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Willie Cotton, SWP candidate for lieutenant governor of New York, speaks at June 24 protest against antisemitism. “Working class and unions must rally against Jew-hatred and pogroms,” Steve Clark told conference. (Photo: MILITANT/ELIZABETH LARISCY; Caption: The Militant)
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For some reason all the links in this post were erased. I've tried to restore some of them, but that's still a work in progress.
Sometimes I think Comrade Jack Barnes doesn't believe his own bullshit. He and his fellow Troika members, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark, propose a long list of incredible propositions. It is hard to take them seriously.
Our
recent post concerned the
first installment of Steve Clark & Roy Landerson's account of the Socialist Workers Party's (SWP) International Conference. Today we consider the sequel by the same authors, entitled
‘Live a life focused on conquering workers power from capitalists, war makers’ — Cuban Revolution set example for fighters. It reports on speeches by Comrades Mary-Alice and Steve.
Mary-Alice's remarks, in defense of the Cuban "Revolution," are full of howlers. For example, whatever the justification--or lack thereof--for Washington's blockade, the notion that it is "'saving' them from the government they have freely chosen for nearly seven decades" is absurd. Since Castro has come to power there has never been a free election in Cuba. That Cubans would in their majority vote for little food, no clean water, no transport, no jobs and now almost no electricity is beyond belief. The Castro kleptocrats are not that popular.
The Party is mustering a massive defense in opposition to the US blockade--or at least it's trying to. In its
current issue The Militant does not mention any US demonstrations on behalf of Cuba. Of course the reason is obvious--a failed state such as Cuba does not inspire many people. So they're taking a different approach: pointing out the most important gains of the Cuban "Revolution." Americans are not asked to rally around the Cuban flag for any straightforward materialist reasons--all of which are in short supply. Instead these dialectical materialist Marxists are inspired by "...the proletarian internationalist example revolutionary Cuba has set from Latin America, to Vietnam, to Africa and beyond."
Cuba has apparently not contributed anything of actual material benefit to humanity--and certainly not to Cubans. But their spiritual contribution--in the form of
solidarity--is enormous. It's
solidarity all the way down.
The former Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde fought for independence beginning in the 1960s. They were both successful in 1975 after the fascist Salazar regime was overthrown in Portugal. In Guinea-Bissau there was much violence; in Cape Verde the effort was mostly peaceful. Today, according to Wikipedia,
Cape Verde is a stable parliamentary democracy with a growing economy.
Guinea-Bissau is ruled by a military junta and is among the poorest countries in the world.
It's that Cuban effort in Guinea Bissau that thrills Comrade Mary-Alice. Indeed, as detailed by Wikipedia, the rebels claimed assistance from Cuba, among other countries. Pathfinder Press, the Party's publishing house, has released a new book touting the heroism of a certain Victor Dreke, entitled
Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, also written by Mr. Dreke. According to Mary-Alice, (emphasis mine)
“Party members and supporters have already been working with others to organize events to get this book into the hands of working people and students, encouraging them to read and use it. ...“And we’re just barely out of the starting blocks.”
Today on Amazon the book is ranked at a bit over a million on the bestseller list (#1 is the top spot), which from my experience means they last sold a copy from that platform about a month ago--hardly an impressive launch off those starting blocks.
Admittedly, Amazon is not the important distribution channel for Pathfinder titles. Instead comrades go hawking books door to door on semiannual subscription drives, during which they also sell books. They set themselves a quota to sell something over a 1000 copies during a 10-week drive. It's more than they sell on Amazon--but probably not a lot more. The odds of this book going viral are very long indeed.
Now it gets weird: Somehow selling copies of this book is what is meant by the obscure slogan
Deeper into the working class. As quoted above, comrades are not just supposed to read the book, but also to "use it." The so-called "revolutionary" effort fighting a guerilla war in the jungle in a country that was then and still is one of the poorest in the world--from that experience comrades are to draw lessons about current American politics! Go figure.
That, as best I can determine, is the extent of the Party's defense of the Cuban "Revolution."
The problem, per Comrade Waters, is "...that for the past 67 years, since the triumph in Cuba, there has “not been a single victorious socialist revolution anywhere in the world.'" For anybody who fancies themselves as a revolutionary socialist worker-Bolshevik that's got to be a real downer.
And the two outstanding socialist revolutions and proletarian leaderships of the 20th century, led by Lenin and by Fidel Castro, were Russian and Cuban.
What happened to China? When I was a comrade the Party championed the "Chinese Revolution" of 1949, however deformed it may have been by Stalinism. For decades after the end of the Cold War, the Party was claiming that no true counterrevolution had happened--that China and the ex-Soviet space were all still socialist under the skin. It was nonsense, but the Party held to it for decades as detailed in Comrade Barnes' 1998 book
US Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War. But no more--China is now a full-on capitalist country, run by the hopelessly misnamed Chinese Communist Party. The Long March has been airbrushed out of history. (For the record, in my view China is not socialist, but also not capitalist. I'd call it mercantilist--a form of pre-capitalism.)
Making a bit more sense, Mary-Alice says
More than three decades after the fall of hated Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, these petty-bourgeois radical currents look to China as the principal alternative to what they see as U.S. imperialism’s “unipolar” world. Beijing is both the Stalinists’ new capital of “world socialism” and creditor-in-chief of “the Global South,” the wished-for capitalist counterweight to U.S. imperialist dominance.
She is on to something here. There are lots of petty-bourgeois radicals floating around, notably on the progressive Left in the Democrat Party, and certainly in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). But I don't see many of them claiming a Maoist heritage. Maoism, as an ideology, seems moribund.
Instead I see much of the Left coalescing around some variant of Trotskyism--Trotsky being the only dead Russian unsullied by not being a mass murderer. (This,
in my opinion, was only because he never had the opportunity.) Perhaps I'm biased due to the nature of my blog--I study Trotskyists--but I haven't encountered much conversation about the virtues of Maoism anywhere.
Speaking of petty-bourgeois radicals who claim to be Trotskyist, there's no better example than
Left Voice--a quality blog run by a
collective of very petty-bourgeois academics from New York City. Mary-Alice's next paragraph is absolutely right on the money!
What’s new today is the convergence of these [petty-bourgeois] currents with the sharp rise of reactionary, Islamist, Jew-hating organizations and actions around the world, which has accelerated since the Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom against Israel.
It's an unholy alliance between so-called progressives (including pseudo-Trotskyists) and Islamic fascism. On this the SWP and I are in full agreement. Killing all the Jews won't solve ANY of the world's problems--especially not for Palestinians! Both the Islamists and the progressive Left are using the Jews as a scapegoat. However crazy the reasoning, kudos to the Socialist Workers Party for seeing this for what it is: a plea for mass murder.
Steve Clark, the junior Troika member, argues that the Iran war is actually two wars in one. The first war is an existential fight for Israel to exist. Should Israel lose this war then all the Jews in Palestine will be exterminated. Comrade Clark takes the Iranian government seriously when they demand Death to Israel.
The second war, happening at the same time, is happening because the US--or more precisely US imperialism is trying to conquer Iran to steal its oil. "Topmost for the U.S. ruling families are their own imperial interests in oil and gas resources, other lucrative markets, arms sales, and control over strategic sea routes and straits worldwide." The imperialists don't really care if all the Jews are killed--no sweat off their back. Apparently the Iranian threat of Death to America is just idle propaganda, and they don't really mean it.
This is just unbelievable. In truth, both Israel and the USA are threatened by an Iranian nuclear weapon, and it is essential for both countries to eliminate that threat.
I don't know how much of this Jack Barnes actually believes. It's all some very weird shit. There are people who think Comrade Jack is a secret Republican--and surely his positions on progressives' antisemitism, his opposition to wokeness, and his muscular defense of Israel will buttress their case.
But then there's all the other stuff. I don't know what to make of it.
Further Reading:
