Why Bush & Co. are bad for capitalism

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Globalizers, Neocons, or…?

The World After Bush
By Mark Engler

The next wave of the Left

“As a cohort, throughout the world, our generation didn't "solve it." We didn't solve the problems of health, education, food, and injustice in the world,” writes one of my oldest comrades in struggle, Daniel del Solar in some recent reflections. He and I are Zeitgenossen, to use Heinrich Böll's unimprovable term -- comrades of our era, in our case, those who reached voting age right around the time of the Cuban missile crisis (October 1962).

Danny's right. We didn't accomplish all the things we dreamed of, but he and I and tens or even hundreds of thousands of us sure made the effort. Not always wisely -- we were young and inexperienced, and for the most part without the benefit of counsel from older cohorts of struggle, for the reasons I noted in last Friday's note ("My '68"). And even if we had been wiser, we still would have made mistakes because the world is complicated, and one can never quite predict the consequences of any change we make. But those sit-ins, mass demonstrations, confrontations with police, leafletting and (Danny's specialty) radio and TV broadcasts to make more people aware and to mobilize them to demand civil rights for people of all races, an end to the war in Vietnam, and all the other issues we took on, all of that did make a difference. Even beyond the specific, usually small victories (securing the release of particular political prisoners, forcing the state to explain its actions, and so on), we helped save the dignity of the human race. We kept the ancestral tradition of protest against inequality alive, the tradition of the Left. And now, though some of us (including Danny) are still in the struggle, it's approaching time to hand over that tradition to the next generations.

The problems they face include some that we were only dimly aware of. Global warming and deterioration of the habitability of the planet are the biggest ones. Dangers of nuclear war, depredations of trans- and multinational enterprises in weaker countries, and racism -- such as the latest assaults on Rumanian gypsies in Italy -- are ones we are very familiar with.

The left that we, my Zeitgenossen, the generation of the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam and so on, knew came apart around the same time, and for the same reasons, as the Soviet Union and its bloc. Most of us had long since abandoned the illusion that the USSR could be the model for world revolution, but its sudden disappearance gave force to the new slogan, "There is no alternative" (TINA) -- that is, no alternative to capitalist domination.

There are and always will be alternatives. Capitalism, the reduction of all things and all humans to commodities and/or factors of production, runs counter to the inerradicable human drive of solidarity which has permitted our race to survive this long. So there will always be resistence, and there is right now, under a dozen different slogans. "Another world is possible," "Greenpeace," groups focusing on women's rights, others on "Third World," others on amnesty for prisoners of conscience, and more. The task now, as it was for us (combining civil rights and antiwar movements into one big movement) and for our immediate predecessors (the "Popular Front" of the 1930s) and for their predecessors, is to bring enough of these narrower causes together to make an impact.

And the task for us, my Zeitgenossen, is to offer what experience and energy we can to help the new guys and gals. They should be smart enough to ignore us when we're spouting irrelevancies, and to find in our successes and our mistakes lessons they can use. Some of them may even be curious enough to look at this and other blogs of us '60s people.

I'm enthusiastic about a lot of the newest Leftists. Here's just one I think we should be watching: Olivier Besancenot, who is only 34 and already a force in France. He is now seen by François Hollande and other leaders of the Parti socialiste as their biggest threat on the left, far more dangerous than the once-feared Parti communiste. His proposals make sense to me, and he makes sense to enough Frenchfolk that he got 4.25% of their votes in presidential elections in 2002 (when he was 28).

Hugo and the FARC

An old friend has called my attention to Interpol desacredita a Colombia en el caso del computador de Raúl Reyes (“INTERPOL discredits Colombia in the case of Raúl Reyes' computer”). I'd seen most of this (except the signatures on the letter). Yes, it seems that Uribe and his policemen are manipulating info to make the Chávez-Farc connection look worse than it probably is. Meanwhile, Chávez lets himself be photographed embracing Farc leaders and makes speeches calling for respect for the Farc as "interlocutores válidos". I don't know what truth there is in claims that the Venezuelan military gives sanctuary to Farc, but probably some truth -- if not from the top command, at more local levels. In isolated army or Guardia Nacional posts, there will be commanders either sympathetic to Farc or susceptible to bribes, or both, and it's pretty clear that Farc units move regularly across the borders into Venezuela and Ecuador. Some of the testimony in this report in Spain's El País from last December sounds more than plausible: El narcosantuario de las FARC.

I just learned (from a speech by Chávez) that there is a Venezuelan guerrilla group in the border area calling itself "Frente de Liberación Bolivariano" claiming to support Chávez -- he has disowned them.

Anyway, its a chaotic frontier, where bands of armed men and a few women make up their own rules while obeying no central authority. And some of those bands are no doubt in the pay of outside organizations who want to exploit the area's resources, including private, state and mixed enterprises looking for oil, pharmaceuticals, and other riches. Just like in José Eustasio Rivera's famous novel, La vorágine (1924, when the coveted resource was rubber).

Photo: Iván Márquez del Secretariado de las Farc y el presidente Hugo Chávez, durante la reunión que sostuvieron en Caracas como parte del proceso en búsqueda de un acuerdo humanitario con el grupo guerrillero. (November 2007. Source: La Tarde)

My '68

Since Daniel Cohn-Bendit and everybody else who was involved is doing it, I too will tell you what I was up to 40 years ago. In 1968, like everybody else who mattered to me, I wanted to be a communist. The problem was that, unlike Danny the Red, I was in the United States (a grad student at Northwestern U., just outside Chicago), where we didn't really know what a communist was or how to be one. There was a CPUSA, but it was practically invisible, driven underground by the likes of Joseph McCarthy and infiltrated so thoroughly by the FBI that it smelled like a maggoty corpse. This was very unlike the case in France, where there was a real Parti communiste that the students had seen up close and rejected. For us, "communism" was an available old label that we could stick onto whatever revolutionary movement most appealed to us. Some people were memorizing Mao's little red book, others were debating Trotsky, others were arguing Rosa Luxembourg against Lenin, lot of people were quoting Frantz Fanon, and everybody admired Fidel and the late Che.

Me, I looked to Spain as one of my main examples of what a communist was supposed to be. I hadn't ever been to Spain and didn't really want to go while Franco was governing, but I read a lot about it. The Republic of 1931-36 liberated people in ways that were worth fighting for, I believed -- and still do. And the communists were the strongest and most effective force for defending it, I believed -- though now I see it was all much more complicated. The book that my colleague Baltasar Lotroyo has just reviewed on our companion, Spanish-language website Lecturas y Lectores, tells us much about the enormous strengths and fatal weakness of the Spanish Communist Party and, I think, of Communist Parties everywhere. (See review of La voz dormida.) The main weaknesses have always been corollaries to its "democratic centralism," the rigidity of its line and resistance to self-criticism and insistence on obedience, which made it vulnerable to the great Stalinist distortion. But the strengths are also real: the courage and persistence of its members in pursuing ideals that still seem worthwhile. Those strengths, and the party's tough history of resistance during the Franco years, have kept the party alive in Spain while it has virtually died everywhere else in Europe.

In '68 and the years following, I steered clear of the Maoists and stayed skeptical of the Trots, and channeled my political energies into setting up an SDS chapter on campus that agitated against the war (Vietnam in those days) and around local civil rights issues like integrating the public schools. And I'm still trying to figure out how to be the kind of communist I've always admired, the kind who makes cultural and economic liberation possible but doesn't accept democratic centralism.

Gender in Spain and Italy

Here's a very good BBC article by Danny Wood contrasting Spain's and Italy's gender policies: Diverging paths on gender equality.

One quibble, though, with the phrase, “Spain - the land that coined the word "macho" -”. The Spanish word macho (from Latin masculus, masculine) has always meant a male animal, usually a mule. It's application to overbearing male humans seems to have started in Mexico, and has only in recent years become widespread in Spain. Its introduction is a sign of moral progress: if people earlier didn't have a specific word for this behavior, it was because they didn't see it as a problem.

Deadly farcism

“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” God is reported to have said to Nietzsche, years after reading Also sprach Zarathustra. (He was of course plagiarizing Mark Twain, who was plagiarizing himself.)

Lately, Fascism (now called “neo-”) appears to be shouting the same thing from the balconies and stairways of Rome. “It never died!" cry the excited Alemanno supporters with their stiff-armed salute. But I think it's an illusion. Fascism, at least in its classic Mussolini sense, did indeed die, even before the Republic of Salo (1943 -- Benito Mussolini's last stand after he'd been dismissed, arrested, and then rescued by German forces). Fascism as a revolutionary force expired almost as soon as it was born, when its egalitarian pretensions were overtaken by its Blackshirt thugs in 1918 and 1919. Fascism as a “corporatist” system of government remained a fantasy even after the Fascisti came to power in 1922. But as a populist and popular movement, imposing its slogan Credere, obedere, pugnare -- “Believe, obey, fight” -- it lasted for more than 20 years before it exhausted itself.

Then, as now, Fascism presented itself as a simple and direct solution to overwhelming social problems. And as usual with such, it was simple, neat and wrong. Today, it's not even plausible: How is a coalition of the Liga del Norte, Alemanno's neofascism, and Berlusconi's media empire going to get the garbage picked up in Naples? Or stem the wasteful gush of public resources in corruption and bureaucracy? Or provide living wages? Oh, I get it: By beating up on Rumanian Gypsies. It's all their fault! Credere, obedere, pugnare.

“The past is never dead. It's not even past," says a character in William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun. But its ghosts come back as players in farce, to plagiarize another 19th century author.

See my 2003 blog, “Flirting with fascism”; also recommended:

What Have We Learned, If Anything? by Tony Judt

After Fidel: Cuba's prospects

Rafael Hernández is an intelligent and well-informed observer. I knew him when he still had hair. He's well worth listening to.

Carboneras' “Book People”

Lately I've talked more about "society" than "literature" here, but in fact in Carboneras we do more literature than social agitation. Spurred on by actor-playwright Antonio Rodríguez Menéndez, 30 or more people in town have joined his "Fahrenheit 451/Personas Libro" project, learning texts (all in Spanish) and delivering them before audiences with voice and gesture. It's great fun, and I think we're all getting better. So far, my texts have been by Neruda, Juan Gelman, and Heberto Padilla, and from the other participants I've become acquainted with a dozen other poets and prose writers. This Saturday our group will be part of a festival celebrating cultural diversity in Almería (capital of the province), where I'll be doing another piece by Gelman: Medidas.

And now, as an offshoot of that Spanish-language project, some of the English-speakers in town have formed our own "Book Person" club. Our aim is to meet once a month (the last Friday), each of us with a new text prepared (memorized and rehearsed) to present. Tomorrow will be our 3rd gathering. Here are some of the pieces performed last month (presenter in parentheses):

The Owl and the Pussycat, by Edward Lear (sung, beautifully, by Jeanne Durban Taylor)
The book has been man's greatest triumph, by Louis L'Amour (Pamela Ravander)
Daffodils, by William Wordsworth (Hazel Jones)
Death in Leamington, by John Betjeman (John Taylor)
Loveliest of trees, by A. E. Housman (David Jones)
Frustration, by Dorothy Parker (Susana Torre)
The Makers, by Howard Nemerov (Geoffrey Fox)

Photo, Inma Caparrós: Larry, Jeanne and Hazel listen as David Jones interprets A. E. Housman's “Loveliest of Trees”.

Atheism? Why bother?

An article in New York Magazine, If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House?, reminds me of why I'm so much more comfortable outside the U.S., a land where non-belief is considered so odd it has to be defended. Here in Spain, non-belief isn't a movement, it's simply a very common reaction to the excesses of the Church (or of any church, mosque, synagogue, etc.). Which doesn't prevent Spanish nonbelievers from participating in Church ritual sometimes (weddings, processions), as community and folkloric events. That is, your neighbors may expect you to participate, but they don't really expect you to believe all that stuff and probably don't themselves. Maybe if I were a Spaniard I would feel more oppressed by the wild pronouncements and silly costumes of the Spanish clergy. But I'm not, and their shenanigans strike me as just strange, distant and sometimes amusing. I suppose each of us is most vulnerable to criticism from his/her own native community. It's the pervasive belief in spirits in the U.S. that gets me spooked.

American values: European?

According to an April 17 news item in La Voz de Aztlán in Arizona (U.S.A.), Arizona legislation will outlaw MEChA and Mexican-American studies: »The anti-Mexican provisions to SB1108 were approved yesterday and the bill is now scheduled for a vote by the full House. The provisions would withhold funding to schools whose courses “denigrate American values and the teachings of European based civilization.”»

American values? Don't those include “A decent respect for the opinions of mankind,” “E pluribus unum,” and a welcoming beacon to the world's “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? I wonder which of these values the bill's sponsor, Rep. Russell Pearce, thinks that MEChA is denigrating.

As for “the teachings of European-based civilization,” Mr. Pearce should take another look at U.S. census figures, or if he is including consumer practices in “civilization,” where our manufactured goods are coming from.

Meanwhile, the Pope is addressing U.S. audiences in Congress and the U.N. in Spanish. Nothing more European than Catholicism or the language of Cervantes, but I don't think that's what Mr. Pearce had in mind.