicked off CP? That’s what he seems to be saying.

Jeffrey St Clair: No. I know that’s what he’s saying, but it’s a lie and he knows it’s a lie. I told him as much and I had his piece for last week edited, loaded and scheduled to run when someone sent me his drama queen tweet. We didn’t publish a single piece, out of the dozens we’ve published, because it slipped past me while I was trying to take a little time off to enjoy the arrival of our first grandkid. It’s a simple as that.

John Ross used to get royally pissed at me for sometimes delaying running his pieces. He’d call Saul Landau from Mexico City and gripe and send me furious emails. But Ross never went public libeling CP editors for having overlooked one his essays. He’d never even consider it. But that’s because Ross was a real journalist, who’d been in the trenches for decades as Alex and I had, and was also on our side politically. The old notions of solidarity are, of course, withering away, while the state remains.

Alex used to say that we should reject every fourth or fifth submission from a writer just to keep them in their toes. I’ve never taken that position. It was an indulgence on my part to run Hopkins at all, since we’d had a fairly iron-clad rule against running satire since it always confuses the credulous readers of the site.

Even so, I think Hopkins’ public assault on us reveals something rather acidic about his character, almost as much as his preference to have his columns published by Ron Unz, the guy who funded the anti-immigrant and English-only ballot initiatives in California and who lately libeled Alex as a Holocaust denier–though, the coward that he is, Unz waited five years after Alex was in the ground to do so.

I don’t know what Hopkins’ real politics are and I don’t want to speculate. But I do know Unz’s politics and the circle that has coalesced around him, like Israel Shamir who publicly denounced me a couple of weeks ago for caring “more about blacks and Jews than white Christians.” I’ll cop to that smear, but not to CJ’s.

CJ Hopkins: Hi [REDACTED], and Jeff. [REDACTED], I’m not sure whether you’re inquiring personally or professionally, so with that in mind, here are the facts … and some of my thoughts.

I sent Jeff my recent Putin-Nazi Paranoia piece, waited for it to run. It didn’t. For the first time in over two years. So I wrote Jeff asking about it, specifically asking whether I had gone too far in my response to DiMaggio’s piece, in which DiMaggio had smeared a bunch of writers as “far right shills,” and supported his smear with a blog piece by Louis Proyect along the same lines, but crazier.

As both DiMaggio’s and Proyect’s smear pieces were focused on writers who write for Unz, or allow Unz to cross-post their essays (as I have for two years), and as Proyect had written me a nasty email fishing for comments for his piece, I considered myself part of the smeared group, though I was not named in either piece.

In any event, Jeff wrote me back, said he hadn’t seen my submission, that it had been a busy week, and that he would rummage around for it. I re-sent it to him immediately in order to spare him the rummaging. I waited for it to run. It didn’t. No follow-up from Jeff.

A week later, I sent my most recent piece, Down with the Working Classes! Waited for it to run. It didn’t. In the meantime, no word from Jeff or anyone at CP about the earlier piece.

So I posted the Working Classes piece on my blog, tweeted that CP had apparently stopped running my work and returning my emails, which is true. I did not claim that I was banned.

The background to this, on my side, is that I have watched as key CP writers, namely Litvin, Frank, Draitser, and then DiMaggio (and Proyect on his blog and elsewhere) have posted a series of paranoid pieces accusing people of being “Red-Brown” agents, or whatever. (You probably recall the “Caitlin Johnstone-is-a-Nazi” episode.) Long story short, the DiMaggio piece was the last straw for me. I wrote my Putin-Nazi Paranoia piece as a response. It was tough. I was angry. Which shouldn’t have surprised anyone.

If CP had run that piece (i.e., my response), that would have sufficed. I think I was entitled to that, after two years of contributing to CP, and otherwise supporting it, and after having been smeared in CP’s pages, in a lead essay, as a “far right shill.” Or, if Jeff or Joshua or anyone at CP had simply returned my emails and informed me why they had stopped running my essays, or accusing me of being a crypto-Nazi because I have let Unz re-post my pieces, or just telling me directly to go fuck myself, that would have also sufficed. But nothing.

This email is long enough, so I’ll spare you the details of my exchanges with Joshua and Louis on Facebook, and Jeff via email, other than to say they all seem to be obsessed with the Unz thing (which is surprising, since Unz has been reposting my stuff for two years) and suddenly very concerned about my “character.”

I think my character is pretty clear from my writing. I don’t appreciate the guilt-by-association game, or being smeared as a “far right shill,” and I simply don’t have any respect for folks who engage in that sort of thing. It appears to have become a standard tactic at CP, as you can see from Jeff’s reference to my “real politics” in his email.

As for my “public assaults” on CP, again, that could have been prevented with a simple email, which, where I come from, is just professional courtesy.

Anyway, [REDACTED], those are the facts and my thoughts. If you have further questions about what happened, or my “character” or my “real politics,” just ask. Despite the CP folks’ insinuations and smears, I’m really not a very sneaky guy.

Jeffrey St Clair: A favor: stop attacking Nat in your online self-promotions—“Read the article that Nat refused to run, blah blah blah.” He doesn’t make any editorial decisions. Train your pop-gun on me, instead. It will probably increase your hits with the Holocaust deniers and Pizzagaters you like to hang with, even as you demure that you ain’t one of them. The reason the “Unz thing” has became an issue is that he just smeared Cockburn as a Holocaust Denier—not so much “smeared,” I guess, as adopted & celebrated as one of the gang. Alex was my partner and best friend for 25 years. Maybe you think it’s funny. I don’t.

PS—For the sake of accuracy, even though I realize that’s not the domain of satirists, Litvin hasn’t written for CounterPunch in more than year because he doesn’t like our politics or the fact that we regularly run writers whose point of view he disagrees with.

CJ Hopkins: Sure, Jeff. Send me an official Twitter handle for CounterPunch that isn’t Nat and I’ll switch to that one. Until then, I’ll use the official CounterPunch handle that exists.

Thanks for making my point by insinuating that I’m anti-Semite, again, and that I share the politics of every outlet that re-posts my essays and am responsible for their behavior. My essays have been reposted by numerous outlets, left and right, which I assume you know. There’s a list of them on my website. I don’t work for or represent any of them.

I don’t think any of this is funny, in case you didn’t get that. If you want to purge CP of writers you suddenly decide are “far right shills” and publish smears of them, that’s your prerogative. If you thought I was going to go quietly, you’re probably not as good a judge of “character” as you think.

Jeffrey St Clair: Why would I know who you write for, CJ? And how would I know this? Am I supposed to have tracked you across the web? I know you advertise yourself as “America’s greatest satirist,” but, even though I think I’m a fairly well-read person, I’d never heard of you before one of your submissions showed up in my inbox, which I gladly ran and continued to do so for many, many months, whether I agreed with your pieces or not. Do you admit that is true or are you going concoct some contorted fabulation about that as well? If I had known that you’d been posting the same pieces we’d run on CP on Unz for two years (or other sites), we wouldn’t have run you on CounterPunch to begin with. Why the fuck would we? Putting aside the rancid nature of Unz’s site, we have too many writers—right, libertarian, left, green and anarchist—who want to write for us to run writers who are broadcasting the same piece across multiple venues. I’ve been libeled as an anti-Semite for 20 years at least and have been on the ADL and SPLC hit lists for nearly as long, so you’ll have to do better than that to get anyone who really knows the score to believe that we somehow gagged you because of your views on the Israel lobby or evicted you as part of some alleged purge of “rightwing” writers. Who are these poor victims? What are their names? Where can we send flowers? Josh and I both grew up among conservatives and we’ve always run conservatives on CounterPunch and published many essay by them in our books, from Imperial Crusades to Red State Rebels. I do draw the line at publishing racists. You don’t draw the line—apparently– about being published by them. I’ll be honest, if I knew that you’d continued publishing on Unz’s after he wrote his defense of Holocaust denialism that libeled Alex (and me, since one of the pieces he cited as “evidence” we co-wrote), I’d’ve asked you to quit publishing with him out of solidarity. But I didn’t realize that until after you’d thrown your public tantrum. I don’t know you at all, so I can make no assessment of your character, other than from the public lie you told about us having stopped running your writing. You can continue to project whatever bile you want about us, I just asked you politely to direct them and not my son, who makes none of the editorial decisions here—not that we even made one your case. You’ve declined to do that. I’m no dramatist, but I think that says something about your “character”.

CJ Hopkins: Dear Jeff, please show us all where I have once advertised myself as “America’s greatest satirist.” When you can’t, admit that you’re just making shit up because you’re angry.

You knew that other outlets re-posted my stuff. I asked you about that a long time ago, and you said it was no probem, as long as they credited CP. I’ve specifically mentioned at least two of them to you at different times, ColdType and Greanville Post. I have tweeted many of those other outlets’ reposts, regularly. All of my essays ran on CounterPunch first.

I don’t “draw the line” at being re-posted by anyone. If I did, I’d spend half my time trying to force people to remove my essays from their sites and blogs. I realize you are trying to draw me into a debate about Unz. That’s how the smear game works. I’m not going to bite. I have nothing to do with Unz, except that they re-post my pieces, as do many other sites, which I also have nothing to do with.

Regarding the Twitter handle, please be honest. You are referring to CounterPunch’s official Twitter handle, not Nat’s personal Twitter handle, which I have never used. I’m not going to stop tagging CounterPunch’s official (and, as far as I know, only) Twitter handle just because you chose to put Nat’s name on it.

I understand that you are angry and want to insult and belittle me. If you could just insult and belittle me without making shit up that I have to refute, that would save us both a lot of time.

Josh Frank: CJ, nobody is shedding a tear for you here, we take this shit personal when writers go public with their petty shit. And yes your whining that we didn’t run your piece was petty. Personally I am happy to see you go. It had nothing to do with your grievance about some link in an article to another article that didn’t even name you – which of course is petty. It’s more to do with the obvious thin skin you have. You can’t be a left writer and have thin skin, you won’t last long. But I guess you are proving the point.

Don’t let the door…

Jeffrey St Clair: “In house satirist”, excuse me, my mistake. All apologies.

If you told me you were running your stuff on other sites, I’ve long forgotten it. It’s certainly not something I’ve ever encouraged in the 20 years we’ve been online.

I’m not trying to draw you into a debate about anything. What’s to debate?

The only thing I’m angry about is the lie you continue to tell for your own self-promotion, I guess, that we abruptly stopped running your pieces for some reason of political correctness.

As for Nat, I see that he just retweeted, as he usually does, your ad for Consent Factory. (As I have also done many times. As I did your book, even advertising it on CP, as I recall.) So I guess you can spit invective (“the latest smear by Nat@counterpunch) in his direction, but it will be hitting the wrong mark. I’m sure there’ll be no acknowledgment of this generosity from you, because it wouldn’t fit your narrative of victimization.

As for you having “nothing to do with Unz,” [cites my tweet] “Here’s my latest leftist heresy, in the @UnzReview, which posts both far-left and far-right views. Unz has been reposting my @NatCounterPunch essays for years, but according to CP, I’m suddenly a fascist “shill” because I let them do so. Am I? You decide.

It’s a quaintly neutral way to describe Unz, but he’s your publisher. Enjoy the ride.

CJ Hopkins: Dear Jeff, I’m happy to acknowledge everything you and CP have done for me. You ran everything I sent you for over two years, plugged my book, and me, often featured my pieces, at least early on. You more or less put me on the map in this gig, and I have been proud to be included in CP’s pages.

What you characterize as a “lie” is indeed my interpretation of events. I’ve detailed those events, and my interpretation of them, so I won’t waste our time doing it again.

The tweet you cited was sent after these events, and after Joshua and Proyect started smearing me on Facebook. I’m not going to sit idly by while CP’s Red-Brown hunters (or you for that matter) smear me, and insinuate that Unz is my publisher, or that I am somehow in cahoots with fascists and Holocaust deniers. Again, as I have stated several times already, I have nothing to do with Unz, nothing more than I do with ColdType, Greanville Post, Black Agenda Report, OffGuardian, ZeroHedge, Entelekheia, or any other outlet that has re-posted my stuff. The tweet was meant to spur readers to look at the facts and decide for themselves.

I am honestly sorry that you set up your official CP account with Nat’s name on the front of it. I have no wish to involve Nat in this. Unfortunately, that is CP’s official handle. So if I want to make reference to CP, that’s the one I have to use, until you change it.

I sense we’re coming to the end of this email exchange. I hope so. I won’t bother to reply to Joshua’s email, which was just spewing more bile, nothing substantive that requires a reply.

All best wishes for the future …

***

—CJ Hopkins
September 29, 2018

 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CJ Hopkins Summer 2018 thumbnail DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist [ Consent Factory] and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian novel, Zone 23, which we understand is pretty gosh darn funny, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, please feel free to contact him directly.

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Three years since Syriza’s referendum on EU austerity in Greece

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

By Alex Lantier, wsws.org


Tsipras: a prime example of today's treacherous non-left left.

Yesterday marked the third anniversary of the referendum on European Union (EU) austerity held by Greece’s Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) government. Syriza’s trampling on the resounding “no” vote by millions of Greek workers was a strategic experience of the working class, whose international relevance is only increasing as ever broader layers of workers across Europe and the world  come into struggle against capitalist austerity.

Syriza took power in January 2015 after a year of strikes across Greece by public-sector, port and television workers and mass student protests against EU cuts that had slashed living standards by over 30 percent since the 2008 Wall Street crash.

Syriza had promised to scrap the EU austerity Memorandum, renegotiate relations with the EU and improve people’s lives within the framework of the EU and capitalism. Six months later, its perspective had failed. It faced unrelenting EU demands to either make deep new cuts or face a cutoff of credit, plunging Greece into bankruptcy. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called a referendum on EU austerity for July 5, 2015.

The events that unfolded provided a bitter lesson that the only way forward for the working class is a revolutionary socialist struggle for power. They comprehensively exposed the class gulf separating workers from an entire international layer of bankrupt anti-Marxist parties like Syriza—based on the affluent middle class and theoretically rooted in postmodernism and gender and racial identity politics.

The working class made clear by the referendum that it was ready to fight. It defied wall-to-wall media propaganda for a “yes” vote based on the claim that voting against EU bank bailouts would produce a catastrophe: the bankruptcy of the state and the banks, and Greece’s expulsion from the euro currency. Despite these threats, over 61 percent voted “no” to austerity.

Syriza responded, however, by betraying its own referendum. Tsipras announced that there would be no break with the EU and that he would meet with the other pro-austerity parties, the social democratic PASOK and the right-wing New Democracy. Less than a week later, he signed a bill making €13 billion in cuts to pensions, wages and health care, and privatizing ports and airports across the country.

The working class found itself in a political trap sprung by the pseudo-left Syriza. Having elected a party claiming to be “left,” it faced a government determined to impose right-wing policies of austerity, attacks on democratic rights and support for imperialist wars.

The referendum was based on lies. Tsipras had said he was calling it to obtain a “no” vote and strengthen his bargaining position against the EU. “Our aim is for the referendum to be followed by negotiations for which we will be better armed,” he declared.

In fact, as Tsipras began imposing draconian austerity, Syriza’s supporters internationally admitted that he had called the referendum as a cynical trick.

Tariq Ali, the British Pabloite ally of Spain’s Podemos and France’s New Anti-capitalist Party, wrote: “It’s no longer a secret here that Tsipras and his inner circle were expecting a ‘yes’ or a very narrow ‘no.’... Why did Tsipras hold a referendum at all? ‘He’s so hard and ideological,’ Merkel complained to her advisers. If only. It was a calculated risk. He thought the ‘yes’ camp would win, and planned to resign and let EU stooges run the government.”

Syriza’s finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who said during the referendum campaign that he would happily step down after a “yes” vote, recounts in his recent book Adults in the Room how fear, horror and anger spread over Syriza on the night of its ostensible referendum victory.

As he walked into the Maximos prime minister’s residence that night, Varoufakis writes, “Maximos felt as cold as a morgue, as joyful as a cemetery.” He met Tsipras, who referred to previous executions of Greek politicians. According to Varoufakis, Tsipras warned “that something like a coup might take place, telling me that the president of the Republic, Stournaras, the intelligence services and members of our government were in a ‘readied state.’”

With this reactionary threat—that if he failed to impose the EU diktat, sections of his own government might join in the first military coup in Greece since the CIA-backed 1967 military uprising that installed the fascistic junta of the colonels—Tsipras then charted a pro-austerity course.

This historic betrayal vindicated the warnings issued by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) even before Syriza took power.

As Tsipras took office, the ICFI wrote, “For working people, a Syriza government would not represent a way out of the crisis; on the contrary, it would represent an enormous danger. Despite its left-wing façade, Syriza is a bourgeois party that rests on affluent layers of the middle class. Its policies are determined by union bureaucrats, academics, professionals and parliamentary functionaries, who seek to defend their privileges by preserving the social order.”

While pseudo-left organizations the world over were hailing the referendum called by Tsipras as confirmation that he and Syriza were going to wage a fight, the World Socialist Web Site warned in a June 27, 2015 statement that it was “a reactionary fraud, designed to lend a veneer of democratic legitimacy to the looting of Greece by the banks at the expense of workers and broad sections of the middle class.”

Not a word needs to be changed. Since then, Syriza has pursued a thoroughly right-wing course, imposing tens of billions of euros in social cuts and selling arms to Saudi Arabia to wage a bloody, US-backed war in Yemen. It not only passed EU laws to prevent workers from taking strike action, but it has run “hotspot” prison camps, in line with the EU’s draconian anti-immigrant policy, in which thousands of refugees fleeing wars in Syria and Iraq are subjected to horrific conditions.

By hailing Syriza, the pseudo-left parties showed that they would only carry out similar policies. And indeed, Syriza’s closest ally, Podemos, is now the main prop of a minority social democratic government that is continuing the austerity policies, military buildup and jailing of Catalan political prisoners of the previous right-wing Spanish government.

In warning the Greek workers about Syriza, the ICFI fought for the building of a revolutionary alternative. The experience of Syriza has underscored that only a return to the traditions of the Bolshevik Party and the October 1917 revolution can provide a viable strategy for the working class. In its statement “ The Political Lessons of Syriza’s Betrayal in Greece ,” the ICFI stressed:

... the working class cannot defend itself by electing new, ‘left’ capitalist governments.

The only way forward is through a genuinely revolutionary policy, mobilizing the working class in Greece and internationally in struggle. It requires a direct assault on the capitalist class, the confiscation of their wealth, the seizure of the major banks and productive forces, in order to place them under the democratic control of working people, and the creation of workers states across Europe and the world. Such struggles require the building of Marxist parties to offer political leadership to the working class, in ruthless struggle against parties like Syriza.

This is the most fundamental lesson of the Syriza experience. However politically criminal the record of Syriza, it serves till this day as a model for a host of pseudo-left organizations in Europe, the US and internationally, who only await the summons of the capitalist ruling class to carry out similar betrayals.

The only way forward lies in building genuinely revolutionary Marxist parties to provide political leadership to the working class in an uncompromising struggle against pseudo-left parties like Syriza. The turn now is to building sections of the ICFI in Greece, across Europe and internationally.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 Alex Lantier is a senior geopolitical analyst with wsws.org, a Marxian publication

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report




Philip Roth and the narrow framework of postwar cultural life

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

By David Walsh, wsws.org


24 May 2018

American fiction writer Philip Roth died May 22 at 85 from congestive heart failure. The author of more than 30 books, Roth retired from writing in 2010.

Among his best-known works are Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Letting Go(1962), Portnoys Complaint (1969), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), Sabbaths Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000).

Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey in March 1933 to a Jewish immigrant family. His father was an insurance broker. The future writer attended Bucknell University in Pennsylvania before pursuing graduate studies at the University of Chicago.

His novella Goodbye, Columbus introduced Roth and some of his concerns to the world. A middle-class Jewish boy who works in the Newark public library falls for a girl who attends Radcliffe College and comes from a wealthier, more assimilated Jewish family. The title refers to the attachment the girl’s brother feels to his years at “all-American” Ohio State University. The narrator, in the end, decides this is not the world for him.

Roth worked over the character of postwar American life, particularly as it affected the Jewish middle class, again and again. He was unsparing in his satire of this world. Indeed, other stories in the collection published with Goodbye, Columbus earned him angry comments from the Jewish establishment. He was so sharply criticized during an appearance at Yeshiva University in New York in 1962 that he pledged never to write about Jewish characters again, a pledge he obviously did not keep.


Goodbye, Columbus (1959)

Portnoys Complaint made Roth a household name. The book takes the form of a monologue told to his psychiatrist by Alexander Portnoy, a young, mother-obsessed Jewish bachelor. Roth asserted that he chose the patient-therapist framework because it allowed him to “bring into my fiction the sort of intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language that… in another fictional environment would have struck me as pornographic, exhibitionistic, and nothing but obscene.”

The frank treatment of sexual matters, including the officially “perverse,” became one of Roth’s trademarks. In The Breast(1972), taking its cue from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the male protagonist, David Kepesh, becomes a 150-pound breast.

We noted some years ago: “In Portnoys ComplaintMy Life as a ManTheProfessor of DesireThe Anatomy LessonThe CounterlifeSabbaths Theater and indeed virtually all of his works, Roth has worked on some of the principal discontents and dilemmas of our time. He has written about relations within families and between the sexes, about America, about the Jews, about the contradiction between the infinity of desire and the finiteness of relationships, about freedom and repression, about the conflict between the desire to lead a serious, high-minded life and all that propels one toward the untrammeled and the sensual.”


Philip Roth in 1973

Roth possessed a verbal brilliance and breadth probably unsurpassed by any American novelist in the postwar period. He could be enormously, subversively funny. He mocked many sacred cows and poured cold water on many national myths. His treatment of his own foibles and those of his friends and lovers was often unsparing.

We also commented in that same piece: “What’s also striking is Roth’s obstinate, perhaps heroic (and certainly exceptional at this moment in history) refusal to draw his characters and their difficulties according to a formula. He has throughout his career written about men and women tormenting one another and provided the psychological and, to a certain extent, sociological conditions underlying the torment, without for a second extracting any of its sting and madness. His ‘explanations’ are not at the same time apologies or comforting pledges that things will get better. In his best writing one grasps, or has the possibility of grasping, why these people are doing these things to one another (and perhaps why we act in this way), but none of the actual experience, as lived and felt, is removed, nor is its unresolved character. This is a rare accomplishment.”

But a writer does not write under conditions of his choosing and artistic greatness is not something merely willed. Some periods are more favorable to genius than others. Roth grew up during the Cold War and the limitations of American intellectual life during that epoch also helped shape him, as much as he may have cursed and even kicked against its confines.

His so-called American Trilogy, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain, all published when the author was over 65, confirmed Roth’s tremendous strengths and his genuine weaknesses, or the weaknesses, above all, of his social milieu. The first two books are worth considering, in the order we discussed them on the World Socialist Web Site, in a little detail.


American Pastoral (1997)

I Married a Communist tells the story of Ira Ringold, a Communist Party member destroyed in the McCarthyite days of the early 1950s thanks to his relationship with a well-known actress, Eve Frame. When Eve discovers Ira is having an affair, she denounces him to a couple of witch-hunters and writes a tell-all book titled I Married a Communist. The novel is narrated by Murray Ringold, Ira’s brother.

There are many remarkable elements to the book. Roth is unapologetic in his revulsion for the witch-hunters and their hangers-on. Murray’s description of the funeral of Richard Nixon, for example, attended by the novel’s fictional McCarthyites, is unforgettable.

“The whole funeral of our thirty-seventh president was barely endurable,” Murray says. After the performing of all the patriotic songs “designed to shut down people’s thinking and produce a trance state,” he continues: “Then the realists take command, the connoisseurs of deal making and deal breaking, masters of the most shameless ways of undoing an opponent, those for whom moral concerns must always come last, uttering all the well-known, unreal, sham-ridden cant about everything but the dead man’s real passions. [Bill] Clinton exalting Nixon for his ‘remarkable journey’ and, under the spell of his own sincerity, expressing hushed gratitude for all the ‘wise counsel’ Nixon had given him. Governor Pete Wilson assuring everyone that when most people think of Richard Nixon, they think of his ‘towering intellect.’ [Robert] Dole and his flood of lachrymose clichés. ‘Doctor’ [Henry] Kissinger, high-minded, profound, speaking in his most puffed-up unegoistical mode—and with all the cold authority of that voice dipped in sludge—quotes no less prestigious a tribute than Hamlet’s for his murdered father to describe ‘our gallant friend.’ ‘He was a man, take him for all, I shall not look upon his like again.’”

But there are difficulties with I Married a Communist. In a review in 1999, we noted that “Roth is perceptive about the Stalinist milieu from a liberal or reformist point of view. Where he runs into difficulties… is when he is obliged by this outlook to make Ira's initial attraction to the Communist Party somehow illegitimate or tainted. The only truly artificial or unconvincing element of the book is the melodramatic revelation, made toward the end, that as an adolescent in Newark Ira murdered a man, an Italian anti-Semite, in a street fight. The reader is drawn into making a link between the protagonist's murderous violence and his political aspirations, i.e., there is the implication that anyone attracted to the prospect of social revolution must have a screw loose. (‘His whole life had been looking for a way not to kill somebody.’) Here the author's political prejudices, it seems to me, come into conflict with his art to the detriment of the latter.”

The same issue came up in relation to the earlier American Pastoral, the story of an upper-middle class family from Newark, the Levovs, whose existence is shattered when teenage Merry Levov becomes a Weatherman-type terrorist and plants a bomb that kills an innocent bystander. There are many brilliant, telling details and sequences in the novel, but the novelist is incapable of creating a realistic left-wing terrorist, in the end, because of his social prejudices.

In 2016, at the time of the release of a film version of the novel, directed by Ewan McGregor, we made the following points, which perhaps sum up my contradictory feelings about Roth:

“For the most part, American Pastoral is a wonderfully written, rich, funny and deeply sad work. Roth is at the top of his game here. A host of characters make their appearance, and most of them receive humane and understanding treatment, even tenderness, when that is possible…

“Roth writes about many things, including amusingly/painfully about the difficulty of ever getting other people right: ‘You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank… And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.’

“One might argue that Roth’s novel is a profound book about nearly everything except its central subject, postwar American life.

“The book simply doesn’t add up. Merry as a character doesn’t add up. It’s not good enough to make her ‘the monster daughter, ‘the angry, rebarbative spitting-out daughter.’ The Swede [her father] complacently imagines that he can pick up and leave Newark and live in the semi-countryside, with his beauty queen wife, and raise a perfect child, and that everything will go on like that forever. Instead, according to Roth, ‘the daughter and the decade [the 1960s]’ end up ‘blasting to smithereens his particular form of utopian thinking.’ The daughter ‘transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counter pastoral—into the indigenous American berserk.’

“The Swede is ‘our Kennedy,’ a man ‘whose discontents were barely known to himself,’ a man awakened ‘in middle age to the horror of self-reflection. All that normalcy interrupted by murder.’ However, it is never entirely clear whether the Swede, in some sense, ‘deserves’ his fate, because he is so deluded and misguided about life, or whether he has simply been unfortunate enough to spawn a psychopath.

“In any event, what is this ‘indigenous American berserk’? Roth won’t agree of course, but what seem to him entirely mad acts of individual violence are nothing more, in the end, than particular expressions of the savagery of social relations as a whole in America. The ‘most democratic republic’ has always generated the most ruthless class struggle, and features a ruling elite that is essentially criminal from head to toe. It is official, everyday, state-sponsored and state-organized violence that powerfully communicates itself and sways the most vulnerable members of American society.

“The novel passes lightly over the bloody Newark riot of July 1967, which lasted for six days and brought the National Guard onto the city’s streets. The upheaval is largely seen from the standpoint of the small businessman who fears his windows will be smashed. Roth has the right to adopt whatever point of view he likes, but can he see no connection between the ferocity of the riot, whether he ‘approves’ of it or not, and the general state of American society? (Or was this simply more of the ‘American berserk’?) Was the turmoil an aberration, a ‘race riot’—or an expression, occurring in one of the most economically devastated industrial cities, of the real state of things in the country? And social inequality is far deeper and economic decline far more advanced today than in 1967.

“Roth waxes indignant at Merry ‘the murderer.’ His attitude toward her is extreme, almost violent. Her actions in the novel are certainly indefensible. But the Weather Underground and similar organizations, disoriented and politically bankrupt, managed to kill a handful of people (including several of their own members) over half a dozen years. The US government and military, on the other hand, murdered 3 million to 4 million Vietnamese and wounded or maimed millions more; destroyed countless villages and communities in massacres such as the one in My Lai; dropped 8 million tons of bombs (more than twice the amount dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II); used 20 million gallons of herbicide, including Agent Orange; shot napalm, which generates temperatures of 1,500°F to 2,200°F, from flame-throwers …

“Roth, born in 1933, was shaped by the Cold War, anti-communism, illusions in American democracy and economic might more than he may realize. He did not permit himself in writing American Pastoral to come nearly close enough to the anger and shame that masses of young people in particular felt about the unspeakable crimes committed in their names—and, yes, some did nearly go mad over it.

“Sadly, Roth took the easy way out in his often remarkable novel and turned Merry into a one-dimensional madwoman. This was Roth’s ‘bit of the [liberal-]philistine’s tail.’”

In the end, liberal anti-communism, even of the most perceptive and radical variety, as in Roth’s case, proved too narrow a basis for examining society in the US in a sufficiently penetrating manner. The artist needed to be able to reject the entire social order, a possibility that was dangerously closed off by the devil’s bargain American liberalism entered into during the postwar period, in the name of opposing “Soviet totalitarianism,” with the most sinister representatives of imperialism.

Roth’s falling back on sex, sex again and sex once more, on largely interpersonal warfare, the obsession with “berserk” elements in everyday life, the intense and articulate ferocity directed toward secondary and even tertiary problems, all of this is the result of a writer hemmed in, above all, by objective social and intellectual circumstances.

In the end, liberal anti-communism, even of the most perceptive and radical variety, as in Roth’s case, proved too narrow a basis for examining society in the US in a sufficiently penetrating manner. The artist needed to be able to reject the entire social order, a possibility that was dangerously closed off by the devil’s bargain American liberalism entered into during the postwar period, in the name of opposing “Soviet totalitarianism,” with the most sinister representatives of imperialism.

It was not to Roth’s credit—though no great surprise—that he described himself in 2009 as “an Obama supporter” and suggested that the new president was “doing the best he can.” It was particularly unpleasant, and Roth at his least trenchant or convincing, that he further asserted that Obama’s miserable, self-serving memoir, Dreams from My Father, was “well-done, very persuasive and memorable.” Obama awarded Roth the National Humanities Medal in a ceremony at the White House in March 2011.

Roth maintained his intransigence on various moral and intellectual questions. He had no use for the nostrums of identity politics and came under fire in recent decades from this quarter, as he had from prominent Jewish figures early in his career. He was absurdly accused of being a misogynist because he lay into his female characters as much as he did his males. Roth was not one to be seduced by the mythology that the female of the species is born without sin. His women characters are capable of the greatest and most luxuriant emotional terrorism and treachery.

When an interviewer asked him about the misogyny charge in 2014, Roth replied presciently that the accusation, although absurd, was “not necessarily a harmless amusement.” He continued, “In some quarters, ‘misogynist’ is now a word used almost as laxly as was ‘Communist’ by the McCarthyite right in the 1950s—and for very like the same purpose.”

Summing up his view of the political and economic landscape, Roth pointed to “very little truthfulness anywhere, antagonism everywhere, so much calculated to disgust, the gigantic hypocrisies, no holding fierce passions at bay, the ordinary viciousness you can see just by pressing the remote, explosive weapons in the hands of creeps, the gloomy tabulation of unspeakable violent events, the unceasing despoliation of the biosphere for profit, surveillance overkill that will come back to haunt us, great concentrations of wealth financing the most undemocratic malevolents around, science illiterates still fighting the Scopes trial 89 years on, economic inequities the size of the Ritz, indebtedness on everyone’s tail, families not knowing how bad things can get, money being squeezed out of every last thing—that frenzy—and (by no means new) government hardly by the people through representative democracy but rather by the great financial interests, the old American plutocracy worse than ever.”

Roth’s best novels will endure.

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report




The Left Needs More Critical Debate and Real Discussion, Less Twitter/Facebook Name Calling and Mic Drops

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

Bruce A. Dixon, BAR managing editor


A couple months ago I attended a gathering at somebody’s Atlanta home. At some point past all the introductions a couple comrades with whom I was less familiar leveled some particular critiques of Black Agenda Report, and of another person in the room connected with the Green Party, labeling us “ultraleftists.” Our critical evaluation of the Movement For Black Lives, and of many self-described leftists who ended up supporting Hillary Clinton and other Democrats, they claimed, had in their words, “shut them down.” After our public observations on the 2016 and 2018 elections, on intersectionality, on M4BLM’s Electoral Justice Project, and the propensity of nonprofit organizations to reflect the interests of their funders rather than their supposed constituents they said, all due respect they just stopped bothering to read or listen to anything we recorded or printed.

A little surprised by this, I quickly pointed out that we had offered publicly and privately to print rebuttals to our positions on intersectionality, on the M4BL and other matters but so far we’d had no takers. While I and some others would have liked to pursue that conversation, asking how we managed to “shut them down,” that was not the focus of the evening’s gathering, so we moved on to other affairs. Their critique if you can call something with no explanation behind it a critique stung and hung in my mind, unresolved.

Was this real life, real politics and real struggle, or were we living on a big Facebook page? If the comrades with whom you disagree are only able to respond to those differences by name calling, unfriending and ignoring you from that point on, without the bother of exchanging ideas, without discussing and comparing our differences in front of an interested audience of truth-seeking leftists then the left does indeed live in a world where our table manners, our methods of internal discourse are dictated by the norms and the forms of capitalist social media marketing platforms.

If all we gotta do is call somebody an ultraleftist or a tankie or an athletic supporter of imperialism –OK, OK I borrowed that one from 1970s Amiri Baraka, 20 years before the internet, but you get the point – if all we gotta do is call names, draft a few devastating Facebook posts Twitter mic drops and walk away, precisely how do we imagine interested leftists, or even interested people who may not yet BE leftists will discern which if any of our strategic and tactical visions and practices are useful and which are not?

So-called social media, as Jodi Dean and others have explained for years, is NOT our friend. It’s not even social, except in the sense that it hijacks the social interactions of millions and turns them into private property, into marketing data and makes the owners of that data into billionaires. That’s not good. Even worse, we have allowed the parasitic marketing platforms of communicative capitalism to teach us how to interact with each other.

The US left simply doesn’t have a tradition of honest and robust critical debate and interaction. DSAers and Berniecrats only speak to each other. Revolutionary nationalists mainly talk to other revolutionary nationalists, Greens only talk to other Greens, and so on. For years we at Black Agenda Report imagined that by detailing our critiques of those with whom we disagreed, and offering them space in our publication to print rebuttals, we might foster the beginnings of a left culture of lively and robust critical comparison of left strategic and tactical visions, before an audience of interested people.

That hasn’t happened, so we’re stepping up our game. In the coming weeks and months, Black Agenda Report will attempt a series of of live and pre-recorded Facebook chats with other self-described leftists with whom we agree and disagree. Our objective is nothing like the mic dropping one-upmanship that dominates Facebook and Twitter. Our aim is not to make the people who already agree with us on this or that feel good, or embarrass and denounce those with whom we disagree. We’re working out the precise format for this project, and you should see its first iteration of it next month.

It’s worth pointing out that not everybody believes in public discussion our differences. Sister Makana Thembi, in a brief essay Toward Movement Grace: Criticism, Self-Criticism and the Wisdom of Silence likens differences among movement activists to what she calls “beefs.” She asserts that differences between movement organizations must be explored and negotiated privately and confidentially, and that no party to a disagreement should issue public statements about anybody else’s position without the expressed consent of both parties. Black Agenda Report answered this line of thinking way back in 2015 in a piece aptly titled “How To Hold Prominent Movement Figures Accountable, With a Private Phone Call or a Public Discussion.” The no-public-criticism model is a formula for unaccountability, one suited only for top-down organizations where the leaders make all the decisions. It makes perfect sense in the nonprofit world, where existing and potential grantees may feel the need to present a united front to existing and potential funders. But private conversations between leaders are the opposite of internal democracy, and not something that can be employed by internally democratic organizations, or by organizations hoping to earn or to serve a mass base. It’s time to grow a pair, ovaries, balls, whatever, along with thicker skins, and as Mao said about 80 years ago, to “Combat Liberalism .” Go look that up too.

We cannot build anything like a broad based US left without creating the spaces and the traditions for principled and respectful struggle and criticism conducted in the light of day, for everybody to teach and to learn from. At Black Agenda Report, we’re committed to moving US leftist discourse out of the mic drop world crafted by communicative capitalism (please go look that term up) and into a place that prefigures the new world we all want to build.

For Black Agenda Report, I’m Bruce Dixon. Please visit our site at Black Agenda Report dot com to subscribe to our free weekly email updates. Black Agenda Report is the only African American owned and oriented web outlet alleged by the forces of the national security state to be under the supposed influence of the Russians, so you cannot depend on Google, Facebook or other corporate social media to deliver our content. Our free newsletter delivered to your email inbox is your only guarantee you’ll get the news, commentary and analysis from the black left we’ve delivered 50 weeks a year since 2006. So subscribe, at Black Agenda Report dot com.


 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a state committee member of the GA Green Party, which unlike Democrats and Republicans unequivocally supports network neutrality. He lives and works in Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com. 

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License



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The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report