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

Abdeslam

"Probably" and "more than likely" will go completely unnoticed by closeted and avowed white racists. If these qualifiers were meant to give balance to the story of this Arab hunt by the imperial powers of Europe, Reuters, the source of this breaking news, makes no other attempt in its reportage of the capture or kidnapping of "Salah Abdeslam, the 26-year-old French suspect".

"French"? That is novel. While the Le Pen family can sell their racism as a political party, an Abdeslam would be spied on, undermined, and locked up. Ask not for whom the bells of liberty, equality, fraternity ring: they ring not for you!

Reuters:

"The Belgian federal prosecutor's office also said an Algerian killed during that earlier operation was probably one of the people French and Belgian investigators were seeking in relation to the Islamic State attacks in Paris on Nov. 13.

"Public broadcaster RTBF said it had information that Abdeslam, whose elder brother blew himself up in Paris, was 'more than likely' one of two men who police have said evaded capture at the scene ... "

The police have never been beyond harassing, detaining, or arresting the extended family members of actual militants, especially our African and First Nation militants. But to their own credit, some extended family members have willingly joined the revolutionary struggle - and I do not mean Bernie Sanders' usage of the word.

Wherever Abdeslam falls, it is the European system and its police forces who remain the guilty ones. The 26-year old is either another Arab with a French passport who was barred from assimilating into the country of his birth, but always seen only as a foreigner coming from the land of his ancestors; because France is a racist country. It solidified its white racism in its 18th century revolution and hardened it in its allegiance to Nazi fascism and the weakest, most symbolic Resistance movements in wartime Europe.

Or Abdelslam is a modern-day freedom fighter trying to correct the 100-year nightmare imposed on Western Asia when Europe began to invent one failed state after another [ending with Israel], and arming the worst sort of people to maintain these failed states. These worst sorts are not only the presidents and sheiks of these Western Asian Bantustans, but they are the best friends of the fascists states of Western Europe and the US.

The peoples of this region have endured a 100-years war and the sabotage of their development - economic and cultural. And the insurgents know it; that is why they escalate their tactics, which Reuters will splash on their news feeds, while the mercenaries from the alien worlds of Europe are hidden from broadcasts, escalating their tactics tenfold with arsenals and royal navies.

The dumb American is left apoplectic about brown people and Allah, believing the world is uncivilized when it is he himself.

It is well passed time to call it as it is. I know this is alien to the aliens - the whites and their apologists. I am supposed to condemn the Paris attacks as if Tangiers never happened. I am supposed to be full of angst and ire about a white thief in North Korea, and to beat my chest that North Korea is the "worst place on earth." I am supposed, in other words, to be an apologist for white civilizatiion You see, these white adventurers who imposed fake sheiks and shahs on Western Asia are no different to me than that white boy who went to North Korea and felt just as entitled to steal something that had great meaning to those people. Silly that the apologists are saying it was just this, or just that. Silly and telling. The aliens do not respect anyone's culture or beliefs. These things and those things are just trash to them waiting to be recycled and refurbished by the white world. These are the guilty people, and even if the justice for them is random - while injustice towards the wretched of the earth is perpetual - I celebrate it.

Fifteen years for the theft, and give him 15 more for the crocodile tear show he put on for the cameras.

Like my Moroccan friend, Chakib, used to say when a European tourist got robbed in Marrakesh: "we're just taking back a little of the lot stolen from us."

Another Direct Shot at Our Dying Unions as the Past is Brought Back

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I'm undone. I don't know who's deserving more of my unbridled wrath right now, the fake right wing, the fake left wing, or the inconsequential group of "organizers" who are forever placarded and parading and chanting bullshit to corral people to vote for the fake left wing.

Rebecca Friedrichs is a 30-year public school teacher in California (Orange County: where else?!) who hates unions. She leads a lawsuit of 10 California teachers who want the California Teachers Association to cease charging them for the services which yielded Friedrichs, etal, their work contracts, benefits, and retirement packages. The services were done by the CTA with the school districts.

By becoming a teacher in California, you can elect not to join the union. I was a member of United Educators of San Francisco. Had I elected not to join, I would have been charged a fee to essentially cover a portion of the costs for the benefits afforded me in the negotiated contract.

She is quoted as saying, “Americans of all political preferences would rise up against such tyranny if their rights were squelched by corporations, yet teachers unions have been legally trampling the free-speech rights of teachers throughout our nation for decades through forced dues used to fund their one-sided political agendas.” [Guardian UK, 1/9/2016]

Tyranny? I smell Ayn Rand! Friedrichs thinks she can negotiate her own contract, benefits, and retirement package. I hope it is not vicious to wish that some crusading investigative journalist looks in to her finances. A trust fund? A rich spouse? Maybe she's German NAZI princess.

Certainly as a school teacher she must know that unions are the main reason for the rise in women's wages, and their death has seen the decline in these wages over the last few generations. If she does not know the tyranny of industrial feudalism, wage slavery, child labor I wonder what she is teaching in these history classes ... ahh, but this IS Orange County.

Her case, Friedrichs vs the California Teachers Association has been catapulted to the US Supreme Court. The issue is: being made to pay this fee to an organization she does not belong to compromises her rights under the First Amendment.

Forty years ago, the high court ruled these fees legal and appropriate, but this was before the war on trades-unions had put public employee unions in its cross-hairs. This was before the court was staffed heavily with neocons and neoliberals. Pensions still had a few years life in them in the late 70's, now they are an extinct species.

Forty years ago was before the pandemic of right-to-work states had reached a fever pitch. With liberal Wisconsin gone now, and the Koch brothers in battled mode, anything is possible. We will all be right-to-work states soon.

I reserve particular ire right now for the crusading left, which keeps playing in to the hands of the Democratic Party. SEIU and its Campaign for $15. Black Lives Matters. Occupy. Et cetera. They mobilize people under leftist Democratic Party goals, then fall in line behind Democratic Party super-stars.

I should be tired of saying they need to fall in line behind the militant trades-unionists, anarchists, communists and start shutting machines down that they do not seize. This is not the 21st century we are headed for but the 19th century.

These fake leftists have given up so much by making their arguments about wages and not who owns the means of production, or why we should be exterminating management altogether.

Improving industrial feudalism is what Democrats do. It is not an improvement. Stop it.

When Margot Honecker was asked to assess the "revolution" that brought the Berlin Wall down and reunified Germany, she recounted what has happened to these capitalist economies and how they they've been worse, not better, for workers: "The past was brought back. No one can name that 'revolution'."

I cite Honecker because the attitude of the neoliberals is that these modifications and innovations, bail-outs and stimulus packages to our economies are seen somehow as groundbreaking things, when really they are things Charles Dickens reported as a journalist and put into his novels.

To call Friedrichs vs CTA a last straw is feeble when there have been 100 years of straws to choose from. The patient, to mix my metaphor, has been on life-support in ICU for a long, long time. Given the reaction of the business unions, I wonder if there is any brain function left.

I am all for pulling the plug. Let this corpse die, and take its riffraff, fake socialists with them, like Bernie Sanders and Kshama Sawant, not so workers can go off in this libertarian capitalist fantasy world where they can negotiate their own wages and benefits. No. But rather, so the whining from leaders of the business unions that the sky is falling will be silenced - the sky has already fallen, baby!!

If the machines cannot be taken, shut them down. If they cannot be shut down, burn them down. If workers cannot be allowed to own and run their business, burn those down too. If management won't be housebroken, lock them out. If there is a past to be brought back it is the militant past that reacted to the best and worst of industrial capitalism.

War by Royal Prerogative or by Any Means Necessary

Tulsi Gabbard is the member of Congress for my district here in Hawaii. She is a Democrat. But she has come out in the clearest terms against the policy of the president and her party for making Syrian president Bashir al-Assad leave office. She is clear that it is not only illegal because the Congress empowered to declare war has not done so, but she has cited the list of failed regime changes perpetrated by the US empire and how those acts have made things far worse in the Middle East region and not made the US safe at all.

This week, British prime minister, David Cameron, has secured the vote of Parliament to bomb Syria.

There's a lot of unfortunate symbolism here which hides the rot at the root of our failed democracies.

The US empire has fought many wars without Congress declaring them. A famous example would be the US war against Vietnam. A less famous one would be the US invasion of Grenada. There was no Congressional approval for regime change in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Argentina.

There was no Congressional approval for regime change and troops invasion of Haiti.

Some might argue that formal declarations of war are reserved for European powers against European powers, as when Congress declared war against NAZI Germany, the last time it made such a declaration. Any other so-called "police action" - their term, not mine, and it does reveal hegemonic posture - is just divvying up pies that naturally belong to the Western world

The UK is a different story altogether.

Cameron going to the floor of Parliament has only one precedent. Tony Blair did as much to invade Iraq - he lied about the evidence, but this is a different story. At that time, the members of Parliament approved the invasion. Blair has since said had he lost the vote he would have resigned. I still wonder why this man is not in a prison for the deaths he caused.

But I digress.

The British constitution, which is unwritten and based mostly on custom, does not give war powers to Parliament. Americans might wonder why it's not written, and I'll get back to that in a moment.

Two years ago, when Cameron's desire to invade Syria was defeated, the first question the Labour Party asked was: would the prime minister use the Royal Prerogative to invade anyway. Cameron said he would not.

If the British constitution does not give war powers to Parliament, who declares war? The answer is the monarch does.

The monarch declares war, concludes peace terms, signs treaties, recognizes other governments [or does not]. Ambassadors are not accredited to Great Britain, as they are to the United States. While there is a French ambassador to the US, there is, in legal terms, no French ambassador to Great Britain.

The French ambassador is accredited to the Court of St James, a royal palace, for receiving and dispatching ambassadors. Like the members of Parliament of the UK, the queen's ambassadors swear their oaths to the monarch and her family.

When Great Britain declared war on Germany, twice, sent troops to Egypt to attempt to reclaim the Suez Canal, invaded and fought with Argentine troops over the Falkland Islands, it was done in the monarch's hand with the advice of the prime minister.

In the British constitution, Parliament has nothing whatsoever to do with it, so their opinion is irrelevant. In the US, the Congressional opinion does matter, but this seems to make little difference.

In 1999, a member of Parliament introduced a bill which would have given authority to declare war on Iraq to Parliament. The Queen, reportedly on the advice of PM Tony Blair, barred debate of the bill in Parliament, and it was effectively killed.

The corrosion that has always been at the heart of our failed states, has only grown more so.

Right in front of our faces, our so-called civilizations have come to depend on constant warfare more than the sustained endorsement of the masses. War is like life-blood itself. The the masses is like acne, to be controlled or eradicated.

While it is fashionable to turn on each other in our communities or at the workplace, our political leadership has gotten out of hand. It makes me recall George Bernard Shaw's scandalous directive during WWI that the troops on both sides needed to turn their guns on their own generals, shoot them, and come home for Christmas.

Britain's establishment is committed to an unwritten constitution, based on convention and habit, because - I suspect - it wants to default to authoritarian rule, whether by a prime minister or a monarch. It does not ever want to codify powers to Parliament and the people. Incidentally, this is why House of Lords reform has become so contentious and at a dead-end: the last thing a British prime minister wants to do is create a second, democratically elected chamber to compete with its powers.

Just as egregious, the US establishment is committed to its written constitution just so long as it is never enforced.

From our workplaces to state and local governments, the United States and its partner the United Kingdom are committed to keeping the people in line - be it with coercion or circuses. And countries, like ours, which hate democracy this much cannot reasonably be believed to import it abroad.

White Refugees and White Settlement: Strategies for Success

I'm clear that the Syrian refugee crisis we are talking about, like the other refugee crises we aren't talking about, is purely man-made. There are man-made refugee crises in Africa, where Western and Chinese capital seek to exploit resources and get the peoples of that land driven off the lands of their ancestors.

Why aren't these peoples being welcomed into Europe? Why isn't German chancellor Angela Merkel speaking on the behalf of Africa?

In the case of Syria, a rapidly escalating bombing campaign by the United States, then Russia, and now escalated by France, are driving the Syrian population from their homes. (Interestingly, coalitions are discussed, NATO considered, but once again the United Nations is sidelined for obvious reasons that the bombing is a war crime)

Africans in the North American diaspora would be justified to be wary of this influx of Syrians into the US, not on religious hysterical grounds or concerns about "terrorism." For good or bad, Islam is as known in the African diaspora as Christianity: unlike Europe, African piety for monotheism or traditional pantheism doesn't extend to Crusades and holocausts. And as far as terrorism, Africans in the diaspora are more likely to be terrorized by domestic white police officers than ISIL. The national police state is our terror.

Our wariness comes from a cursory look at immigration policy in the United States, a white-settler nation-state that basically ceased the acceptance of masses Africans with the end of the slave trade in the mid-1800's until the late 1960's.

Before the Civil War, and especially after, the United States, like much of Latin America and the Caribbean, opened its arms solely to European immigration, some of which, like the Irish, were virtually refugees given the British government's pogrom against them. The goal was to whiten the population.

These newer waves of white immigrants served their purpose. They were always placed quickly in positions above the First Nation and African populations, who arguably have been here for many more generations.

The post-US Civil War white immigrant learned very quickly where their place was in a white settlement. They learned quickly what the white man's Negro fantasy meant and to keep clear of that side of town ... unless you were trying to exploit them with a liquor store or a nail salon.

With few, notable exceptions, these white immigrants did not stand in solidarity with the conditions of First Nations and Africans. They aspired to be Kennedys, Carnegies, Rockefellers.

In the early 1960's, then-US attorney general Robert Kennedy had the audacity to tell writers James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry that he could foresee a Negro US president in fifty years.

Baldwin left this meeting incredulous that a white man who's family had just arrived on these stolen lands, been permitted to exploit the wealth of it, could lecture people who had been here since the early 1600's.

But this is always the pattern. The African and First Nation are kept on the bottom, while the newcomers afforded an opportunity to flourish on our backs.

The Statue of Liberty was never meant for Africans.

Our white friends and their right-wing brothers like to fall back on some version of a narrative that speaks to the newcomer's work ethic. They never realize it but this is as offensive as what Kennedy said. White people rarely speak to basics like how I as an African am perceived applying for a job I never get, let alone a business loan I never qualify for.

They won't talk about the structural racism that lifts some boats and sinks others.

I don't expect anything different with the Syrian refugee. I would not put it passed the racist institutions of this nation that they would welcome these non-African immigrants, whom by the way the US Census Bureau designates as "white" for the same reasons they did for the hundred years after the US Civil War. To keep, goes the motto, the Negro in his place.

This is why I have been clear from the start. End the causes of the refugee crises in all the global South. End the wars. The bombings. The drone-assassinations. The occupations and puppet generals-turned-presidents.That will address the refugee problem.

The United States as a white-settler nation-state with white-settler institutions is a tougher conundrum that history shows requires a more rigorous, militant response.

Innocent Victims

The first telegrams of condolence for the victims and the wounded in Paris should come from the French government itself, not ISIS. France is one of the biggest arms dealers to the roguest elements in Western Asia and Africa. In fact, as Ghana's first president Kwame Nkrumah illustrates, this market in death is not only to keep pro-Western, anti-labor generals in power, or, to arm "rebels" who will depose pro-nationalist, anti-Western regimes, but it literally is also the main fund for the post-war European welfare state. Nkrumah writes that while the European left had been staunchly anti-imperialist before the end of WWII, they traded that position for the founding of the welfare state.

After WWII, the European Left abandoned its anti-imperialism for generous economic supports at home. These social programs were founded on the backs of neocolonial policies.

I might argue that just as France has some of the most generous social benefits, this is inextricably connected to its promiscuous market in weapons to the global South.

Just so, to the extent we are supposed to think of these victims in France as "innocent" we can only do so in as much as they do not participate in the trade. If I sell a loaded gun to a madman, and he shoots me, am I innocent? If my family are arms dealers and we sell a group of madmen guns, and they slaughter my whole family, are we innocent?

It's a provocative question, but one that must be asked if we are serious about locating the causes of "terrorism".

The question of innocence got Prof Ward Churchill hounded out and fired from his Univ of Colorado tenured post. After 9/11, Churchill, whose subject is mostly and richly First Nations struggles and the crimes committed against them, characterized the workers in the Towers as "Eichmanns." For those who don't recognize that name, Adolf Eichmann was a German Nazi bureaucrat in charge of administering the gas chambers. Put on trial at Nuremberg, his defense was "I was just following orders."

We have mostly forgotten that the court ruled that this is not a defense, and indicted him and executed him.

Pulling the former empires and their continued imperial thirsts out of the former colonies is a tall order to those who want their gas cheap, wardrobes affordable and filling every drawer, and all the creature comforts we are used to in the West. Our lifestyles are addictions that indict masses of Black and Brown peoples to a purgatory of dictatorships, torture chambers, sweat shops, and disappearances.

Are we innocent? No. Whether we confront the fact or not, just as those post-WWII European anti-imperialists turncoated their common cause with the workers in the colonies, so have we.

We have in the US built up a different kind of welfare state than Europe's, but it is just as vile at its foundations. We have sold our African brothers and sisters down the river to Hell. We have looked away while our government greenlighted Latin American generals to round up labor activists and drop their living bodies from helicopters into the ocean.

The telegrams of condolence should come first from our own governments, whom we need to send to Nuremberg for trial and execution.