----
At Labor Day, Let the EITC Help All Low-Wage Workers
// Center on Budget: Comprehensive News Feed
Bipartisan proposals to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for low-wage workers who aren't raising children in the home would extend the EITC's success to such workers in every state.
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Poverty, Vulnerability and Social Protection
// TripleCrisis
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
According to the World Bank, the MDG target of halving the share of the poor was achieved by 2008, well in advance of 2015, the target year. However, increased unemployment and lower incomes in recent times remind us that poverty is not an unchanging attribute of a shrinking group, but rather, a condition that billions of vulnerable persons risk experiencing.
Despite the various shortcomings of money measures of poverty, they nevertheless reflect the extent of vulnerability. For example, the estimated number of poor globally in 2012 more than doubles from 902 million to 2.1 billion when one raises the poverty line by 63% from $1.90/day to $3.10/day per person, suggesting that a very large number of those not deemed poor by the World Bank are very vulnerable to external economic shocks or changes in personal circumstances, such as income losses or food price increases.
Of the world's poor, three-quarters live in rural areas where agricultural wage workers suffer the highest incidence of poverty, largely because of low productivity, seasonal unemployment and low wages paid by most rural employers. Vulnerability and economic insecurity have increased in recent decades with rising insecure, casual and precarious jobs involving part-time employment, self-employment, fixed-term work, temporary work, on-call work and home-working – often mainly involving women.
Such trends have grown with labour market liberalization, globalization, and declining union power. To make matters worse, macroeconomic policies in recent decades have focused on low inflation, rather than full employment, while limited social protection has exacerbated economic insecurity and vulnerability.
Additionally, lower economic growth rates, following the global financial crisis, would push 46 million more people into extreme poverty than expected before the crisis. This figure was later revised to 64 million, implying over 200 million people fell into extreme poverty due to food-fuel price hikes and the global financial crisis.
While some of these figures were subsequently revised downward, they suggest widespread vulnerability and economic insecurity, due to the inability of governments to respond with adequate counter-cyclical policies and in the absence of comprehensive universal social protection measures. During the East Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, the official poverty rate in Indonesia shot up from 11% to 37% in just one year following the massive depreciation of the Indonesian rupiah.
Working Poor
The working poor are defined as those employed, but earning less than the international poverty line ($1.25 a day in 2005 and $1.90 a day in 2011 in purchasing power parity [PPP] terms). Despite working, they cannot earn enough to get out of poverty. In most developing countries, most poor adults have to work, if only to survive, in the absence of adequate social protection.
According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), an estimated 375 million workers lived below the international poverty line in 2013. The number of working poor rises dramatically to close to 800 million when a $2-a-day poverty line is used. Women comprise the majority of the working poor, accounting for about 60%. It also found that progress in reducing the number of working poor has slowed markedly since 2008.
An estimated 1.42 billion people globally were in vulnerable employment in 2013, still increasing by around 1% in 2013, well above the 0.2% average increase in the years prior to 2008. The number was projected to exceed 1.44 billion in 2014, accounting for 45% of total world employment.
Social Protection
Most people who fall under the international poverty line are vulnerable, with no basic social protection. The lack of comprehensive universal social protection is a major obstacle to economic and social development, exacerbating high and persistent levels of poverty, economic insecurity, and inequality. Most countries do not have unemployment insurance or other similar social protection. In the most vulnerable countries, more than 80% have neither social security coverage nor access to health services.
The ILO's World Social Protection Report, 2014/15 found a high or very high vulnerability in terms of poverty and labour market informality. Only 27% of the global population enjoy access to comprehensive social security systems, whereas 73% are only covered partially, or not at all. This means that about 5.2 billion people do not have access to comprehensive social protection, and many of them – in the case of middle- and low-income countries, nearly half their populations – live in poverty. About 800 million of them are working poor, of whom most work in the informal economy.
Although 2.3% of GDP worldwide is allocated to public social protection expenditure for income security during working age, there are wide regional, national and local variations, e.g. ranging from 0.5% in Africa to 5.9% in Western Europe. Only 28% of the global labour force is potentially or legally eligible for unemployment benefits. Yet, only 12% of unemployed workers worldwide actually receive unemployment benefits, with effective coverage ranging from 64% of unemployed workers in Western Europe to just over 7% in the Asia and Pacific region, 5% in Latin America and the Caribbean, and less than 3% in the Middle East and Africa.
Globally, about 39% and more than 90% of the population living in low-income countries have no right to healthcare. About 18,000 children die every day, mainly from preventable causes. On average, governments allocate 0.4% of GDP to child and family benefits, ranging from 2.2% in Western Europe to 0.2% in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.
Fiscal austerity measures since the 2008-2009 global financial and economic crises have exacerbated the situation. Such measures are not limited to Europe; many developing countries have also adopted such measures, including reducing or ending food and fuel subsidies; cutting or capping wages; more narrowly targeting social protection benefits, and reducing public pension and health care systems.
These are contrary to the pledges countries made in adopting Agenda 2030 for the Sustainable Development Goals which include achieving universal protection and health care. Not surprisingly, fiscal austerity measures, including cuts in social protection expenditure, have not helped economic recovery, but instead, have exacerbated inequality.
Triple Crisis welcomes your comments. Please share your thoughts below.
Triple Crisis is published by
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What does Scott recommend? A trade war with China? Isn't "leverage" against China the main objective of TPP? But Scott is against that, right?
----
Manufacturing Job Loss: The Consequences of Malign Neglect of the Dollar and Chinese Overcapacity
// Economic Policy Institute Blog
Today's Jobs Report from the BLS showed that the U.S. manufacturing sector lost 14,000 jobs in August and has now lost 57,000 jobs since January of this year. This job loss is, in part, a consequence of the sharp rise of the dollar in 2014 and 2015, which has gained nearly 20 percent on a broad, trade-weighted basis, as shown below. The rising dollar has reduced the cost of imports, increased the cost of U.S. exports resulting in growing trade deficits. Growing exports support U.S. employment, but growing imports cost U.S. jobs, so the manufacturing decline was entirely predictable from the expected increase in the U.S. trade deficit, which responds to changes in the dollar with a lag of one to two years. Yet the U.S. government continues to do nothing about destructive exchange rate movements, whether they are caused by intentional currency manipulation or more recent, market-driven misalignments.
Data for the U.S. trade deficit in July were also released this morning. The trade deficit in manufactured products (Exhibit 1S) increased 3.1 percent, year to date, relative to the same period last year, despite a decline in the overall U.S. trade deficit. U.S. imports of petroleum products declined sharply in this period, while the trade deficit in non-petroleum goods (which is dominated by trade in manufactures) increased sharply. The single largest cause of the growing manufacturing trade deficit is malign neglect of currency manipulation over the past 20 years by the U.S. government.
China, which has been the most important currency manipulator over the past two decades, was responsible for nearly two thirds (61.3 percent) of the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods in 2015. The trade deficit with China increased in July. China has also distorted trade by generating massive amounts of excess production capacity in a wide range of industries, including steel, aluminium, glass, paper and renewable energy products. China's capacity growth has been fueled by illegal subsidies and other unfair trade practices. A new report from Duke University explores the impacts of overcapacity in China's steel industry.
As the U.S. prepares for G-20 prepares for its summit meeting in Hangzhou, China, it is imperative that leaders prepare to confront China about its unfair trade and the massive amount of excess capacity which is distorting global trade not just in these industries, but in sectors that use these primary commodities to produce a wide range of downstream products such as electrical appliances, machine tools, autos and auto parts. The United States also must come to terms with its sustained failure to address the currency manipulation, and more recently developed problems of currency misalignment, which I will address in a subsequent post.
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Gary, we DID revisit this argument in 2010. And other times too,
as I recall. Sectarianism is one thing. Abandoning your politics is
something else. So yeah, we'll be revisiting stuff. Hopefully not
forever.
PS--I know 2010 was a typo. It just gave me a chance to be a
wise-guy.
John Crawford
Wrap Fish in it
Sectarianism in the CP, final chapter
John Case
Once around 1980 I tried to give away a copy of the Daily World, a successor to the Daily Worker and a newspaper published by Communist Party, USA, to Boris (Red) Block, then General Secretary-Treasurer of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). The paper had an article in it based on an interview I had done with Bernie Sanders after he had been elected Mayor of Burlington, Vt as an open, independent Socialist.
Red Block replied: "I would not wrap fish in that paper!".I was taken aback, surprised, despite knowing some of the history of the UE's founders' disagreements with the Communist Party over the election campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948, and more seriously, over the Party's reaction to the Taft-Hartley act's anti-communist and anti-union provisions.
While I did not much like the style and format of the paper myself, I nonetheless had and still have a very high regard for my early mentors and teachers in the labor movement. Almost all of these folks were either active or ex- members and friends of the Communist Party's very talented and effective brigades in the industrial organizing campaigns of the 1930's, through the World War, and including the big strike of 1946. I knew Red had been in that crowd--working-class geniuses--every one of them.. I counted, and count, him among those mentors.
In addition, I had some direct loyalty to the Party, who found me in 69-70 when I had been indicted for various SDS offenses, and helped me recover my courage, as well as other considerations, for which I am forever in their debt.
I thought Sanders agreement to be interviewed, AND some of the spicy remarks he made, made good press for the paper. Maybe reach a bigger audience. But not Red?
So asked "Why?"
"No organization or movement in American history was ever more consumed in eating its own than the Communist Party."
Notwithstanding that for which I am forever thankful, truer words were never spoken. Red had even deeper disgust for the various left splinterings from the CP, few of which he ever took seriously.
Indeed, Red's very assertion was itself a joust in the sectarian disease, or perhaps more accurate -- diseases -- that blind the infected to what is directly in front of them: in this case evidence of a "socialism", of an "elected, and electable, working class advocate"; direct evidence of a socialism that shunned dogma and embraced the real challenges of democratic governance in a mixed economy. Bernie Sanders will not go down in history for his great ideological or scientific brilliance. He did not write a new edition of Capital (although one of his supporters, Thomas Piketty, did). He did not indulge much in punditry style polemics (a la Krugman, or Lenin). He devoted himself, more like Dolores Ibarruri of Spain, to showing by doing.
Still, neither Red, nor Gus Hall, then General Secretary of the CP, were much impressed by Bernie. For Red, Gus was an embodiment of the "disease", and anything appearing on the pages of the Daily World would stink of it. He viewed with contempt, and never forgave, the CP role in raiding left led unions in the face of the post war wave of cold war repression against the CIO under the slogan "merge with the mainstream" AFL, which he referred to as a "sewer of redbaiters", while at the same time, the CP itself would go underground rather than become an association [a la Browder], or merge with the Democrats."
For Gus, the UE leadership were renegade syndicalists, or FBI agents (he frequently got around to suggesting some adversary was connected to the FBI).. Further, he was starting his own presidential campaign with Angela Davis as his VP running mate, and referred to Sanders as "a fake socialist".
Gus was wrong. Sanders' campaign was the serious campaign. He won. Gus's was fake. Wrapping it in "Marxism Leninism" did not change that. Indeed it aggravated and confirmed Gus's never faltering allegiance to the Soviet model of socialism and its leadership of the "world communist movement". "Marxism-Leninism" might seem like something to do with Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin. But it's not anymore. And I suspect never was. The term is a "whole cloth" (a backasswards Vermont expression meaning NOT "whole", but made of patches) fabrication by Joseph Stalin intended to transform the legacy of Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx into dogmas serving, primarily, the state interests and reputation of the USSR, the "land of socialism". Dogma here is defined as: the assertion of "scientific laws and truths" unsustained by evidence.
The Hall presidential campaign was a joke as an electoral political event, and served mainly as recruiting tour he could do with Angela Davis, with members consumed in petitioning to get the ticket on the ballot in states where the CP retained some modest strength and coherence.. As it turned out time would have been better spent defending Jimmy Carter against Reagan, or going to Vermont and learning how to run a real socialist, working class campaign for public office. Patterns similar to this persisted until the 1991 split when nearly every dogma collapsed under the weight of the final exposure of Soviet socialist model as a failed model.
The history of sectarianism in the Party can be traced back to multiple origins: from largely anarchist movements in 19th century labor radicalism; from the racial, nationality, ethnic, gender and geographic divisions in the emerging industrial working class; from the strong culture of individualism in American social development. But -- from the 1932 "Build a Soviet America" CP presidential campaign of WZ Foster AGAINST Roosevelt, and onward, the commitment to Stalin's dogma, and its emerging weaknesses -- especially in the post-war scene -- infected almost every area of political work. It can get complicated: In the CIO organizing upheaval dogma and reality were pretty close to equal for industrial work in ALL the emerging mass manufacturing centers. Yet it also had early weaknesses, as seen in Foster's slogan. As a semi-legal movement, democratic standards of organization were seldom on the top of the CP to-do list, and factions -- open differences -- were nearly intolerable. One might excuse this in an illegal organization, but it's poisonous for participation in US democratic processes.
Yet the disease of sectarianism prevailed against every attempt -- and there were several -- to dislodge it. Including, it appears, Sam Webb's latest attempt, as calls from the remaining narcissistic fools condemning him for "bourgeois liberalism", and "Browderism" for supporting Hillary have made their way into the CP press. That means the suicidal, stupid season is on again in the CP. LIke a curse that can't be exorcised. Browder, Gates, Healy, the CCDS split: 10%, 20%, 30%, 50% membership losses -- no matter. Keep sucking on the "better fewer but better" tube until any remaining sustenance from the legacy of some heroic and unequalled fighters in the working class movement is completely depreciated.
No party leader was more vilified -- eaten by his own -- than Earl Browder after 1946 when he distanced himself from both the USSR and the "cadre-style" organizational culture (another of Stalin's betrayal of Lenin's warnings on exporting features of the Russian revolution). Yet his criticisms look pretty astute today. Except for modest growth during the 60's and 70's upheavals, the CP never recovered from the repression of the 50's. After the 1991 CCDS split and the collapse of the USSR, Gus Hall -- a Fosterite and Stalin supporter from way back -- remained undaunted by his failures as a leader. Dogma will eventually blind you to everything if you hold on to it. Hall blamed everything on Gorbachev, on FBI agents (one of them, however, was his bagman for USSR money -- "to pay for newspaper subscriptions", he told me --- Jesus, you can't make it up!), and "petty-bourgeois forces".
Sam Webb made a major retreat from sectarian practices, in press and messaging. But in his retirement as Chair and now resignation from the Communist Party, there are signs that there may be an insufficient leadership and membership base remaining to perform the necessary reforms. There are signs of this in many other left factions as well. Jill Stein, for example, is running a completely high-minded and pointless, indeed reactionary, campaign from any serious working class standpoint. In states like West Virginia, where it could make a difference in which party controls the state legislature post election, the third party efforts are scab-like in their denials of the obvious consequences of their campaign.
What are the necessary reforms? The short answer is: drop every last ounce of dogma from the official line and documents (Marxism-Leninism, Communism in the name (no one knows what that means), Democratic centralism, etc); retain the working class approach, the fight for equality, the common advance of all who labor across the world. Be a voice around which the "Our Revolution" agenda, and its millions of rising adherents, whatever its name, can find friendship, brotherhood and sisterhood, and the ability to take on governance challenges in very harsh circumstances. Develop the socialist elements of Bernie's campaign, many of which were included in the Clinton platform.
Now -- it's 2016. Sanders has repeated his lesson many times since 1980. He just did it again on a national, even international scale. He did it on straightforward working class issues. He did it by taking a class approach to every question. He did it by being SERIOUS about American politics. He shunned dogma completely. Yet he used "revolution" and "socialism" repeatedly in constructive, not rhetorical, dogmatic, or bullshit, contexts. "Revolution" because the reforms required to address inequality and austerity require a new ruling coalition to consistently implement. "Socialism" because most of the reforms involve expanding public goods, infrastructure and services, as well as changes public regulatory authority in trade, tax, financial sector, and corporate governance policy.
Sanders campaign is only part of the story. Many other movements are challenging the status quo in comparable ways, most notably the Black Lives Matter movements and the intimate connections between equality, democracy, justice, and peace, at home, and in the world.
So, once again, a crossroads for the Left, one leading to opportunity, the other to dogma death. Sanders has, very interestingly and not unlike his approach after his first Mayoral victory in 1980, chosen NOT to personally lead an independent political formation. He set up a funding mechanism for campaigns across the country in line with the themes of his presidential campaign. But a new political formation he did not form, either inside, or outside the Democratic party. That's up to the Left, a sober, serious Left, to figure out. If we can. He has shown how, in large measure, to make the sharp turn that our duty and class loyalty asks of those who seek the rise of the working class, and not to rise above it.
--
John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV
The Winners and Losers Radio Show7-9 AM Weekdays, Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio Stream,Sign UP HERE to get the Weekly Program Notes.Check out Socialist Economics.Check out The EPIC Radio website
_______________________________________________
CCDS Members mailing list
CCDS website: http://www.cc-ds.org
CCDS welcomes and encourages the full participation of our members in
this list serve. It is intended for discussion of issues of concern to
our organization and its members, for building our community, for
respectfully expressing our different points of view, all in keeping
with our commitment to building a democratic and socialist society. To
those ends, free and honest discussion of issues and ideas is
encouraged. However, personal attacks on named individuals, carrying on
old vendettas, excessive posts and, especially, statements that are
racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic and/or anti-working class are not
appropriate.
Repeated failure to respect those principles of discussion
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Please respect each other and our organization.
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Socialist.
Red Block replied: "I would not wrap fish in that paper!".I
Wrap Fish in it
Sectarianism in the CP, final chapter
John Case
Once around 1980 I tried to give away a copy of the Daily World, a successor to the Daily Worker and a newspaper published by Communist Party, USA, to Boris (Red) Block, then General Secretary-Treasurer of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). The paper had an article in it based on an interview I had done with Bernie Sanders after he had been elected Mayor of Burlington, Vt as an open, independent Socialist.
Red Block replied: "I would not wrap fish in that paper!".I was taken aback, surprised, despite knowing some of the history of the UE's founders' disagreements with the Communist Party over the election campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948, and more seriously, over the Party's reaction to the Taft-Hartley act's anti-communist and anti-union provisions.
While I did not much like the style and format of the paper myself, I nonetheless had and still have a very high regard for my early mentors and teachers in the labor movement. Almost all of these folks were either active or ex- members and friends of the Communist Party's very talented and effective brigades in the industrial organizing campaigns of the 1930's, through the World War, and including the big strike of 1946. I knew Red had been in that crowd--working-class geniuses--every one of them.. I counted, and count, him among those mentors.
In addition, I had some direct loyalty to the Party, who found me in 69-70 when I had been indicted for various SDS offenses, and helped me recover my courage, as well as other considerations, for which I am forever in their debt.
I thought Sanders agreement to be interviewed, AND some of the spicy remarks he made, made good press for the paper. Maybe reach a bigger audience. But not Red?
So asked "Why?"
"No organization or movement in American history was ever more consumed in eating its own than the Communist Party."
Notwithstanding that for which I am forever thankful, truer words were never spoken. Red had even deeper disgust for the various left splinterings from the CP, few of which he ever took seriously.
Indeed, Red's very assertion was itself a joust in the sectarian disease, or perhaps more accurate -- diseases -- that blind the infected to what is directly in front of them: in this case evidence of a "socialism", of an "elected, and electable, working class advocate"; direct evidence of a socialism that shunned dogma and embraced the real challenges of democratic governance in a mixed economy. Bernie Sanders will not go down in history for his great ideological or scientific brilliance. He did not write a new edition of Capital (although one of his supporters, Thomas Piketty, did). He did not indulge much in punditry style polemics (a la Krugman, or Lenin). He devoted himself, more like Dolores Ibarruri of Spain, to showing by doing.
Still, neither Red, nor Gus Hall, then General Secretary of the CP, were much impressed by Bernie. For Red, Gus was an embodiment of the "disease", and anything appearing on the pages of the Daily World would stink of it. He viewed with contempt, and never forgave, the CP role in raiding left led unions in the face of the post war wave of cold war repression against the CIO under the slogan "merge with the mainstream" AFL, which he referred to as a "sewer of redbaiters", while at the same time, the CP itself would go underground rather than become an association [a la Browder], or merge with the Democrats."
For Gus, the UE leadership were renegade syndicalists, or FBI agents (he frequently got around to suggesting some adversary was connected to the FBI).. Further, he was starting his own presidential campaign with Angela Davis as his VP running mate, and referred to Sanders as "a fake socialist".
Gus was wrong. Sanders' campaign was the serious campaign. He won. Gus's was fake. Wrapping it in "Marxism Leninism" did not change that. Indeed it aggravated and confirmed Gus's never faltering allegiance to the Soviet model of socialism and its leadership of the "world communist movement". "Marxism-Leninism" might seem like something to do with Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin. But it's not anymore. And I suspect never was. The term is a "whole cloth" (a backasswards Vermont expression meaning NOT "whole", but made of patches) fabrication by Joseph Stalin intended to transform the legacy of Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx into dogmas serving, primarily, the state interests and reputation of the USSR, the "land of socialism". Dogma here is defined as: the assertion of "scientific laws and truths" unsustained by evidence.
The Hall presidential campaign was a joke as an electoral political event, and served mainly as recruiting tour he could do with Angela Davis, with members consumed in petitioning to get the ticket on the ballot in states where the CP retained some modest strength and coherence.. As it turned out time would have been better spent defending Jimmy Carter against Reagan, or going to Vermont and learning how to run a real socialist, working class campaign for public office. Patterns similar to this persisted until the 1991 split when nearly every dogma collapsed under the weight of the final exposure of Soviet socialist model as a failed model.
The history of sectarianism in the Party can be traced back to multiple origins: from largely anarchist movements in 19th century labor radicalism; from the racial, nationality, ethnic, gender and geographic divisions in the emerging industrial working class; from the strong culture of individualism in American social development. But -- from the 1932 "Build a Soviet America" CP presidential campaign of WZ Foster AGAINST Roosevelt, and onward, the commitment to Stalin's dogma, and its emerging weaknesses -- especially in the post-war scene -- infected almost every area of political work. It can get complicated: In the CIO organizing upheaval dogma and reality were pretty close to equal for industrial work in ALL the emerging mass manufacturing centers. Yet it also had early weaknesses, as seen in Foster's slogan. As a semi-legal movement, democratic standards of organization were seldom on the top of the CP to-do list, and factions -- open differences -- were nearly intolerable. One might excuse this in an illegal organization, but it's poisonous for participation in US democratic processes.
Yet the disease of sectarianism prevailed against every attempt -- and there were several -- to dislodge it. Including, it appears, Sam Webb's latest attempt, as calls from the remaining narcissistic fools condemning him for "bourgeois liberalism", and "Browderism" for supporting Hillary have made their way into the CP press. That means the suicidal, stupid season is on again in the CP. LIke a curse that can't be exorcised. Browder, Gates, Healy, the CCDS split: 10%, 20%, 30%, 50% membership losses -- no matter. Keep sucking on the "better fewer but better" tube until any remaining sustenance from the legacy of some heroic and unequalled fighters in the working class movement is completely depreciated.
No party leader was more vilified -- eaten by his own -- than Earl Browder after 1946 when he distanced himself from both the USSR and the "cadre-style" organizational culture (another of Stalin's betrayal of Lenin's warnings on exporting features of the Russian revolution). Yet his criticisms look pretty astute today. Except for modest growth during the 60's and 70's upheavals, the CP never recovered from the repression of the 50's. After the 1991 CCDS split and the collapse of the USSR, Gus Hall -- a Fosterite and Stalin supporter from way back -- remained undaunted by his failures as a leader. Dogma will eventually blind you to everything if you hold on to it. Hall blamed everything on Gorbachev, on FBI agents (one of them, however, was his bagman for USSR money -- "to pay for newspaper subscriptions", he told me --- Jesus, you can't make it up!), and "petty-bourgeois forces".
Sam Webb made a major retreat from sectarian practices, in press and messaging. But in his retirement as Chair and now resignation from the Communist Party, there are signs that there may be an insufficient leadership and membership base remaining to perform the necessary reforms. There are signs of this in many other left factions as well. Jill Stein, for example, is running a completely high-minded and pointless, indeed reactionary, campaign from any serious working class standpoint. In states like West Virginia, where it could make a difference in which party controls the state legislature post election, the third party efforts are scab-like in their denials of the obvious consequences of their campaign.
What are the necessary reforms? The short answer is: drop every last ounce of dogma from the official line and documents (Marxism-Leninism, Communism in the name (no one knows what that means), Democratic centralism, etc); retain the working class approach, the fight for equality, the common advance of all who labor across the world. Be a voice around which the "Our Revolution" agenda, and its millions of rising adherents, whatever its name, can find friendship, brotherhood and sisterhood, and the ability to take on governance challenges in very harsh circumstances. Develop the socialist elements of Bernie's campaign, many of which were included in the Clinton platform.
Now -- it's 2016. Sanders has repeated his lesson many times since 1980. He just did it again on a national, even international scale. He did it on straightforward working class issues. He did it by taking a class approach to every question. He did it by being SERIOUS about American politics. He shunned dogma completely. Yet he used "revolution" and "socialism" repeatedly in constructive, not rhetorical, dogmatic, or bullshit, contexts. "Revolution" because the reforms required to address inequality and austerity require a new ruling coalition to consistently implement. "Socialism" because most of the reforms involve expanding public goods, infrastructure and services, as well as changes public regulatory authority in trade, tax, financial sector, and corporate governance policy.
Sanders campaign is only part of the story. Many other movements are challenging the status quo in comparable ways, most notably the Black Lives Matter movements and the intimate connections between equality, democracy, justice, and peace, at home, and in the world.
So, once again, a crossroads for the Left, one leading to opportunity, the other to dogma death. Sanders has, very interestingly and not unlike his approach after his first Mayoral victory in 1980, chosen NOT to personally lead an independent political formation. He set up a funding mechanism for campaigns across the country in line with the themes of his presidential campaign. But a new political formation he did not form, either inside, or outside the Democratic party. That's up to the Left, a sober, serious Left, to figure out. If we can. He has shown how, in large measure, to make the sharp turn that our duty and class loyalty asks of those who seek the rise of the working class, and not to rise above it.
--John Case
Harpers Ferry, WVThe Winners and Losers Radio Show7-9 AM Weekdays, Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio Stream,Sign UP HERE to get the Weekly Program Notes.Check out Socialist Economics.Check out The EPIC Radio website
_______________________________________________
CCDS Members mailing list
CCDS website: http://www.cc-ds.org
CCDS welcomes and encourages the full participation of our members in
this list serve. It is intended for discussion of issues of concern to
our organization and its members, for building our community, for
respectfully expressing our different points of view, all in keeping
with our commitment to building a democratic and socialist society. To
those ends, free and honest discussion of issues and ideas is
encouraged. However, personal attacks on named individuals, carrying on
old vendettas, excessive posts and, especially, statements that are
racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic and/or anti-working class are not
appropriate.
Repeated failure to respect those principles of discussion
may result in exclusion from the list.
Please respect each other and our organization.
Any member of the list who objects to a posting on the list or the
behavior of a particular member should send email describing his or her
concerns to members-owner@lists.cc-ds.org
Post: Members@lists.cc-ds.org
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To Unsubscribe, send email to:
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visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/options/members/hicksgary6770%40yahoo.com
You are subscribed as: hicksgary6770@yahoo.com
Wrap Fish in it
Sectarianism in the CP, final chapter
John Case
Once around 1980 I tried to give away a copy of the Daily World, a successor to the Daily Worker and a newspaper published by Communist Party, USA, to Boris (Red) Block, then General Secretary-Treasurer of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). The paper had an article in it based on an interview I had done with Bernie Sanders after he had been elected Mayor of Burlington, Vt as an open, independent Socialist.
Red Block replied: "I would not wrap fish in that paper!".I was taken aback, surprised, despite knowing some of the history of the UE's founders' disagreements with the Communist Party over the election campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948, and more seriously, over the Party's reaction to the Taft-Hartley act's anti-communist and anti-union provisions.
While I did not much like the style and format of the paper myself, I nonetheless had and still have a very high regard for my early mentors and teachers in the labor movement. Almost all of these folks were either active or ex- members and friends of the Communist Party's very talented and effective brigades in the industrial organizing campaigns of the 1930's, through the World War, and including the big strike of 1946. I knew Red had been in that crowd--working-class geniuses--every one of them.. I counted, and count, him among those mentors.
In addition, I had some direct loyalty to the Party, who found me in 69-70 when I had been indicted for various SDS offenses, and helped me recover my courage, as well as other considerations, for which I am forever in their debt.
I thought Sanders agreement to be interviewed, AND some of the spicy remarks he made, made good press for the paper. Maybe reach a bigger audience. But not Red?
So asked "Why?"
"No organization or movement in American history was ever more consumed in eating its own than the Communist Party."
Notwithstanding that for which I am forever thankful, truer words were never spoken. Red had even deeper disgust for the various left splinterings from the CP, few of which he ever took seriously.
Indeed, Red's very assertion was itself a joust in the sectarian disease, or perhaps more accurate -- diseases -- that blind the infected to what is directly in front of them: in this case evidence of a "socialism", of an "elected, and electable, working class advocate"; direct evidence of a socialism that shunned dogma and embraced the real challenges of democratic governance in a mixed economy. Bernie Sanders will not go down in history for his great ideological or scientific brilliance. He did not write a new edition of Capital (although one of his supporters, Thomas Piketty, did). He did not indulge much in punditry style polemics (a la Krugman, or Lenin). He devoted himself, more like Dolores Ibarruri of Spain, to showing by doing.
Still, neither Red, nor Gus Hall, then General Secretary of the CP, were much impressed by Bernie. For Red, Gus was an embodiment of the "disease", and anything appearing on the pages of the Daily World would stink of it. He viewed with contempt, and never forgave, the CP role in raiding left led unions in the face of the post war wave of cold war repression against the CIO under the slogan "merge with the mainstream" AFL, which he referred to as a "sewer of redbaiters", while at the same time, the CP itself would go underground rather than become an association [a la Browder], or merge with the Democrats."
For Gus, the UE leadership were renegade syndicalists, or FBI agents (he frequently got around to suggesting some adversary was connected to the FBI).. Further, he was starting his own presidential campaign with Angela Davis as his VP running mate, and referred to Sanders as "a fake socialist".
Gus was wrong. Sanders' campaign was the serious campaign. He won. Gus's was fake. Wrapping it in "Marxism Leninism" did not change that. Indeed it aggravated and confirmed Gus's never faltering allegiance to the Soviet model of socialism and its leadership of the "world communist movement". "Marxism-Leninism" might seem like something to do with Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin. But it's not anymore. And I suspect never was. The term is a "whole cloth" (a backasswards Vermont expression meaning NOT "whole", but made of patches) fabrication by Joseph Stalin intended to transform the legacy of Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx into dogmas serving, primarily, the state interests and reputation of the USSR, the "land of socialism". Dogma here is defined as: the assertion of "scientific laws and truths" unsustained by evidence.
The Hall presidential campaign was a joke as an electoral political event, and served mainly as recruiting tour he could do with Angela Davis, with members consumed in petitioning to get the ticket on the ballot in states where the CP retained some modest strength and coherence.. As it turned out time would have been better spent defending Jimmy Carter against Reagan, or going to Vermont and learning how to run a real socialist, working class campaign for public office. Patterns similar to this persisted until the 1991 split when nearly every dogma collapsed under the weight of the final exposure of Soviet socialist model as a failed model.
The history of sectarianism in the Party can be traced back to multiple origins: from largely anarchist movements in 19th century labor radicalism; from the racial, nationality, ethnic, gender and geographic divisions in the emerging industrial working class; from the strong culture of individualism in American social development. But -- from the 1932 "Build a Soviet America" CP presidential campaign of WZ Foster AGAINST Roosevelt, and onward, the commitment to Stalin's dogma, and its emerging weaknesses -- especially in the post-war scene -- infected almost every area of political work. It can get complicated: In the CIO organizing upheaval dogma and reality were pretty close to equal for industrial work in ALL the emerging mass manufacturing centers. Yet it also had early weaknesses, as seen in Foster's slogan. As a semi-legal movement, democratic standards of organization were seldom on the top of the CP to-do list, and factions -- open differences -- were nearly intolerable. One might excuse this in an illegal organization, but it's poisonous for participation in US democratic processes.
Yet the disease of sectarianism prevailed against every attempt -- and there were several -- to dislodge it. Including, it appears, Sam Webb's latest attempt, as calls from the remaining narcissistic fools condemning him for "bourgeois liberalism", and "Browderism" for supporting Hillary have made their way into the CP press. That means the suicidal, stupid season is on again in the CP. LIke a curse that can't be exorcised. Browder, Gates, Healy, the CCDS split: 10%, 20%, 30%, 50% membership losses -- no matter. Keep sucking on the "better fewer but better" tube until any remaining sustenance from the legacy of some heroic and unequalled fighters in the working class movement is completely depreciated.
No party leader was more vilified -- eaten by his own -- than Earl Browder after 1946 when he distanced himself from both the USSR and the "cadre-style" organizational culture (another of Stalin's betrayal of Lenin's warnings on exporting features of the Russian revolution). Yet his criticisms look pretty astute today. Except for modest growth during the 60's and 70's upheavals, the CP never recovered from the repression of the 50's. After the 1991 CCDS split and the collapse of the USSR, Gus Hall -- a Fosterite and Stalin supporter from way back -- remained undaunted by his failures as a leader. Dogma will eventually blind you to everything if you hold on to it. Hall blamed everything on Gorbachev, on FBI agents (one of them, however, was his bagman for USSR money -- "to pay for newspaper subscriptions", he told me --- Jesus, you can't make it up!), and "petty-bourgeois forces".
Sam Webb made a major retreat from sectarian practices, in press and messaging. But in his retirement as Chair and now resignation from the Communist Party, there are signs that there may be an insufficient leadership and membership base remaining to perform the necessary reforms. There are signs of this in many other left factions as well. Jill Stein, for example, is running a completely high-minded and pointless, indeed reactionary, campaign from any serious working class standpoint. In states like West Virginia, where it could make a difference in which party controls the state legislature post election, the third party efforts are scab-like in their denials of the obvious consequences of their campaign.
What are the necessary reforms? The short answer is: drop every last ounce of dogma from the official line and documents (Marxism-Leninism, Communism in the name (no one knows what that means), Democratic centralism, etc); retain the working class approach, the fight for equality, the common advance of all who labor across the world. Be a voice around which the "Our Revolution" agenda, and its millions of rising adherents, whatever its name, can find friendship, brotherhood and sisterhood, and the ability to take on governance challenges in very harsh circumstances. Develop the socialist elements of Bernie's campaign, many of which were included in the Clinton platform.
Now -- it's 2016. Sanders has repeated his lesson many times since 1980. He just did it again on a national, even international scale. He did it on straightforward working class issues. He did it by taking a class approach to every question. He did it by being SERIOUS about American politics. He shunned dogma completely. Yet he used "revolution" and "socialism" repeatedly in constructive, not rhetorical, dogmatic, or bullshit, contexts. "Revolution" because the reforms required to address inequality and austerity require a new ruling coalition to consistently implement. "Socialism" because most of the reforms involve expanding public goods, infrastructure and services, as well as changes public regulatory authority in trade, tax, financial sector, and corporate governance policy.
Sanders campaign is only part of the story. Many other movements are challenging the status quo in comparable ways, most notably the Black Lives Matter movements and the intimate connections between equality, democracy, justice, and peace, at home, and in the world.
So, once again, a crossroads for the Left, one leading to opportunity, the other to dogma death. Sanders has, very interestingly and not unlike his approach after his first Mayoral victory in 1980, chosen NOT to personally lead an independent political formation. He set up a funding mechanism for campaigns across the country in line with the themes of his presidential campaign. But a new political formation he did not form, either inside, or outside the Democratic party. That's up to the Left, a sober, serious Left, to figure out. If we can. He has shown how, in large measure, to make the sharp turn that our duty and class loyalty asks of those who seek the rise of the working class, and not to rise above it.
