Don’t Bicker, Organize

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Weekend Edition May 24-26, 2013

Generation Leftover

The Silent Death of the American Left

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Is there a Left in America today?

There is, of course, a Left ideology, a Left of the mind, a Left of theory and critique. But is there a Left movement?

Does the Left exist as an oppositional political, cultural or economic force? Is anyone intimidated or restrained by the Left? Is there a counterforce to the grinding machinery neoliberal capitalism and its political managers?

We can and do at CounterPunch and in similar publications, such as Monthly Review and the New Left Review, publish analyses of capitalism and its inherent vulnerabilities, catalogue its predations and wars of military conquest and imperial exploitation. But where is our capacity to confront the daily horrors of drone strikes, kill lists, mass layoffs, pension raids and the looming nightmare of climate change?

It is a bitter reality, brought into vivid focus by five years of Obama, that the Left is an immobilized and politically impotent force at the very moment when the economic inequalities engineered by our overlords at Goldman Sachs who manage the global economy, should have recharged a long-moribund resistance movement back to life.

Instead the Left seems powerless to coalesce, to translate critique into practice, to mobilize against wars, to resist incursions against basic civil liberties, powerless to confront rule by the bondholders and hedgefunders, unable to meaningfully obstruct the cutting edge of a parasitical economic system that glorifies greed while preying on the weakest and most destitute, and incapable of confronting the true legacy of the man they put their trust in.

This is the politics of exhaustion. We have become a generation of leftovers. We have reached a moment of historical failure that would make even Nietzsche shudder.

We stand on the margins, political exiles in our own country, in a kind of mute darkness, a political occlusion, increasingly obsessed, as the radical art historian Tim Clark put it a few years ago in a disturbing essay in New Left Review, with the tragedy of our own defeat.

Consider this. Two-thirds of the American electorate oppose the ongoing war in Afghanistan. An equal amount objected to intervention in Libya. Even more recoil at the grim prospect of entering the Syrian theater.

Yet there is no antiwar movement to translate that seething disillusionment into action. There are no mass demonstrations. No systematic efforts to obstruct military recruiting. No nationwide strikes. No campus walkouts. No serious divestment campaigns against companies involved in drone technology.

Similar popular disgust is evident regarding the imposition of stern austerity measures during a prolonged and enervating recession. But once again this smoldering outrage has no political outlet in the current political climate, where both parties have fully embraced the savage bottom line math of neoliberalism.

Homelessness, rampant across America, is a verboten topic, unmentioned in the press, absent from political discourse. Hunger, a deepening crisis in rural and urban America, is a taboo subject, something left to religious pray-to-eat charities or the fickle whims of corporate write-offs.

What do they offer us, instead? Pious homilies about the work ethic, the sanctity of the family unit, the self-correcting laxative of market forces.

The economic immiseration of black America, brutal and unrelenting, is simply elided, erased from the political dialogue, even at jam sessions of the Congressional Black Caucus. Instead, whenever
Obama mentions the plight of black Americans (about once every two years by my count), as he did in his patronizing commencement addresses this spring, it is to chide blacks about cleaning up their acts, admonishing them to stop complaining about their circumstances and work harder at adopting the flight plan of white corporate culture.

The self-evident need for large-scale public works projects to green the economy and put people to work goes unmentioned, while the press and the politicians engage in a faux debate over the minutia of sequestration and sharpen each others knives to begin slashing Social Security and Medicare. Where’s the collective outrage? Where are the marches on the Capitol? The sit-ins in congressional offices?

A few weeks ago I wrote an essay on the Obama administration’s infamous memo justifying drone strikes inside countries like Pakistan and Yemen that the US is not officially at war against. In one revealing paragraph, a Justice Department lawyer cited Richard Nixon’s illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War as a precedent for Obama’s killer drone strikes. Let’s recall that the bombing of Cambodia prompted several high-ranking officials in the Nixon cabinet to resign, including CounterPunch writer Roger Morris. It also sparked the student uprising at Kent State, which lead the Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes to declare a state of emergency, ordering the National Guard to rush the campus. The Guard troops promptly began firing at the protesters, killing four and wounding nine. The war had come home.

Where are those protests today?

The environment is unraveling, thread by thread, right before our eyes. Each day brings more dire news. Amphibians are in stark decline across North America. Storms of unimaginable ferocity are strafing the Great Plains week after week. The Arctic will soon be ice-free. The water table is plummeting in the world’s greatest aquifer. The air is carcinogenic in dozens of California cities. The spotted owl is still going extinct. Wolves are beginning gunned down by the hundreds across the Rocky Mountains. Bees, the great pollinators, are disappearing coast-to-coast, wiped out by chemical agriculture. Hurricane season now lasts from May to December. And about all the environmental movement can offer in resistance are a few designer protests against a pipeline which is already a fait accompli.

Our politics has gone sociopathic and liberals in America have been pliant to every abuse, marinated in the toxic silt of Obama’s mordant rhetoric. They eagerly swallow every placebo policy Obama serves them, dutifully defending every incursion against fundamental rights. And each betrayal only serves to make his adoring retinue crave his smile; his occasional glance and nod all the more urgently. Still others on the dogmatic Left circle endlessly, like characters consigned to their eternal roles by Dante, in the ideological cul-de-sac of identity politics.

How much will we stomach before rising up? A fabricated war, a looted economy, a scalded atmosphere, a despoiled gulf, the loss of habeas corpus, the assassination of American citizens…

One looks in vain across this vast landscape of despair for even the dimmest flickers of real rebellion and popular mutiny, as if surveying a nation of somnambulists.

We remain strangely impassive in the face of our own extinction.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book (with Joshua Frank) is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

This is a condensed version of a talk delivered at the University of Oregon.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/24/the-silent-death-of-the-american-left/

Don’t Bicker, Organize

by Ron Jacobs / May 26th, 2013

Recently, Counterpunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair posed the question “Is there a Left in America today?” His article was not the first in recent times to pose the question but it did receive a fair amount of attention given the prominence of Counterpunch in the US Left. To sum the piece up in a sentence, it stated that yes, there is a Left, but it is in a fairly deep slumber. Whether one agrees with St. Clair’s essay or not, the facts are as follows. St. Clair is not the first of today’s leftists to pose this question, nor is it a question easily dismissed by some stock answer regarding cynicism, ignorance of the facts on the ground, or some other dismissive remark (one I heard accused the writer of ultra-leftism.)

The question is fair and needs to be asked. The magazine St. Clair edits is known for its provocative style. That’s why it’s called Counterpunch. It’s supposed to make its friends feel uncomfortable on occasion and its enemies unsure on their feet in the ring of politics. Ideally, it causes the latter to fall down for the count every once in a while and the former to challenge the zone they feel comfortable in. Even more to the point for those who are its friends, it should provoke debate that will move the revolution we all know we need that much closer.

I don’t want to sound like an old-timer here–in part because I don’t feel like one mentally or emotionally (physically is sometimes another matter)–but mostly because what I aim to write is not passé or irrelevant to the current situation. The Left has been here before. The historical circumstances were different, but the static situation was eerily similar. Although I could be referring to the 1950s in the United States, when anti-communism was the national faith and leftists were considered on a par with Satan and his dominions by the mainstream media and most of its readers, the period I want to talk about is the 1970s and 1980s.

The New Left was in retreat. A combination of victories and half-victories, massive repression, a retooling of the Democratic Party, and the demise of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had created a situation where a multitude of organizations existed on the US Left. All too many of them considered their line to be the correct one. None were very willing to compromise, preferring instead to fine tune their particular interpretation of Marx, Lenin and the rest to such a point that instead of gaining adherents, they slowly but surely lost them. By the end of the 1970s, some of these groups were working on the left end of the Democratic Party, hoping to expand the small opening created by George McGovern’s 1972 campaign into creating a genuine left parliamentary opposition in the US. Other groups were fighting amongst themselves, listening to provocateurs in their midsts, or just dissolving into thin air, as it were. Meanwhile, the US right wing was consolidating its forces behind millions and millions of corporate dollars. The result was the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House and the portrayal of Jimmy Carter, the creator of the Carter doctrine (which further bound the Empire’s military to the authoritarian regimes under whose lands the energy industry’s oil profits lay), as a leftist and wimp.

Nothing has been the same since. The Left waged successful campaigns against US support for apartheid, but hardly bothered to oppose the US invasion of Grenada. It was also fairly successful in opposing US support for the Contras in Nicaragua and the bloody regime killing thousands in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America. Unfortunately, their activities did not foresee the creation of an extralegal funding process for the Contras or the emptiness of the legislation against the human rights violations of the El Salvadorian government. Also, despite one of the broadest campaigns against nuclear weapons in history, the Pentagon and its corporate cohorts placed their missiles throughout Europe. By 1989, the response of the Left to the Bush administration’s invasion of Panama was barely a whimper. Then came Bill Clinton–the popular pretender to the progressives’ throne. In a litany fairly well known, Clinton pushed the neoliberal wet dream known as NAFTA through Congress. Then he “reformed” public assistance to the poor. Then he pushed through the Omnibus Crime and Terrorism Bill, making federal crimes out of a multitude of political activities and increasing the number of federal crimes that were punishable by death. Oh yeah, he reneged on LGBT equality and injected racial coding into his campaign as if he were a modern day Republican. Meanwhile, he and Tony Blair maintained a deadly sanctions regime on Iraq while bombing it at will. Besides all this, Clinton lobbed cruise missiles much like Barack Obama launches armed drones. On top of all this, he helped create the situation that provoked the crash of 2008. No, he wasn’t solely responsible, but the illusion of money where there wasn’t any greatly expanded during his rule. And the Left was rather silent.

So, what does this have to do with today? To begin, the Left is rather silent. There are a few campaigns organized around the suffering environment, some of them even bringing thousands of people to the streets. The Occupy movement raised the question of corporate greed and responsibility, but when certain elements within the movement directly challenged not just “bad” corporations but the system of capitalism itself, the Democratic White House aligned with the forces of law and order and cracked down hard. This was after the White House’s current occupant rode to his position on a wave of disgust with the wars and cronyism of Wall Street, the Pentagon and Congress. After decades of painting corporate liberals as tantamount to socialists and communists, the right wing dominates the political arena in the United States. The loyal opposition is spot on when it comes to instances of individual racism like the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2011, but ignores the ultimately more damaging institutional racism that has never been far removed from the US mainstream. That same opposition chastises a lone protester who challenges the president on his drone assassination program and the prison camp known as Gitmo, but says little or nothing when those programs murder and imprison innocents. This is the hegemony of capital at work. There is nothing it can not purchase, silence or kill. Elections and highways, politicians and militaries, there is a price on it all. And it is us who pays that price. It is also us who must end this dynamic.

It is time to organize. We don’t have time to bicker. Debate over tactics and approaches, yes. Bickering and name-calling, no. Leave the latter to those whom we wish to defeat.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/05/dont-bicker-organize/