Holocaust and resistance: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, June 2021

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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Time: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, April 2023

“We will sell no wine before its time,” Orson Welles proclaimed in sonorous tones in his famous Paul Masson California wine commercials from 1978 to 1981. The motto and those ads became an oft-parodied media trope in the late twentieth century, a meme before memes were invented, when bootleg outtakes of an apparently drunk Welles circulated widely, gaining a second comedic life for the advertising campaign.

Historians sometimes have difficulty in determining how to categorize and periodize historical events. The mere chronicling of short-term, discreet historical events known as evental history—histoire événementielle in the French Annales School—needs to be superseded by the study of long-term historical trends, structures, and collectivities (the longue durée), the broad evolution of economies, societies and civilizations. Once established, the historical long haul—the histoire totale—can then be subdivided into convenient medium-length combinations of events; decades and centuries when more thoroughgoing socio-economic-cultural changes can be studied. Thus the much-vaunted or maligned 1960s becomes the “long 1960s” (1955-1975) as the significant history before and after the actual chronological decade of the 1960s are incorporated. The “long 1940s” spans roughly from 1933 to 1955, and the “long 1970s” overlaps with the “long 1960s” from 1965 to 1981. Periodizing such “long” decades are above all flexible and frequently conjoined, with historians often debating when to start and end a particular period, and what to include in or exclude from their study.

As the Orson Welles/Paul Masson slogan implies, the proper demarcation of time for an historical study is crucial, with the discipline of history preferring more natural historical periods to the simplistic use of standard calendar definitions. The “long eighteenth century” thus spans from the English Glorious Revolution (1688) to the Battle of Waterloo (1815), with some historians extending the period to 1660-1830 in order to encompass broader socio-economic trends. The “long nineteenth century” begins with the French Revolution in 1789 and ends with the start of the first World War in 1914. But the “short twentieth century” starts in 1914 with the first World War and ends in 1991 with the dissolution of the old Soviet Union, and might be subtitled “the rise and fall of Soviet Communism.” Here again natural historical periodicity is key, even as historians argue over the specific dates in question.

Take for example the Italian Years of Lead from 1968 to 1988, a 20-year period of political and social unrest highlighted by the birth and reign of terror, respectively, of the far left Red Brigades and the far right Armed Revolutionary Nuclei. This was in the context of popular workerist/autonomist organizations and movements to the left of the Italian Communist Party and much smaller neo-fascist groupuscules to the right of the Italian Social Movement party. Within the context of the “short twentieth century” and Soviet Communism’s beginnings and demise was the era of Joseph Stalin’s rule from 1922 to 1952. Of all the Communist dictators—Mao, Tito, Castro, Sung, etc—Stalin was easily the most brutal and bloody, presiding over millions of corpses created by forced agricultural collectivization and economic industrialization, a Ukrainian famine, several mass political purges, and numerous political show trials and executions.

[As for the historian-explicated “long decades” and “long centuries” cited above, the self-defined, self-perpetuating dynasties of West and East have them beat. China was ruled by the Shang (16th-11th century bce), Zhou (1046-221 bce), Han (202 bce-220 ce), Song (960-1279 ce) and Ming (1368-1644 ce) dynasties. Europe had the Houses of Romanov (1613-1917), Oldenburg (1101-1917), and Habsburg (1020-1918), not to mention the British (1066-present) and Dutch (13th century-present) monarchies. These capitalist “long duration” periods and, less so, the feudal dynastic spans are the meat and potatoes of my history-based nonfiction inquiries as well as some of my fiction work.]

I write nonfiction essays and fiction books, specifically speculative, near-future, and science fiction. But I’m seventy years old. I have a limited time left on this planet and, in a way, my life is my own personal periodization. I anticipate having only one more novel in me to write.

This next and perhaps final novel is a departure from my usual fiction efforts. I’m switching from the future to the past, specifically 1968. Nineteen sixty-eight was the year I got leftist politics and so this novel attempts to encapsulate my experiences with that year and the 1960s in general. I’ll also hope to elucidate certain “truths” of the era while keeping the process lively and entertaining. My protagonist, who I’ve made a white Western European cis male to avoid claims of cultural appropriation, has a story of political intrigue and mayhem as a National Autonomous University of Mexico student set in Mexico City prior to the 1968 Olympic Games. When the Mexican State gunned down an unknown number of protesting students in Tlatelolco Square. Prior to Mexico’s momentous student uprising, this protagonist travels the Western world to highlight other aspects of the effervescent 1960s. The plot is further drenched with action and politic, fascists and Situationists, and sex, drugs and rocknroll.

I started the book maybe ten years before, dropped it, and returned to it a year ago. I’ve been writing it ever since. I’ve never been prolific but I have been consistent. The historical research is daunting. But I intend to get a rough draft out and to various editors in three to four years. Given my mortality, it’s now a race against time. Lately, I’ve been remembering my residual  Christianity that counts us lucky at eighty years but admonishes that no one knows the hour. I’ve outlived my parents and I’ve had a few serious illnesses. I’m healthy now but I’m also in a hurry.

My rush is being impeded by several factors. I’ve already mentioned the research I’m doing for the book. I’m slowly, painfully reading through the miniature library I’ve accumulated to backdrop the story. The plot comes first, and even if the writing goes more slowly then is my usual pace the story can be altered as I dig up and apply the historical details. Currently I’m reading through Elena Poniatowska’s stunning Massacre in Mexico with its haunting oral micro-histories. More serious is the fact that I don’t speak Spanish. My main character—pretty much all my characters in Mexico—speak Spanish so my lack is a definite disability. I have to do an impossible task, write an authentic story of a time and place without knowing the language that authenticates it. I am hoping to learn some basic Spanish. I constantly rewrite what I write, but since I’m not very good about editing my own writing I always need to hire an editor for beta reading, proofreading, copy editing, line editing, substantive editing, mechanical editing, and developmental editing. If and when I finish this novel I’ll need to hire an editor who speaks Spanish.

Finally, the sheer complexity of this story threatens to sink my efforts. When I first conceived the idea for this book I sketched out four plot lines: (1) the protagonist’s story prior to the October 2, 1968, Tlatelolco massacre in  Mexico; (2) his travels around the US and Western Europe earlier in 1968; (3) his back story growing up; and (4) a parallel plot about a UC Berkeley researcher who encounters evidence of a centuries-old entity that embodies the essence of revolution. The researcher chases down this revolutionary demiurge through photographic evidence during key historical uprisings—Paris Commune, 1871; Russian Revolution, 1917; German Spartacist uprising, 1918; Shanghai Commune, 1927; Spanish Revolution, 1936; Hungary, 1956; Cuban Revolution, 1959—to interact with the novel’s protagonist and witness Tlatelolco.

One of the plots of Paco Ignacio Taibo’s detective novel An Easy Thing is the search for Emiliano Zapata, the folk hero and a leader of the Mexican Revolution—very much alive and rumored to be hiding in a cave outside Mexico City. This element of magic realism aligns well with the science fiction/fantasy bent of the novel’s fourth plot line. But because of my desire to base the novel firmly in the history of 1968 and of the Tlatelolco massacre I abandoned the fantasy element early on.  Even without this however the story’s intricacies are discouraging. Do I switch back and forth between plot elements or do I lay out each plot discreetly from beginning to end? The former threatens to muddy the plot with convoluted flashbacks and flash forwards while the latter simplifies things to the point of trivializing the reading experience.

So what’s left is whether I have the time to finish this project. Emerson’s aphorism that it’s not the destination but the journey only goes so far in assuaging my anxieties. Running out of time is up there with losing my memory or suffering a debilitating accident or disease which prevents me from completing the book. All high level fears for me. But all I can do is write the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page until I’ve written the book. Or I have nothing left to write.

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Out Now!: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, January 2023

“This is the thing about the Left. They’re unified to a fault. They’ll take in any looney, trannie, pedophile. They’ve got their back, they’ve got Biden’s back, they’ve got Fetterman’s back. We have the opposite problem. If someone has one imperfection, if Trump is too braggadocios, if Elon Musk talked to the ADL, if Ben Shapiro doesn’t support Nick Fuentes, we shut everyone down, and we’re all divided. That’s not me. I’m a hippie man. If you want less government and free speech, then I’m with you. We’ve got to unify these anti-government groups because the Left is winning.”

This nasty “bizarro world” harangue, this deluded bit of hate speech comes from Gavin McInnes as he complains about the state of American politics after the disastrous performance of the GOP in the 2022 midterms. We on the Left are nowhere near as crackpot. Many of us argue that an American Fascism is just around the corner, or was ensconced in the White House during Trump’s presidency, or perhaps remains embedded in some deep state apparatus. But unlike the 1960s when we routinely called everything and everyone fascist, much of the current Left sees divisions in American society that can be exploited or pockets of resistance that can be rallied or embers of hope that can be fanned into a prairie fire. The Left today doesn’t see our enemies on the Right as monolithic and we certainly don’t see our own ranks as hegemonic.

Campism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, November 2022

“This is utter nonsense.”

The gray-haired bespectacled man gestured angrily. It was July 21, 1989 and I was standing behind the Neither East Nor West literature table at the “Without Borders” anarchist conference/festival in San Francisco’s Mission High School. I was hanging out with the THRUSH girls and Bob McGlynn as the pissed-off individual continued to point at our table’s banner.

“Neither East Nor West, huh? That sounds an awful lot like the slogan of the Italian Fascist MSI. Neither Left nor Right.”

“We’re anarchists, not fascists,” Bob said.

“Anarchists, fascists, it’s all the same.” The man delivered his verbal coup. “If you’re not for the international socialist revolution you’re for reactionary capitalist imperialism.”

I’ve recently written a couple of columns exposing the idiocy that is Fascist Third Positionism.[1] Let’s now talk about campism and legitimate efforts to transcend it. In order to discuss international politics, let’s start with an analogy.

Fascisms: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, October 2022

Jeremy was a dandy. At a time when young men were going hippie—growing their hair long, wearing faded, ripped blue jeans with western or tie-dyed shirts, buckskin or Edwardian vests and sandals or cowboy boots—Jeremy wore sharply pressed pleated dark slacks, pastel dress shirts with smart cardigan sweaters highlighted by the occasional ascot, and black or brown wingtips. This was 1970 and I was just such a wannabe hippie when I boarded the local Ventura city bus to sit down next to Jeremy. He sniffed in disdain at my unruly appearance and went back to writing in his notebook.

“I’m on the Prom Committee,” he said, holding his pen in the air between thumb and forefinger. “We’re developing the theme for this year’s Prom. What do you think about ‘a taste of bittersweet’?”

I had no school spirit nor had I plans to attend my high school prom so I simply shrugged. Jeremy was a walking contradiction. Everybody knew he was gay even though he was not out. He was overtly Catholic however and always wore a silver crucifix with a finely tooled image of the bloodied Jesus around his neck. Michael boarded the bus the next stop and sauntered back to where we sat. Michael was a year older and now a freshman at UC Santa Barbara where he had participated in the Isla Vista student riots that burned down the Bank of America. He wasn’t just a shaggy hippie but also a burgeoning New Leftist like myself. Michael and Jeremy despised each other. So while Michael and I chatted, Jeremy and Michael ignored each other. Then Michael happened to mention he “planned to hitchhike around Europe in the summer.”

“Spain is quite lovely, although a tad hot in the summertime,” Jeremy feigned a casual air. “I visited Spain last summer for an Opus Dei retreat and I had such a wonderful time.”

Logic: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, September 2022

I was on a college track in high school getting mostly A’s and B’s. There wasn’t quite the feeding frenzy in 1970 to stack my academic CV and get into the very best institution of higher education I could. Besides, my parents were barely middle class and we’d agreed that, to save money I’d attend the local community college for two years before transferring to UC Santa Cruz.

One of my English teachers my senior year was Lynn Bjorkman who instructed us on how to write a proper nonfiction essay and academic paper in preparation for our college careers. His specialty was the “science of logic,” both the formal logic of propositions, proofs and inferences and the informal logic of natural language argumentation and logical fallacies. He was a singularly unappealing individual who gave milquetoast a bad name. In the days when Star Trek’s Mr. Spock was the fascinating poster boy for logic, we would pass around notes depicting Bjorkman as an addled cube-headed robot spewing logical nonsense.

I was into pro-Summerhill/Skool Abolition/student liberation politics, so I decided to write an academic-style term paper using Marshall McLuhan’s famous catchphrase “the medium is the message.” In education that meant the message (content) of freedom and democracy was being taught in educational institutions (forms) that were profoundly authoritarian and hierarchical. So I argued that the form/medium invariably prevailed over the content/message, using plenty of quotes, footnotes and a respectable bibliography that included AS Neill’s Summerhill, Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Miseducation, Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Jerry Farber’s The Student as Nigger. I got a C- on the paper. Bjorkman commented that my writing was bright and sparkling on the surface but deeply flawed logically. He also remarked that I was actually dangerous and unfortunately would make a persuasive propagandist. But aside from noting an occasional logical fallacy in the margins, he never engaged with my argument’s logic point-by-point nor did he try to refute my conclusions.

Left of the Left: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, July 2022

I sometimes view humanity’s sordid past as one long, interminable tale chronicling organized bands of murderous thugs trying to exterminate each other. Much as I admire the sentiment of pacifism and humanism, I’m neither a pacifist nor a humanist. Homicide seems to be part of our species, with genocide often its inevitable conclusion.

I’ve been on the left of the Left for most of my life; from being a left anarchist in my youth to a half-assed libertarian Marxist today. That means embracing a vision of stateless, classless global communism even as I abhor the terrors perpetrated by Leninist movements and regimes. I consider all forms of Fascism an abomination, and I dismiss the red-brown sophistry of Third Positionism as fascist sleight-of-hand. In the wake of the precipitous 1989-91 collapse of the Communist bloc, there’s been an upsurge of tankyism/campism on the Left that sees world conflict in terms of US-led imperialism versus any and all opposition to imperialism. That anti-imperialist “camp” is considered socialist by default, even when it’s in defense of patently capitalist, authoritarian, totalitarian, even outright fascist regimes. Then there’s the steady rehabilitation of overtly Fascist/Nazi politics. Last column I commented that, when I was growing up I only saw Nazis as fictional TV characters. Now I see them unashamedly flaunting their fascism in the Republican Party and in demonstrations I’ve recently organized against.

So why do I identify with the Left, despise the Right, and consistently choose socialism over barbarism every time?

Revolution, war, chess: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, February 2022

“Shachmat,” Uri said in Hebrew, then English, “checkmate.”

I was stunned. I’d dominated the chess board as white, with eleven of my sixteen pieces intact and pushing aggressively into black’s territory. I’d mercilessly attacked him throughout the game until he had only a half dozen pieces left on the board. I was just about to deliver the coup de grâce when he put me in check with his remaining knight, then checkmated me with his remaining bishop.

“Another game?” Uri asked, the right side of his face and his right arm marked by a stroke.

American socialism revisited: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, October 2021

Socialism for the rich; capitalism for the poor.

It’s an oft-repeated Leftist cliché that encapsulates an entire socio-political-economic analysis in a single sentence. It was first promulgated by Michael Harrington and frequently repeated by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, and Robert Reich. The gist of this argument is that capitalist corporations receive government largess in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, and favorable legislation while the general population is left to fend for itself. Big business regularly receives favorable treatment and corporate welfare from the government which allows corporations to “privatize profits and socialize losses.” The rest of us are shit-out-of-luck.(1)

Anti-imperialism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, September 2021

I am against imperialism, be it French, British, US or Chinese. I am not an “anti-imperialist,” since that is a political position supporting national liberation movements opposed to imperialist powers.
—Gilles Dauvé

Mark Twain was an anti-imperialist, a member of the American Anti-Imperialist League (1898-1920) which opposed US annexation of the Philippines. For the League, just republican government was based on the principle of the “consent of the governed” as embodied in the Declaration of Independence, Washington’s Farewell Address, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The imperialism of US territorial expansion thus violated the classical liberal precepts of self-government and non-intervention as put forward by British writers like John A. Hobson. Twain’s dark sarcasm and claims of America’s liberatory intent notwithstanding, he was neither so generous nor as damning regarding the US continental expansion of Manifest Destiny that expropriated the native peoples. The raison d’être of this type of anti-imperialism was simple; empire was bad and needed to be morally opposed.