The problem of Cuba: some thoughts

Panel meeting of the Union of Young Communists (UJC). Photo by Cde. Raul Palmero.

Cuba is once again in the mainstream news. This can only mean the prism through which all US mainstream media view the global South has discovered new grist for the mill. How, it remains to be understood, does a free press, uncontrolled by the US State Department or US secret agencies, all, and in unison, ask the same questions, make the same demands, hold the same prejudices of any number of things, including Cuba's Revolution?

But they do. So, the grist was a small, 100-person protest in Cuba's eastern city, Santiago de Cuba. Cubans protested the shortage of food and the incessant blackouts.

The same free press did not cover the protest of thousands in support and solidarity with Palestinians suffering under apartheid Israeli genocide.

Cuba is suffering. As hard as that is to say as a supporter of that Revolution, it must be said. Too many of my comrades, who do not live in Cuba, wax on and on about the achievements of the 1959 Revolution - literacy, health care, housing, education, culture - as well as its exemplary demonstrations of global solidarity with its medical brigades, which go all over the world practicing the skills of saving lives, while the US plants more than 800 military bases around the world.

Highlighting Cuba's successes does not mitigate its current and growing problems. These problems, given the conditions, are unsustainable. 

I voted for Biden for one reason, and one reason only: he campaigned to reverse the harsh sanctions Trump had imposed on Cuba and vowed to restore Obama's policy. That was enough for me to ignore his previous record in the US Senate.

Biden won. He did not reverse Trump's sanctions. He added more of his own!

But that is one problem of Cuba. That problem was thoroughly and beautifully unpacked in Fidel's 1960 speech to the United Nations General Assembly. It took him 4-1/2 hours to complete his lecture, during which the US representative walked out, and the global South countries cheered. (Fidel spoke for over 7 hours at the Third Communist Party Congress in 1986).

Fidel at the UN - September 26, 1960

Nothing much has changed since Fidel's speech with regard to the US, but much had changed otherwise. 

The USSR has been destroyed.

China has become a capitalist country governed by a communist party.

The other problem of Cuba is its friends. Yes, they wax about the "triumphs of the Revolution," as I am guilty of doing. But they are reformists at heart who are quick to concede false narratives about the country they claim to support. 

The best example of this was when US House Rep. Barbara Lee was barred from a Congressional subcommittee on Cuba by former CNN newsreader, Maria Elvira Salazar. Lee conceded to Salazar's notion that broad discussions aren't and cannot be had in Cuba. Lee conditioned having such discussions on the US lifting the blockade and allowing "entrepreneurs" to thrive. This is the liberal view of things. It's also false history.

Cubans have had many broad discussions on all levels of its society.

In short, the problem of Cuba is its supporters are Gorbachevistas and Kerenskyists. There's not a communist nor Marxist, nor Marxist-Leninist bone in their bodies. They are more AFL and no ounce of CIO. They believe in their heart of hearts that free trade with the Revolution will dissolve that Revolution peacefully. This was Obama's belief. This was USAID's belief.

Many of these supporters run organizations on the left.

This is supposed to be the better option to the "rightist" position of violent uprisings and a color revolution.

I am not Arab, nor Muslim, am not Palestinian. But when I see US and European Palestinians rise in defense of Gaza and Palestine, I hope I betray the same uncompromising feeling about Cuba and its Revolution. I hope that I am as clear and as clear-sighted, and that I will call things by their right names, without nuance.

If the genocidal blockade won't be lifted, it must be broken. This cannot mean only food and medicines. It must also mean adding to Cuba's technological prowess, stifled by the blockade and the exodus of its people. With those medicines and medical equipment must go doctors and scientists to collaborate with Cuba's. All sectors must emulate this. Building a socialist society is a mass project by the hands of the masses.

UJC-Havana. Photo by Cde. Raul Palmero.

Why Margaret Sanger Matters: a message to the Left

[from l-r, author Pearl Buck, Margaret Sanger, and Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn]

In a 2014 speech in Honolulu for LaborFest Hawaii, historian Dr. Gerald Horne ended his talk with these words:

"A scarecrow is a poor excuse for a human being, but if it is removed I daresay that one's crops will be plundered by scavengers.

"The socialist camp had admitted flaws and weaknesses but with its decline our crops have been devastated by our class antagonism.

"Labor and the Left need to realize that one lesson of the passed few decades is that progressivism will find it difficult to survive unless radicalism is strong, and if radicalism is weak then progressivism is weak."

Recently, Planned Parenthood publicly disavowed their founder, Margaret Sanger. The organization announced it was removing her name from a clinic in Manhattan, citing her support for eugenics. In an unprecedented event, the organization had cancelled its own founder. This decision garnered support from anti-abortionists, who indeed had pushed for it, and who have always rejected Sanger, as well as pro-choice, anti-racist activists. 

Sanger had become a hindrance to outreach to women of color, was one complaint. 

The disavowal comes in the wake of a movement to take down the statues and memorials to US Civil War Confederates and their pro-slavery supporters. This movement seems to have extended even to John Muir, an early founder of the environmental movement, but not to the FBI headquarters bearing J. Edgar Hoover's name.

In Sanger's case, while allegations about her white racism and support for eugenics have existed for some time, this disavowal by her own organization is a gross error: it ignores Sanger's labor and anti-racist record, it fails to appreciate the other anti-establishment eugenics of the early 20th century that emerged out of the left and lures the modern-day left into a familiar trap.

Sanger's cancellation qualifies for what former Communist Party USA leader, Dorothy Healey, characterized the expulsion of lesbians and gays from the Party - "a self-inflicted wound."

It is first an error because the things attributed to Sanger are not honest portrayals of her life.

At a time today when the working class is deeper in disarray, suffering successive, regressive setbacks since the post-WWII anti-communist years, Reagan/Thatcher attacks against labor union in the 80's, the destruction of the USSR in 1991, and now calamities as the COVID-19 pandemic upturns the fragile workforce we had, the radical left shouldn't be throwing its most capable, most effective, most visionary labor leaders and feminists overboard.

Sanger's many years of work qualify her as an effective labor leader and feminist. A casual study of her life's work would find the accusation of white racism puzzling. The charge would seem incongruent with her activism. And while Sanger did have some ideas we'd find intolerable today, racism was not one.

Sanger's early successes as a labor leader set into motion the present disavowal by the organization she founded, and it's a history worth repeating. 

For almost 25 years before she founded Planned Parenthood with her sister, Ethel Byrne, Katharine Marthe Houghton Hepburn [the actress' mother], Sanger was an early Socialist Party USA member and one of the Industrial Workers of the World's [IWW] best labor organizers. Along with future chair of the CPUSA, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sanger was also one of IWW's most prominent women labor organizers. Sanger led two successful labor strikes.

It was the witnessing effect the labor struggle had on the wives and children that caught Sanger's attention to birth control. As she details in her memoir, Pivot of Civilization (Brentano's NY), "We saw that in the final analysis the real burden of industrial warfare was thrust upon the frail, all-too-frail shoulders of the children ... " She writes her concerns were rebuffed by a mostly male labor leadership. She wanted to encourage these families to limit the numbers of hungry children they were producing. The labor leaders argued that the more poor we had, the sooner the proletarian revolution would come.

Sanger writes "The eloquence of those who led the underpaid and half-starved workers could no longer, at least for me, ring with conviction."

Equally, the male leadership didn't like Sanger's challenge to patriarchy and frequently reprimanded her for counseling women to not listen to their husbands.

According to her memoir, her interest in writers who had similarly fallen out of favor with the socialist left coincided with her own fall from favor. She cites writers like Karl Kautsky, Rudolf Rocker, Lorenzo Portet, Francisco Ferrer, Enrico Malatesta. Sanger writes in her memoir how these thinkers "encouraged and strengthened" her. Of these, she cites Rocker, the anarcho-syndicalist, most of all.

But if there were any racist eugenicists among her influences, they are not named. In fact, Nazi Germany was so opposed to her writings, they burned them.

But the eugenics movement handed down to us describes only one of those movements - the racist, white supremacist, Nazi variety. The one championed by Adolf Hitler. 

Another movement is not familiar, and it grew mostly out of a turn-of-the-century class struggle and the catastrophe of World War I where organizers, writers, and thinkers on the left made what might be called the final break with feudalism, rejected church and state as static beings, and imagined a progressive state producing, in turn, progressive citizens. A few historical incidents mark this shift around the turn-of-the-century. In the US, the so-called Progressive Era witnessed mobilization against the affects of industrialization and urbanization. In the UK workers' struggles pressured to end forever the powers of the British House of Lords with the Parliament Act of 1911. The final nail in the coffin had to be the Great War - World War I - and the devastation it left in its wake.

Intensely angered at a bloody European war sanctioned and blessed by the Church, George Bernard Shaw, author of such works as "Man and Superman" (1905) and "Back to Methuselah" (1921), venomously counter attacked, were emblematic of this shift. In "Methuselah," implicit in Shaw's warning is not only a call for humans to do better or be cast aside but this is cast in almost Darwinian terms:

"The power that produced man when the monkey was not up to the mark, can produce a higher creature than man if man does not come up to the mark. We must beware; for man is not yet an ideal creature. At his present best, many of his ways are so unpleasant that they are unmentionable in polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to pretend that pain is often a good. Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results. If man will not serve, nature will try another experiment."

Then came the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which not only enhanced the vocabulary of this social movement, it offered a tangible example of the first "workers state" which expressed a desire to make the new man and woman.

This "social eugenics" sentiment is the context we have to place Sanger (or Shaw for that matter), not the Nazi stance attributed to her. 

It's a sentiment that is even seen in Ernesto "Che" Guevara's famous letter, "Man and Socialism in Cuba" [1965] where he describes to a friend how the Revolution will create the New Man[sic].

The rift between the IWW and Sanger widened when she and her sister started smuggling contraceptive devices from the UK. This brought the Planned Parenthood founder not only on a collision with the labor leadership of her day but also against many state laws that prohibited possessing, teaching, or disseminating contraceptives. Connecticut was just one of these states.

By 1920, the "pivot" from full-time labor organizer to birth-control advocate was complete. Sanger had always been a feminist, socialist, and suffragette, and these impulses equally drove her labor organizing as much as it did in organizing Planned Parenthood. Sanger the IWW labor organizer did formally break with the union and was solidifying the concept of Planned Parenthood "clinics," but it was part of the same cause of women's liberation. The clinics would provide women education, contraception, teach techniques to avoid pregnancy, and nurture the idea that women as autonomous beings needn't listen to their husbands. 

At Sanger's direction, drawing from her years as a labor organizer, the clinics were integrated with Black and white staff - nurses and doctors.

In establishing these clinics, she had not only the support of many white women, like Flynn of the CPUSA, who counted among her financial and activist supporters, but also NAACP co-founder WEB DuBois, the Communist Party's Paul Robeson, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, Mary McCloud Bethune, and some pro-labor activist Black ministers who would eventually invite Sanger to come and speak to their congregations. 

DuBois sat on the board of Planned Parenthood. In later years, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., praised her work - and became the recipient of the organization's first award.

DuBois and those Black ministers' support is important to this false narrative. Again, "a casual study of her life's work would find the accusation of white racism puzzling." 

It is a 1939 correspondence with one of her friends that a passage has been taken out of context to haunt Sanger for some time. 

Her "... We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the [Black] minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members" which discussed her visits with these Black congregations.

The meaning of this one passage has forever been manipulated into its opposite. Detractors and critics has spun this as proof of a hidden agenda, when Sanger was actually anticipating her opposition and looking to those Black ministers as truth allies.

The other racist quotes attributed to Sanger have been dispelled by scholars like Marxist historian Silvia Federici and Charles Valenza. 

Valenza's research found that the racist quotes attributed to Sanger were not hers but did appear in a magazine she founded and was later under other editorial control. Nevertheless, Valenza argues these disparate authors appeared in her birth-control journal due to their name recognition at the time and the funds they would generate. Sanger was interested in raising money for her cause [see, "Was Margaret Sanger a racist?" Family Planning Perspectives, Vol 17 No. 1, 1985], not because she endorsed their ideas.

Challenged once to explain her stance on eugenics, Sanger was clear "If by 'unfit' is meant the physical or mental defects of a human being, that is an admirable gesture, but if 'unfit' refers to races or religions, then that is another matter, which I frankly deplore," she said in 1934.

Admittedly, even Sanger's qualification for "physical and mental defects" is abhorrent today, but our evolved social attitudes toward the disabled or physically challenged are barely 30 years old, dating back to the 1990's American with Disabilities Act and slightly earlier struggles in public education to educate all children. Further, I argue her use of the term "racial betterment" in her memoir, writings, and speeches - even to Black congregations - bears the broader connotation of the human race, not a narrow ethnic one.

Federici's effort to rehabilitate Sanger extends to such works as Caliban and the Witch: Woman, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation [AK Press, 2004] to the overarching problem Sanger and women like her face.

"As we learned in the feminist movement," Federici says, "often the first obstacle a woman encounters when she wants to make a fight is not directly the state but the man in the family." (interview, Race, Poverty & the Environment, Vol. 19 No. 2, 2012).

Lastly, there is Connecticut, the locale of Sanger's first clinic. New York and Maryland would follow. Sanger's friend and Planned Parenthood co-founder, Katharine "Kit" Hepburn, a communist, helped organize the Connecticut clinics. Kit Hepburn's sister, Edith Houghton Hooker, organized the first clinic in Baltimore.

The Connecticut clinic was chosen early on by Sanger as the site to test the anti-contraception laws, test cases which culminated in the US Supreme Court's 1965 Griswold v Connecticut, which not only established a "right to privacy" but also became the foundations to the later Roe v Wade decision, the overturning of anti-gay sodomy statutes, and lately the right of lesbian and gay marriage.

Sanger died after Griswold in 1966.

The sum of Sanger's lifetime of struggle and the allies and friends she attracted do not add up to a white racist or a eugenicist. It is a disservice to her work to say so. It is also a disservice to women of color to rob them of a militant feminist warrior. Further, and perhaps more dangerous, taking out ones fiercest leaders [or scarecrows, if you will], inevitably damaged your own forces. And it has.

Instead, we might inquire the hypocrisy of present-day, right-wing, anti-immigrant and racist movements who are hijacking a moment of racial "wokeness" to destroy not so much Sanger but rather the movement she founded. 

Sanger is not the real target: it is women's sovereignty over their bodies that the right wing and patriarchy find objectionable. 

In fact, this right wing scarcely knows her: it's news to anti-abortionists who despise Sanger that Planned Parenthood did not begin performing abortions until 1973, several years after her death.

This right wing seeks to capitalize on an anti-racist narrative in which they have no street credentials whatsoever to take down a hundred-year organization which has not only served its main constituency of working-class women but is also unrecognized as providing health services to gay men during the AIDS pandemic.

The left must be smarter than be lured into this trap. Who thinks the right will be satisfied now that Sanger's name has been publicly disavowed? Who thinks the mission of Planned Parenthood will now be freed to do its work? The right is chipping away at the foundations of our radical history, and we must not cede ideological ground to them.

It is deeply troubling at this critical juncture for the working class struggling to find its way and acknowledge its power to disavow a militant feminist, socialist, and trades-unionist who even braved the conservative thinking of the labor movement of her day. Sanger should not be disavowed anything; she should be emulated.

Some Final Thoughts on the Gender Wars and the Left

The year 2022 is about to be behind us, and 2023 rises in the near distance. The future always begs some questions. Will it be more of the old wine in new bottles? Will I find the lovers best suited to me? And will the left - inasmuch as it still exists to be called such - get its shit together?

One area that guarantees to cause dumpster fires on social media that I wish we could have left in 2021 is the so-called gender debate.

Even though the only hope I see of that ending is a scourge of Republican takeovers showing utterly and finally the irrelevancy of the gender debates loudest performers to the struggles of the working class. I know that was an incendiary mouthful. But as I see no hope that the moderate left has any capacity to resolve this extraordinary debate, what else can I hope for other than a nuclear detonation

You will have already assumed my position on this, and that is to be forgiven given the lines drawn by those performers who claim to carry the cause of trans rights.

I cannot call them organizers.

But you just might be wrong in where you think my thoughts on this struggle lay.

A Pew Poll from mid 2022 sums up best where the vast majorities of Americans are on this issue. I say vast majorities, because being the reputable and thorough poll it is, Pew takes a broad look as well as dives into different ideological and age groups.

Unfortunately, if anything disqualifies the woke scolds, as someone called them, from being called organizers it is that public opinion such as Pew's has absolutely no effect on them.

The poll resonates with me personally, since it jives completely with my anecdotal experience in the workplace, where this issue has come up as official policy is rolled out from upper management, among family, and friends.

An organizer harnesses and mobilizes. They don't scold. They don't put dissenters into "baskets of deplorables." This is the rhetoric of elites and academics who hate the working class anywhere it exists outside their conferences and cohorts.

Pew's headline deck [that blurb following a headline] succinctly summarizes its extensive findings [for those who do not want to get extensive]:

"Most favor protecting trans people from discrimination, but fewer support policies related to medical care for gender transitions; many are uneasy with the pace of change on trans issues."

An organizer would take this information and mobilize the people, the constituency, the workforce, whomever, to securing that those anti-discrimination policies are stopped and that the trans community itself reap the benefit.

"Roughly eight-in-ten U.S. adults say there is at least some discrimination against transgender people in our society, and a majority favor laws that would protect transgender individuals from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces," reads the Pew report.

You should see opportunity here for transgender people. I do.

"But" the Pew report goes on "60% say a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth, up from 56% in 2021 and 54% in 2017."

This is the cue for the woke scolds to come out with their horses and hounds for the blood sport of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist [TERF] hunting. It is with this rising 60% they see their opportunities to malign and castigate anyone who will not conform.

What's gained by this tactic, and what is lost, is the question for the organizer? But, as I noted, these are not organizers.

One prominent social media influencer with a large social media following declared JK Rowling "the world's biggest transphobe." Tens of thousands of "likes" were generated. I found an article in The Harvard Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Law Review titled "America’s War on Black Trans Women."

This is beyond hysterical nonsense, and not outliers as far as framing for these advocates. This is how full of themselves some people have become.

The violence inflicted on trans women, and Black trans women in particular, has so many known associative factors - as journalist Katie Herzog has amply recorded. Sex work/prostitution being the main cofactor. Drug abuse and the drug trade being another. But "America's War on Prostitutes" doesn't have the right ring for GLAAD.

Besides this social media influencer's account, I also follow Rowling on social media. Rowling's opinions are literally indistinguishable from the majority in that Pew Poll. But you'd never know that if you only read the Tweets and screeds of her TERF-hunting detractors.

As a union organizer myself, their haranguing approach has always baffled me. I wouldn't last a minute interacting with my coworkers like this on a campaign. We would have won nothing as a union local against our management were I to delineate 60% of my coworkers as trash and called them such because they weren't, say, communists, like me.

The Pew poll goes on with some encouraging news that shouldn't be dismissed. "Nearly half of adults (47%) say it’s extremely or very important that if a person who transitions to a gender that’s different from their sex assigned at birth changes their name, others refer to them by their new name."

But this is of no matter to the woke scolds if that same 47% say something like former Olympiad Caitlyn Jenner is a man because she was born a male. Too bad: the cup is still half empty, so they're branded TERFs. That has become their red line and their "safe space."

Clearly, the goals and vision of these advocates are different than mine. The winning of broad civil rights for trans people is a minimum requirement. The significant goal is, for them, for us to all "see" and become enlightened to their "new facts" that females and males are interchangeable, that sex is a state of mind more than a determinant of birth.

That is a galaxy beyond our understanding. Some argue it harms women. Some would say it's just bullshit pseudoscience.

Regardless, I return to exploiting what seems like a huge leap forward in this area, where a majority of polled Americans support policies that protect trans people. Unlike other movements, like Black or First Nation civil rights, the significance of trans rights has risen and become acceptable to broad sectors of this largely white country - which might be a topic for another essay, exploring how the swelling "LGBTQIA+" "community" has outpaced significantly the Black struggle.

I am sorry this sentiment has not been effectively exploited as the advancement it is. Instead, it has become bonfires of vanities, egos, and posers. This as a loss. I see these performers as I view some current labor leaders, disconnected from their rank-and-file workers. A disconnect I would say bred from hatred of working-class people.

Those union workers are rebelling. The forces that want to gain tangible rights for trans people should too and purge these clowns. I would argue these so-called trans advocates, to crisscross my allusions, hate the working class too. That's their problem. They're dripping with contempt for working-class people. They're snobs. That's why they haven't an organizer cell in their bodies and are shrews.

As much as I hope they disappear in 2023, I am pessimistic. The people who tired of them are also tiring of the Democrats. Your average moderate Democrat conforms to the Pew poll, too, but gives oxygen to the clownery in a balancing act. In our two-party system, the GOP is the likely alternative, and in its current form, when it replaces the Democrat, it will not give oxygen to any aspect of this fight. The circus will be driven from town, but with it the civil rights most Americans will support will have less legislative support too. And that's a shame.

The Roots of US Anticommunism can be found in White Racism

The deep roots of anticommunism in the US are integral to white racism. They are not tangential, nor are they coincidental. They are connected in logical flow, one to another.

Anticommunism in the US has less to do with the 1917 Russian Revolution and much more to do with the so-called "freeing of the slaves" after the US Civil War and the white panic this unleashed.

Prof. Gerald Horne recently pointed out how the product of anti-slavery activism leading up to abolition set the groundwork for anticommunism in the US - an anticommunism, I would add, that is the most paranoid and ferocious in the Western world.

Freeing the slaves certainly had a more visceral, ferocious effect on US society than the Bolshevik Revolution.

That a whole white, Southern planter aristocracy lost its capital [African slaves] without compensation haunts the American political psyche to its core, and this haunting pervades both sides of the proverbial chamber, left and right. This is what a Black Bolshevik-style revolution threatens both white left and white right.

This is why the US police state, from the days after the Bolshevik Revolution to the murder of Fred Hampton to the framing of many Black radicals, was particularly paranoid about Black communists. Suspected and actual Black communists were targeted. And they weren't only targeted in the US. 

FOIA records show that after Cuban Communist Party Blas Roca opened the doors of the Cuban Party to Black Cubans in 1940, made anti-racism a priority, and elaborated its own version of the "Black Belt Theory," and Black Cubans joined in droves. The US responded with anxiety. It got more anxious and produced more files on any prominent Black Cuban whom they suspected of joining Cuba's communist party, renamed the Popular Socialist Party. Young Black Cuban singer, Celia Cruz, being an example of this target for her mere association, and possible membership.

In the US, the most popular Black man was also a communist. Paul Robeson. And he had to be the object of a well-orchestrated, prolonged takedown by the state.

But this is also why Black voices - militants and otherwise - have always been corralled by the gatekeepers of the left. "Don't be so angry." "Don't come off too strong." "Cool it." Or a variation of "that's not a working-class issue" or "that's not our issue." I've heard them all firsthand.

Worse, from time immemorial it is a matter of record we keep being asked to set aside our needs for some greater working-class ambition. I argue there is a larger, strategic motive behind this.

The view of the Black man and Black woman in the US is a national view, regardless of political leanings. We were raised with it. It's in our public institutions. It is the white left that does not understand the implications of this on themselves.

So, we have a credible explanation now as to why our white leftist friends, and their formations, groups, marginal political parties continue to fail the Black community - and thereby fail the mission of neither bettering the Black condition in this white settler-colonial state, nor producing a socialist society.

Our white left's fear of a new slave revolt, even if that slave revolt is necessary to bring us the liberation of a socialist society to build, remains a deterrent over a century after the 13th amendment.

Like the US police agencies, these white leftists have an institutional paranoia of Black radicalism. They've acculturated just enough where their propaganda shows the Black faces, they know we must be included in the list of marginalized, oppressed groups, and they will celebrate the voices of Black radicals - who are dead. They must be dead.

This savvy can no longer be allowed to give these people a pass.

Malcolm is quoted, put on memes, and brandished conspicuously today by the white left, but in his life, the white communists lambasted him as "an adventurer." He was far from promoted; he was ridiculed. A Black communist like Harry Haywood, who joined the Communists when his Black Marxist formation, African Blood Brotherhood, merged with them. As soon as the white communists dropped Black interests - this barely lasted a decade - many of those Black ABB communists quit. Haywood stayed in and was eventually expelled for lack of conformity.

These are provocative thoughts, and they are meant to be. As the working class further degrades under capitalism's neoliberal phase leading to fascism, the hubris and kinship ties of many white leftists needs confrontation. They need to reflect. I have as much hope they will as I have in a Democrat changing his/her spots.

But they must change, and its formations must change. I repeat that socialism will only come to the US when it is Black, even though the implied revolution that this demands is as scary to any white leftists as it was to their Southern Confederate kin. This is a problem. But this is the rite of passage communists and socialists will have to undergo if we are to have any hope for the broader working class.

For communism - or socialism, if you will - to take hold and have any success in the broad US society, it must reach the Black population first. Anything short of this is sham socialism and more liberalism.

But for socialism - or communism if you will - to succeed in the Black population a shift equally radical as abolition will have to occur in this country, and this makes even white leftists uneasy.

And this shift will never occur. It is not intended to occur. Neither the left nor right, for specific historical reasons, want this shift to occur, and this fact should make us question the quality of allies we have among the Black radical left.

Prof. Horne's illumination definitely helped open my eyes to a phenomenon I have, for very personal and very political reasons, been wrestling with for over a year. But also, the new flourish of attacks on Black intellectual bodies - and the way these attacks are played out, in the frenzy of an old lynch mob they perform. In this climate, even white leftists who know otherwise how to say the right things and stand on the right stages, join the mob in shutting down Black voices in ways you would never see used against white racists in this country.

The takeaway is white racists aren't a threat to them; Black people who dare to think outside the box are.

Are white leftists a hopeless cause? Well, they cannot be, and I do not believe they have to be. For one, they outnumber the Black as well as the indigenous as well as the Chicano. We need solidarity to begin the urgent steps to stopping, reversing, and building a socialist society on the ashes of this capitalist one.

But there are also ample examples of real race traitors who endured the enmity of their white leftist brethren. John Brown is the easy example of this.

So, as we head towards a juncture where our establishment promises more suffering, not less, in order to "save" the economy, where millions are anticipated to be thrown out of work, joining the already filled pipelines to housing insecurity, homelessness, prison, where it becomes clearer by the hour that this economy worth saving can only be saved when it serves fewer and fewer lucky lottery winners - we need socialism, so white people need to be slapped wake. 

A brief note on British democracy

A brief note on British democracy on the day Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigns but doesn't leave.

From 1935-1945, Britain had a "National" government consisting of a coalition. No elections were held in Britain for those 10 years. The king chose the PM and with the PM, they both chose the cabinet. According to biographers, the king chose the PM based on his class and chose the aristocrat Churchill over the working-class alternative.

By the early 1960's, sentiment had shifted. When a Tory PM resigned with a Tory majority, it was up to the queen, as it had been before with her father and his father and his mother and so forth and so on, to select the "top man" for the job. The British Tories weren't electing leaders in those days. She had two leading Tory members to ask to form a new government, and, like her father, she chose the aristocrat - Lord Home, who was incompetent and lasted ONE YEAR, exposing the queen to a flurry of criticism.

So, when PM and Labour leader Tony Blair announced he would resign, and to avoid any appearance of the queen's involvement and earlier backlash, Blair, still PM with a majority, coordinated a hat trick with his party and the palace. He formerly stepped down only as leader of the Labour Party. His successor, Gordon Brown, was then elected as leader of the Labour Party, at which time Blair tendered his resignation to the queen as PM. Then she called for Gordon Brown, the leader of the party. 

Otherwise, it would have appeared that she herself had filled the office.

The last monarch to bring a government down for political reasons was William IV, after he refused to endorse the democratizing Reform Bill of 1832. The last monarch to bring down a government at all was his successor, Victoria, because she refused the incoming PM his demand that her personal staff be mixed and not all of his opposing party.

Both maneuvers would have succeeded a generation earlier, but both failed even in the 1800's. William had to recall the fallen government and sign a bill that weakened his powers and the powers of the aristocracy. Victoria, too, had to recall the fallen government and change the composition of her staff.

To my knowledge, no monarch since has dared do this. Popular sentiment, whatever you think of it, scares these people.

Unlike all of his successors, Boris Johnson's resignation this morning made absolutely no reference to the queen. This was always a formality, just as upon taking office, a PM would say "I have just come from seeing the queen, and she has asked me to form a government .... blah blah blah." Equally, upon resigning of a loss of a Parliamentary majority after an election, a defeated PM would say, "I have gone to see the queen to offer my resignation ... blah blah blah."

Boris said none of this.

What's happening here may not be at all on the scale of an October Revolution or a march from the Sierra Maestra on January 1959, and it may be overlooked. But it is the force of democracy, and our work has yielded this - going back to those radicals after Charles was executed and Republic England unleashed democratic demands, continuing with the Shay's Rebellion, the emanations of the women's movements, and the first and enduring abolitionists: those Africans who refused to submit.

The supernatural powers of the aristocracies of the world are collapsing. I know this is a strange lesson to draw from this morning's resignation, but as one guy said, "Them's the breaks.

Like they say, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Don't forget the long view of things. 

The First Shots in the Next Civil War?

June 24, 2022, at 4:30AM HST [10:30AM EDT], the rightwing of this settler-colonial experiment called the United States made a seismic win for its side comparable only to the seismic shift it gained on March 6, 1857. 

On that earlier date, the US Supreme Court's chief justice, the proslavery Roger Taney, issued the court's ruling that not only failed Dred Scott but all Black people. Tanney's ghost has never left this land, and it has reincarnated itself in the bodies of some of these justices - most particularly and ironically, that of Clarence Thomas.

Thomas strides ahead of his companion on the court, Alito, in his debasement of any progress and evolution in this country. Just like Roger Taney's wife, Thomas' is active in the furthest reaches of the fascist movement. Anne Key Taney, sister of Francis Scott Key, was the daughter of slaveowners and a slaveowner in her own right.

But this decision to reverse two generations of precedence and hard-won civil rights for women is not a stand-alone event, as bad as it truly is.

As some justices on the high court loosely encourage, they have the rights of lesbians, gays, and trans people on their radars next.

The left must really keep its eye on this ball and be cognizant of what exactly is happening here.

This isn't a fight for the lives of babies. These fascists starve and kill babies as sacrifices to capitalism.

This isn't a fight against lesbians, gays, and trans people. There are and always have been those people among the fascists as easily as they've been among the left.

What this is as critical a cultural fight between two visions of civilization as any fight in other epochs, and old one civilization and a new, emerging one.

The right wing of this country has loathed not only every step of progress made since the overturning of Dred Scott with the 13th amendment, but also every piece of progressive legislation enacted since the Franklin Roosevelt administration. They hate the laws, and they despise the movements that organized to bring about these laws.

The right wing in this country wants those laws reversed, which goes without saying; but it has been equally intent on gutting these movements. If you doubt the extremist lengths the right wing will go to in its battle for its civilization, you need only ask a Communist. If not a Communist, ask a Black or white militant.

Communists, and Black and white militants faced spying, framing, false imprisonment, assassination, and deportation, among other things. These acts were done by local, state, and federal authorities - state-sanctioned mob violence.

The left, in my opinion, will never peacefully gain ground in this battle without deep democratic reforms in this country. And what might I mean by that?

I mean how gerrymandering has allowed the most extreme rightwing candidates to hold office. 

I mean the hold corporate money has on both parties. 

I mean the monopoly of power both parties hold as well.

I mean how huge swathes of the center part of this country have been de-populated to greater and greater extents yet their powers in the US Senate are not diminished one iota.

Where have we seen the consequences of such cronyism before in history?

Mass movements in Britain coalesced to produce the Great Reform Act of 1832. The king at the time, William IV, was the last British monarch we know of to bring a government down because he refused to pass this bill authored by said government. That government resigned, but the mass movements had grown too strong, and in order for the king to get any laws passed, he had to recall the former government and assent to the reform bill. 

The Reform Act did several things, but one thing in particular should be of interest to us and this matter of US senators representing states with virtually no one in them.

Since Henry VIII's reign, British monarchs could "stack" Parliament with representatives who had no constituencies but who were favorable to the king and the British Establishment. An empty hill. A swamp. An abandoned farm. These were among the sites "represented" by men in Parliament. The masses had grown sick of this cronyism. 

The Reform Act of 1832 abolished this practice and set standards for representatives of Parliament - called "ministers of Parliament, or MPs." The British Establishment began to lose its grip. In less that 100 years, a newly rejuvenated lower House took aim at the House of Lords and weakened its powers too.

These US senators from virtually emptied states are just like the cronies placed on empty hills to control Parliament. And they have guided, aided, and abetted the construction of a reactionary judiciary.

Of course, back in the US, keen students of history know what Taney wrought, and what radical abolitionist John Brown wrought too. Theirs were the first shots in the unfolding US Civil War. Let's be mindful there is worse to come. 

Let us also be mindful that part of the antislavery forces - the Republican Party - ultimately turned on its civil rights project and abandoned the freed population.

We in the US need such a mass movement that can confront and sustain itself, or we will never - or never easily - gain the ground in this critical fight, which we are presently losing. 

P.S. And the Democratic Party will not save us.

Lucy and the Communists

Recently, Turner Classic Movies embarked on a podcast series delving into Hollywood history. The inaugural launch of the series, which can be heard on iTunes or watched on YouTube began with the life of actress/comedian Lucille Ball. This was soon followed by Aaron Sorkin's treatment, "Being the Ricardos." The TCM multi-part series on Ball begins with her birthplace of Jamestown, NY, through to her early successful television programs, and her relationship with husband and business partner, Desi Arnaz.

"Being the Ricardos" takes artistic license in condensing into one week a pivotal moment in Lucy's life when she confronts her philandering husband and is exposed as having registered to vote as a member of the Communist Party USA.

Part seven of the TCM podcast is titled “Red Scare.” It explores this controversial, and infinitely interesting, chapter in the comedian’s life. Infinitely interesting because showing how these otherwise one-dimensional public figures live complex, personal and political lives makes those lives richer and more believable - and more relatable.

Controversial because Hollywood in general and Ball in particular had every motivation, given the extent of the Red Scare, to put this chapter behind them and move on for the sake of their careers, profit, and salvaging the film industry.

In James Baldwin's last book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, is about the child murders in Atlanta in the 80's. Baldwin's thoughts return again and again to an indictment that this particular mobilization around these deaths was about saving commerce in Atlanta.

Commerce, not Christianity, is this nation's religion.

Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, the TCM podcast contributes to this white washing in the name of commerce. Not surprisingly, so does Sorkin.

According to sworn testimonies before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, from Ball, her mother, and her brother, they had all registered to vote in California as Communist Party USA members in 1936.

Lucy's registration is about the only fact TCM almost gets correct. The podcast does not include Ball’s mother or her brother, and neither does Sorkin.

Though impossible to tell whether intentional or not, much of the podcast, despite the sworn testimony in HUAC transcripts, obscures the known facts of Ball’s alleged connections with the Party, and it seems to become another PR revision.

This we know from the testimony:

* Lucille Ball not only registered as a member of the Communist Party USA [CPUSA], but also so did her brother, Fred Ball, and mother Désirée E. Ball (all were subpoenaed by HUAC)

* Her grandfather, Fred Hunt, is described in the podcast as a "socialist" who held CPUSA meetings, which seems to leave in question whether the man was a Party member or a sympathizer. Hunt was in fact a CPUSA member and organizer in NY state [before a series of strokes]. He conducted those weekly meetings. 

*The Party meetings referenced in the podcast were in Lucille Ball's Los Angeles home. 

* Ball was named to the Party’s California state central committee, a fact omitted by the podcast and the film.

* Ball signed an affidavit at the time she registered to vote to sponsor a fellow CPUSA member to run for the 57th Assembly District of California, also omitted by the podcast and the film.

On Friday, September 4, 1953, Lucille Désirée Ball presented herself for questioning to HUAC in Hollywood. Between 1947 and into the 1950's, HUAC roamed the country and as far away as the Hawaii Territory [not yet a state] to ferret out Communists. 

This September testimony was actually her second time testifying, the first behind closed doors, a year earlier, and which testimony is still classified. 

As the podcast suggests, Ball thought her initial closed-door testimony settled the matter. It did not.

Part of the transcript, titled “Investigation of Communist Activities in the Los Angeles Area,” reads:

William A. Wheeler: "Would you go into detail and explain the background, the reason you voted or registered to vote as a Communist, or as a person who intended to affiliate with the Communist Party?"

Lucille Ball: "It was our grandfather, Fred Hunt. He just wanted us to, as we just did something to please him. I didn't intend to vote that way. As I recall I didn't.

"My grandfather started years ago - he was a Socialist as long as I can remember. He was the only father we ever knew, my grandfather. My father died when I was tiny, before my brother was born. He was my brother's only father.

"All through his life he had been a socialist, as far back as Eugene V. Debs, and he was in sympathy with the workingman as long as I have known, and he took the Daily Worker.”

Ball denies throughout the testimony ever being a member of the CPUSA or a communist, and that “I thought things were fine just the way they were.”

Yet, the same year she registered to vote as a CPUSA member, she, her grandfather, and a third person, Emile Freed, are appointed to the Communist Party’s California central committee. 

The HUAC investigator, Wheeler, reads from an alleged Party announcement of this appointment and passes it to Ball for a response.

Asked how she thinks her name was listed, Ball replied “Possibly my grandfather, Fred Hunt.”

After she confirms her signature on the nominating affidavit, the HUAC investigator asks for an explanation. Once again, “… Doing what I could to appease grandpa … “

At other points, in this same vein, she suggests to HUAC being duped into making a radio announcement on behalf of the Okies - the migrant, destitute farmers described in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; or being mentioned in a Daily Worker article. Again and again, she pivots to her grandfather Fred Hunt. She asks the investigator at one point if a certain allegation was during “Being nice to Daddy week”?

Whatever the actual depth of her Party membership, the performance reads through the transcript. She’s playing them, and, it turns out, they may be getting willingly played. Records suggest after Ball's first, behind-closed doors testimony, the panel was satisfied, save one politician who alerted a radio journalist.

It was the radio journalist's subsequent broadcast that triggered this more public testimony.

We learn some other interesting biographical notes from her testimony, like that she attended but never graduated high school. And that her father died when she was very young and her brother not yet born, making the grandfather the only father they really knew [and she says as much in testimony].

We learn that her grandfather’s advocacy for a living wage extended to maids Ball employed in the house. She recounts to HUAC: 

“We were never able to keep a maid, although we paid the highest prices we could afford, or they were getting at the time. My grandfather would walk out into the kitchen and see a maid and would say ‘Well, what is your name? How much are you getting?’

‘Oh, $20 or $25 a week,’ or whatever they were being paid.

“And he would say ‘That is not a working wage. What are you doing here?’

“And after a few times like that, you know, they would leave.”

But none of these things are brought up in the TCM podcast or the Sorkin film, and this is disappointing. Since the presumption is left against the Communist Party as a bad thing. 

The producers seem to do their level best to continue the performance Ball gave HUAC in 1953.

Instead of being ashamed of people's membership in the CPUSA and keeping up this revisionist nonsense, like "my grandfather made me do it," let's remember why tens of thousands like Lucille Ball joined the Party, why many more joined in the 30's at the height of the labor movement, why her grandfather was a Party organizer. As Ball herself explains her grandfather’s involvement: the Communist Party USA was the party of working people. 

The CPUSA was also the party for Black people, an anti-lynching party, and anti-Jim Crow party. It was the Party that staffed the CIO and its unions. That's why so many joined, and we should say this explicitly.

Unlike many other artists, teachers, government workers, and laborers who were so accused and subpoenaed, Ball’s Red Scare storm lasts but about two weeks and blows over. In my opinion, this is for two reasons. She attributes her actions to her grandfather, which I doubt a male actor or worker would get away with [Ball’s brother, Fred, faced a life of employment problems after his subpoena].

The second reason is that Desilu, the film company Ball and Arnaz founded and ran, had become a huge moneymaker for an industry that by the early 50’s was facing an identity crisis as the age of the major film studios was waning rapidly and the studio system in disarray. Desilu was infusing life [read: cash profits] into a dying corpse and taking down Lucille Ball would destroy their cash cow.

That’s why, as the podcast reveals, tobacco giant, Philip Morris, the main sponsor of the "I Love Lucy" show, stood by Ball and its sponsorship of her TV series.

The pivots and deflections aside, Ball’s HUAC testimony is in parts a touching acknowledgment of her grandfather's work. Even in the Sorkin film, she is shown as someone who wants to maintain loyalty to the "only Daddy we knew" and who raised her.

She says at one point to the panel:

"[The politics] never meant much to us, because he was so radical on the subject that he pressed his point a little too much, actually, probably, during our childhood, because he finally got over our heads, and we didn't do anything but consider it a nuisance, but as a dad, and he got into his 70's, and it became so vital to him that the world must be right 24 hours a day, all over it, and he was trying his damnedest to do the best he could for everybody and especially the workingman; that is, for the garbageman, the maid in the kitchen, the studio worker, the factory worker. He never lost a chance doing what he considered bettering their positions."

Rather than continuing to portray these "Hollywood legends" as naive dupes, how about we flip the script and consider they were the advanced ones, and elite society the albatross around our necks? We will not progress if we keep telling these Red Scare stories like this.

Click here to read a full version of the HUAC testimony and here, which is followed by Ball's mother, then brother.

Lucy and Desi hold an informal press conference
at their LA Valley ranch

[Note: this article originally appeared in People's World on December 7, 2021, but for reasons unknown to me it was taken down. It can be read here via web archive]

This is from the Army Times, a periodical I have never read, but the narrative on Afghanistan could have come from practically any US news organ, left or right, bemoaning the crisis of this "withdrawal" and the affected Afghanis left at the mercy of the Taliban.

This is strange, tiresome jibberish.

You will never read, except perhaps in People's World that Afghanistan did in fact have a stable government in 1978. That government was led by a party comprised of men and women, the People's Democratic Party. That government developed social and economic programs. That government sought to unify, not exploit as the UK and US have done in the region, the various ethnic groups that make up Afghanistan. That government was bringing women and girls into all areas of social and political life.

But this government was socialist, and that was intolerable.

The women and girls we're supposed to be worried about right now; the civil society we're supposed to worry about right now; the "tribal" tensions we're supposed to worry about right now - all this and much more were brought to Afghanistan by the same force that created it: the United States of America.

The US's response to this progressive, stable government was to create the counter-revolutionary force known as the Mujahedeen, aka, the Taliban. Osama bin-Laden was one of their recruits. The US had to reach deep into the sewer to pull out such a force as would be against all that the People's Democratic Party were achieving. The US and the West have always preferred destabilization and chaos to peace and socialism. That is why it always sides with the most retrograde, reactionary, fascist elements.

So all this public fretting about the fire that our arsonist set is laborious. The self-discipline and deference required by an educated sect of US intellectuals - reporters, think-tank researchers, academics - to handwring about the fate of this West Asian society and never a word about 1978 and what the US did is extraordinary.

But Mother was a communist

 

Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn and Dr. Thomas N. Hepburn

A biographer of actress Katharine Hepburn, William Mann, who wrote Kate: The Woman who was Hepburn, [Henry Holt, 2006] writes that the actress's mother, Mrs. Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn, almost joined the Communist Party USA and did not.

Mann's contribution, the most recent in a line of biographies which begin with Garson Kanin's "expose," Charles Higham's approved biography, Barbara Leaming's, and Scott Berg's posthumous work, all make much reference to the actress' mother's hard-left politics. A 1940 Life Magazine article even attributed "Bolshevik" sympathies to her.

"Dad was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist," Katharine Hepburn said about her parents in 1986 to a magazine reporter, "but Mother was a communist." 

She told Phil Donahue "I've been very lucky. I was brought up with people who had a lot of nerve and who fought for a better life for male and female in the world. Especially for people who didn't have a lot of money. And they weren't afraid to die." 

No evidence exists that the actress's mother, who co-founded Planned Parenthood with Margaret Sanger, was a Communist Party USA member, but abundant evidence exists she was close to the Party and its work.

Most biographical sketches end with Hepburn's involvement in the suffrage movement. Scant others will mention her role in founding Planned Parenthood.

Connecticut Women's Suffrage Association, 1911. (Mrs. Hepburn kneeling far left)

Indeed, this work itself would fill a volume - which no one has written.

Reminiscent of her daughter's film role in 1947's "Adam's Rib," the elder Hepburn led a crusade to have convicted wife pardoned of an imposed death penalty. The woman, Mrs. Bessie Wakefield was found guilty of conspiring to murder her husband. She denied it. The sentence was death by hanging. [1]

Hepburn, president of the Connecticut Women's Suffrage Association at the time, argued, “we protest against the extreme penalty being applied to a member of a class which has been denied the protection of representation.”

Bridgeport Evening Farmer. Nov 21, 1913

Hepburn resigned her position as president of the CWSA in 1917 over an ideological split in the suffrage movement over WWI and the importance of the suffrage fight.[2] [3] The National Women's Suffrage Association had condemned the National Women's Party for organizing protests against Pres. Woodrow Wilson and the war. The NWSA sought to de-prioritize the suffrage movement during the war effort. Hepburn and other radical women of the CWSA disagreed.

Upon Hepburn's resignation, she joined Alice Paul's NWP.

With the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920, Hepburn deepened her work with trade-unions in general and Sanger in particular.

Perhaps reminiscent of the CWSA rupture, two decades later, Hepburn hinted at taking a similar stance within the Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO], a radical union forged from a break from the American Federation of Labor. Hepburn worked with the CIO intimately, and its WWII decision - along with the CPUSA's - to suspend all labor actions for the duration of the war got a similar reaction from Hepburn. 

Perhaps, we do not know, if this is the reason she considered and never joined the Communist Party USA.

Regardless, due to those close associations with CPUSA comrades and front groups, several Congressional House Committees on Un-American Activities (HUAC) throughout the late 30's, 40’s and 50’s thought she had joined.

Several citations from the House investigations from California to Washington, DC, name Houghton Hepburn - using the older, patriarchal form: “Mrs. Thomas Norval Hepburn” - as a member or affiliated with several Communist Party front groups.

The front groups were a feature of the popular front strategy the Party employed from the middle 1930's. These enabled people sympathetic to the Party's mission to participate with actual Party members in the struggle to achieve these goals. Some examples of these front groups are the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Civil Rights Congress, and Sojourners for Truth & Justice, among many others.

One of the earliest HUAC citations, from 1939, is questioning the motive and composition of the CIO's National Citizens Political Action Committee, formed expressly "for the election of Franklin D Roosevelt and a Progressive Congress." The CIO was a union federation formed from a break with the more conservative American Federation of Labor. It was not a Communist union but many of its organizers were open Communist Party members, and many of its unions were led by Communists. 

Among "the overwhelming preponderance of fellow travelers" cited by the Committee was Houghton Hepburn. Fellow traveler is defined as "a person who is not a member of a particular group or political party (especially the Communist Party), but who sympathizes with the group's aims and policies." But remember that "overwhelming preponderance" phrasing ...

In May 1944, in a HUAC hearing, Houghton Hepburn was named as one of "11 prominent American leaders" who had signed a joint statement against a witch hunt of "29 men and women" on behalf of the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism. Once again, the HUAC report reads "the overwhelming preponderance of fellow travelers on the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism is convincing proof of Communist infiltration."

Margaret Sanger [left] and Katharine Houghton Hepburn [right] at Congressional Hearings

In July 1953, progressive Garfield Bromley Oxnam, a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal church and IWW supporter, was called before the HUAC to explain his associations with communists. Houghton Hepburn was named because of her sponsorship of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship.

She was further cited or named in House Un-American Activities sessions by witnesses as late as 1957 when the House was investigating "Communist Political Subversion" the document reads. 

As Houghton Hepburn died in 1951, the HUAC citations after this are interesting. According to several biographies, her surviving husband, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, burned all her papers upon her death, including his correspondence with playwright and socialist, George Bernard Shaw. *

These associations can't answer the question definitively was she or was she not a CPUSA member. We're left to speculate. We're also left to speculate whether she was ever called to testify to HUAC [her daughter was allegedly subpoenaed and defied it]. Many who were merely supporters of the Party were swept up in the witch hunts and blacklist.

What's definitive is Houghton Hepburn's longtime support for these causes and her willingness to work time and time again with the Communist Party.

Why the burning of all her papers, an act which the actress-daughter has lamented? Houghton Hepburn died suddenly of a heart attack on March 17, 1951. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been arrested in July of the previous year. Their espionage trial began March 6, 1951, more than a week before her death. The Smith Act trials against Communist Party members began in 1949 and went on until the late 50's [the leadership of the Hawaii Party were rounded up in 1951]. 

The witch hunts had the desired side effect of creating fear of in any way being associated with the Communist Party USA.

____________________________

* a note on sources. It would be unforgivable to cast the elder Hepburn's politics based on HUAC documents alone. I only do so given the corroborating testimony of her family, including her actress daughter and granddaughter, and the destruction of Hepburn's own papers. In the early Life Magazine profile, Hepburn admits to being a Bolshevik sympathizer. Her great-granddaughter has recently gifted a trove of papers by another of Hepburn's daughters, who had been a CIO organizer. Hopefully, these documents will shed more light.

[1] Connecticut Suffragists and the Case of Bessie Wakefield - Connecticut Digital Newspaper Project (ctdigitalnewspaperproject.org)

[2] Connecticut Women and World War I - Connecticut Digital Newspaper Project (ctdigitalnewspaperproject.org)

[3] When Attitudes toward World War Divided the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Movement - Connecticut Digital Newspaper Project (ctdigitalnewspaperproject.org)

What's Going on in Florida is What's Going on in the US

I watch a lot of YouTube content like this because while reviving dead theorists over and over can be interesting, applying radical analysis to what's going on RIGHT NOW is better. What does this "out of control" housing market in Florida mean for the working-class renter? Nothing good. I saw this phenomenon in the two years I lived in Tampa, 2016-2018, where my rent was hiked three times [third time I got out]; while my income remained stagnant. And there's no rent control law in Florida, so these increases can look like down payments. As the property manager over my studio apartment told me: "we can adjust the rent to the market rate of the neighborhood." The neighborhood was Seminole Heights, and just after I moved there in 2016 the blocks across my street were re-zoned for commercial spaces. Of course the first space to open in a remodeled home was a sushi restaurant. Then came a boutique bicycle shop. You get the picture.

The public housing complex about two miles from me was slated for destruction to build condos. This is happening all over the country and should be a national scandal. I talked to two of the dispossessed in the waiting room of my doctor's office one day, and they said they had been promised Section 8 vouchers, but they already knew - if you do not - how Section 8 has failed the working class and the poor. It is underfunded, by both Democratic and Republican administrations. And many landlords simply do not accept the program. The waiting lists are also outrageous.

But this rapid influx should be studied carefully. Where are these new Floridians coming from? What are their motivations to leave where they came from, and what political conclusions can be drawn from this? And the other question might be the only silver lining in this - because there will be no silver lining for workers and the poor: will this demographic shift also shift the political posture of Florida from a Red state?

And speaking of demographics. Included in how I research places I move to, I turn to the ever-reliable Grindr. That's right. The gay "dating" app. I want to see the mix of people who live in a given place. So Eureka, CA, is lily-fucking white. No go. When I moved to Tampa, there was a nice mix of Black, white, and Latin. That was 2016. I look at Grindr now for Tampa, and I might count one Black face on the feed. It's mostly white. Some Latin. Where did the Black men go?

And that's an persistent question we should be asking too. Remember in the late 80's when then vice president Dan Quayle came to visit San Francisco and as a precaution in this paranoid country, any Black man with an outstanding warrant or on parole was rounded up in the then-Black neighborhood of Bayview/Hunter's Point. Quayle had the nerve to sit on camera holding a Black child and asked "where are the men?" as an indictment of the Black family. (Footnote: like everyplace else, Bayview/Hunter's Point today is no longer a Black neighborhood, and the Black people have disappeared too].

So people disappearing from our cities is something else that should be a national scandal.

Why San Francisco's Burton Academic High School doesn't make the List and wasn't supposed to

I scoured the list for the high school where I taught and was later promoted to be a guidance counselor. Philip & Sala Burton Academic High School was not on the list. And only two San Francisco schools are listed, one is Lowell High School which only takes students based on high test scores. The second is a charter school. A note about San Francisco Unified School District. In the early 80's a Consent Decree resulting from an NAACP lawsuit against the district resulted in the creation of Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School, Thurgood Marshall Academic High School, and Philip & Sala Burton. SFUSD had responded to the 1970's US Supreme Court mandate to integrate with reluctance and was failing Black and Brown students. When integration did happen, many white parents took their children out of school and created what must be the most private schools per square mile in the whole country. Remember, we are talking about San Francisco! 

The consent-decree high schools, like Burton and Marshall, were unique in that their graduation requirements were linked to the requirements to qualify for the University of California. This meant ensuring faculty, classes, and programs. The schools were placed in the southeast part of San Francisco, near the the city's highest concentration of Black residents.

The founding principal, Mrs. Fredna B Howell, a Black woman originally from Alabama, is the woman who kept an open social studies position unfilled because she insisted on finding a Black man. Mrs. Howell had that kind of clout, and the consent decree was her tool. When she promoted me to the counseling department, only one of us she chose had credentials.

Under the Clinton Justice Department, the consent decree was deemed "satisfied," and it was withdrawn. With that, the obligation of the SFUSD to fund the school's founding mission and Mrs. Howell's clout came to an end. The school dipped into disarray. Imagine emptying half of the fuel tank on a plane in mid flight. As intended, this was the pretext for the anti-public school/anti-teachers union mob to force the district into accepting more charter schools, thus diverting resources for schools like Burton and Marshall, creating more intended disarray. And as I was by then ending my teacher education program and not credentialed, Mrs. Howell could not put who she wanted in positions she wanted. My days were ended.

The reign was over. For Mrs. Howell. For me. But especially for the Black kids who had been availed of programs sorely needed. And this is the story of public education in the United States, especially where it pertains to Black and Brown and poor students.

CDE. CHRIS HANI MEMORIAL ESSAY: Why the US needs a communist party ... and why it does not have one

I compose these thoughts barely a day after the US National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] declared a resounding defeat for the Retail, Warehouse, Department Store Union [RWDSU] election in Bessemer, Alabama, and a victory for Amazon, whose CEO is one of the wealthiest people on the planet. While the union has vowed to challenge illegal acts taken by Amazon and seek overturning the election, I cannot help connecting this defeat to similar ones in Mississippi with Nissan, and in Tennessee with Volkswagen. I do not doubt those corporations resorted to all kinds of maneuvers to turn the vote in their favor, but this does not mean the labor movement in general or the unions in particular should not do some deep reflection of where it gained and where is fell short, pick up its arsenal of weapons, sharpen ones too long in disuse, and continue the fight for the working class and its ascendancy to power.

Reflect on, say, some of the failures of that most valiant labor union, the Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO], and its push to organize the Deep South in the 1940's. The monumental campaign was dubbed "Operation Dixie." Had the CIO's organizing campaign to unionize sharecroppers and dock workers and farm labor, it would have made the US look very different today, brought an end to Jim Crow at least 20 years early, and possibly altered the militarist direction of US foreign policy.

 And given the high saturation of Black workers in the South - as today - it would have changed the face of Black America.

But Operation Dixie failed, and it nearly bankrupted the CIO. Without a doubt, the viciousness with which segregationist white elites responded to the CIO was unequal. To the white elites, this particular union had two particular sins: the power of a militant union steeped in Communist Party organizers and the policy of integration, which was integral to the CPUSA's stance since its beginning. 

The CIO, unlike other antique-minded unions who were either indifferent to white racism or afraid of alienating their own white rank and file, organized workers across racial lines, and they did this in the North, in the West, and in what was then the Territory of Hawaii. So the CIO's entrance into the Bible Belt was perceived as a double threat to white Southerners, and it had to be stopped at all costs.

As we know, the Operation Dixie did fail.

But among the factors that contributed to the CIO defeat came from blind spots of the organizers themselves who failed to appreciate the traumatizing effect Jim Crow politics had on many Black workers. 

In the case of New Orleans, LA, at the time, Black workers had been afforded the exclusive jobs at the ports of that Gulf of Mexico city. These were grueling jobs with low pay, but to a Black man in Jim Crow Dixie, it was a job nonetheless. "The new CIO affiliate promised democratic unionism, the replacement of the notoriously corrupt 'shape-up' with 'the hiring hall method of dispatching men without discrimination and the 'equalization of earnings.'" [1] Added to the resistance put up by white segregationists, these Black workers themselves put up resistance to the prospect of a CIO victory. Such a victory, they reasoned, might undercut their own employment under an integrated workforce and leave many of them with the double jeopardy of being Black and working class poor.

"ILWU organizers in the Gulf had to test their egalitarian creed in a new and alien environment where Black workers predominated numerically on the docks but the ideology of white supremacy and the reality of racial separation remained pervasive." [ibid]

What could the CIO then, or the UAW and RWDSU today, have done differently to address the special concerns of Black, Southern workers?

I ask the question in that way because I take all these unions in good faith. Their respective records prove their antiracist credentials. But is this enough? Is it enough to be antiracist?

I'll return to this.

***

The challenges confronting us from the right remain enormous, pervasive, and escalating.

Arguably the US being a settler-colonial nation-state the political tendency would always be toward the right leaning as the white settlers were paranoid of indigenous and African rebellion against their peculiar spread of civilization. This paranoia is writ large in the nation-state's founding documents, which have over the years been expanded, but never corrected.

This has been the perfect fertile ground in which a right-wing orthodoxy would prevail in this country.

The right-leaning tendency of the US project only worsened after such events like the Haitian Revolution, John Brown's insurrection, Wounded Knee, the Bolshevik Revolution, etc., not to diminish in any way the more local insurrections staged by what scholar John Ogbu calls the "involuntary immigrants" - Africans and the indigenous populations - upon whom settler-colonialism landed with a heavy thud. [2]

While Ogbu's focus was mostly on academic outcomes and cultural disengagement, his delineation of the broader Black diaspora and so-called "Hispanic"/"Latino" in native-born US Blacks and Chicanos on the one hand from continental Africans and other South Americans on the other should be useful tools for labor and community organizers to understanding how settler-colonialism impacts us in very different ways.

Settler-colonialism has always had to, as the cop will claim, "fearing for its life."

This has meant that the right-leaning tendency of this nation-state has always shifted the leftwing off its center, where a certain consensus is made and certain facts agreed to - like for example, the discourse that the country was founded on imperfect freedom and evolving towards perfecting such. Nonsense just like that, which we hear from left and from right.

Or the framing of the colonialist revolution from Britain's George III as in any way a "workers rebellion."

I would argue many of the incessant splits, irreconcilable differences, distortions, divorces, purges, and expulsions from within the left arise from this tension of being on the left and having to deal with this right-leaning tendency. How to negotiate an energy that is there, like a poltergeist? You cannot ignore it. What do you do with it?

But the right-leaning character of this country, coming as it does from the roots and from its origins means this energy can always reshape the left if cadres are not diligent and vigilant against it.

Any left-leaning political organization or party that aspires to be on the left and be relevant to the left can easily become so entangled within the right wing of this country - given that the right wing is virtually the air we breath and the ground we stand on.

This caution includes unions like UAW and RWDSU, and all the others. Because what befell the CIO is the same force that bolstered the opposing American Federation of Labor and later the combined AFL-CIO. Some called it Anticommunism, but it is much simpler than that. It's as simple as John Jay's admonishment in the Federalist Papers that "the people who own the country should run the country."

This means curbing any worker power over the means of production or civic life. This was equated with communism.

And to ensure the AFL [by 1955, the merged AFL-CIO] would remain staunchly anticommunist, the CIA and other federal agencies later, massaged the direction of the union in particular and the labor movement in general with funding. [3] Probably informants and plants too, I have no doubt.

This solidified the role of the US's largest labor federation on the side of the right-leaning tendency. This means a lot of what it pronounces from podium and pulpit is performative. This means even its internal structures must be shielded from rank-and-file members. 

The leadership of the West Virginia teachers union did not want a strike. Strikes are illegal in West Virginia, but the teachers forced the issue and forced their leadership on the train, because the train was about to leave without them.

Such displays are unfortunately very rare.

The concession to right-leaning thought has made unruly rebels and delinquents out of those who want to exercise the muscle of working class power, shuttered the activity of unions locals into Rotary Club meetings, and diverted the energies of leadership towards finding tactical ways to keep itself away from the mass of workers: and this should make the leadership of these organizations apostates.

When the so-called grassroots groups become supporters or provide justification for bourgeois candidates like Obama, or Clinton, or Biden, and do so out of the expediency that the US electoral system was created by paranoid white settlers wanting to create a nation-state owned and run by its class, these grassroots play a dangerous game - that is to say, by design US elections are less free, less open, and not democratic - these grassroots groups go through an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" moment where they are cocooned into bourgeois mouthpieces. If there are criticisms, they are vagaries; because they cannot give the game away and say a plague on both their parties. Such a declaration would mean the grassroots organizations would actually have to declare radical alternatives and do some radical organizing of the masses who need radical solutions.

For the record, I do not know, but would never be surprised to learn, that the reason these leftist parties and grassroots organizations are so facile to their purpose is the same reason the AFL-CIO is not. I do not know if CIA, USAID, or National Endowment for Democracy funds are massaging their backs as well, but it would not be a surprise.

***

By talking all around and not on the topic of the headline, I hoped to lay out the field why communist parties traditionally emerged to to seize the neglected left space, mobilize the working class, and reach across racial and ethnic lines to create a force to be reckoned with. 

This is the minimum any communist party should be doing, and if it is not it is not a communist party. Armed struggle or no armed struggle; going into exile; working underground seem to be to depend on the conditions of the time and place. But even a group of French intellectuals having coffee at a Parisian café should be bringing the same sharp analyses of what is going on as the South African miner. There cannot be a rhetorical accommodation to bourgeois power in France while those workers are being frontally assaulted by that same state power.

This tone deafness does not suit a communist party.

Just so, US Vice -President Kamala Harris' political background should never, ever warrant her being praised in any capacity by a comrade in a partisan newspaper. Let's review the low lights of this woman's career: she was maneuvered into a local District Attorney race to unseat a comrade. Upon winning that seat, she went after protesters and poor women. She dragged her feet to keep Black men incarcerated who should not have been.

She has not a root, not a finger, not a toe in any of the movements that aspire our social and political goals. The comrade she unseated in that San Francisco race not only himself has deep roots, but so did his mother and father.

Further, while the working class has sustained body blow after body blow at least since the administration of Jimmy Carter, in modern times, Black, Brown, and Indigenous workers have fallen exponentially farther. 

Recall by Obama's second administration it was widely reported the "disappearance" of 1.5 million Black male workers.

Given the right-leaning consensus of a settler-colonial state, it's to be expected that the state intelligentsia and state media apparatus will gloss over, obfuscate, misdirect, or reframe the meaning of these disappearances to uphold the medieval concept of "the king can do no wrong." Further, the traumatizing and politicizing impact this might have on the broader Black community or workers will never even be mentioned by these state parrots.

It is an apostasy for a communist party, hiding behind some quotes of Marx, to raise their fists ostensibly for the working class, to leave us Black workers to live on more "trickle-down" theories that what will benefit the broader working class [which has not benefitted by the way] will lift up Black workers.

This tone deafness is why those Black New Orleans workers opposed the CIO and Operation Dixie.

***

In place of taking up the radical left baton, not only on behalf of Black workers, but on behalf of the many children sunk into poverty, the rising numbers of homeless caused by state sectors accommodation to the housing industry, on behalf not just on just wages but the equally important social investment - in place of all these things, too many on the left who attained leadership positions sound more like endowed researchers in anthropology speaking on parts of the animal kingdom rather than organizers mobilizing workers into a force to be reckoned with.

And why? Simply, it must be reasoned at this point these leaders do not want to mobilize this force to threaten the state power they are so tethered to at the waist. 

One has to wonder how many are leftover informants and state-police plants.

This is why I say their antiracism is not enough, and their cries for "justice" pathetic. 

The best hope we have at this juncture, which has been long coming - I do not mean to suggest this crisis is new and of the 21st century - is a vanguard movement of the working class, for the working class, lead by the working class. And it must be socialist in its core and communist in its aspiration. If it cannot appreciate the predicament of women workers, or Black and Brown workers; if it cannot appreciate the colonial status of such captured peoples as Hawaiians, Chamorros, or Puerto Ricans and how this status is integral to the what the US is and integral to the dire situation of those colonial peoples, then this vanguard will amount to nothing.

This is why the United States sorely needs a communist party, and while it may have one in name, it has none in substance. That is why the historical reports featured in its party newspaper can't shine a candle on what it's doing today. The contrast between past and present respectively fills you with awe but then deflates and demoralizes.

Cde. Chris Hani, in whose name and spirit I pen these thoughts, was head of the South African Communist Party until his assassination in 1993. He had previously been overwhelmingly elected to the Executive Committee of the African National Congress, and before that had been chief of staff of the anti-apartheid armed struggle.

Like many of his comrades, he felt betrayed and alarmed when the armed struggle was call off without proper consultation of the alliance. He argued it was too soon to lay down the weapons.

The best hope of the left - that vanguard party needing to be reborn - has similarly laid down its weapons too soon and ceded too much ground to the rightward backwardness of settler-colonialism. In doing so it has rendered itself meaningless to the working class broadly, but also to the sectors hardest hit and in most need of radical mass struggle. This is not an easy, but rather a painful, wrenching announcement. Because our lives and our well being are at stake.

Footnotes

[1] Bruce Nelson, "Class and Race in the Crescent City: The ILWU from San Francisco to New Orleans," THE CIO'S LEFT-LED UNIONS, Steve Rosswurm, editor [Rutgers]

[2] John U Ogbu and Herbert Simmons, "Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural-Ecological Theory of School Performance with Some Implications for Education," [Univ. of California]

[3] Kim Scipes, "The AFL-CIO, NED, Solidarity Center & US Labor Imperialism" and "The AFL-CIO's Secret War against Developing Country Workers:  Solidarity or Sabotage," laborvideo interview conducted by Steve Zeltzer