Purging is not a Cure for Patriarchy

At this writing, I can only imagine who in the celebrity world will be next exposed as a sexual predator. These revelations are coming with such frequency, I wonder if Ted Koppel needs to revive his daily tally on the bottom of the TV screen, as he had at the start of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979. Recall, this nightly spotlight ticking off the days, weeks, and months the US embassy staff was held was the birth of Koppel's long-running program, "Nightline", and furthered his television career.

Koppel did not free a single hostage, but it is said that his nightly spotlight of the hostage crisis, and the meticulous tally of the elapsing days - which went into the 300's - was one nail among several in the coffin of Jimmy Carter's one-term presidency, and it paved the way for last century's right-wing buffoon, the Acting President and FBI snitch, Ronald Reagan.

Could a sage female journalist, like Barbara Walters, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, or Connie Chung, do a nightly news program, tallying the latest sexual assault, delving deep into the power/lack-of-power dynamic between men and women in our advanced societies?

Could a tally bring down patriarchy?

Not likely. But if it ever did it would have to go back 500+ years to the European conquest and genocide of First Nations and Native peoples; it would have to document the voices of countless African girls kidnapped from their homelands and communities to work in the forced-labor camps that we quaintly call plantations. It would have to excavate quite a few unsavory roots to the phenomenon of the oppression of women.

The Dilemma

Dismantling patriarchy would demand a lot of work. And yet, in the wake of these present and ongoing revelations how these men acted upon women, men, girls, and boys, we're not doing the Work.

What we are barraged with are women encouraged to tell their stories.

We are admonished to believe them.

We are asked, what is to be done with these perpetrators?

Should he resign? Is a week of therapy enough? Should his series be cancelled?

What have more than one dozen testimonies done to the current US president, who boasted not only sexually assaulting women, he sexualized his daughter, and suggested he could commit murder in New York City?

These oral histories from the victims could be conducted by the late, great reporter Studs Terkel, we could wear "I believe you" buttons, flood social media with "Me Too" hashtags, and indictments could be filed and jail sentences imposed, and none of these things would address what must be done when it comes to patriarchy.

These public confessionals, with the invariable close-up of the traumatized woman being made to relive her trauma on national television is the bread and circuses of the elites. Elites do not want to talk about power, so instead we focus on victims or on who attorney Gloria Allred will defend next for a close-up and how sordid and debauch was the behavior.

If it is testimonials you really want, how many immigrant women working as agricultural laborers have been abused by their employers, and why don't we hear about the Black women working as domestic laborers, not only in the South, who faced sexual assault from their male bosses? I wonder why Gloria Allred won't seek them out to defend in a class-action suit.

Testimonials just scratch the surface to understanding how power works. They do prove there is in fact a problem, but they do not deal with the problem. Like the convening of a committee by a municipal body, they are often meant as a distraction rather than promote real restructuring.

Purging is not a cure for bulimia.

Because while women - and particularly women of color - have faced and do face enormous challenges and exploitation under capitalism, like sexual assault of various kinds from their workplace superiors, like wage theft through legal pay disparities, and like sex trafficking, the structure of this oppression finds its source in our authoritarian workplaces and nuclear families. This is where we nurture our children to comply with these powerful structures, supposedly for their long-term benefit, we teach them to suffer in silence, and to labor out of fear that one's very livelihood can be extinguished in a moment by one's employer.

This is where patriarchy finds its most eager accomplices among some women, who have been taught the path to their liberation is through being the equal of men.

Equality under Patriarchy

Germaine Greer

                            Sylvia Federici

Audre Lorde

The equality battle risks being a pillar upholding patriarchy. This is where focusing on increasing the presence of women in local police forces or imperialist militaries, or corporate boardrooms, is to cosign the very authoritarian regimes that demand not only the silence of women, teach all the wrong social lessons to them, and subject them to assault, but these authoritarian regimes subject all workers to these antisocial lessons of staying silent for fear of one's future.

Radical, second-wave feminist, Germaine Greer, said in 2010:

"I never wanted equality. It's a meaningless idea. A nonsensical idea. I certainly don't want the life of an 'organization man' or a corporate lawyer or a bond trader or a diplomat or even a parliamentarian because you're simply recycling the same injustice and misery. What I look forward to is a complete reversal of priorities so that the things we take for granted as trifling, like housekeeping,... become major. For example, we need to housekeep this planet. We need to really bring in principles of domestic economy so we're not behaving in a way that is depleting the resources of the planet, reducing its biodiversity, which is our real inheritance. Everything else is nonsense: all the 'great houses' and silliness. Even the works of art are nothing compared to biodiversity. But in order for that to become so important that people will accept a fall in their standard of living and live in a more frugal and austere way, we've really got to have completely different mindset. Consumerism has got to be as no-no as drinking and driving."

Further, we nurture young girls and encourage women to offer their labors for free within all domestic contexts (marriage, motherhood, children, and house work), and not to complain when offered less in the public arena.

In a 2015 interview, Marxist radical feminist, Sylvia Federici, undermines concepts of "women's work" in her critiques of capitalism:

"When women fight for the wage for domestic work, they are also fighting against this work, as domestic work can continue as such so long as and when it is not paid. It is like slavery. The demand for a domestic wage denaturalized female slavery. Thus, the wage is not the ultimate goal, but an instrument, a strategy, to achieve a change in the power relations between women and capital. The aim of our struggle was to convert exploitative slave labor that was naturalized because of its unpaid character into socially recognized work; it was to subvert a sexual division of labor based on the power of the masculine wage to command the reproductive labor of women, which in Caliban and the Witch I call 'the patriarchy of the wage'."

The Dilemma: the Workplace and Work

Dismantling patriarchy has to include how we are all our collectively complicit in sustaining it. It must note the gross hypocrisy in eliciting women's testimony in tearful public displays, telling them "we believe you," while making their suffering in silence for low wages noble, and discouraging their complaints, litigious and otherwise.

Newer revelations and hearing testimonies about what we should already know and feigning shock will not advance the demise of the authoritarian culture that patriarchy thrives in, especially if we keep pushing our daughters and encouraging our sisters to succeed from within it.

The "organization man" that Greer alluded to is a watched, reviewed, and vetted man. He does not go from one promotion to the next without proving, like any good Mafioso, his loyalty to the system. And loyalty to the system is not the liberation of other women, especially not of women of color.

Recall when in 1979 the late Black lesbian poet, Audre Lorde, admonished a conference of mostly white feminists, white feminists who had empaneled mostly white women:

"If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clear your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of color?"

As we still commemorate the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, we must also commemorate the social institutions created and inspired from it for the benefit and radicalizing of working people - to nourish a democratic mentality. Workplace councils, though not always perfect, became the norm, as were neighborhood councils. But the point isn't their imperfections: these gave workers and their communities contexts to imagine and actualize better conditions.

This tradition stands in marked contrast to what can only be called the authoritarian workplaces in our so-called leading democracies, the military command structures, the write-ups, arbitrary firings, union-bashing, and, yes, sexual predators among upper management. These things go hand in hand.

For us, workers collectivizing informally as in grassroots committees, or formally, as in unionizing, are direct threats to our management-centered culture. It was the strength of the union movement that, not ironically, narrowed the gender pay gap; and so, predictably, as unions are allowed to whither under Republican and Democratic indifference, that gap widens. Given that so much of our lives are spent having to work, the persistence of these authoritarian workplaces would bely our boast of being a global democratic leader if actual, meaningful discussions were to be had. The goal of these social institutions is not to become partners with management, cannot be to "share the wealth" with Wall Street. These social institutions must, in the final analysis, dismantle the authoritarian regimes and empower workers to control their communities and their workplaces. This is democratic.

Slaying Dinosaurs and Dragons or when the young confront their elders and the elders show their unworthiness to be elders

[Trevor Hill, left, is an economics student at New York University. Eliecer Avila, right, was a student at the Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas]

Two infamous incidents reveal a glaring problem with our activism and our movements

Trevor Hill vs. Nancy Pelosi

The first is from a young college student, Trevor Hill, who confronts California Democrat, Rep. Nancy Pelosi [San Francisco] about young people's attitudes toward socialism.

Note in this interview with the Democratic Socialists of America where Hill says he was supposed to ask a different, “softball” question?

He went off script, thankfully, and Pelosi essentially said “we don’t hear you.” There is something encouragingly, but thinly, Marxist about her answer, when she attributes the wealth created as being created by the workers: unfortunately, she believes this wealth belongs to the owners, and that we are supposed to beg for it. But it makes me mindful that we too handpick our audiences to ask softball or scripted questions.

It also makes me regret that my party, the Communist Party USA, needs to be picking up young women and men, like Hill, who are ripe for the picking.

Eliecer Avila vs Ricardo Alarcon

This interaction reminds me of another off-script moment, which was just as ridiculous but was widely mocked and manipulated in the Western, bourgeois media for other reasons.

That is when another young student, Eliecer Avila, a young Cuban technology student, asked Ricardo Alarcon, then president of Cuba’s National Assembly of People's Power about why Cubans had to work for pesos and buy goods in dollars:

“That means a worker has to work two or three days to buy a toothbrush.”

Avila asked Alarcon why Cubans were forbidden from hotels and tourist shops, to which Alarcon replied incongruently that when he was stationed in New York City non-Anglo people were treated badly in stores.

Avila asked about restrictions on foreign travel, to which Alarcon responded if everyone flew there’d be catastrophes in the skies.

I say this not to mock Alarcon, who served the Revolution well, better than millionairess Pelosi has served the working class, Blacks, and the poor, but this Cuban upper statesman and member of the Politburo doesn't seem to have a clue what the young people are thinking any more than Pelosi, and the recent purges within the Democratic National Committee of leftists and Sanders supporters proves this.

Antiques Road Shows

This means we not only have an economic problem called capitalism, which siphons money and resources from the poor and guarantees the rich, but we have a generational problem, where old guards exceed their relevance and become those antiques we think are valuable but then the appraisers from "Antiques Roads Show" assess them as fakes.

This is the class of people who love to shoot invective at undemocratic regimes, when I don't think they care two bits about democracy. Just power and privilege.

One-time mayor of San Francisco and right-wing Democratic US Senator, Dianne Feinstein has just announced she is seeking yet another term at 84 years old. This is a pitiful story arc that needn't have happened. At ne time, Feinstein was a rising female Democrat in an establishment of men; she was considered vice presidential material because she lead [thanks to the assassinations of the Mayor and city councilman, Harvey Milk, because her bid to become mayor failed] a major US city. But the longer she stayed in that sun, the more the system steeped her.

Hill was able to join the DSA, and they are damn lucky to have him I'm sure. Avila, who had described himself as a Revolutionary, was effectively exiled for his impertinence and lives today in Havana where he gets harassed by the authorities for speaking out against the shortcomings of Cuban policy. It has been suggested, though not proven, he is being funded now by the Miami Mafioso. This is as dark a story arc as Feinstein's and it didn't have to be.

Our radical coalitions have barely dealt with the race issue, where often the leadership looks exactly like those Polo shirt-wearing, Tiki torch-carrying white nationalists in Charlottesville. And the men's club is often exactly as a younger Dianne Feinstein found the Democratic Party in the 1970's. So to burden our radical movements with more requirements might seem too much, it is necessary. It is necessary that the young be put there.

Those who are too fragile can be made into kindling.

The People's Republic of China and Africa: Ideological Hypocrisy or One-Calorie Maoism?

Amilcar Cabral and Fidel Castro in Guinea Bissau

The problem with those leftists celebrating the People's Republic of China's role in Africa is not that they're unknowingly lifting their talking points from the Economist, but rather that they don't show the nasty flip side of the coin to this involvement - as even the Economist does.

They also happen mostly to be white and fall into that chauvinism that anything a white person, or a white nation, does or believes to be done, for the lesser races, is a good thing. Even when they fuck up [viz., the narrative the US had "good intentions" by invading Vietnam, which still pollutes newsfeeds and Ken Burns].

These supporters will cite such things as hundreds of billions "invested," but may not mention it was for things like an extensive railroad. If they mention the railroad, they won't mention that it's to move raw materials from Addis Ababa to coastal Djibouti and to a port that China has built.

Further, how much of this investment billions comprises the low wages of imported Chinese laborers that bristle the rising unemployed African laborer? (Locals often assume because these Chinese laborers are dressed in identical jumpsuits that they are prison labor, which bristles even more). Investment is a pretty broad, ideologically blank page on which one can put almost anything - like a loan to a bank to repay a loan held in Paris.

In places like SOWETO in South Africa and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, local vendors and craftspeople are anxious as Chinese investment comes, their own markets are downgraded or dry up completely. Opposition movements are getting more vocal against the Chinese while their governments continue to make more and more deals.

The ongoing convention of the Communist Party of China has been watched closely, President Xi Jinping's words measured by left and right as closely as we used to measure Federal Reserve chairman Allan Greenspan's riddles. Analysis is interesting. Rhetoric indicative. But so are actions.

Xi Jinping is General Secy of the Central Committee of the CPC and President

The visuals of the auditorium are a thing of beauty to a communist. The red flags. The giant hammer and sickle. Lenin. This contrasts sharply to Cuba's Communist Party congresses, where only the Cuban flag is prominent, no hammer and sickles, and the images are of Cuban liberation fighters.

From the visuals alone, one might conclude the PRC is staunchly Marxist-Leninist and that revolutionary Cuba has centered itself on a purely nationalist, anti-imperialist fight.

But actions mean things too, like Cuba's renowned internationalism, and how even after the collapse of the USSR it sustained its support of armed liberation forces in the Americas. Almost 40 years since the death of Chairman Mao, the PRC has not only not lent its support to liberation movements of the global South but has made these business deals and lucrative “investments” with the shady characters that Western capitalism has installed in power, as reliable African leaders.

A good place to start a wakeup call is to read Marxist historian Walter Rodney’s HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA to get a sense on the various tactics employed by Europeans to rape Africa and build its capitalist super world. Then read some of Kenyan historian and African Pan-nationalist Ali Mazrui, author of THE AFRICANS: A TRIPLE HERITAGE, THE AFRICAN CONDITION, etc. Mazrui was no communist, but he was able to distinguish, like other communists and nationalists on the continent, “development without industrialization.” He was decrying this at least as far back as the 80’s and would find, for instance, the malls in Namibia filled to the brim with Chinese manufactures indistinguishable from what the French, Portuguese, and USAID were implementing over a generation ago.

Guyanese-born Walter Rodney [left] and Kenyan-born Ali Mazrui [right]

Someone told me I was obscene for comparing the PRC with Western imperialists. The PRC has no invading armies, I was told. Besides the fact that there are PRC troops in Africa – like, the 10,000 in Eastern Africa – has no one heard of neocolonialism? The PRC needn’t shoot communists and labor militants if the post-apartheid South African government will shoot them instead. This is what neocolonial governments do. This is why they are well funded and handpicked by Western power brokers to secure “our interests.” It cannot be beyond consideration that these same regimes benefit the Chinese designs in Africa, and this is counter-revolutionary.

Whatever Xi Jinping says of Mao and Marx and Lenin and Stalin from the floor of the CPC conference, whatever the PRC’s domestic policy, these results remain to be seen within China itself. But I see none of these luminaries influencing the PRC’s foreign policy where it regards Africa, which disempowers workers and communities and can at best be called a grossly reformulated Maoism Lite..

Where the UAW went wrong

The troubles of the UAW are emblematic of labors' troubles while it tries to serve the two masters of the workers and capitalism simultaneously

The news that Mississippi auto workers rejected the United Auto Workers (UAW) should not be surprising. Trades-union membership in the US has not only declined but so has support for unions among wide swathes of workers.

Mainstream media discussion would stop there. Even pliant academic research from the nation's best schools would go no further. Our distaste for unions would be more or less comparable to the reaction of consumers to the New Coca-Cola formula. No analysis would follow. Union membership and opposition to unionism would be as natural as the sun rising and setting.

The official talking points would laud the new worker as more self-confident and independent, not wanting to be constrained by corrupt bureaucracies. Spin doctors of corporate media would highlight all the good things government has done in the last 100 years, and conclude we simply have no need for unions or union activism.

Remember all the triumphalism that followed the demise of the USSR and Eastern bloc countries, and how countries like Cuba were predicted to collapse by the following Christmas?

Radicals must avoid these spin-cycles and ask more pertinent questions and even engage in some self-criticism.

The Roots of a Once Militant Union Ripped Out by Class Treason.

The UAW used to be a very radical union, led, like many Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) unions, by members of the Communist Party USA, socialists, and other far-left radicals.

You probably won't hear that from the mainstream media, and the most titled academics will not even add this to their footnotes of research.

The shift rightward to undermine the union did not begin last week in Mississippi, when the workers, 2-1, rejected organizing with a union. Nor did it begin in Chattanooga, TN, where Volkswagen auto workers opposed organizing with the UAW.

The rot began several generations ago, and has been a sustained and deliberate campaign for "hearts and minds," as well as drawing a lot blood of the working class.

A man named Walter Reuther was elected to lead the UAW in 1946 in a very contested election. Reuther was a longtime UAW member, and he had participated in strike actions in the 1930's. He supported civil rights later in the 60's. But he was also buddy-buddy with the Democratic Party, and he hated communists.

After his election Reuther began to assist the government to purge the UAW and CIO of Communist Party USA members, and he expelled unions from the CIO that were led by communists. This 1946 Reuther election, not the Volkswagen vote in Chattanooga, not the vote in Mississippi, was the beginning of the end of the labor movement. This is where our analysis can begin, an analysis that must appreciate those strikes that Reuther had participated in, those civil and human rights he is credited as supporting, have deep roots in the CPUSA annals.

To the comment from Nissan that the workers "have rejected the UAW and chosen to self-represent, continuing the direct relationship they enjoy with the company." I say there is no such thing as "self-represent", there is no "direct relationship" with management.

Reuther Took the Life out of the UAW and the Labor Movement.

The late CPUSA California chair, Dorothy Healey, whose mother was a founding member of the Party, called the CPUSA "the yeast" of the labor movement. Then anti-communists like Reuther had the yeast removed, and this is why the UAW continues to struggle to remain relevant to the working class while it stays allied with corporate political parties, like the Democrats.

"Reuther's election, though, was the turning point in the balance of power in the CIO. Had he gone down in defeat in 1946, had he been unable to secure a sympathetic majority on the UAW's executive board in 1947, I don't think there would have been the expulsions of the eleven Left-led unions three years later. And if those unions had not been expelled from the CIO and we had retained our base in the labor movement, the history of the 1950's might have been very different, not only in terms of what happened to the Communist Party but what happened to American unions." (Dorothy Ray Healey, CALIFORNIA RED A LIFE IN THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY)

"Business" Schools Assist in Anti-Labor Fight

Since the late 60's and 70's, business schools have produced some very cunning innovations to undermine trades-unionism and solidarity. Innovations like Employee Councils, potlucks and staff barbeques. Advisory Committees. Open-door policies. These innovations came at the heal of the purges that class traitors, like Reuther, collaborated with. These innovations gave the appearance to workers that they had a voice with management, that they could knock on the door and get their personal problems resolved. This cultivated a false sense of security in many workers and gave a lot of room for corporate heads and management to do exactly what they've been doing for the last 50 years, precipitously degrade our work lives.

All across the Deep South right now, community organizers are mobilizing to have Confederate monuments removed and put into the dustbin of history. I would add Walter Reuther to this campaign for the serious attacks he led against the advances of the UAW in particular and labor activism in general. If anyone needs to cultivate its self-confidence and the voice and moral strength it has, and seriously reevaluate its collaboration with the pro-capitalist, pro-business school Democratic Party, it is certainly the Communist Party USA.

You cannot win a labor gain tethered to a political party that is pro-profit and pro-racist and expect workers - particularly Black workers, as in Mississippi and Tennessee - to take you seriously.

Britain's Hung Democracy and Ours: A Cautionary Tale on Reformism

[Labour PM Clement Attlee, who won a 1945 landslide, with George VI]

Events are constantly developing around the recent General Election in Great Britain, of the Labour Party's Jeremy Corbyn's surprising gains and the Conservative Party's pitiful loss. At this writing, a Conservative minority government has signed some sort of alliance with a British political party ensconced in Northern Ireland, a party that seems to have come out of the 50's for its reactionary views on women, lesbians and gays, and equally important, against the sovereignty of an Ireland free of British colonial occupation.

THE AUSTERITY PARTY FINDS CASH TO SAVE ITSELF
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a group of reactionaries that the failed Theresa May hopes will save her premiership, are as delusional about the northernmost part of Ireland being British as the French who once insisted that Algeria was part of France.

The Conservative-DUP agreement has already raised many doubts before the ink was dry. For one, can the British government can be an objective mediator between the DUP and Sinn Fein (the political arm of the Irish Republican Army)? This is an interesting question, because cadres of the officially disbanded IRA question why the UK, the occupying power, should be a mediator at all.

Doubts raised that a five-year Parliament can last its full term given the guarantee of $1 billion of funding to Northern Ireland is just over two years: what is the alliance agreement for the final three years of the Conservative's fixed term? More money? Doubts that this funding can be fairly administered to both nationalist and republican sides within Northern Ireland while there is no power-sharing administration are also being raised. Given the discovery of this new funding, the other devolved administrations, like Wales, are asking where their extra funding is in these austerity times.

The Labour Party has rightly turned the Tory election talking point back on Theresa May: where is her money tree?

Despite these day-to-day fights, there are some broader lessons we as communists, radicals, militants, etc., can draw from this election to direct our futures forward.

Among these lessons, the last would be the persons of Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May, if they must be mentioned at all.

The winners are the electorate, which made a clear expression of its leftist tendencies. The earlier, so-called "Brexit" vote, however marginal, was a rare moment in British democracy or democracy anywhere in the Western world. Our so-called democracies are carefully stage managed by corporations and stockbrokers who hire politicians at enormous costs (viz., the recent Congressional race in Georgia for which over $50 million was spent). Rarely .. dare I say never are voters allowed to have such a direct voice in where the nation-state collaborates its finances. It was clear the neoliberals who head all the major political parties in the UK wanted to remain in the EU, which is reflexive of the desires of the financiers.

It was just as clear in the wake of the vote, that those Brexit voters had to be maligned as possibly confused or as the worst kinds of people with bad character. It was hard to find that the older Labour Party position - the position of the moderate to radical socialists, like Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner, George Galloway, Glenda Jackson, and, yes, Jeremy Corbyn - were to resist this neoliberal takeover of the state by the Common Market/European Community.

The post-election smear of the electorate, and in some sense Labour's old position, is to inoculate the UK from ever holding such a plebiscite again.

The waffling and sliding of the political class on "what kind of Brexit" is a clear attempt to circumvent the vote and find an accommodation to please Wall Street and its European partners.

The more recent General Election may have produced a hung Parliament with no party in majority, but the voice against austerity, for funding social services, for a return to free tuition, better public housing, and nationalization of British industry made a phenomenal advance, especially considering the neoliberal voices - Tory, Labour, and Liberal Democrat - which openly mocked Corbyn and his programs. "Where is the money tree?" became the key talking point of the spokespeople of the banks - that is, the capitalist parties functionaries - who have not asked this question of Britain's "coalition of the willing" wars in Western Asia and the Middle East.

The losers are the British establishment, which is not taking this by turning the other cheek. Their new talking point is "stability," which if there was ever a hint of fascism, that word must be coupled with the British prime minister's frequent call to give the police more powers "to do their jobs."

This is why neither Corbyn nor May or any political leader must ever be put on our pedestals.

THE MASSES MAKE HISTORY
Recall the late Kwame Ture's (Stokely Carmichael) lesson:

"Only the masses make history. Our people make history. Sometimes we get confused. The history books are confusing our conceptions having us think we make history when one African becomes the first this or that. So in the history books you read that the first president of this association was an African. The first doctor to come to this hospital was an African. The first African to do this. The first African to do that. The first African astronaut. It makes you think that our history is a history of individual advancement into the capitalist system. This is not history. History is made by an oppressed people only in fighting against their oppressor. This is the only way you make history."

The winners are green shoots of a movement in Britain that emerged several hundred years ago and has been routinely co-opted by elites.

The losers, for all the disparity of their respective Labour-Tory platforms, are both equally tethered to the market system and are an impediment to building socialism or communism and radically rearranging our failed capitalist societies and its toxic neoliberal prescriptions.

The winners must be seen in a long view. So I trace the aspirations of this austerity-weary, EU-skeptical electorate back to the 17th century.

The English civil war saw a king executed and Britain's only experiment as a republic enduring for about 12 years. But the years of Oliver Cromwell's republic unleashed other radical movements that are rarely acknowledged by bourgeois historians.

As Christopher Hill chronicles in his WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN: Radical Ideas of the English Revolution, emboldened by the execution of the king, activists turned their sights on critiquing the utility of Parliament, unequal distribution of the land, and of the nobility. They had different visions of real, grassroots democracy that nurtured the Chartists, suffragists, slave abolitionists, and successive electoral reform movements of later decades well into the 19th and early 20th centuries. But their own communistic visions never materialized.

And this is the cautionary tale for radicals. We must appreciate our militant visions inspiring other movements, but we must beware of those movements becoming our own.

As elsewhere, the Establishment always managed to co-opt these movements or divert them. The insurgency during the Cromwell republic got so fierce to abolish Parliament and the elite class that the Establishment protected its interest ultimately by restoring the monarchy as the one institution immune from popular control that could protect the status quo.

This Establishment then reluctantly allowed mediocre electoral reforms within the established system.

The results are a predictable mixed bag, at best.

I'M SORRY, BUT WE'RE CAPITALISTS

Despite the radicals in its ranks, the British Labour Party has a long history of reformism. Its first Labour government, in 1925, alarmed the king who had second thoughts about allowing Ramsay MacDonald, Labour's leader, to take power. But George V's fear's were unwarranted. As The New Statesman editor, Kingsley Martin writes of that time:

"There was no cause for alarm. George V was immensely relieved to find that the first Labour prime minister had himself an Establishment mind[set] and had appointed an Establishment man to watch over Defense. The senior members of the Administration were flattered, overwhelmed, by the affability of the King and very ready to cooperate with the Establishment in keeping the Left Wing in order.

"When the second Labour Government (1929-1931) was confronted with the dilemma of either adopting a socialist policy ... or of joining forces with the Conservatives, MacDonald ... unhesitatingly chose the second course." [Martin, The Crown and the Establishment]

After World War II, Party stalwarts, like the radical socialist Kier Hardie, were marginalized to make the Party more acceptable to the British establishment (like his father, George VI was openly suspicious of the Labour Party). This same Labour government joined forces with the US imperialist mission to halt the liberation movement on the Korean peninsula.

Recalling this history is not to take away from the real, significant and radical gains made by the Labour Party, just to acknowledge its limitations and where further radical movement must continue if it is to realize its dreams.

Right now, New Labour elites seem to be dining on crow after the Corbyn-led electoral success, but I'm watching carefully, and they seem to be moving their forks around the plate but not taking any bites. They acknowledge Corbyn's gain but not sounding like their eyes have been opened, rather like the actor who lost the Oscar and needs to sounds gracious.This neoliberal wing of the Labour Party, which solidified its hold on the party in the 1990's, would still prefer a moderated Conservative in power over an emboldened moderate socialist.

What must Corbyn reasonably do to keep this wing supporting him, is a vital question for his radical base and for all radical cadres? The answer is this base must be crystal clear in its objectives and keep the long view. Coalitions are critical but we must not become them. We're communists. This long view reminds us again and again no shortcuts exist to building socialism, and that reactionaries never turn the other cheek and accept defeat. This base must be just as aware of New Labour's presence in that Party as we here in the US must remember that even after a failed election, Nancy Pelosi was put back in her leadership position. She proved her tone-deafness when in response to a question by a young, socialist-leaning activist she said, "I'm sorry, but we're capitalists."

If this lesson isn't learned by the winners, Corbyn could very well become prime minister, follow the reformist tendencies of many of his predecessors, and the masses that wanted much more will be left as frustrated and disillusioned as those 17th century insurgents who came so close only to have the monarchy restored.

Our Permanent Radical Interests Vs Transient White Radical Friends

My head would spin off my shoulders, like Linda Blair in "The Exorcist" busying myself with white peoples' demons of the day and compromises of the moment. What did Mandela respond to the US journalist who challenged his friendships with Fidel, Arafat, and Qadaffi?

As if on cue I am supposed to turn on their announced enemies - e.g., Fidel, Qadaffi, Angela Davis, Robert Mugabe, Kwame Ture, the Communist Party, and many more to mention, as if I were white people's archetype of an antebellum slave, who cannot distinguish his master's pain from his own, and who himself has no pain but his master's. I am supposed to assume myself a white man, left or right politically, and view the world from there and from there only.

There are too many white radicals who keep doing this. In 2017.

One white socialist replied of Angela Davis: "she still cant justify her support for Hillary Clinton." To which I let him know whatever the nature of that support, which is debatable, Davis has absolutely not a fucking thing to justify to him.

At the deep, rotten heart of this matter is white exceptionalism. Whatever their politics, they set the standard and stand on the pinnacle. The thought that their history of conquests and socio-political organization has driven the world to a precipice, not a pinnacle, and that the global South might save humanity is negated by their liberal white racism.

Many radical whites who act like their latest brand of radicalism is like the new iPhone will dismiss movements they themselves have no use for, but take care: this does not mean these movements don't serve you.

They love to disparage the Communist Party as being "Democrats." Ok, here I can kind of see their point, but their analysis is lazy, kind of like confusing and conflating Egypt's Mubarak's, the House of Saud's, the Assad family's, and the Hashemite kingdom's Euro-centric view of the Middle East with that of the Arab people of those countries.

This frequent analysis redacts a nearly 100-tear history of the Communist Party in the US, a history that Black people should know.

Black people, in particular Black people in the US, would be wise to look at all the things white society want us to not look at. The Communist Party, for example, was a critical force in what was to become the "civil rights movement," period. I think I can say "what was to become" because this was not the light at the end of the tunnel aspired to by those communists and fellow-travelers, but this is another discussion. The Democratic and Republican Parties were not present.

Official history has handed us Franklin D Roosevelt, as hero of the working class, man of the people, the answer to the Depression: words and redactions provided by white historians who inflated the establishment's role and erased the radical tactics of the communists altogether.

Yes, admittedly even some of those whites in the CP were slow to make bolder moves, but then Stalin pushed them to be bolder and into forming fully integrated trades-unions, like the CIO (which later merged with the non-integrated AFL). So maybe your grandparents should have hung a picture of Joseph Stalin, who pressed for Black liberation, next to FDR, who did nothing to stop lynching and passed a New Deal largely for the white poor and not Blacks. Just saying.

Someone disparaged Kwame Ture for his "friendship with Idi Amin." That came out of nowhere. When then-Stokley Carmichael headed SNCC, he divorced its work from all whites [pretty much for the same reason I'm writing this piece]. I'd have been prepared for someone criticizing that rupture, which I would have defended. Not his association with another African leader. A life of radical, socialist, pan-Africanist struggle reduced to one relationship? More laziness. I don't think the critic here even knows what pan-Africanism is or its history.

Meanwhile, the same whites who make a fetish out of such posturing will, in the same breath, accuse me of immaturity for not being more nuanced in my analyses of a Jill Stein, who supports Israel, or a Bernie Sanders, who also supports Israel and dropping drones on people without due process. These are the white's compromises. They ran to Barack Obama in 2008, to Bill Clinton in 1992, and to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Their reading lists are confined to Europeans, which they excavate again and again as if it were a crime scene, but I notice no Black or brown radical voices ever seem to make their citations. Radical Black voices do not exist.

Yet they expect me to take on their views of the world and accept their criticism when I do not?

This is a "keep your eyes on the prize" public service announcement for 2017. White radicalism often has its limits, so beware. It will go only so far but wants to preserve white civilization at the same time, which is often their first master and a yoke around our necks. White allies set their expectations for you today and, if you rise in stature, will submit you to litmus tests tomorrow - to publicly condemn this person or that movement.

Beware of Black and Brown radicals who are no better than slaves, who have no pain of their own except what white people tell them to have: they can be expected to mimic the script you just heard from the white man. Did you chuckle with me when, in the wake of Bernie Sanders' "political revolution," Democratic Party flunkies and politicians, like Donna Brazille, seemed to discover the word "revolution" in their interviews? Well, laugh no more: no sooner had Bernie disappeared back to his role as DNC cheerleader did these slaves drop the word from their vocabulary.

Rejecting our real heroes, class warriors, and radical movements is exactly the docile position white civilization want us, its Black and Brown underlings. Inoculate yourselves: find the most radical voice you can and do not diverge until one more radical comes along, and do the same. This is how revolutions are imagined. The planning will come naturally.

Don't let the defenders of capitalism and white civilization turn your gaze to their expediency and reject your North Star.

"One of the mistakes political analysts make is to think their enemies should be our enemies. That we can't and we will never do. We have our own struggle, which we are conducting. We are grateful to the world for supporting that struggle. But nevertheless we are an independent organization with its own policy. Our attitude towards any country is determined by the attitude of that country towards our struggle ... " - Nelson Mandela