Black Leadership and the Indomnible Revolutionary Spirit

Liberals will say there is a crisis in black leadership.  They have been saying it for years.  Recently, Dion Rabouin wrote for International Business Times, "The leadership void is a reality for African-Americans across the nation. Tuesday night saw organized protests in 130 American cities, but no one was able to articulate just what all the marching -- or the bricks thrown, overturned police cars or buildings set on fire -- were intended to accomplish."

In August, Jesse Jackson was asked by protesters, "When are you going to stop selling us out...?"


The Congressional Black Caucus members recently staged a "hands up, don't shoot" protest on the floor of congress.  However, the website Breaking Brown reports:

None of the Congressional Black Caucus members who were a part of this “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protest voted in favor of H.R. 4870, an amendment offered by Rep. Grayson (FL) to halt the Pentagon’s 1033 program, which distributes hundreds of millions of dollars of military weapons and equipment to local police annually.

They conclude, "It seems that symbolism is still more important than substance among many of our CBC members."

The reality on the ground in and around St. Louis seems different than the black liberals would have us believe.  There is indeed a new black leadership forming out of the Ferguson crisis.

There is the Huey P. Newton Gun Club and the #blackopencarry movement in Texas.

There is the Black Riders Liberation Party.

Young leaders are taking a lion's share of the organizing through Hands Up United and the Don't Shoot Coalition on the ground in Ferguson.

What is clear from Ferguson is not that there is far from a lack of black leadership.  Rather, there is a renaissance of black leaders who are proving to be heirs to the black radical tradition of the Black Panther Party, the Organization of Afro-American Unity and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers more than Obama, Sharpton or Jackson could ever hope to.

And finally, there is Shaka Shakur who posted this inspiring video on fb.

Facebook Poll - Who of the Current Possible Candidates Would Win In 2016 based on Facebook "Likes"

So if you're looking for who Facebook users might vote for in 2016, I did a quick poll.
According to this page these are the current possible candidates for president on the Democratic and Republican, bipartisan agenda.  After their names, I have added how many facebook likes they have currently as of 11/19/2014 followed by a brief commentary.

Joe Biden - as a "politiciain" 845,800
Bernie Sanders - as a "politician" 732,964, independent considering running on the Democratic line.  Once described himself as a "democratic socialist." Also has a page encouraging him to run for prez. as a "political organization" with 16.157 likes.  Judging from the "politician" page alone, Sanders is second to Biden in FB "likes," above Clinton.
Hillary Clinton - as a "politician" 298,161
Martin O'Malley - as a "politician" 59,703
Joe Manchin - as a "Govenment Official" 22.165
Jim Webb - as a "public figure" 15,447, as a "politician" 447

Mitt Romney - as a "politician" 11,345,953, "for president in 2016" 10,693, "mitt romney sucks" 29,581, former GOP Presidential nominee
Paul Ryan - as a "politician" 5,041,723, "paul ryan is a douchebag" 228,137, former GOP vice-Presidential nominee
Rand Paul - as a "politician" 1,823,410, maverick "libertarian" Republican, son of Ron Paul
Mike Huckabee - as a "politician" 1,640,298
Rick Perry - as a "politician" 1,142,604, "not having rick perry as governor" 21,908
Dr. Ben Carson - as an "author" 1,090,141, "for president" as a "public figure" 115,088, retired neuosurgeon, It is his "author" page that has the majority.  Thus, many folks may appreciate his work as a neurosurgeon, but may not agree with his politics.
Ted Cruz - as a "politician" 1,033,148, as a "governmental official" 862,098, His "politician" page likes still dwarf Joe Biden's, the leading Democrat.
Scott Brown - as a "Public Figure" 382,908
Marsha Blackburn - as a "Government Official" 32,401, as a "politician" 14,763
Bob Corker - as a "politician" 25,009, as a "government official" 12,572
John Bolton - as a "business person" 6,537
Jan Brewer -
Jeb Bush - as "public figure" 107,400
Chris Christie - as a "politician" 102,809
Carly Fiorina - as a "public figure" 23,103
Lindsey Graham - as a "politician" 87,918, as a "government organization" 25,759
Bobby Jindal - as a "politican" 224, 754
John Kasich - as a "politician" 1,249, as John R. Kasich "politician" 104,381
Pete King -
Steve King -
George Pataki - as a "politican" 372, as George E. Pataki "politician" 1,173
Mike Pence - as a "politician" 59,653, as a "government" official" 14,444, "Mike Pence Is A Douche" 245
Rob Portman - as a "politician" 129,485 as a "government official" 41,400
Marco Rubio - as a "politician" 705,629, also as a "politician" 8,223, as a
government official" 228,948
Rick Santorum - as a "politician" 262,601, "for president" 1,052 also a "closed group"
Scott Walker - as a "community and government" 195,376

Notable third party candidates:

America's Party - Tom Hoefling - as a "politician" 1,709, ultra-right party that apparently thinks the Republicans are not conservative enough
Green Paty - Jill Stein - as "public figure" 102,547, "for president" 1,031, as a "politician" 9,041, the main left-alternative, although she doesn't approach the numbers of even to top Democratic politicians, she still has more "likes" than any of the other third-party candidates
Libertarian Party - Gary Johnson - as a "politician" 360,296, former Libertarian Party Presidential nominee
also Libertarian Party - Judge Andrew Napolitano as a "News Personality" 618,470

Of course, we know the old cliche that if voting changed anything it would be illegal.  However Lenin wrote in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder:

...[T]he Bolsheviks did not boycott the Constituent Assembly, but took part in the elections both before and after the proletariat conquered political power. That these elections yielded exceedingly valuable (and to the proletariat, highly useful) political results has, I make bold to hope, been proved by me in the above-mentioned article, which analyses in detail the returns of the elections to the Constituent Assembly in Russia.

The conclusion which follows from this is absolutely incontrovertible: it has been proved that, far from causing harm to the revolutionary proletariat, participation in a bourgeois-democratic parliament, even a few weeks before - the victory of a Soviet republic and even after such a victory, actually helps that proletariat to prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be done away with; it facilitates their successful dissolution, and helps to make bourgeois parliamentarianism "politically obsolete". To ignore this experience, while at the same time claiming affiliation to the Communist International, which must work out its tactics internationally (not as narrow or exclusively national tactics, but as international tactics), means committing a gross error and actually abandoning internationalism in deed, while recognising it in word. 

- From the chapter entitled "Should We Participate in Bourgeois Parliaments"

Non-violent movements and their violent counter-parts

I hear people demonizing Ferguson rioters lately.  Mainly their arguments revolve around some sort of Thoreau/Ghandi/MLK idea of the power of non-violence.  Stokley Carmikel, of course, had the best critique of the non-violent approach in general, and Dr. King's approach in particular.

If individuals are masochistic enough to be non-violent, it can be an effective strategy, but only when coupled with more aggressive tactics.

One of the most invaluable resources dealing with those who would oppose rioting as a tactic is a piece entitled Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid written by Ta-Nehisi Coates for the Atlantic Monthly.  Most notably, he writes:

"Property damage and looting" is a fairly accurate description of the emancipation of black people in 1865, who only five years earlier constituted some $4 billion in property. The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 is inseparable from the threat of riots. The housing bill of 1968—the most proactive civil-rights legislation on the books—is a direct response to the riots that swept American cities after King was killed. Violence, lingering on the outside, often backed nonviolence during the civil-rights movement. "We could go into meetings and say, 'Well, either deal with us or you will have Malcolm X coming into here,'" said SNCC organizer Gloria Richardson. "They would get just hysterical. The police chief would say, 'Oh no!'"

Ok, so MLK didn't win Civil Rights alone.  We also know that Nat Turner and John Brown provoked violent slave uprisings that culminated in the Civil War to end slavery.  

What about Ghandi and Indian independence?  Well, there was of course the violent movement of Bhagat Singh. Additionally, Ghandi's form of non-violence was essentially to put people into harm's way and then have them not defend themselves.  Passive resistance courts violence.  That is the basis on which the tactic is founded.

Remember, Obama said nothing about Mike Brown or police violence until Ferguson was in flames.

What about the Arab Spring? The Arab Spring resulted in bloody civil wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen.  In Egypt, where there was a bloodless coup, the people elected Mohamed Morsi after ousting Mubarak, who turned out to be worse.  Then they elected Mubarak's party back into power.

Surely the labor movement in this country has always been peaceful.  Actually, all the gains made by the labor movement came after bloody altercations.  In fact, there are two, separate Wikipedia entries for union-violence (violence perpetrated by unions) and anti-union violence (violence perpetrated by thugs, cops and union-busters against union workers).

For every successful non-violent movement, there is a violent faction that helps it succeed.  The violent action shows the urgency.  The non-violent shows the legitimacy.  Both tactics are necessary.

Hegemony, Ideology and Religiosity

Almsgiving and helping the poor are also great ways to keep the devil at bay.  Anything done from the heart, especially when it's sacrificial, confounds him.  Why?  Because he doesn't have a heart, and he can't understand it.  He has an immense intellect, and can win a battle of wits with us every time, but he always loses the battle whenever we do something for the less fortunate, from the heart.
- Catholic Bible 101

So why is it that in horror movies involving demon possession you never see the possessed or tormented going to a homeless shelter or food cupboard and volunteering?  It is, of course, the increasingly reactionary ideology of Hollywood.  However, there are redeeming qualities in films like the Exorcist and the Paranormal Activity series.  They depict privileged people who don't really deserve their privilege who get their comeuppance from the demons.  In fact, in the Paranormal Activity films, the riches/privileges themselves come from a pact with Satan and his demons.

I am, of course, a total materialist, but even in the most despicable of religions there are lessons to be learned.  Undeserved privilege, whether it be race culture, gender, orientation, ability or body type based must be formally renounced, in the way someone tortured by demons must renounce Satan.  It must also be recognized that despite such renunciation, those of us who have privilege may still benefit from it.  Thus, we must become traitors to our identites, like John Brown, and actively oppose these systems of privilege.

As a great liberation theologian once said: 

In terms of Bill Maher, I think he's a flip-flopping Zionist liberal who gives atheism a bad name.  However, the general thrust of his argument against Islam is correct, albeit problematic.  Essentially, Bill Maher is saying that if you read the holy books of just about any religion and interpret them through a fundamentalist/literalist lens, they're all pretty despicable.  Of course they are!  They were written a long time ago when the world was a very different place culturally, socially, politically and economically.  He also blames religion for wars.  Well of course religions have been responsible for wars.  They often preach about spiritual warfare as a proof of a zealot's devotion.

What makes Bill Maher's conceptualization of religion problematic, is that he seems to think it's just a religion thing, when it's really just hegemonic ideology that is the problem.  Religion is one form that hegemonic ideology takes, but there are other forms as well.  Fascism, for example, was not a religion (although some fascists like Franco and to a lesser extent even Hitler espoused religiosity) but it was an insidious ideology that resulted in some of the most horrific atrocities of the last century.  

Neoliberal capitalism is another more current example.  As a matter of fact, I would call a progressive liberation theologian like the Catholic Workers or the late-Malcolm X's Muslim Mosque, Inc. a comrade before I would a free-market libertarian neo-atheist.

Religion is only different because it is ideology at its rawest, purest form.  It demands faith, not facts or even revisionist history to sustain its legitimacy.  However, it should be seen as simply an ideology.  It should not be sheltered from criticism nor should it be unjustly criticized and disproportionately blamed for atrocities.  Even we communists have some past crimes done in our name that we have to own.

Often I am disappointed by those who call them socialists who would disavow Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung etc. by saying they weren't really communists, or their governments didn't try real, authentic socialism.  Bullshit!  They were communists of some form or another, even though maybe not whichever particular version may be popular at the moment.  They made mistakes, their thinking was off in some ways, they tried things that failed and they even committed atrocities at times.  However, to insist that they weren't authentic communists is to parrot the libertarian-capitalist argument that "true capitalism was never tried."  Additionally, we must not reject wholesale these leaders' contributions to the body of socialist thought.  The benefit of studying history is that we can see, in hindsight, what aspects of which theories worked and did not.

If socialism was never tried than socialism can never be tried and the socialist project is doomed to failure from its outset.  The ray of hope here, however, is that a successful revolution redeems all failed ones.  Let us not dismiss uncomfortable aspects of our tradition's history as non-authentic.  Let us learn from them and improve going forward. 

Buddhism and Materialism

I've had some friends and comrades that would insist that if you're looking for spirituality without the "opiate" effect that Marx talked about, one should try Buddhism. However, the more I have studied Buddhism, the more convinced I've become that it is completely incompatible with communism and leftism in general.

Doctrinally, it teaches elimination of suffering through withdrawal from concern over material realities. The ultimate goal is to reach enlightenment through mental discipline and meditation.  Herein lies the heart of my beef with Buddhist philosphy.  An enlightened one has eliminated suffering for her/himself, but to maintain enlightened status, must be indifferent to the suffering of others.

I have had self-described leftist/Buddhists explain to me that there is such a thing as secular Buddhism and it is more of a philosophy than a religion.  Religions are just dogmatic philosophies, anyway.  If you follow what Gautama said with or without 1) spirituality or 2) cult of personality you are left with the idea that the way to eliminate suffering is to be indifferent to it.  Any philosophical paradigm must stand up to the dialectical materialist test: Does this way of thinking benefit the proletariat, or harm it?

 Counter-intuitively, when measured against this rubric, Christianity is actually more progressive on this than Buddhism.  Jesus preached that the meek shall inherit the earth, blessed are the poor, woe to the rich and that it is more difficult for a rich man to get into to heaven than it is for a camel to get through the eye of a needle.  Indeed, the beatitudes in the sermon on the mount are some of the most proto-communist religious writings ever.

I'm confused by the strange relationship between Buddhism and leftism in the USA primarily.  Buddhism is marketed as a peace and love religious tradition that is much more benign than the mono-theistic religions, Christianity especially.

One Buddhist comrade told me that he reconciles communism and Buddhism by being 'both against materialism but pro person.'  He proceeded to explain that communists strive for the betterment of all and that is the common ground that Buddhist anti-materialism and Communist dialectical-materialism shares.


Certainly not!!! Marxism is dialectical MATERIALISM! That means suffering will be alleviated only when MATERIAL resources are distributed equally and humans no longer have to compete.  Additionally, I don't want material conditions to get better for everyone, equally.  Marx said "From each according to ability, to each according to need."  To espouse an ideology that rosily insists that things must get better for everybody, even the rich, is no different than the "rising tide brings up all boats" concept in Reganomics.  In order to have economic equality, things must get better for the poor and worse for the rich, most essentially, the billionaires.

Yet another Buddhist comrade recounted a Buddhist parable to me.  The moral at the end went something like this:

The monk smiled and nodded. Then he said softly, "First, take away the "I". That is ego. Then take away your "want". Now you are left with only happiness.

First, if one is believe Lacan, happiness is not really what we want.  He claimed that the source of desire is not the object of the desire (petit objet a), but it is that we desire the desire itself and objet a is merely a placeholder.

Additionally, I desire to uplift my class (proletariat). Only through this desire will we as a class be motivated to struggle for our own liberation.

Many American Buddhists look to the Dali Lama as a spiritual leader.  Dali Lama, of course, no longer resides in Tibet due to his dissident status according to the Chinese state.  The origin of the insistence on Tibetan autonomy appears to be anticommunism influenced by USA/CIA.

Here Michael Parenti relates the Dali Lama's ties to US covert-ops and US hegemony in general:

  
This link gives you a sense of what kind of people the Dali Lama is courting these days:

'Free Markets Are Miracles,' Panelist Claims; Debate Opens Dalai Lama's Mind to Capitalism

 
Finally, I would like to speak on corporate Buddhism.  A recent Salon article, written by Shawn Van Valkenburgh, a self proclaimed Buddhist, starts with the following anecdote:



Recently, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave some shocking advice to a young businesswoman who was concerned that her male peers were passing her up for promotions: Don’t question the systemic sexism of corporate America, just trust in “good karma” to get you ahead. While his attitude made waves in the blogosphere, in fact it accurately represents a form of spirituality that is becoming popular in the West.

He correctly cites Zizek's comments on Buddhism, which can be heard here (most relevantly at around 5:00):



However, unlike Zizek, he still sees redeeming features in Buddhism. He concludes thus:


The good news is that there may be a spiritual antidote for what Tibetan teacher Trungpa Rinpoche called “spiritual materialism.” And I’m not talking about intermittent bouts of Catholic guilt. I’m suggesting that if we work to complement our gratitude with mercy and compassion for those who are less fortunate, we can move away from the surface-level spirituality that is really just materialism in disguise. And this may be what the world needs more than ever.

There are plenty of opportunities for us to be compassionate. For example, as scientists’ long-term projections of the effects of climate change become more and more dire, somehow American denial of anthropogenic global warming is on the rise. This kind of denial is only possible if it is not met with compassion for those who are already facing the extreme weather of hurricanes like Sandy and Katrina, like the hard-hit women who are struggling to survive after flash floods destroy their communities. Cultivating compassion for those we usually ignore — whether that’s women in the global south who are facing the ugly end of natural disasters, inmates of American prisons, or businesswomen who make 20 percent less than men who do in the same job — is therefore both a spiritual and political imperative.

The point is not that we give up on Western spirituality, as Zizek seems to suggest. The teachings of Eastern religions are becoming more mainstream in America, but this is an opportunity as well as a cautionary tale. As we develop a more conscious lifestyle, let’s ask ourselves if we are deepening our spirituality, or just falling for the myth of spiritual meritocracy. May all beings be free from pain and suffering.
  
I disagree with this conclusion. The problem is not materialism. Just the opposite. For liberation we must desire and demand improvement in the material conditions of the oppressed. Spirituality's de-emphasis on the material is what makes it complimentary for late capitalism.

My argument against Buddhism is a philosophical argument from dialectical materialism. I wouldn't oppose a concept of Buddhism that is open to revolutionary communism, but I would oppose it philosophically as the opposite of dialectical materialism, and certainly not the necessary philosophy to arouse the proletarian class to a point of rage that would create conditions favorable to build worker power and revolution.

An Atheist Responds Insufficiently to a Christian Apologist

So I stumbled upon an argument from Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias that I find very strange.  The claim was brought to my attention on an atheist social media group with a link to this soundbite.  The toughest question for an atheist to answer, he says at about 17:00, is where does our concept of good come from if not from God.  I could answer that quite simply.  Evolution of course.  Good and evil both result from higher reasoning abilities afforded us by our neo-cortex.  This part of the brain gives us the ability to think abstractly, which was an evolutionary adaptation, possibly passed down because it gave us better hunting ability, i.e.: we could see patterns and predict what our prey would do next.

Then I came across a post in the Atheist Experience blog (that $hit'$ trademarked $$$$$ btw) where the author was attempting to answer some of Zacharias' suggestions of what to ask an atheist.  His answers were wholly insufficient.

First there's this disgusting piece of anti-communist slander:

3. If people don’t believe in God, the historical results are horrific, so how do we deal with the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot who saw religion as the problem and worked to eradicate it? Countless millions lost their lives under these godless regimes, regimes more influenced by Nietzsche’s concept of the ubermensch (superman) than they were by transcendent morality.

Once again, we have an implied argument that has nothing to do with the actual existence of god but rather on the purported benefits of believing that a god exists; if people stop believing in gods, bad things will happen, so don’t stop believing.

The assertion that atheism leads to horrifying atrocities is simply not true. It’s a vile, slanderous charge, rooted in ignorance and deception that isn’t the slightest bit softened by Zacharias’ stylish, questioning form.

In the case of the examples given, atheism is neither necessary nor sufficient to be identified as the cause of the actions taken. In truth, the atrocities were the result of belief systems which, while consistent with atheism, are not caused by atheism. You simply cannot draw a causal chain from “I do not believe a god exists” to “I’m going to destroy religious organizations and religious people” without an additional belief — and it is that belief that would be the cause of the atrocities.

To claim otherwise is to claim that atheism necessarily leads to horrifying acts (which is what he’s trying to do) and there are millions of secular people who testify to the false nature of that assertion every single day.

Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot took actions based on beliefs that are akin to religions. They were powerful zealots of socio-political ideologies and a belief that the opposition must be eliminated. To claim that those beliefs were caused by atheism is as much a non sequitur as claiming that they were caused by a stomach ache.

Hitler, on the other hand, gave conflicting reports about his beliefs. He publicly and privately identified as a Catholic, yet there’s also testimony that he was anti-religious or anti-Christian at times. If he had done great work, I suspect that the Christians would claim that he was opposed to organized religion, but a devoted, personal believer. Because of the atrocities he committed, they take a different tact, labeling him an atheist.

We can no more know Hitler’s true beliefs about the existence of gods than we can know the mind of any other. What we can know, though, is that even if he was an atheist, that wasn’t the cause of the actions he took. As Zacharias points out, it was the ideology of the Übermensch (among other beliefs) that encouraged those actions.

While that ideology is consistent with atheism (everything except for a belief in a god is consistent with atheism) it is not caused by atheism nor is it necessarily connected with atheism. It is not, though, consistent with modern secular humanism.

So he responds to "Why do atheists do bad things?" by saying that communism is like a religion and Hiter actually was religious, so ya know (also, I should mention that Pol Pot was not a communist, but that's a different discussion).  Of course, other than the remark about Hitler's religiosity, he makes no mention of all the atrocities that religious people have committed and ignores the strongest counter-argument, that atrocities are committed by religious and non-religious people.  He does allude to the concept that atrocious acts are the result of ruthless ideologies and the varying, subjective interpretations of those ideologies by those with power, but does not state it explicitly.

His next response is worse still.

4. If there is no God, the problems of evil and suffering are in no way solved, so where is the hope of redemption, or meaning for those who suffer? Suffering is just as tragic, if not more so, without God because there is no hope of it being rendered meaningful or transcendent, redemptive or redeemable, since no interventions in this life or reparations in an afterlife are possible. It might be true that there is no God to blame now, but neither is there a God to reach out to for strength, transcendent meaning, or comfort. There is only madness and confusion in the face of suffering and evil.

His claim is that suffering is just as tragic, if not more so, if there is no God. This is another roundabout way of saying, “Hey, you might as well believe, you’ll be no worse off” — another argument for belief with no ties to the truth of the proposition one is being asked to believe. It reminds me a bit of the people who try to claim that atheism is “just another religion” without realizing the implication of what they’ve just said.

I disagree with his assessment, though, that suffering is just as or more tragic if there is no god.

If there isn’t a god, then suffering isn’t the result of original sin or impious thoughts and it isn’t a test from God or a torment from demons and devils. If there is no god, then suffering is a natural part of reality and that means that we can equip ourselves to alleviate unnecessary suffering by learning more about reality. We can also take comfort in knowing that the unavoidable is actually unavoidable and not punishment.

If there is no god, then those who blame natural disasters on immodest women, abortionists, homosexuals and atheists are simply arrogant bigots and not the voice of a deity. That’s no small comfort and, since we’re talking about the impact of suffering, that’s a valid point.

We do not require a god for comfort, we can reach out to other people and we can reach within, to the confidence and security that is bolstered by the understanding that one is not simply a plaything of a transcendent being.

There is a big elephant in the room here.  In the soundbite posted in the first paragraph of this post Zacharias himself admits that evil and suffering are problems for theists, not atheists.  Why does a loving God allow suffering and evil?!?!?!  Suffering is certainly more tragic if you believe in a god, because that means God does not care about your suffering, or God is inflicting your suffering, or God is powerless to do anything about your suffering, in which case He may as well not exist anyway.  

I do like this part of the response: 

 If there is no god, then suffering is a natural part of reality and that means that we can equip ourselves to alleviate unnecessary suffering by learning more about reality.

...but again, it is an allusion to the strongest argument, and not an explicitly stated argument.  The reason Marxists (who adhere to the atheist philosophy of dialectical materialism) oppose religion is because it offers a supernatural reward in place of an earthly, material reward for good works.  We will insist that suffering would be more tragic if there was a God because that would mean we would have an all-powerful enemy: an omnipotent, omniscient creator who refuses to do anything to alleviate the atrocities of inequality, domination and war.  If God existed, it would be necessary to fight Him.  Luckily, He doesn't, and neither does the devil.  That leaves us to fend for ourselves, so if we want to abolish classes and poverty and mass incarceration and police brutality ad nauseum we'd better get to work.  We can't just pray and hope something will happen.

Democratic centralism (not libertarianism) will bring liberation

Those anarchists who call themselves communists (and I am among
them) are communist not because they want to impose their specific
way of seeing or believe that it is the only means of salvation, but
because they are convinced, and will remain so unless there is
evidence to the contrary, that the more men and women, united in
comradeship, and the closer their cooperation on behalf of all, the
greater will be the well-being and the freedom that everybody will
enjoy. They believe that even where people are freed from human
oppression they remain exposed to the hostile forces of nature, which
they cannot overcome on their own, but that with the cooperation of
others, they can control and transform into the means of their
well-being. The individual who wished to supply his own material
needs by working alone would be the slave of his labours. A peasant,
for instance, who wanted to cultivate a piece of ground all alone,
would be renouncing all the advantages of cooperation and
condemning himself to a wretched life : no rest, no travel, no study, no
contacts with the outside world .. . and he would not always be able
to appease his hunger. 
- Errico Malatesta The Anarchist Revolution

But how you build such a society without imposing your own vision onto others? How would revolutionary anarchists address problems with counterrevolutionaries? Marxists (and I among them) think that a transitional periodm whereby workers' states would establish socialism and eradicate classes is necessary before the state can be abolished.

Anarchists insist upon horizontalism in organizing.  They would invoke the misattributed Ghandi quote, "Be the change you want to see in the world."  Unfortuantely, spontaneous, horizontal organization has never resulted in a successful revolution.  This lesson was hard learned by the Spanish anarchists in 1939. 

A movement that self consciously avoids taking power is masochistic. Franco took over Spain because of such masochism. Education for class consciousness is all well and good, but I'm not convinced that spontaneous, horizontal organization will arise without a vanguard party.

Meanwhile, there have been examples of revolutionary workers' states (even though most have failed to hold up against imperialist capitalism).  Often anarchists blame authoritarianism for the failures of these states to achieve even the first stages of socialism.  The question becomes, how would a vanguard party keep on track with the project of progressively establishing socialism and also preparing for the state to wither away once that eventuality is achieved?

MLs often answer this question by invoking democratic centralism: a cadre leadership that is responsible for addressing the needs and concerns of the proletariat. 

Since the fall of the USSR there have been no shortage of theories on what went wrong. Revisionists and trots blame Stalin, Stalinists blame Khrushchev blah blah. What is apparent is that the USSR was curving rightward long before 1991. 

Another more concise example of a capitalist communist party is, of course, modern day China. I do think that dialectical materialist analysis is useful here. Both China and USSR had socialist revolutions prior to modernization. The neo-feudal systems in both pre-revolution Russia and China presented favorable material conditions for proletarian uprising. The socialist governments were able to modernize those countries very rapidly due to economic planning. They were then elevated to superpower status. From there, it would appear that nationalism overrode socialism and the allure of neoliberalism and a piece of the global capital pie resulted in the downfall of socialism in those nations.

 Those who insist on formal, liberal democracy are those who refuse to distinguish formal freedom from actual freedom.   A one party system has the potential to be more democratic than a multiple party parliament, so long as an active civil society is encouraged. Cuba is a good example of this: one ruling party, but participation in civics and the airing of grievances is encouraged. Mariela Castro, the president's daughter, is currently a leader of a protest movement in favor of LGBT rights. 

Contrast that with USA where we have formal democracy, but the protests of civil society are largely ignored. Additionally, we are told in school that checks and balances on governmental power are what keep us free, but they're really just what keep us from change. Those checks and balances are part of the way the system perpetuates itself. 

A one party system, on the other hand, must adapt to changes in public opinion if they are to stay in power, as there is no protest vote placebo as in a two party system.

Some Scattered Musings on Animal Rights

The Homo sapiens sapiens species is a particular branch of the animal kingdom.  Religious and ethical notions of human superiority in relation to the whole of nature have been problematic throughout history.  The Genesis account in the bible gives Adam and Eve dominion over the animals (Gen 1:26).  The result of this ideology of H. sapiens superiority has resulted in an alienation of humanity from nature.  Murray Bookchin has developed one of the most adequate theories, from the left, regarding such alienation via his writings on Social Ecology.  In Society and Ecology he writes:

...by so radically separating humanity and society from nature or naively reducing them to mere zoological entities, we can no longer see how human nature is !derived! from nonhuman nature and social evolution from natural evolution. Humanity becomes estranged or alienated not only from itself in our "age of alienation," but from the natural world in which it has always been rooted as a complex and thinking life-force.

This paradigm stands in contrast to the notion of speciesism, a liberal ideology, which extrapolates uniquely H. sapiens concepts of ethics, morality and dignity to the whole of the animal kingdom.  Of course, glaringly missing from the concept of "speciesism" is a discussion of the H. sapiens species' relationship to other kingdoms of life such as plants, fungi and single celled organisms, but I will skip over this misstep for the sake of argument.

The purportedly anarchist/socialist/anti-speciesist website Species and Class is one of the forerunners of the left-wing approach to animal rights.  In an article posted on the Species and Class website John Tallent claims that veganism is an obligation for leftists, not an option:

The real question here is this: Why is it wrong to enslave humans that are relatively ‘less intelligent’ than others that are ‘more intelligent’? And if we think about this for a moment, we begin to understand that it is wrong to enslave any human, regardless of intelligence, because humans are sentient beings — that is, we all experience pain and pleasure and we are aware that we, individually, exist. If we did not know that we exist, and we could not experience pain and pleasure, what would it matter what happened to us? We would be senseless, unknowing beings.

Tallent, however, uses a key fallacy as his argument: that intelligence and sentience are guideposts for ethics. A sense of ethical behavior is a uniquely human trait.  According to triune-brain theory, a sense of ethics arises for the capacity for abstract thought resulting from the evolution of the neocortex, evolutionarily the most recent part of mammalian and human brains.  The neocortex is unique to humans and certain other primates.  Below is a description of the evolution of the three brains as well as a pictorial model of the triune brain.

Thus, if we are to take a positivist/materialist approach, "speciesism" has no empirical basis as different species' nervous systems can be radically different.  The neocortex abilities for abstract reasoning and thus ethical behavior that takes dignity into account are unique to the H. sapiens species and a handful of other apes.  To provide a simple analogy, one wouldn't treat a goldfish the same as a lion, would one?

Additionally, isn't it more speciesist to insist that a carnivorous species like lions, who kill other animals for food daily, behave in a similar way as an omnivorous species like humans, or even a herbivorous species like cattle?  So how can one human insist that another human must cease to eat other animals in order to be a proponent of the dignity of all humans?

With the inflated prices of vegan foods and the outrageous adoption fees of pet rescue agencies, it appears that animal rights is fairly certainly a bourgeois issue.  Far from another front for liberation, it is a derailment of the class struggle.  What's more, this assertion is supported by empirical, qualitative data.  According to Business Insider Magazine:

Rich people care more about animal welfare than human rights, and about a dozen other important causes, according to a new report from consultancy Capgemini.
The firm interviewed more than 4,500 high-net-worth individuals from 23 different markets during Q1 of this year to get their take on a number of subjects, including what social issues they care about most.
Besides human rights, the respondents also said they cared more about animal welfare than climate change, poverty alleviation, income inequality and race and gender issues.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/capgemini-wealth-report-2014-6#ixzz3FlcoPoIp

Here is the chart posted on that page:

Additionally, animal rights organizations like PETA have proved themselves to be out of touch with the reality of class struggle.  The worst of these recent stunts was when PETA reported that they would cover the water bills for Detroit families deprived of the human right to water on the condition that they would agree to go vegan for 1 year.

Of course, avowed liberal organizations like PETA are not alone in this culture of tone-deafness.  For example, shortly after a Ferguson, MO police officer had described Ferguson residents of African descent as "animals" the Species and Class site posted the following meme on their facebook page:

To close, I did find on article from Species and Class worthy of praise. I post it below in its entirety:

The Animalization of the Proletariat

August 29, 2014

By Percy Gauguin

The animalization of the dispossessed has been the very process by which the dispossessed became dispossessed. To reduce another to a bestial status is the establishment of supremacy over that other.
The condition of animality is essentially the lacking of humanity. The human who is treated as inferior is not fully human, and therefore lies somewhere between humanity and animality. This hierarchical mechanism is a form of predatory relations constituted within society, or the relations of nature transferred into social relations- not the reproduction of nature on social terrain, but the institution of a separate nature within society. This humanized nature, originating from nature but diverging from it, imposed itself upon ‘original’ nature and made it indistinct from it, thereby conflating human social relations with the natural order spontaneously arising between life forms in an idealized form. 

Animalization has been one of its underlying historical processes that has established inferiority and superiority between people, which then condensed the signification ‘animality’ as a distinct concept in opposition to ‘humanity’. This continual reproduction of animality throughout time has perpetuated the divide between humans and other species because humans themselves are divided into ‘social species’, or classes.

And so the species-relations between humanity and its livestock appear as the reflection of inter-human relations, reproduced in a distilled manner. The imperative of capital is to relegate each individual to the status of a meatbag which will generate, or at least not be an impediment to, profit. In the mass concentration of animals into bestial death camps proletarianization is reproduced in a very raw manner: the hyperexploited animal is merely a disposable unit situated in the accumulation of alienation. The hamburger fuels and provides alienated pleasure (e.g. McDonald’s) to those whose labor fuels the accumulation of capital and the even greater alienated pleasures of the capitalist class. The idea that animals suffer greatly under the industrial farm system is still extremely alien to many people, and oftentimes a matter of complete indifference and contempt. How can the proletariat’s proletariat become an object of solidarity when workers have no conception of even themselves? The pivot on which capitalism hinges is the individual ego that disregards all life that is situated beyond its egotistical view. The destruction of the slaughterhouse can never be accomplished within capitalism because capitalism is by nature always a world where the predatory instinct is sanctified. [emphasis mine]


What this double proletarianization points to, moreover, is that the proletariat consumes itself as it embodies the contradictions of capitalism within its own being. Through sanctioning the factory-farming of animals the industrial ontology of capitalism is itself sanctioned. The unquestioning devouring of meat no matter what sort of productive processes begot it belies an indifference to the very web of life. This is not a question that only intellectuals bother about in mindnumbing tomes that no one but other intellectuals read. The social and natural ecosystems which we are ceaselessly in communion with are becoming even more severed from us than they have ever been, and to blind oneself to their reality is to become a passive receptacle of capitalist civilization. Food cultivation- of both animals and plants- is undergoing a rapid transformation that is adhering increasingly to a nauseatingly capitalist logic. Our complacency with any type of diet is a complacency with the capitalist system- it is only because animals are alive that we place so much emphasis upon veganism and animal liberation.

But it is not our desire to replace meat-factories with colossal rice patties, and veganize the proletariat. To ‘veganize’ the proletariat would be almost to undo the ideology and practice of veganism altogether. It is the factory as an industrial category which we seek to destroy- because only meat, whether human or non-human, is herded into the factory, for the sole sake of one class over another. The insurrection against capitalism is an insurrection against classes, and the movement of communism is ultimately the championing of the individual within a free society. As long as class systems pervade humanity, the mass slaughter and subjugation of animals will always be a fundamentally class-based issue. Communization is the process which disentangles humanity from its countlessly false links and separates those who are willing to inflict pain on fellow beings and those who are not. The animalization of others in a revolutionary world can only be the action of individuals and groups, but within capitalism it is a systematic process that degrades and marks us all.

Update: Apparently PETA has an insidious, bourgeois notion that pets are better off dead than to be kept by poor people.

Man claims PETA stole, killed family pet

 

Update II on speciesism: Plants know when you are eating them, and they don't like it