What's Happened Since I've Been Gone

I guess I need to explain my absence. My cancer came back and I've spent the last four months undergoing chemotherapy. The first few weeks were truly debilitating and I couldn't have blogged even if I wanted to. But after that--I just didn't want to. I was getting bored with my own posts. So with chemo as the excuse I took a break from blogging.

The good news is that the chemo worked--I am now in complete remission. In celebration my wife and I will be taking a vacation, including 12 days on a Caribbean cruise. I've never done that before--it's definitely an old man's holiday. So regular blogging won't resume until early May when we get home, but I'm chomping at the bit to get started again.

I've been gratified to see that even in the absence of new material, this blog has attracted 20 - 30 legit hits per day--pretty good for an amateur covering a very niche topic.

So if I've been sick, then my friends over at Socialist Action (SA) have been going stir-crazy. They managed to post exactly one (1) article during the month of March. I sure am glad I haven't paid for a subscription to the print newspaper--it must be mostly blank pages by now.

The reason for the silence is obvious. SA is unapologetically pro-Putin. To summarize their position in my own words, while they acknowledge that Russia is a capitalist/imperialist state, the country is nevertheless an objective force for progress because it necessarily must oppose the much stronger American imperialism. The real cause of the Ukraine war, in this view, is not anything that Putin or the Ukrainian people have done, but instead it's entirely the fault of "US imperialism"--that largely mythical boogeyman upon which all evil can be blamed.

On April 11th SA's chief honcho and failed presidential candidate Jeff Mackler finally posted a long article explaining at great length the position I've just described. The supposed sins of the USA are catalogued in detail. For example:

• Ukraine is dominated by US-funded fascists, such as the Azov Battalion.
• Fascist snipers shot 100 innocent civilian on Maidan Square in 2014.
• Fascists overthrew the duly elected president, Viktor Yanukovych--forcing him to flee to Russia.
• The US installed (somehow, mysteriously) the fascist prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. 

And so on. He cites no references for any of this--neither as links nor in a bibliography. His only source for the fascist snipers are unspecified remarks by Victoria Nuland--he provides neither the date nor venue for her speech. It's impossible to track this down. His only other source is a booklet authored by--Jeff Mackler--of all people.

In other words, Mr. Mackler just makes stuff up. You can't believe a word he says.

SA's call to action is to demonstrate against the US government for forcing Putin to invade Ukraine--as summarized by their key demand: US Out Now! Hands off Ukraine! Needless to say this is crazy-talk, and will attract no support from anybody on the American political spectrum.

One last thing: I can't let Mr. Mackler's antisemitism go unchecked. The fact that current president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish apparently sticks in his craw. The only mention of the man's name is this: "We note with contempt Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s recently-proclaimed affinity for Zionist Israel’s model of a militarized state aimed at the subjugation of oppressed people."

If Mr. Mackler is nutty, then our comrades in Solidarity are perfectly sane. A long editorial, dated March 2nd, is posted by the "National Committee." The piece is well worth reading, and I recommend you do so. 

I think the article is mostly correct. They unambiguously condemn Russia for the invasion and are not making excuses for Putin. But at the same time they write:

NATO’s expansion into post-Soviet Eastern Europe, up to Russia’s borders, was all the more dangerous because it was not only a power grab, but also ideologically driven by the U.S. establishment’s assumption, after the Soviet Union’s collapse and the crushing U.S. victory over Iraq in the 1990-91 Kuwait war, that its rule was uncontested. It violated assurances that U.S. diplomats at the highest level had made to Soviet leader Gorbachev, and was already called by George Kennan in the 1990s a “tragic mistake” that Russia ultimately would never accept.

This is absolutely correct. NATO should never have expanded east of the Oder/Neisse line (today Germany's eastern border). The extension into eastern Europe has to be seen by Russia as a threat. The Biden administration's biggest mistake was to insist that Ukraine have a hypothetical right to join NATO. Indeed, I think that was the proximate cause of the war to begin with.

Unlike Solidarity, I do not believe NATO should be abolished--I do think it needs to retreat from Russia's borders. The editorial also states that "...NATO and particularly U.S. imperialism are at least equally aggressive and as dangerous as Russian annexationism." I do not agree with the adjective equally here--Putin is by far most at fault.

Contra Jeff Mackler, they write:

It is painful to see how much of the U.S. peace movement swallowed the simplistic story that the events of 2014 in Ukraine, when a spectacularly corrupt pro-Russian government was deposed under pressure of a mass movement (over whether to join a European trade bloc or a Russian-led Eurasian one), were a “fascist coup” and a “genocide” of Russian-speaking regions.

In these claims, some kernels of reality are wrapped inside layers of twisted falsehoods that could (and do) come straight from the Kremlin – as if, for example, violent ultra-nationalist forces, which do exist in Ukraine, are more powerful there than they are in Russia!

I couldn't have put it better myself!

On a completely different topic, news comes that Socialist Resurgence (SR) will unite with a grouplet called Workers' Voice (WV), with the new group adopting that latter name. They write:

We are in agreement about the necessity for principled regroupment of revolutionary groups. The two groups carried out common discussions and practical work for two years and have come to a shared perspective on the fundamental situation facing the working class and oppressed today. On this basis, a congress was held on March 19-20, 2022, in which WV and SR voted to merge as Workers’ Voice. Our congress included observers from the International Workers League, Revolutionary Socialist Organizing Project, Tempest Collective, Corriente Obrera, and affiliates of the Revolutionary Socialist Network. 

As a fused organization, Workers’ Voice brings together two historic traditions of world Trotskyism into a common revolutionary party.

The "two historic divisions" represent two versions of the Fourth International (FI): that of the United Secretariat, which purports to be the original FI, and the International Workers' League-Fourth International  (IWL-FI), which claims a mission to "reconstruct" the original FI. (A more useless mission is hard to imagine.)

The Workers' League existed back in my day (1970s), then led by a fellow named Tim Wohlforth. In a play on his name, our derogatory name for them was the Woolies. I did not know them well--there weren't many Woolies in the cities where I lived. I say more about this in one of my earliest posts, here.

The IWL-FI writes a history of their movement--it reads like an endlessly tedious soap opera. I couldn't make much sense of it. Mr. Wohlforth is not mentioned at all--I think he was forced out in disgrace. More useful than the text itself are the footnotes. They're explanatory and can be read independently--and serve as a useful summary.

I've since googled around and discovered that Mr. Wohlforth died in 2019 at age 86. He spent the last decade of his life in Ashland, OR, where he was a member of the Society of Friends Meeting--a tradition he picked up from his childhood. He wrote mystery novels (with some success) and mentored others in that craft. Here is his obituary, and here is a reminiscence. Neither mentions his Workers' League years, but his Wikipedia page does. He is survived by a wife, a son, two grandchildren, and many friends. In other words, he was a successful and accomplished man.

I do wish the new Workers' Voice success. Certainly not in making a world revolution--heaven forbid--but in producing an interesting and useful web page from which I may learn something, and from which I can draw inspiration.

Further Reading:

• American Brezhnevism Today
• What's Happening at Socialist Resurgence?
• 'Against the Current' Celebrates 200 Issues