National liberation: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, February 2024

Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! The NLF is gonna win!

The chant rang out from certain quarters of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement during marches and rallies. It was voiced by anti-imperialist components of the movement, a minority element comparable to the pacifist portion that believed in nonviolence and called themselves “the Peace Movement.” Most of the rest of us were neither anti-imperialists nor pacifists, and while some of us considered ourselves revolutionaries few of us were sycophantic cheerleaders for Third World national liberation movements.

Last column I discussed how the GI organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a stellar example of revolutionary defeatism during the Long 60s. The concept of revolutionary defeatism arose with the first World War, the near global conflict between the Allied and Central European powers and their colonial empires. European Social Democratic Parties—all avowedly Marxist and internationalist, some like the Social Democratic Party of Germany extremely popular, and none in power prior to 1914—split when the war began. The majority of these parties went pro-war, and defended their respective countries involvement in the war effort. Hence the term revolutionary defensism and the epithet social patriotism.

The social democratic minority—Luxemburg, Lenin, Liebknecht, Kautsky, Jaurès, et al—called themselves genuine internationalists, defended radical class struggle, and espoused revolutionary defeatism. The ruling classes of nations at war send their working classes to fight and die in battle against each other, so workers can never win when fighting capitalist wars. Workers need to turn these nationalistic conflicts into civil war and then international proletarian revolution to overthrow their national bourgeoisies. The imperialist ruling classes are the only true enemy and workers of the world need to turn their guns against them.

The VVAW attempted to do just that and caused the near collapse of the US Military in the process. But there are limitations to considering the GI revolt during the Vietnam War as unalloyed revolutionary defeatism. First, the concept had its ascendency during and soon after the first World War which experienced dozens of troop mutinies and a half dozen mostly-failed social revolutions. Revolutionary defeatism was a real option, as was the potential for international socialist revolution. In the Long 60s however, and despite our wishful thinking that revolution was imminent in America, the VVAW and the larger 60s social movements didn’t have any real opportunity for overthrowing the US government or Western imperialism.

Second, while the VVAW arguably practiced a form of revolutionary defeatism, the Vietnamese side of the war was not practicing revolutionary defeatism but rather revolutionary defensism. Right off, I’ll get blowback contending that the Vietnamese fight was not revolutionary defensism but a genuine “socialist struggle for national liberation.” To understand why the distinction is not so clear-cut, start with the preamble of Marxism’s retreat into nationalism.

When Social Democracy split into a “social patriotic” majority and a newly-minted Communist minority, the latter’s internationalism was short-lived. After the Russian Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were keen advocates of anti-imperialism and self-determination for all peoples, demanding freedom from colonial oppression for the Third World. Marxist-Leninists insisted they stood for international socialism, yet they also insisted that national liberation movements were not about chauvinism but about revolutionary democracy. Stalin took power in 1924 and declared his doctrine of “socialism in one country.” Mao then insisted that “Chinese Communists must therefore combine patriotism with internationalism.” These are the cornerstones of Third World national liberation struggles, including the Vietnamese one.

Imperialism and colonialism were also defining characteristics of Third World national liberation struggles, starting with the small elite of the colonized class that emerged during the colonial period known as the national bourgeoisie. This Third World national bourgeoisie was Western educated and organized with the consent of and by the imperial interests of the colonial powers. (Regarding Vietnam, Hồ Chí Minh traveled extensively throughout the West, gaining his political education and commitment to socialism while living in France. Võ Nguyên Giáp studied at the French Indochinese University at Hanoi.) The native bourgeoisie in the Third World possessed limited capital and so cooperated in the exploitation of their nations with their colonial overlords. Their commitment to nationalism was an article of blind faith, and their national liberation struggles were an uncritical replica of European modernity, born of the successful bourgeois revolutions starting in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Their commitment to socialism was frequently born of Leninist vanguard party politics and Stalinist “socialism in one country” ideology. This national bourgeoisie, once in power, administered imperialism, decolonization, capital accumulation and the restoration of ruling class power. The national bourgeoisie claimed to be revolutionary and benefit “the people,” but in fact they underdeveloped certain sectors of their national economy while developing the whole economy to assist imperialist exploitation, and thus made the people dependent on global capitalism through hegemonic practices like national debt. (Vietnamese sweatshops mercilessly exploited native/child labor and indebted the country to the World Bank as Vietnam ostensibly became a mixed “socialist-oriented market economy.”) Ultimately, this native bourgeoisie prevented their people from achieving their full potential and maximizing their wealth by separating the working classes from direct ownership and control of the means of production, specifically the land. This is classic substitutionism; of the vanguard party substituting in power for the working classes, and of the central committee or the chairman substituting for the vanguard party. This national bourgeoisie was relentless against workers and people holding resources coveted by that bourgeoisie, insisting once in power that they were presiding over the end of colonialism, the birth of socialism, and the achievement of true national liberation. Rather than helping the people and the workers however, they only helped themselves and often the imperialists of a global capitalism.

National liberation struggles in the Third World attempted to mimic Europe in virtually every way, and not just its sometimes virulent nationalism. The contradictions between the French Revolution’s “Rights of Man” with its supposed humanism, freedom and autonomy and the increased exploitation, slavery and even mass murder of European history are paralleled in the Third World as it decolonized. (Vietnamese “re-education camps,” forced labor and economic relocations, brutal treatment of national minorities like the Hmong, Montagnards and Khmer Krom, expulsion of boat people, atrocities and massacres committed during Vietnam’s invasion and occupation of Cambodia, all while professing the ideals of “international socialism.”) Third World national liberation struggles attempted to “overcome” racism by instigating their own, often more relentless racism within the racist framework inherited from Europe. Much as European racism was initiated and fueled by Spanish, Portuguese, English and other colonialist powers through “primitive accumulation” against native peoples in the Americas and the rest of the world, Third World national liberation recapitulated both Europe’s “primitive accumulation” and racism. The national/racial/ethnic identities constructed by these struggles were in turn joined to the alienation, fragmentation, and consumerism fostered first by monopoly capitalism and then late-stage capitalism.

Third World national liberation movements, once in power, had numerous other problems beginning with failing to stem the flow of capital out of their country despite efforts at decolonization and anti-imperialism after political liberation. This is partly due to false decolonization and anti-imperialism. According to Franz Fanon, “if the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new state, in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists.” But it’s also due to rampant corruption, and not just state capture where private interests significantly influence a state’s decision-making processes to their own advantage. Widespread systemic political corruption, the corruption of politicians, bureaucrats and civil servants as well as the commodification of everything, including the integrity and conscience of the leadership, accounted for the flight of capital. (Vietnam’s rates of political/party corruption, bribery, etc stand second only to India, with foreign direct investment lagging at barely $28.5 billion, far below its ASEAN neighbors, due to mistrust.)

Third World national liberation struggles had hazy definitions of “democracy” that separated political from economic democracy, adulterated participatory democracy with Leninist faux democratic centralism, and postured that one-party dictatorships were actually European-style social democracies. Similarly, imprecise applications of “socialism” and “Marxism” were often insufficient, usually cultural formations disguised as economic, and denying the importance of economic democracy, workers’ self-management and community control against state ownership and bureaucratic control. The national bourgeoisie pretended to usher in democracy and socialism while actually incorporating itself within and entrenching the global capitalist system of imperialism. Thus national liberation movements seamlessly coalesced with new, anti-colonial forms of imperialism. Third World national liberation struggles, their politics and manifestations, became reified. György Lukács in History and Class Consciousness called reification “the structural process whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society.” Since all is capitalism these days—from the inner workings of individual consciousness to external corporatist economic structures, from “socialist” China and Vietnam to Campist so-called anti-imperialist regimes—we live in a totally reified world. The distinction between revolutionary defeatism versus revolutionary defensism I initially expressed by comparing the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to Vietnam’s national liberation struggle remains. Sanctifying national liberation is fraught at best, lethal at worst.

– – – – –

Half of this column was stolen from Idylls, Imitation, Ideology and Imperialism: A Fanonian Critique of National Liberation by Seshadari Jesse Moodley,  Picasso said mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal. I’m not a great writer, but I do know when someone is. This University of Cape Town MA thesis is brilliant. (Download at https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/33870)

 

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“Thank you for your service”: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, January 2024

Thank you for your service.

catchphrase of the day

The world was in upheaval in 1968. I identified with the anti-Vietnam War movement at the time and even considered myself a pacifist for a minute. I helped with the Quaker-run draft counseling held at the Ventura Unitarian Church and joined the War Resisters League. And I attended local anti-war demonstrations every chance I got, affiliating with a community group called Ventura County Committee for Peace. That was when I was a junior in high school. In September, 1969, my senior year teachers and administrators herded the males of our school class in small groups into a classroom where we were confronted by a man dressed in full Army uniform. After introducing himself, the recruiter got right to the point.

“You owe six years of your life to your country in military service. Two years active duty, two years ready reserve, two years inactive call-up, or some combination thereof. You will need to register for Selective Service within thirty days of your 18th birthday to fulfill this obligation.”

The Army recruiter was matter-of-fact, and I was freaking out. How dare he claim I owed any of my life to the government!? What about becoming a Conscientious Objector to all war? When’s the next bus to Canada?

I was almost a year away from having to register for Selective Service and acquiring my student deferment (1-S) in 1970. But I was already compiling evidence for my intended Conscientious Objector claim (1-O), having no desire to end up in the rice paddies of Indochina. Terrified as I was by that possibility, the process of putting together a file to defend my case for refusing to comply with serving in the military was both an act of resistance and intoxicating. One stipulation of the rules governing conscription allowed me to put anything in my file that I considered as influencing me in my anti-war convictions. So once registered I could walk into my draft board and insist that they put in the latest Jimmy Hendrix album or part of a highway sign graffitied with peace symbols or a rotting fish carcass that revealed the plight of the world and my commitment to peace and my CO status.

Thus my fear of being drafted was counterbalanced by my excitement over “sticking it to the Man” through my anti-war activism. But things quickly got complicated once Nixon took office. America’s war in Indochina had sparked the broadest, most persistent anti-war movement in US history. The movement rapidly spreading in terms of consciousness, activism and resistance to other parts of society, and which Nixon attempted to quell at all costs. In addition to an extensive law and order campaign that unleashed the FBI, state and local police against The Movement, he promised to relieve the class and racial inequities built into conscription by first introducing a lottery draft system (12-1-1969) and then by moving to an all-volunteer military (AVM, 1973). Nixon’s other measures—withdrawing US troops, Vietnamization of the ground war, expanding and intensifying the air war, negotiating the Paris Peace Accords—didn’t amount to crap. By 1970, and my birthday’s high lottery number, I gave up my CO claim because it was just too much trouble. By 1973 the anti-Vietnam War protest movement had been decimated. By May 1, 1975 the Vietnamese people had won their war against the greatest military power the world had ever known.

I grew my hair long, started smoking dope, talked big about The Revolution and continued participation in anti-war activities. But I was also a middle-class happy-go-lucky college student, first at Ventura Community College and then at UC Santa Cruz. That’s where I met Walter Goldfrank, a junior professor who taught Sociology, specifically World Systems Theory. When I told him my rather petty travails of getting out of military service he told me that being drafted into the US Army was the best thing that ever happened to him. Wally was an upper middle class Jewish boy from Brooklyn who graduated from Harvard and whose first real encounter with people of different races, in particular black and brown folks, was in the military. He considered the Army a profoundly democratic and democratizing experience. Now, at the time I attended UCSC, Wally was a full-on Maoist, an admirer of Red China, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the People’s Liberation Army. So, there was some affinity between his politics and his evaluation of his military service even as he became a full professor, department chair and eventually professor emeritus.

What we in the Long 60s called The Movement had plenty of elements dedicated to toppling the United States of America. There were New Left groups committed to armed struggle and overthrowing the government—Weather Underground, Black Panther Party, May 19th Communist Organization, etc. And there were countercultural groups ardent about dropping out and moving back to the land—Drop City, the Diggers Kaliflower Commune, the Farm, etc. But Wally and I, and most of us in The Movement, were “Summer soldiers and Sunshine patriots” in the words of Tom Paine. We considered ourselves revolutionaries but in truth we’d essentially made peace with “The System.”

I became a member of the Winter Soldier Organization of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1975. VVAW/WSO was the vanguard of the GI/Veterans Movement during the Vietnam War, a practical example of revolutionary defeatism. After the Tet Offensive the US was losing the war although few citizens realized it and almost none admitted it. There were nearly a half million American troops in-country by 1967. Whereas Black Americans constituted just 12% of the population, they occupied 31% of the ground combat positions in Vietnam and suffered 24% of the casualties. Martin Luther King called Vietnam a white man’s war but a Black man’s fight. It was also a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight, in that high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam while the children of the educated got college deferments.

American soldiers were considered a horror and an abomination who killed babies, perpetrated genocide, and promoted imperialism. Drug use among the troops—from marijuana to heroin—was rampant, as was racial unrest. What followed was the near-collapse of the US Military with murder, riot, beatings, arson and mass refusal to deploy or follow orders. Troop casualties rose annually, reaching nearly 17,000 in 1968, at which time Nixon’s multilayered strategy went into effect. A growing number of US military bases in this country and abroad were host to anti-war GI coffee houses off-base where propaganda, support and organizing was available. And veterans were returning to the burgeoning mass Anti-Vietnam War Movement in the streets spearheading creative protests like Operation Dewey Canyon III in 1971 where Vietnam Veterans Against the War threw back their medals, awards, ribbons and commendations onto the US Capitol building.

VVAW pioneered some of the more imaginative tactics known to The Movement. It advanced veterans rights and health advocacy, fighting to recognize the dangers of Agent Orange and the disabilities of PTSD. After 1973, it pursued a more and more explicit anti-imperialist line, and opened its membership to civilians with the Winter Soldier Organization auxiliary. But by the time I started volunteering for VVAW/WSO’s Vets Coop in Santa Cruz in the beginning of 1975, participation in The Movement and membership in VVAW/WSO had declined precipitously. The Maoist Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU) started infiltrating the organization, seizing control of the National Office through which it removed members, expelled chapters, disbanded the WSO and placed the organization under ideological conformity. VVAW was integrated into the RU which—with the Revolutionary Student Brigade, Unemployed Workers Organizing Committee, National United Workers Organization and Wei Min She—reconstituted itself as the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) under the pro-Gang of Four leadership of Bob Avakian.

Vietnam veterans were a minority of American veterans in 1975 yet their problems—homelessness, indigence, drug addiction, suicide, physical disabilities, mental illness—became the default face of all veterans. What’s more they were accorded no sympathy because they were supposed to have served their country out of patriotism, nationalism and loyalty, yet had rebelled and mutinied to the point of crippling the US military.

Military mutinies among conscripts have been common throughout history. The first World War was nearly scuttled by waves of revolutionary defeatism—mutinies and rebellions of enlisted and drafted soldiers and sailors on both sides of the conflict. Leaving aside dubious notions of “honor” military conscripts are duty-bound to serve, forced in fact by law. They’re not told “thank you for your service.” That phrase came into vogue after the advent of the All-Volunteer Military as sport stadium’s full of lazy entitled civilian spectators gave standing ovations to thank volunteer troops for serving in the military. I’d rather honor the Vietnam-era soldiers, sailors, marines and pilots—draftees all—whose greater service to humanity nearly broke the American empire with acts of revolutionary defeatism.

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Denialism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, November 2023

“Trump did nothing wrong.”

It’s a sentiment that’s become a chant, an incantation from Republicans—from their base to on high—that summarily dismisses Trump’s two impeachments and ninety-one criminal charges. And no one says it louder and stronger than Trump who proclaims in the third person that “Trump Won” at every opportunity.

“Trump did nothing wrong” is part of a long line of right-wing apologetics that started with the anti-semitic canard “Hitler was right” shortly after the second World War which evolved into the 4chan meme “Hitler did nothing wrong” by 2011. Proud Boy Tusitala “Tiny” Toese wore a “Pinochet did nothing wrong” t-shirt to a Portland, Oregon, far-right rally in 2018. Proud Boys at the December 12, 2020 “Stop the Steal” rally wore “Enrique Tarrio did nothing wrong” t-shirts to counter the revelation that Tarrio worked repeatedly as an FBI informant after his fraud arrest in 2012. And Proud Boy Tarrio himself wore a “Tarrio did nothing wrong” t-shirt after his indictment for seditious conspiracy and his sentencing to 22 years in prison for orchestrating the failed plot to keep Donald Trump in power after the Republican lost the 2020 election.

My friend recently did a faux meme that made me laugh; a scruffy man wears a t-shirt captioned “Stalin did nothing wrong” from a sham company called “Tankie—Mind.” There’s been an uptick of declarations that “Stalin did nothing wrong” since 2014 as part of the Stalinist/anti-imperialist/anti-revisionist/campist/tankie idiocy that began after February, 1956. That’s when Nikita Khrushchev consolidated his power in the Politburo with his secret speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and its consequences for the Soviet Union. The changes he instigated in the USSR—his liberalizing domestic reforms and easing of Cold War tensions (the khrushchovskaya ottepel)—were opposed by increasing ranks of anti-revisionists, Mao being the “Stalin was right” OG. There were unrepentant Stalinists, then pro-Stalin Maoists and Hoxhaists, and now execrable Marcyists; all of whom continue to peddle their falsehoods on the Left that “Stalin did nothing wrong.”

Clearly, pro-Stalin polemicists have often been orthodox, even vulgar Leninists like Ludo Martens, Domenico Losurdo and Michael Parenti, and Soviet fellow travelers like Paul Robeson, Joseph E. Davies and Grover Furr. But there are a number of far right apologists like conspiratorial Synarchist Annie Lacroix-Riz, neo-Nazi Kerry Bolton and mystic Eurasianist Aleksander Dugin who admired Stalin for fascistic reasons. There was even an occasional all-purpose appeaser of bloody dictators like E. H. Carr who praised not just Stalin and Mao but Hitler as well. That “Stalin did nothing wrong” or “Mao did nothing wrong” is more and more conflated with “Hitler did nothing wrong.” In this time of growing red/brown crossover politics it is captured in the congruity of the tropes used to defend their respective historical dictatorships. The pattern of argumentation used by Stalin apologists versus Hitler apologists is virtually identical.

I’ve concluded this column with two appendices listing historical crimes of the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union respectively. To play the game of “they did nothing wrong” it’s not important whether the crimes were Fascist or Communist, nor what particular offense is singled out so much as the kneejerk defense that’s universally applied to them. The most infamous comeback is denialism, the claim that said crimes never happened. That for instance the Holocaust murder of six million Jews by the Nazis or the Holodomor starvation of five million Ukrainians by the Soviets never happened. There are concocted nuances to denialism; for instance that Hitler actually protected German Jews or that Stalin was desperately dealing with a countrywide famine caused entirely by climate. But the point of denialism is not to counter facts with facts, documents with documents, or experts with experts. Denialists make up facts to spec, construct documents to order, and recruit experts for hire. They outright lie, cherrypick or misrepresent evidence, and engage in false equivalencies, half truths or other disingenuous argumentation (by “moving the goalposts” and other debating tricks).

Closely related to denialism is trutherism, the idea that Hitler’s or Stalin’s crimes were deliberately faked or fabricated. Trutherism raises the claim more directly than denialism that someone or something is behind this falsification as an intentional hoax. And here’s where distinctions between Left and Right arise. For Stalin apologists it’s Nazis, Trotskyists, Khrushchevites, anarchists, Western liberals, the ruling bourgeoisie, the CIA and Zionists. For Hitler apologists it’s primarily the Jews and secondarily Marxists, Western race mixing liberals, the Freemasons, Illuminati, the New World Order, George Soros and our Lizard Overlords. The Stalin and Hitler trutherist apologists insist that their opponents engage in propaganda and subterfuge as part of dangerous conspiracies or as secret cabals bent on world domination. Without contradicting that their crimes never happened or that they were faked these apologists imply that the victims deserved what they got or brought their fate on themselves; for instance the Ukrainians for being class enemy kulaks and the Jews just for being Jews.[1]

An apologist ploy contends that even though Hitler and Stalin were ruthless dictators and while the crimes of their regimes were real enough they weren’t really in control of their governments or subordinates.  It has been argued that the NKVD acted alone in Stalin’s Soviet Union and that the Gestapo actually ran the Third Reich. To argue that Hitler and Stalin weren’t really responsible is revisionism lite. Regular revisionism contends that neither Stalin’s nor Hitler’s crimes were really all that bad, that the body counts of both regimes are exaggerated, that any evidence for genocide is hyperbole. Furthermore, the impact of each is minimized by comparing one to the other in a fallacy of totalitarian relativism and whataboutism. Stalin killed more people in the Holodomor than Hitler murdered in the Holocaust and visa versa.

An interesting footnote to revisionist Stalin apologetics is that it was championed by the arch anti-revisionist Mao Zedong. Mao argued that Stalin’s crimes were merely “mistakes” because he didn’t really understand contradictions and dialectics very well. Clever how the Great Helmsman managed to simultaneously minimize Stalin’s crimes while demoting his Marxist-Leninist credentials. That Mao’s bloody reign was historically less murderous than Stalin’s and that Mao’s legacy remains potent in China to this day attests to the shrewdness of those who promote “Mao did nothing wrong.”

I’m not talking here about the relative body counts of Nazism versus Stalinism. I’ve detailed that in past columns Piling up the corpses: “What’s Left?”, July 2015, MRR #386 and Left of the Left: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, July 2022. I’m also not averse to refuting apologists for genocide with history and fact. I have taken on Holocaust denialism in Holocaust and resistance: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”,  June 2023 for example. But neither Stalin apologists nor Hitler apologists are really interested in facts, truth, history or reality. They are delusional at best or lying sacks of night soil at worst and debating them has only limited value. What’s more, I consider the merits of free speech in the “public square” and “marketplace of ideas” in countering threats to individual and collective freedoms highly overrated. Apologists for murder and genocide are not quite the same as advocates for totalitarianism although they are siblings frequently working hand-in-glove. Yes, information, education and debate are necessary but by no means sufficient. Organizing and taking action are absolutely crucial. That intra-Left and red/brown alliances have made Left/Right political distinctions dubious at best. Formulating plans against apologists is also problematic. For instance, activists have long advocated deplatforming Nazis from social media. Whether deplatforming Stalinists would even be possible for Leftists to conceive of let alone carry out makes the difficulty of acting against Stalin apologists obvious.

The Left considers itself one grand solidarity, one extended family. Yet from 1918 to 1953, Stalin presided over—in one capacity or another—the mass arrest, imprisonment, reeducation, and murder of Mensheviks, anarchists, syndicalists, Social Revolutionaries, renegade Bolsheviks, Left Communists, Trotskyists, Left Oppositionists, Bukharinists, et al. Fellow Leftists all, and part of the Soviet Union’s bloodstained body count under Stalinism. As a libertarian socialist, I’ve often felt like I’m in an abusive relationship with the Left. We must not kowtow to our would-be executioners, the Stalinist/anti-imperialist/anti-revisionist/campist/tankie Left. Nor must we accept their epitaph for us that “Stalin did nothing wrong.”

FOOTNOTES:
[1] There are also those who are proud of their legacy of mass murder. There are Nazis who contend that all Jews are the spawn of Satan, and Stalinists who blame everything on “counterrevolutionaries” and “social fascist Trotskyites.” For them, genocide was too good for their victims.

APPENDIX ONE: HITLER’S CRIMES:

• Holocaust-6 million Jews killed
• Soviet POWs-3.3 to 5 million killed
• Polish/Slavic ethnic cleansing-3 to 5 million killed
• Le Paradis massacre
• Wormhoudt massacre
• Lidice massacre
• Normandy Massacres
• Ardenne Abbey massacre
• Graignes massacre
• Malmedy massacre
• Wereth massacre
• Wahlhausen massacre
• Gardelegen war crime
• Oradour-sur-Glane massacre
• Massacre of Kalavryta
• Medical experimentation on concentration camp prisoners
• Liquidation of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
• Liquidation of Vilna Ghetto Uprising
• Liquidation of Bialystok Ghetto Uprising
• Liquidation of Slonim, Łachwa, Mizoch, Mińsk Mazowiecki, Częstochowa, Będzin, Kraków, Łódź, Lwów, Lutsk, Marcinkonys, Minsk, Pińsk, Riga, Sosnowiec Ghetto uprisings
• Unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shipping.
• The intentional destruction of major medieval churches of Novgorod, of monasteries in the Moscow region (e.g., of New Jerusalem Monastery) and of the imperial palaces around St. Petersburg.
• Commando Order
• Commissar Order
• Nacht und Nebel decree

APPENDIX TWO: STALIN’S CRIMES:

• Forced collectivization of agriculture
• Forced industrialization
• Dekulakization of Ukraine-800,000 to 5 million killed
• Holodomor/Ukraine famine-3.5 to 10 million killed
• Kazakhstan famine-1.5 to 2.3 million killed
• Political purges
• The Great Purge
• Moscow Show Trials
• Gulag prison camp system
• Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
• Katyn massacre
• Murder/deportation of Crimean Tatars
• Murder/deportation of Chechens
• Murder/deportation of Ingush
• Murder/deportation of Germans
• Murder/deportation of Balkars
• Murder/deportation of Kalmyks
• NKVD Polish Operation
• NKVD German Operation
• NKVD Greek Operation
• NKVD Latvian Operation
• NKVD Korean Operation
• NKVD Chinese Operation
• NKVD Estonian Operation
• NKVD Finnish Operation 

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Apocalypse: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, October 2023

I’ve lived through my share of apocalypses starting with the ur-apocalypse of nuclear war. We did duck-and-cover drills in elementary school and my parents converted a windowless back room into a slapdash fallout shelter. I remember at ten seeing the cover of the National Enquirer at a grocery checkout stand with “psychic” Jeane Dixon predicting that a planetary alignment would herald the end of the Earth. From 1962 on, predictions of the end of the world from fringe Christian religious types happened regularly—George Williams, Herbert Armstrong, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses among them. Combine these religious charlatans with the countercultural/New Age/new religious movement apocalyptarian grandstanding of murderous cultists—Jim Jones, Charles Manson—and you cover the first 20 odd years of my life. Comets have played prominently in apocalyptic dramas—Halley’s, Kohoutek and Hale-Bopp for instance. More recently, there’s the coincidental apocalypse of Y2K and how all the world’s computer systems might have ceased functioning along with the planet when the date changed from 1999 to 2000.

All of these “end of the world” scares occurred in a country that until recently was profoundly optimistic. America proclaimed itself the greatest country in the world, a land of freedom and opportunity bar none. Even my involvements in the counterculture and the New Left were from optimism, a sense of this country’s driving potential and its people’s boundless ingenuity. Yet I also witnessed the collapse of American New Deal liberalism and the rise of the Right, beginning with Reagan’s dismantling of the welfare state under the slogan “Morning again in America. Prouder, stronger, better.” (Note: Nixon was America’s last “liberal” president.) What followed was an inexorable slide to the right through the second New Right, right-wing populism, neo-Nazism, the “countercultural” fascism of skinheads and the Abraxas group, ultimately reaching Trump and the third New Right. This was well after George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party and George Wallace’s segregationist populism.

Let’s return to Y2K for a moment.

The Year 2000 Problem was an issue of coding potentially interacting with hardware, and of people praying that the double-ought two-digit date switchover would not confound and crash modern technological civilization as the fear at the time claimed. It piggybacked on a more esoteric chronological issue of the twentieth century (the 1900s) transitioning into the twenty-first century (the 2000s) as well the transition from the second to third millennium. Such century/millennium changes have always inspired millennial apocalyptic scares and movements so Y2K was just one more drama among scores of others, including Nostradamus, Jerry Falwell, the Nuwaubian Nation, Sun Myung Moon, and Edgar Casey. Except that for as long as millennial apocalyptic predictions have been around there’s been the common idiocy that they’ve been somehow triggered chronologically.

When we started categorizing things into BC and AD, or BCE and CE, we started dating things from the year 1. There was no year 0. The first century thus ran from year 1 to year 100, with the turn of the century occurring from the year 100 to the year 101. The same holds true for the first millennium, which started in the year 1 and ended in the year 1000, transitioning to the next millennium from the year 1000 to the year 1001. So the twentieth century and second millennium did not end on the last day of 1999 but on the last day of 2000, meaning the actual esoteric apocalypse should have occurred a year after Y2K. But of course, neither the apocalyptic predictions of faux spiritual/religious idiots nor Y2K hackers materialized.

Similar end-of-the-world sensibilities prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Called the fin de siècle (French for the end of the century), this turn of the century was understood to have been the end of one era and the beginning of another. Starting in the 1880’s the old era of Enlightenment liberalism, individualism, democracy and the Rights of Man gave way to a time of anxiety, malaise, distrust, pessimism, and decadence. Civilization was considered in crisis, requiring a total overhaul by a generation imbued with emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism, and vitalism in revolt against materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society, and democracy. This “fin de siècle, fin du monde” sentiment gave rise to Fascism which Roger Griffin summarized as “a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.”[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led “armed party” which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence. (“The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology,” 9-10-2008)

Sui generis during the fin de siècle, Fascism has become the terror of subsequent centuries.

There is an historical argument that the American revolution of 1776, far from being a “conservative revolution,” was actually a class war between a radical democratic majority and a conservative “republican” elite. The radical democratic majority won the first round and formed the Articles of Confederation of thirteen independent states that championed decentralization, a bill of rights, paper money, etc. The conservative “republican” elite of large landowners, merchants and slave holders staged a counterrevolution through the Constitution that centralized power in a Federal government and Alexander Hamilton’s financial regime favoring gold and a national bank. Everyone from Charles A. Beard to Robert Ovetz pushes this overly simplistic analysis.

A similar argument holds that FDR’s New Deal, far from being a stopgap attempt to prevent the United States from turning either Fascist or Communist during the Great Depression, was a genuine effort to form a welfare state just shy of European social democracy. I buy neither the “America’s original democratic revolution” nor the “New Deal social democracy” arguments. That one faction of American capitalists triumphed over another does not make American socialism an historical possibility. Let me repeat my above contention that with the steady demise of Democratic Party liberalism and the New Deal welfare state the United States has been moving relentlessly to the Right. What has changed is America’s unerring optimism.

The Penn Schoen Berland Poll of June 8-19, 2015 revealed Americans to be personally optimistic yet nationally pessimistic. If anything, this trend has broadened with a number of recent polls (PEW, Gallup, AP-NORC, etc) indicating that no matter their age, race, economic status or politics, Americans think most things are worse than they actually are. Spencer Sunshine recently analyzed a new wave of neo-Nazism that he argues is “a result of the robust state of the U.S. far right as a whole, which has been able to outlive the Trump presidency, continue to dominate the Republican Party, and keep energized and active.”
Anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns have been its most popular issues, and far right activists have taken over school boards, banned books from libraries and disrupted Drag Queen Story Hours. There is no doubt that the far right will only pick up steam as the election approaches, and especially if Trump is convicted. Within that movement there is always a militant edge, partly underground and partly on the street. Neo-Nazis have always positioned themselves as the hardest of the white supremacists, and their stress on hating Jews is in tune with the antisemitic propaganda that has flooded social media. (“A New Wave of Neo-Nazism Has Become Visible in Wake of Jacksonville Shooting” by Spencer Sunshine, Truthout, 9-9-2023)

Whether pessimism contributes to the demise of democracy or the rise of Fascism is debatable. I’ve certainly gotten more pessimistic as I’ve grown older. I don’t have high hopes that the rightward trend in American politics will be halted let alone reversed, nor do I consider a democratic socialism or a libertarian one on the horizon anytime soon. I’ve had a fascination with apocalypse most of my life but even the threat of that has wimped out. I coined the phrase “slow-motion apocalypse” well before the Grotus album of the same name. T.S. Eliot’s last lines of “The Hollow Men” have never felt more relevant: “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”

 

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The Long Sixties: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, September 2023

The Sixties, henceforth designated the Long Sixties, are a touchstone for me. I make a lot of “coming late to the party” as I became aware of politics only in 1968 at age 16. And so I return to this period of my life obsessively in my writing. This piece treats the historical period as crucially intertwined with the history of the United States. To understand what I’m hoping to accomplish, consider that from one perspective the Vietnam War (1946-1975) was a war for national liberation—part of the decolonization wave of Africa, Asia and Latin America—that saw the defeat of first France and then the United States, and inspired similar armed struggles around the globe. But from another perspective America’s initial involvement in the Vietnam War—when the US first shipped military aid to the French colonial administration in 1950 and Eisenhower first sent military advisors to train the South Vietnamese Army in 1955—was crucial to the historical impact of the Long Sixties through the numerous movements I detail below. Because so much happened in these two decades, I’m necessarily selective about what I’m including in this synopsis. Instead of my regular column, I’m fashioning this as a type of “CliffsNotes,” a shorthand attempt to summarize the Long Sixties every time I drop the term. Expect this to be periodically updated in future installments as I expound and expand on it.

THE LONG SIXTIES: 1955-1975:
Contours Of U.S. History:

Colonial origins, continental expansion (Manifest Destiny) with displacement of the native population, and hemispheric hegemony (Monroe Doctrine). Capitalist individualism and entrepreneurialism alongside Black plantation slavery, Civil War, failed Reconstruction, codification of Jim Crow racial segregation reinforced by white supremacist terrorism. Beginnings of empire and imperialist interventionism, robber baron capitalism mythologizing laissez-faire while creating monopoly, US entry onto international stage with first World War. Assumption of two-camp capitalist/socialist global division around 1917 Russian Revolution, economic crisis in world capitalism, Great Depression, beginning of US welfare state with FDR/New Deal. Second World War between fascist Axis powers and US/USSR allies of convenience, US supersedes British imperial reach. Post-war consolidation of American corporate state and Pax Americana.

Elements Of The Long Sixties:

• American Way Of Life: American Liberalism’s welfare state, as constructed by Franklin D. Roosevelt (New Deal), Harry Truman (Square Deal), John F. Kennedy (New Frontier), and Lyndon Johnson (Great Society), integrated with the team cooperation, bureaucratic management, and multinational scope of Monopoly Capitalism. The individual subsumed to the organization. This required worker-management cooperation to guarantee labor peace through a liberal corporatist consensus. The American Way of Life defined a time of suburbanization, consumerism, material surplus and affluence; “the world’s highest standard of living.”

• The Cold War: The post-second World War division of the world into two contending power blocs, the US-dominated “Free World” and the USSR-dominated “Communist bloc.” Instead of direct military conflicts between the two superpowers, proxy or brush wars were fought indirectly between their spheres of influence, often in nations on the periphery (Korea, Vietnam). Anti-imperialist wars of national liberation often relied on asymmetrical guerrilla warfare to achieve decolonization, national self-determination and putative socialism. The rise of China (PRC) and the Third World further fractured and complicated the Cold War internationally. A bipartisan Cold War consensus about the means and ends of American foreign policy against the Soviet threat was considered to have prevailed domestically

• Rock Music/Youth Culture: The cross-pollination of rhythm-and-blues and gospel music from American Black culture with country/western music to create rock-and-roll, a cross fertilization of ethnic and regional styles that included the trend toward inter-racial bands. Rock Music/Youth Culture emphasized the importance of youth trends, tastes, and consumption and spread almost immediately to Britain, then to Western Europe, and finally to the rest of the world. A number of distinct rock-and-roll sub genres emerged by the late 1960s (blues rock, folk rock, country rock, psychedelic rock, jazz/rock fusion, progressive rock, heavy metal, etc). Dovetailing with the Beat Generation’s nihilism, youthful rebellion became social discontent that, when combined with quasi-sacramental drug use and liberated sexuality, formed the “turn on, tune in, drop out” freethinking communalist Hippie Counterculture/Youth Movement. Large, multi-day music festivals and intentional communities were hallmarks of the movement. The collective organizing, urban cooperatives and back-to-the-land rural communes of the San Francisco Diggers, Merry Pranksters, Good Earth, Hog Farm, White Panther Party, UATW-MF, etc. attempted to establish a practical alternative society on the ground and had decidedly anarchistic sensibilities.

• Civil Rights Movement: Starting with Brown vs Board of Education, the NAACP, and desegregation the rise of Black protest, nonviolent civil disobedience and various tactics (marches, boycotts, sit-ins, etc) through ML King, SCLC, SNCC and CORE. The move away from moderate incrementalism and nonviolent civil disobedience led to the Black Power Movement as enunciated by Stokely Carmichael and embodied by the Black Panther Party (BPP) for Self Defense. Both revolutionary Black nationalist and socialist, the BPP was influenced by one of the legacies of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction—Black Nationalism—specifically Marcus Garvey (Back to Africa) and the Nation of Islam (Black separatism) both of which emphasized cultural and economic autonomy. The BPP monitored the Oakland Police with armed patrols and ran a Free Breakfast for Children Program. In turn, Black Power led to Brown Power (Brown Berets, Young Lords Party), Yellow Power (Red Guard, I Wor Kuen), and Red Power (American Indian Movement). The Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State College led a successful 3-month-long strike demanding ethnic studies in 1968, and AIM occupied the island of Alcatraz for nearly 19 months (1969-1971).

• New Left: Students for a Democratic Society, founded in 1962, and the sit-in occupation at UC Berkeley in 1964-65 known as the Free Speech Movement represented an ever-widening student rebellion that consciously set itself apart from the party-oriented/class-oriented Old Left of the Socialist Party (social democratic), Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist), and Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyist). The New Left’s sit-ins, teach-ins, occupations, demonstrations and strikes in colleges and universities across the country cross-pollinated with the Hippie Counterculture and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, sometimes producing hybrids like the Yippies. SDS continued with university and community/neighborhood organizing, shifting to anti-draft/anti-war work as the 60s went on. The attempt by the anti-revisionist Maoist Progressive Labor Party-Worker/Student Alliance to take over SDS led to sectarianism, factional infighting and splintering, and eventual dissolution. An ever-increasingly fractious landscape of multiplying groupuscules known as the New Communist Movement roughly polarized between a clandestine armed struggle tendency [Weatherman/Weather Underground Organization, May 19th Communist Organization, Black Liberation Army, Symbionese Liberation Army, et al] and a vanguard party-building tendency [October League/Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist), Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, Organization for Revolutionary Unity, League of Revolutionary Struggle, Communist Workers Party, Sojourner Truth Organization, Venceremos Organization, ad nauseam] The NCM’s ideological hodgepodge of anti-revisionism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, support for Cuba, Vietnam, national liberation struggles generally and various Third World ideologies, Maoism, Stalinism, Hoxhaism, etc., never congealed into a single coherent organization. Its endless wrangling over the “correct line,” macho posturing, overt homophobia, and support for genocidal Third World movements (Khmer Rouge, Shining Path) were notable negatives. A notable positive was the turn to rank-and-file labor organizing (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, Miners for Democracy, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, etc) emphasized in the Long Seventies (1965-1981). Other tendencies survived the collapse of SDS with a revival of anarchism, a Gramscian/socialist-feminist New American Movement etc. And the NCM was paralleled by a bewildering proliferation of Trotskyist groupuscules (International Socialists, Revolutionary Socialist League, Freedom Socialist Party, etc,) [Precursor Revolutionary Labor Movements: The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) with its emphasis on direct action and use of free speech fights. The Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO, later Congress of Industrial Organizations) with its stress on collective bargaining and use of the sit-down tactic. Both deployed various labor actions (strikes, boycotts, slowdowns, sabotage, etc) culminating in the all-encompassing General Strike.]

• The Women’s Liberation Movement had its roots in Women’s Suffrage, with the goal of complete social equality for women, ending the patriarchy, and ultimately abolishing all sexual and social hierarchies in a realization of full human intersectionality. Feminist organizations included NOW (liberal), New American Movement (socialist), Bread and Roses (anarchist), and Redstockings (radical). Because homosexuality was illegal until recently, the Gay Liberation Movement relied on secret social clubs—Mattachine Society for gay men, Daughters of Bilitis for lesbian women—to organize. The San Francisco Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in 1966 and the New York Stonewall Riot in 1969 propelled the Movement into the public eye.

• Ecology Movement: The first pictures of the whole earth from space inspired both Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and the environmental movement, which celebrated the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Environmental organizations range from liberal (Sierra Club) to radical (Earth First!). Without the planet there were no sixties, long or otherwise.

• GI/Veterans Movement: Whereas Black Americans constituted just 12% of the population, they occupied 31% of the ground combat positions in Vietnam and suffered 24% of the casualties. Martin Luther King called Vietnam a white man’s war but a Black man’s fight. It was also a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight, in that high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam while the children of the educated got college deferments. After the Tet Offensive the US was losing the war although few citizens realized it and almost none admitted it. There were nearly a half million American troops in-country by 1967. Drug use among the troops—from marijuana to heroin—was rampant, as was racial unrest. What followed was the near-collapse of the US Military with murder, riot, beatings, arson and mass refusal to deploy or follow orders. Troop casualties rose annually, reaching nearly 17,000 in 1968, at which time Nixon’s combined strategy of Vietnamization and expanding the air war across Southeast Asia went into effect. A growing number of US military bases in this country and abroad were host to anti-war GI coffee houses off base where propaganda and organizing was available. And veterans were returning to the burgeoning mass Anti-Vietnam War Movement in the streets spearheading creative protests like Operation Dewey Canyon III in 1971 where Vietnam Veterans Against the War threw back their medals, awards, ribbons and commendations onto the US Capitol building. Early anti-conscription, civil disobedience and anti-war organizing came from traditional peace groups (Quakers, War Resisters League) and took hold among students facing the draft. The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party formed the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (New Mobe) in 1966 and organized ever larger national marches and rallies, a mass demonstration strategy demanding “immediate withdrawal” as opposed to “negotiated peace.” Replaced by the SWP-dominated National Peace Action Coalition after acrimonious splits in 1970, other anti-war organizations and strategies arose (MayDay Tribe with mass civil disobedience, People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice with a “People’s Peace Treaty”). Divisiveness weakened the anti-war movement, causing a lull in protests and demonstrations. The largest protest against the Vietnam War occurred on April 24, 1971 in Washington, DC where upwards of half a million participated, with another 150,000 marching in San Francisco, CA. The National Chicano Moratorium Committee Against The Vietnam War reached its peak on August 29, 1970 with a march of 30,000 in East Los Angeles.

 

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DIY socialism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, August 2023

We were challenged with a peace-time choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines—doctrines of paternalism and state socialism.
Herbert Hoover, Inaugural Address, 3-4-1929

Herbert Hoover coined that threadbare phrase “rugged individualism” as his presidency teetered on the brink of the 1929 Wall Street crash and subsequent decade plus Great Depression. Rugged individualism means the individual who is independent and self-reliant, standing alone without assistance from the state or government. At its most extreme however the term refers to the man (and it’s usually a man) who makes his own way in life, self-sufficient, without help from any larger collective entity, be that a business enterprise, local community, or even an extended family.

The country’s founding ideology was a particular subset of eighteenth century liberal enlightenment thought that emphasized both individual rights and the general welfare—both self-interest and the common good. Compared to reactionary medieval Christianity and monarchism, America’s brand of liberal enlightenment was eminently progressive. And this particular mix of individualism and communitarianism has been part of the warp and weft of the country’s society and politics for centuries. Despite the claim that rugged individualism has its origins in the American frontier experience, the modern invention of the term suggests that it’s a product of propaganda more than history.[1]

Americans, true Americans, supposedly eschew any form of charity as a demeaning handout. This is notwithstanding a rich history of “pioneer” mutual aid and decentralized communitarianism in the colonial era and during our extended frontier development. There are ample instances of collective and communal work—barn raisings, working bees and workers cooperatives—in native American, slave and free Black, religious (Amish, Mennonite, Mormon), original Anglo-Saxon/Scotch-Irish, and immigrant Scandinavian, German, Italian, and Jewish communities. The self-activity and self-organization of the American working class after the Civil War produced labor unions and federations, associations of trade and industrial workers based on class solidarity and mutual aid to protect and advance their rights, interests and power. The bloody struggle for the eight-hour day, the wildcat Industrial Workers of the World, and the militant Committee for Industrial Organization were highlights of this period. While the individualism of the American experience remains a constant throughout this history, the rugged aspects of it are far less accurate.

Which brings us to the long 1960s (1955-1975). The rise of the Civil Rights and the Black Power movements revived Black cooperatives and mutual aid societies. The hippie counterculture was characterized by its urban cooperatives and back-to-the-land communes. The New Left exploded with cooperatives, collectives, councils, and a militant wave of labor organizing. The goal of the movements in the long 1960’s was self-emancipation for workers, women, gay people and racial/ethnic minorities. Part of that involved reinvigorating an American do-it-yourself culture and its transformation from an individualistic emphasis to collective practice.

I started driving my parents’ VW Beetle in 1968 when I got my first driver’s permit at 16, the same year I became a social anarchist. At 17 I bought a used 1958 off-white VW bug with a canvas sunroof, the year when Volkswagen changed from the oval back window to the enlarged rectangular one. And in 1969 I purchased my first copy of John Muir’s classic wire-bound manual How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive; A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot.

I began buying tools to do my own car maintenance almost immediately, first to change my own oil and spark plugs, and then gradually to repair almost everything else. While attending UC Santa Cruz I lent my car to a friend who blew out a piston. So during the summer, home for a job, I rented an apartment and took apart my engine in my small combined living/dining room. Not the most pleasant experience living and eating with the smell of oil, grease and gasoline, but I did successfully repair my VW using Muir’s Compleat Idiot book. In all, I have owned three VW bugs and two buses.

The Volkswagen—literally the “People’s Car” designed and manufactured for “the masses” under the Nazi Party’s German Labor Front—rose to prominence as a symbol for post-war West German capitalist regeneration, and became a default people’s car symbolic of a generation of hip white youth in North America and Europe. The VW’s simple styling and usefulness for home, work and play combined practicality with free expression. VWs could handily haul people and goods cross country, were easy to operate and maintain, proved uncomplicated and fun to customize, and became the statement of an entire generation bent on collective self-reliant DIY activism. Owning a VW was a form of protest both against Detroit’s oversized, overpowered and overpriced cars and the “country’s role as a nuclear superpower and its reliance on commercialism to feed a voracious appetite for more, more, more.” The Beetle’s cute curves and the Microbus’s boxy appearance—“so unlike anything the major auto manufacturers in Detroit were producing—became a symbol for counterculture types, who wanted to stand out from the rest of crowd.”[a] Some VW owners painted peace signs, flowers and psychedelic art on their vehicles to further the “turn on, tune in and drop out” connection between car and counterculture.

The sterling example of all of this was Muir’s book. John Muir was a structural engineer who collaborated with the artist Peter Aschwanden to design the authoritative manual for Volkswagen owners, with handwritten lettering and intricate and often humorous hand-drawn illustrations. The exploded views of various aspects of the VW were spectacular works of art in their own right. (Tosh Gregg updated and appended material for subsequent editions.) An iconic 60s manual for an iconic 60s vehicle, the Compleat Idiot was entirely self-published and self-promoted, selling over two million copies and becoming one of the most successful independent author published and financed books in history.

“The legend of John Muir, 60s counter culture auto mechanic, runs something along these lines; a distant relative of the namesake American naturalist, he worked in the American defense industry during the Fail Safe/Dr. Strangelove days of the Cold War, until he’d had enough of it and decided to drop out. In the late 1960s, he moved to Taos, New Mexico and became a VW mechanic.”[b]

As a DIY VW mechanic I belonged to a couple of enthusiastic shadetree mechanic collectives who performed car repairs with minimum tools and equipment in our home garages, backyards or driveways. This included jerry rigging, basic maintenance, DIY upgrades, and more sophisticated repairs and customization. One of these was associated with the William James Work Company. Founded in 1973 by Page Smith and Paul Lee in Santa Cruz, the project organized unemployed or marginally employed people to enable them to find jobs. The pragmatic 19th-20th century philosopher William James proposed what came to be called “work service” as a substitute for military service and as such the Work Company dovetailed nicely with the counterculture.[2] The San Francisco Diggers laid out a utopian scheme for the post-competitive, comparative game of a Free City based on the idea that “[E]very brother and sister should have what they need to do whatever needs to be done.”

“Each service” in the Free City “should be performed by a tight gang of brothers and sisters whose commitment should enable them to handle an overload of work with ability and enthusiasm. ‘Tripsters’ soon get bored, hopefully before they cause an economic strain.” Under Free City Garage and Mechanics, the Diggers proposed:

[T]o repair and maintain all vehicles used in the various services. The responsibility for the necessary tools and parts needed in their work is entirely theirs and usually available by maintaining friendly relations with junkyards, giant automotive schools, and generally scrounging around those areas where auto equipment is easily obtained. The garage should be large enough and free of tripsters who only create more work for the earnest mechanics.[c]

This DIY culture was an extension of the larger mech culture of the 1950s, typified by magazines like Popular Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated which provided their readers a way to keep up-to-date on useful practical skills, techniques, tools, and materials. Since many of those readers lived in rural or semi-rural areas, this was a part of the even larger make-do culture on farms and small towns that still constituted the vast majority of the country. In the long 1960s this included everything from artists rebelling against mass production and mass culture with self-made crafts, artisanal cooks and brewers, farmers going organic, back-to-the-land homesteading, home improvement and smaller construction projects to build-your-own ham/crystal radio, telescope, robotic and computer projects. A recent outgrowth of this has been the “fair repair/right to repair” movement that seeks to mandate access to repair tools. “If you own something, you should be able to repair it yourself or take it to a technician of your choice.”[d]

You might have noticed the “hyphenated self” throughout this column. Self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and self-interest often have a right-wing, individualistic focus. In turn self-activity, self-organization and self-emancipation have a left-wing, collectivist emphasis. As with self-defense, all of these “hyphenated self” terms can be seen in both individual and collective aspects. There are two sides—an individual and a collective side—to the self.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
Books/Pamphlets:
A Moral Equivalent of War by William James (1910)
History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 10 volumes, by Philip S. Foner (1947-1994)
The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962) and Socialism: Past and Future (1989) by Michael Harrington
The Digger Papers (1968) www.diggers.org[c]
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive; A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot by John Muir and Tosh Gregg. Illustrated by Peter Aschwanden. (1969)
Communalism, From It’s Origins to the Twentieth Century by Kenneth Rexroth (1974)
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn (1980)
Women, Race & Class (1981) and The Meaning of Freedom (2012) by Angela Y. Davis
Socialism and America by Irving Howe (1985)
Marxism in the United States: A History of the American Left by Paul Buhle (1987)
Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard (2014)
Communalism, a Liberatory Alternative by Marcus Amargi & Stephanie Armagi (2016)
Articles/Essays:
“Socialism, American style” by “Lefty” Hooligan (“What’s Left?” 9-2012, MRR #352)
“Forward Into The Past With John Muir’s ‘Idiot’s Guide’” by Samuel John Klein (The Zehnkatzen Times, 6-10-2016)[b]
“What Is Socialism? A History of the Word Used as a Scare Tactic in American Politics” by Jeremy Hobson and Serena McMahon (WBUR, 3-7-2019)
“How Socialism Made America Great” by Jack Schwartz (Daily Beast, 7-1-2019)
“The myth of the rugged individual” by Robert Reich (Salon, 8-11-2019)
“How the Volkswagen Bus Became a Symbol of Counterculture” David Kindy (Smithsonian Magazine, 3-6-2020)[a]
“What You Should Know About Right to Repair” by Thorin Klosowski (New York Times, Wirecutter; 7-15-2021)[d]
“American socialism revisited” by “Lefty” Hooligan (“What’s Left?” 10-2021)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Herbert Hoover’s former Secretary of the Interior and long-time Stanford University president, Ray Lyman Wilbur, wrote in defense of the concept of “rugged individualism”: “It is common talk that every individual is entitled to economic security. The only animals and birds I know that have economic security are those that have been domesticated—and the economic security they have is controlled by the barbed-wire fence, the butcher’s knife and the desire of others. They are milked, skinned, egged or eaten up by their protectors.”

Now compare this to a quote from the famous anarchist-communist Peter Kropotkin who wrote in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution that reveals the newspeak in the Hoover/Wilbur concept of “rugged individualism”: “In The Descent of Man [Charles Darwin] gave some powerful pages to illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival. He intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community.”

Other relevant quotes from Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid abound: “[I]n the long run the practice of solidarity proves much more advantageous to the species than the development of individuals endowed with predatory inclinations.” “[U]nder any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life.” “Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual and moral.” and “The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.”

 

[2] The Work Company was subsumed into the William James Association.

 

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Drugs: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, July 2023

I’m a cat person. At one time my wife and I had three indoor cats. As my wife’s asthma grew worse we let them die of natural causes one by one so that now we’re cat-less.

One of their treats was letting our cats indulge in some catnip. They ate it and rolled in the leaves and stems. Then they would start sneezing, licking, rubbing themselves, stretching, jumping, hopping around, stalking imaginary prey, acting dazed, even drooling. It’s not as if they sought it out but they did enjoy catnip when we gave it to them.

Various animals have an affinity for mind-altering substances. Deer, moose and caribou get high on fly agaric mushrooms. Cows graze on locoweed. Bighorned sheep scrape hallucinogenic lichen. Dolphins squeeze puffer fish for their neurotoxins. And numerous creatures demonstrate a fondness for alcohol—from monkeys, chimpanzees and other primates, birds like lorikeets, cedar waxwings, blackbirds and redwings, various species of bats, to insects like bees and fruit flies. Some of the animals that indulge in this panoply of drugs become dependent on them, showing signs of addiction, and experience withdrawal when access to those drugs is removed.Hominids have indulged in alcohol for some 200 million years and hominins for over 8 million years, a primate-alcohol dynamic called the “drunken monkey hypothesis.” Our primate ancestors may have developed our genetic predilection for alcohol from their dependence on ripe, fermenting fruit as their main food source. There is circumstantial proof that Neanderthals and other archaic humans used psychoactive drugs and more significant archeological, anthropological and historical evidence that modern humans have been sometimes avid users of betel nut, khat, kava, nutmeg, nicotine, caffeine, cocaine, opium, heroin, marijuana, peyote, ayahuasca, psilocybin, etc. The spread of human psychoactive drug use always came with frequent instances of addiction and withdrawal.

I grew up in the overwhelmingly white suburbs of California. The only drugs I was exposed to were the legal and readily available ones—caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. There was secret prescription pill abuse, of course, but the truly illegal stuff—heroin, marijuana, cocaine, etc—was relegated to the poor and people of color. It was when a subculture of literary, nonconformist, nihilistic, downwardly mobile white people—the Beat Generation—came into contact with jazz and poverty that these drugs made their way into mainstream American society. Such drug use was considered “cool” and included experimentation with psychedelics. The beatnik subculture overlapped with the hippie counterculture which was more rock music-oriented, rebellious and idealistic. The concept of “cool” was universalized and the range of experimental drugs broadened.

And that’s when I entered the picture. I joined the counterculture, the New Left, the “Revolution” some time between the Prague Spring and the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968. I started thinking politically, if naively, and committed myself to the left side of the culture wars that had been raging for over a decade by then.

That was roughly the same timeframe that the San Francisco Diggers scattered. David Talbot contends that: “[b]y the time the Summer of Love was over, the Diggers leaders had all drifted off to country communes, celebrity entourages, hard drugs, the Hell’s Angels, or all the above,” which was a premature assessment. Digger groups were active throughout the end of 1967 and into 1968 when the Diggers Free City Collective held their last San Francisco event, a summer solstice celebration, on Monday, July 1, 1968. The reasons posited for their demise, however, were correct enough. The San Francisco Diggers emerged in 1965 from the nexus of “the bohemian/underground art/theater scene, and the New Left/civil rights/peace movement.” The Diggers combined “street theater, anarcho-direct action, and art happenings in their social agenda of creating a Free City. Their most famous activities revolved around distributing Free Food every day in the Park, and distributing ‘surplus energy’ at a series of Free Stores (where everything was free for the taking.)” One of the more infamous Digger leaders, Emmett Grogan, took issue with the Left’s insistence that: “[O]ne had to be either a Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, or hold to some combination of these ideologies, or else be politically categorized an anarchist. All these radical labelers ever did was read, write about or discuss the different revolutionary theories, dealing with semantics, while […] the Diggers refused to discuss publicly or define the political dialectics of the work they never ceased to continue to do. Work which was alien neither to Marxism or Maoism but at the time needed neither to endure.”

Grogan was born a streetwise working class Brooklyn kid named Eugene Leo Grogan (aka Kenny Wisdom), who got addicted to heroin before a teenager, then kicked the habit, won a scholarship to an elite private school, pursued a lucrative career as a Park Avenue burglar, and “retired” to Italy. He briefly attended Duke University after high school. When Grogan returned to his heroin habit in San Francisco he arguably helped contribute to the downfall of the Diggers.“Emmett struck me with a needle twice,” Peter Coyote writes in his introduction to Grogan’s book Ringolevio when Emmett first pierced his ear. “The second time […] the needle was a syringe, loaded with heroin. ‘It’ll change ya,’ he said, and it changed a lot. […] I began the process of ruining a heretofore healthy body […] Emmett’s road petered out ‘at the end of the line’ of the Coney Island subway April Fools Day 1978 – some twelve years later, where his body was found, dead of an overdose.”

Of the counterculture’s various drugs grass was just pleasure and fun, acid was the key to transcendent reality and junk was “associated with creative luminaries like Basquiat, Cobain, Jagger, and Joplin. […] [H]eroin has retained a certain allure, the reigning drug of genius. Those who die at its hands — the famous ones, at least — don’t just die, but flame out terrifically, having ‘lived too hard’ and ‘felt too much’ but barely scratched the surface of their potential.” But alcohol does far more damage physically and mentally and is harder and more dangerous to withdraw from than heroin.

“The Good Earth communards took up where the Diggers left off” in 1968 “but in many ways they were tougher and more resilient. The core group within the commune were life-hardened young men and women—ex-cons, Vietnam veterans, streetwise runaways—who knew how to survive. They called themselves a church and claimed pot as their sacrament, and they preached the usual peace and love philosophy. Still, they were no pushovers. They loved their neighborhood, but they knew it was turning into a jungle, with violent predators and vicious cops around every corner. Good Earth made it widely known that it was prepared to defend its turf.”

The Good Earth Commune was smaller in numbers, but more tightly organized and disciplined than the Diggers; nine well-armed houses in the Haight that were part of the second hippie settler wave when the Haight-Ashbury became a dangerous place overrun by junkies, speed freaks, dope dealers and corrupt cops. The Good Earth made their money from selling “soft” drugs—marijuana and LSD—but at first they forbade members from using, let alone selling, anything harder. One of their main internal debates was whether something was a “soft drug” or a “hard drug,” and that debate resurfaced in 1974 when cocaine started making the rounds in San Francisco. Ultimately, the Good Earth Commune’s leadership decided cocaine was a soft drug, a fatal mistake.“Drugs and money were our downfall,” Steve Kever said. “We became very self-indulgent; we got seduced by all the flash. There was suddenly huge amounts of money from dealing coke, and we had access to a kind of lifestyle that people can only dream of. We had been a hard-working hippie commune, and suddenly people were giving you their flashy cars when they got tired of them because they wanted something flashier.”

The distinction between soft and hard drugs that eventually brought down the Good Earth was debated by a number of countercultural scenes, most notably the Motherfuckers in New York City and the Provos/Kabouters in Amsterdam. And without venturing into Straight Edge puritanism, I don’t think it’s possible to draw a hard and fast line between such categories of drugs. There is really no such thing as a drug that does not have some bad side effects or detrimental consequences. As I’ve mentioned, one of the most dangerous “hard drugs” is one of the most socially and historically accepted, that being alcohol. In my day we were in search of the strongest marijuana we could find, with Colombian Gold much sought after. But by today’s standards of potency, the marijuana in the 60’s was dirt weed. Medical marijuana proponents today argue that cannabis is not very dangerous or can be made relatively safe with vaping or ingesting. Yet heavy use of high-potency cannabis is now being linked to schizophrenia, particularly among young men.

It’s hard to imagine our cats seeking out, demanding or doing crimes for high-potency catnip.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
http://www.diggers.org
Ringolevio: A Life Played For Keeps by Emmett Grogan (1972)
Introduction to Ringolevio by Peter Coyote (1990)
Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot (2012)
“The heroin mystique” by Alyssa Giacobbe (The Boston Globe, 2-23-2014)

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Holocaust and resistance: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, June 2023

I have heard nothing about Hilberg taking my side. He is pretty stupid and crazy. He babbles now about a “death wish” of the Jews. His book is really excellent, but only because it is a simple report. A more general, introductory chapter is beneath a singed pig.
—Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers, 4/24/1964

I have Raul Hilberg’s three volume opus The Destruction of the European Jews. I’ve read it, skimming it in parts, and studying select chapters. I’ve also used the footnotes and index for related research. Hilberg relied on mostly German primary sources supplemented by secondary literature, but precise figures of Jewish deaths were hard to come by. He necessarily had to round his numbers. The conventional view is that between 5 and 7 million Jews perished in the Nazi Final Solution, with the number 6 million cited as standard. Hilberg’s comprehensive research, with various rounding factors taken into account, posits a range of 4.9 million to 5.4 million deaths, with a mid-point of 5.1 million Jewish lives destroyed by the Nazis.

Hilberg’s landmark study, with its exhaustive research, focused on German collective responsibility and bureaucracy, not on the Nazi leadership or their victims, and arrived at a figure that was at the low end of the official range. But Hilberg could be cantankerous and didn’t shy away from controversy. As Hannah Arendt knew, it was possible to like the man’s work but dislike the man. Hilberg was clear on a number of contentious points, principal among them that the Jewish people were overwhelmingly passive in the face of Nazi persecution and murder. “The reaction pattern of the Jews is characterized by almost complete lack of resistance […] [T]he documentary evidence of Jewish resistance, overt or submerged, is very slight,” according to Hilberg, who further stated: “In exile, the Jews […] had learned that they could avert danger and survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies. […] Armed resistance in the face of overwhelming force could end only in disaster. Thus over a period of centuries the Jews had learned that in order to survive they had to refrain from resistance.” These historical tendencies were augmented by Jewish communal structures—in particular the cooperation of the Jewish councils, or Judenräte, that made the Nazis’ job easier—and a deference for authority. Further, Hilberg rejected the contention that “[e]ven passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance” as highly problematic.

Hilberg argued that Jewish resistance to the Nazis was grossly overstated and that less than 300 Germans were killed by Jews during the second World War. The Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB, Socialist Zionist and Labor Bund fighters) and the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW, Revisionist fighters) futilely attempted to defend the Warsaw Ghetto from Nazi deportations in 1943.[1] Similar armed actions followed in the Vilna and Bialystok ghettos. But had every Nazi-controlled Jewish ghetto in Eastern Europe rebelled in emulation of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and given the resources the Nazis needed to deploy to crush that insurrection alone, the German military on the Eastern Front would have been totally immobilized. Hilberg disagreed with what he called a “campaign of exaltation” of heroic Jewish resistance to the Nazi Holocaust. Mitchell Hart stated that “[t]his sort of ‘inflation of resistance’ is dangerous because it suggests that the Jews truly did present the Nazis with some sort of ‘opposition’ that was not just a horrible figment of their antisemitic imaginations.”

Yad Vashem disagreed with Hilberg and countered that his thesis amounted to blaming the victims for their plight; that the Jews themselves somehow bore some responsibility for the extent of the Nazi genocide. I visited Yad Vashem in 1974 and walked through the rooms dedicated to depicting Jewish heroism. I choked up over the portrayal of Jewish resistance in German-occupied Europe—from the armed uprisings in Eastern European ghettos and concentration camps and guerrilla groups (like the Bielski and Parczew partisans and the UPO) to the sabotage, disruption, intelligence gathering and participation within national resistance movements in Western Europe. Given my proclivity for revenge, I was particularly taken with the post-war Nokmim partisans/Nakam assassins—the Jewish Avengers—who intended to annihilate as many Germans as the Nazis had killed Jews. But compared to the decades long Vietnamese/Cambodian/Laotian national liberation struggles happening concurrently in Indochina against Western imperialism, I had to admit that Jewish resistance to the Nazis seemed sparse. And I understood why most Israeli Jews believed that European Jewry went “like sheep to the slaughter,” walking meekly into Hitler’s gas chambers. I had burned my draft card, applied for a Conscientious Objector status, and otherwise spent six years of my life protesting against the Vietnam War. My resistance to America’s slaughter conservatively of 1,156,000 Vietnamese, 273,000 Cambodians and 28,000 Laotians, not to mention the reduction of the Indochinese countryside into a subtropical moonscape saturated with Agent Orange, felt exceedingly paltry to me at the time.[2]

My Polish Catholic mother lived through the second World War and was interned in a Nazi forced labor camp as an adolescent. She developed an abiding hatred for all things German and once said that there must be something positive about the Jews because the Germans despised them so much. I inherited my knee-jerk anti-German sentiments from her. As a libertarian Marxist, I’ve found the Jewish left particularly constructive and instructive for my own socialism. The Jewish Labor Bund and its program for diaspora socialism—emphasizing do’ikayt (here-ness), Yiddish, secular Jewish culture, national-cultural autonomy, trade unionism, and community control—was liquidated by the Nazis along with the Jewish community of Eastern Europe. What remained was Jewish nationalism as exemplified by the tens of thousands of socialist Zionists who immigrated from Eastern Europe to Palestine prior to 1940 to found a socialist society. I’ve been an admirer of the former having befriended a Bundist union baker in 1969 who retired from Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, to Ojai, California. And I became a student of the latter at UCSC taking World Systems Theory in Walter Goldfrank’s Sociology class.

I’ve argued that socialist Zionism was perhaps the first example of a modern socialist struggle for national liberation, albeit one with a fatal flaw—that being its program of “socialism for one people” in a settler-colonial context. I sympathize with the bi-nationalist libertarian communism of the Hashomer Hatzair which became MAPAM, and I have a soft spot for the left communism of the Gdud Ha’avoda/Labor Brigades. Socialist Zionism ultimately failed to achieve a socialist society both internally and in socialist peace and justice with the Palestinians. What’s more, when Labor Zionism took power as the social democratic State of Israel in 1948, and especially when Revisionist Zionism—openly rooted in European Fascism—gained control as Likud after 1977, Israel can be understood as a settler-colonial regime little different from apartheid South Africa.[3]

As for the present Palestinian/Israeli conflict I unequivocally oppose the Jewish settler movement, Israeli ethnic cleansing and the IDF’s ongoing repression and massacre of Palestinians. I favor first a decentralized bi-national socialism of autonomous federated Jewish and Palestinian communities residing side by side in the region. Then I support, ultimately, a bi-national democratic one-state solution for all of Palestine/Israel, with the formal two-state solution that Amos Oz called “a peace through gritted teeth” coming in a distant third. Yet none of these solutions are likely, with the current de facto degraded Israeli apartheid state reality of endless occupation and war the norm for the foreseeable future. So I protest Israeli military attacks on Gaza and the West Bank, and Israeli civilian assaults on Palestinians and their lands, without rejecting the promise of a bi-nationalist Jewish socialism upon which that society was founded. And I express solidarity with Palestinian resistance to Israeli settler-colonialism without endorsing Palestinian politics as “objectively anti-imperialist.”

I also plant olive trees in Palestine through a variety of non-Zionist charities, a symbolic act at best but one that I can take whether or not Israel is currently bombing the hell out of the Palestinians. By “supporting the act but not the actor” I reverse the precept held by Gandhi and later Martin Luther King to “hate the sin but not the sinner.” I thus refuse to reduce my politics to simplistic Leftist anti-imperialist drek. It’s a stance I take in confronting Stalinist tankies, crude Leninists and generic campists alike. But the dogmatists, sectarians and vanguardists of this leftover Left have never been good with political subtleties and ambiguities.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg
Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969 by Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner
“The historian’s past in three recent Jewish autobiographies” by Mitchell B. Hart
Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation by Isaiah Trunk
The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State by Ze’ev Sternhell

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Zionism warned that the Jewish community in Eastern Europe was in imminent danger of antisemitic persecution and mass murder almost from its inception. But whereas the socialist Zionist/Bundist ŻOB wasn’t formed until 1942 and then mainly in response to the Nazi threat to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto, the rightwing ŻZW—founded by Revisionist Zionism and Betar in 1939—anticipated the threat posed by Nazism. Soviet censorship aside, the ŻZW’s role in the uprising seems to have been exaggerated. I despise Revisionism’s parafascist politics even as I acknowledge its contributions to Jewish resistance to the Nazis.

[2] And these are very much the conservative estimates of the death toll. R.J. Rummel puts the upper estimates of American mass murder at 3,207,000 for Vietnam, 273,000 for Cambodia, and 115,000 for Laos, giving a grand total of 3,595,000 killed by US imperialism in Indochina from 1954 to 1975.

[3] In the 70s I took note of principled bi-national socialist anti-Zionism within Palestine/Israel—mainly Rakah, Maki and the pivotal Matzpen. Inspiring and influential, Matzpen was numerically marginal back in the day. I remember reading Arie Bober’s The Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism and following the various debates and subsequent splits. Now bi-national socialist anti-Zionism within Israel is virtually non-existent, examples like the Da’am Workers Party and Hadash notwithstanding.

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Town v. country: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, February 2023

I’m a city boy. I call myself a flâneur, an individual who strolls city streets for personal freedom, independence, and enjoyment. I’ve lived in cities pretty much all my life and the very brief periods I resided in the countryside drove me bats.

It was love at first sight when I visited New York City in autumn, 1988. People I befriended living in San Diego invited me to holiday in the City and I returned nearly every year thereafter for a decade. That initial trip I was a total tourist. I got a crick in my neck the first day from walking around, looking up and marveling at all the tall buildings. I’d leave the collective household’s Park Slope brownstone where I was staying, maybe stop by the nearby Food Coop for some breakfast, then catch early morning subway rides into Manhattan neighborhoods. Graffiti was everywhere, and the subway cars were rolling works of underground art. I hit the main sightseeing spots.[A] I spent afternoons in St. Mark’s Comics and the Strand just browsing. Missing Foundation’s overturned martini glass tag was ubiquitous on the Lower East Side. Because I was a drunk, a 16-oz can of cheap malt liquor and a couple of hot dogs or slices of pizza from street food stands were all I needed.[1]

Most of my friends had day jobs—bike messengers, temps, low-level secretarial or warehouse grunts—as well as office workers, librarians and academics. I’d arrange to meet them after work at the Cube at St. Marks Place where we regrouped for more food, drinks, and partying. We’d go out for inexpensive ethnic dinners where it was always BYO. And we’d end most evenings talking politics, either socially over more food and drinks or at meetings of Neither East Nor West, Anarchist Black Cross or the Libertarian Book Club.  Several of my friends had “red-eye” radio shows on WBAI, so we would sometimes stumble home at 2-3-4 in the morning. The sidewalks were crowded curb-to-wall with people, pedestrians on the streets all hours of the day and night. There was always something happening. Anything you wanted to do or transact, legal or illegal, was available if you only looked hard enough or had enough money.

I also experienced New York during the late Koch, Dinkins and early Giuliani years when city cops were fat, and stop-and-frisk, “zero tolerance” and “broken windows” policing were at their height. Enforcing “quality of life” violations meant racial profiling, rousting the homeless, and harassing nonconformists. Punk was raging as was hip-hop. The Tompkins Square Park riots of unruly countercultural teens and the homeless occurred in the summer of 1988, resulting in 35 injured and 9 arrested, with over 100 complaints lodged against the police. The New York Times called it a “police riot.”

New York had a reputation for filth, vermin, noise, crime, corruption, homelessness, disorder, brutal cops and racial antagonisms. But it was also known as the capital of the world, the city that never sleeps, and the city of dreams. Some 80+ ethnicities spoke over 200 languages, serving up 35 different global cuisines, worshipping in 150 different religious denominations, residing and conducting business in 278 neighborhoods in 5 boroughs. As the line goes, “there are 8 million stories in the Naked City,” only it’s closer to nine million now. I admired the direct, no nonsense, practical attitude of New Yorkers, their irritated impatience embodied in the term “New York minute,” their borough-distinctive street accents, their raised middle finger stance toward the world. I always returned from my NYC vacations reinvigorated and renewed. Yet I could see how living permanently there and experiencing the City’s monumental indifference and relentless grind could wear on a person’s body, mind, and spirit.

Karl Hess once argued that Ireland had an anarchist society for centuries, how its cities of tens of thousands of people operated without a government and avoided crime without a police force, and how the English took hundreds of years to conquer the Irish because they had no national government to surrender for them. When I remember back to my New York City experiences I sometimes think it’s just the opposite, that it’s a city with lots of police and government but which is fundamentally ungovernable. I’ve lived in West Coast cities[B] and visited various world-class cities[C] sometimes for extended periods. Nothing, no city can compare with New York. But maybe it’s useful to find alternatives to city life. Perhaps socialism can provide different options to the typical urban experience.

Murray Bookchin gained notice for his 1969 pamphlet Listen, Marxist! which presented a left-anarchist critique of Marxism using orthodox Marxist categories (means of production vs relations of production, proletariat vs bourgeoisie, objective vs subjective forces, etc.) Bookchin was a Trotskyist whose acquired anarchism retained a flavor of vulgar Marxism thanks to that stodgy vocabulary. He would eventually develop politically beyond these origins in the 1980s and 1990s but his 1971 book, a collection of essays entitled Post-Scarcity Anarchism (P-SA), still had that crude feel. P-SA proposed a utopia of small decentralized communities founded on communal property that integrated town and country, industry and agriculture, manual and intellectual labor, individualism and collectivism, etc.[2] Federations of such integral communes constituted an idealized stateless, anarchist-communist society of abundance where all social, economic and political contradictions would be resolved.

P-SA created a stir among anarchists in the 1970s and not merely because it repurposed Marxist ideas and terminology to defend left-anarchism. Anarchist study groups based on the book emerged, while criticisms arose from classical anarchists of various stripes. P-SA’s pro-technology bent, in particular, elicited negative reactions in Luddite and primitivist circles. As a left-anarchist I realized Bookchin’s integral commune sounded a lot like the Israeli kibbutz I lived in for six months in 1974.

I consider Israel a settler-colonial apartheid state that failed primarily because Labor Zionism practiced an exclusionary “socialism for one people,” placing ethnic identity over class identity. At the same time I consider the Jewish socialism that established Israel to be one of the more autonomous, communitarian, emancipatory forms of socialism I’ve experienced. I consider both true.

Kibbutz Mizra was established by the Hashomer Hatzair socialist-Zionist youth movement in the Jezreel Valley under the slogan “from commune to communism.” The commune members practiced “from each according to ability, to each according to need” where, for their community labor, they received free housing, food, clothing, education, entertainment, even a monthly stipend to purchase luxuries at the general store. Property was held in common and children were raised collectively. Mizra was a small town communal farm on 1915 acres of land purchased from an absentee Arab feudal landowner whose Arab peasant tenants had been evicted by the Jewish National Fund. Located between the Arab cities of Nazareth and Afula, it had maybe a thousand adults and children and a mixed economy of agriculture (crops, orchards, eggs, chickens, dairy) and industry (meat processing plant, hydraulics machinery factory). Kibbutzim were in the vanguard of the Zionist colonization and economic development of Palestine (Hebrew land, labor, products). They were also on the frontlines of defending the Jewish Yishuv via the Hagana and Palmach (Hebrew defense).

To say life on the kibbutz was bucolic was an understatement. I worked, ate, read, hung out and slept. There was occasional communal TV or a movie available, and we took weekend trips to tourist destinations[D]. But otherwise my stay was uneventful to say the least. Commune life was excruciatingly boring. I started down my long, sordid years of alcoholism living at Mizra because I had to stop smoking marijuana when I arrived and so I purchased bottled wine from the kibbutz store to get high every day.

Jewish socialism shared the idyll of creating the “New Man” with the broader socialist/communist movements of its day. It’s the notion that, come the revolution, the free association of producers would construct a global society without a state, social classes, hierarchies or private ownership of the means of production through a fully developed communism to produce a new humanity. In P-SA Bookchin used the terms “the rounded man, the total man.” This utopian individual is described as cooperative, selfless, virtuous, hard working and comradely. Hardly a portrayal of your average New Yorker, let alone your typical Israeli kibbutznik.

The concept that the new socialist individual is the product of the new socialist society is standard-operating-procedure. Leftists contend that human nature changes depending on lifestyle (hunter-gatherer nomadism, agricultural sedentism, urban civilization) or stages of production (primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism). I consider humans to be social beings by nature, but the broader nature-versus-nurture debate over humanity’s essence remains unresolved in my mind.

The kibbutz movement, like the hippie back-to-the-land movement, was a conscious rejection of urban life. But there’s truth to the WWI song lyric that “how ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” I experienced a triumphant yet tedious rural socialism in Kibbutz Mizra, then a chaotic yet dynamic urban capitalism in New York City. Much as I favored enlightened communalism theoretically, in practice I enjoyed privatized decadence more.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections

FOOTNOTES:
[1] “The liver is a muscle! It must be exercised!” (b)ob McGlynn
[2] “Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.” (Communist Manifesto, 1848) “The first great division of labour in society is the separation of town and country.” (Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1877) “Also characteristic of civilization is the establishment of a permanent opposition between town and country as basis of the whole social division of labour.” (Friedrich Engels,The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884)

THE LISTS:
[A] Museums galore, Times Square, Central Park, Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, Brooklyn Bridge, Fifth Avenue, Grand Central Station, New York Public Library, etc.
[B] Ventura, San Bernardino, Santa Cruz, San Diego, Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco
[C] Jerusalem, Athens, Vienna, Warsaw, Kraków, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Bristol
[D] Jerusalem, Haifa, Baha’i Gardens Nazareth, Akko, Sachne pools, Eilat, Lake Kinnereth, Beit She’an, Dead Sea, the Sinai, Mar Saba Monastery, etc.

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Anxiety: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, June 2022

I’ve always been anxious. Fidgety, agitated, hyper; I was so talkative and disruptive during my early elementary school years my teachers isolated me to my own desk in the back of the class. I still rocked myself to sleep during my adolescence while listening to 50s pop music on AM radio, then early 60s rocknroll on the FM dial; a habit I had to break anticipating dorm life at  UCSC’s Merrill College. My politics turned left anarchist my senior year in high school, and stayed left of the Left ever since. I’ve always gravitated to the action faction of any organization or movement I belonged to, ultimately adopting the 2 June Movement’s mantra: “Words cannot save us! Words don’t break chains! The deed alone makes us free! Destroy what destroys you!”

“Action for action’s sake” became a political panacea, it’s own anodyne, a knee-jerk reflex that superseded critical thinking. It was an easy way for me not to challenge my ultra-gauche political analysis and avoid self-criticism. When in doubt, act. Somewhere in this political process I started self-medicating—first with marijuana, then alcohol—trying but never succeeding in slowing down, blunting that relentless “on edge” sense to my life. I was, and am still dealing with emotional pain, though I’m not quite sure the cause of it. Both my Polish parents survived forced labor camps during the second World War and my father was a falling down alcoholic. There’s a basis in family trauma for my interminable anxieties.