I sent John Case on a mission. To scope out the The Committees of Correspondence for Socialism and Democracy's 6th National Convention in San Francisco, CA to see what we could do to get things patched up just like Change To Win and the AFL-CIO.
John went to San Fransisco with a flower in his hair.
I wanted to find out if I have pushed the CPUSA far enough off the political stage to the right to see if we could maybe get back together again with these poor marginalized souls. A better possibility than me and the wife getting back together again.
John tells me we will have to move further to the right in order to get unity of thought. Danny Rubin's new book should help to get us the rest of the way if I can get you folks to start reading it.
Here is the report John Case submitted to me.
Sam Webb
National Chair, CPUSA
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2009
From: John Case
Subject: CoC conference
Lonesome Hobo Economics -- On the Road at the CoC
San Francisco, CA.
The Committees of Correspondence for Socialism and
Democracy has just concluded its 6th National
Convention in San Francisco, CA. The CoC was founded in
1994 as a coalition of socialist-oriented groupings
from a number of organizations, including a large
section from the Communist Party following a split in
that organization after the collapse of the USSR. It
was a gathering of color! Multi-racial and
multinational. There were guests from Germany, El
Salvador, South Africa, France, Venezuela and Vietnam.
There were gays and straights. 200 Men and women very
active in a wide range of social, political and labor
constituencies.
"Build the progressive majority and a socialist future"
was the theme of the conference. I will get to that,
but the truth is I came out to see old friends more
than to engage in political discourse. One friend in
particular -- Charlene Mitchell -- was honored on
Thursday for her lifetime of devotion to expanding
democracy, to the struggle for equality, and to the
advance of socialist ideals. Charlene Mitchell was the
first African-American woman to run for President of
the Unites States, which she did in 1968 on the ticket
of the Communist Party of the US. She also played an
historic role in the worldwide defense of Angela Davis
in 1970, who was targeted and framed for murder during
a period when more than one police force was seeking to
exterminate anyone connected with the Black Panther
Party. Angela Davis was acquitted and Ms Mitchell went
on to help found the National Alliance Against Racist
and Political Repression, which mounted many campaigns
against racist and repressive attacks. Courage,
persistence, faith, and a sharp mind for both politics
and human character --Charlene has mentored many people
over her long life, this writer included. It was a joy
to participate in the tribute to her. Viva Charlene!!!
Now, on the substance: I confess it normally requires a
certain astral patience to sit through left-wing
conferences. And, in recent years, I have acquired a
strong allergy to dogmatic talk about socialism,
revolution, etc. However, the economic crisis, the
global climate change crisis, and the quality of the
movement that elected Barack Obama have accomplished
what a thousand manifestos could not: they have proven
that market failures of capitalism in certain areas
such as finance, health care, housing, environmental
policy, and retirement security make incremental steps
toward socialism matters of necessity that do not
require one to have the slightest familiarity with
socialist "doctrine" in order to recognize. In fact,
the ways in which the imperatives of greater
socialization make themselves apparent in health care,
financial regulation, retirement security, employment
for all who seek work, and large-scale intervention to
both prepare for and reverse trends in climate change,
argue strongly for an entirely new political
vocabulary. The new vocabulary must dis-enthrall the
tasks of economic recovery and progress from sterile
cold-war, and Vietnam era, Left-Right rhetoric.
While it is difficult to leave behind some longstanding
left-wing political categories, and plow fresh ground
for a new generation of socialist renewal, the CoC made
important progress. Carl Davidson calls this process
"imagining 21st Century socialism." Most important, in
this writer's view, was the focus on defining and and
elaborating the principles and programs upon which
progressive majorities can be built in all arenas of
politics: local, state, and national. For the Left to
think in terms of majorities is the single greatest
improvement arising from the defeat of the reactionary
"Reagan coalition" of which George W Bush was only the
latest and most sordid chapter.
Many challenges remain: there were not enough youth at
the conference. The electoral and unemployment issues
were under-covered. And the right balance between
"socialist" ideals and the progressive majority agenda
is still wobbly, partly because the new situation is --
really NEW! Nonetheless, workshops on socialist
education, international solidarity, economic and
social justice, climate change, peace and labor were
well attended, and many energetic ideas were shared.
Its happening! Socialism's reconnection with
broad-based democratic change in response to the crisis
is bearing fruit!
Venceremos!
John Case Harpers Ferry, WV
Friday, July 31, 2009
Speech to Chautauqua: The Communist Party — A work in progress
This is one of my important speeches. I was able to craft this speech by liberal use of generalities and skirted all specifics.
There is no reason to get into specifics of what to do about this or that plant closing. The bulldozers will come in, create a parking lot and in a few years all we be forgotten.
What we are specifically doing is best left unsaid lest the right-wing attacks us.
We want to go with the flow.
It is enough to describe Obama's policies as progressive. There is no reason to be specific. It is unfair that anyone ask me to state specifically what Obama has done that is progressive.
I am mastering American politics. This is the longest speech I have ever made without saying anything.
I like throwing a few words into my speeches that people need to use a dictionary to look up. This is a little trick I learned in college. Toss in a word people aren't familiar with at the beginning of a speech and while they are trying to figure out what you are talking about you can say a lot of things they might disagree with but what you say can be posted on the internet later.
I like the new way we can work to solve issues of racism. Sit around and belt down a few beers. I hope I get invited to the White House for a beer or two.
Cheers.
Sam Webb
National Chair, CPUSA
Speech to Chautauqua: The Communist Party—A work in progress
Author: Sam Webb, National Chair
First published 07/30/2009
A presentation to the Chautauqua Institution’s Heritage Lecture Series, July 21, 2009
Thanks for the kind introduction. I am happy to be a part of this prestigious conference and want to thank you and others for the invitation to be a participant.
This conference provides an important site to explore a world confronting challenges both near and long term that will tax our analytical and problem solving capacities.
The title of my talk is “American Communism,” which is so expansive that I could turn this presentation into a marathon. But I suspect such an attempt on my part would not be well received.
A far wiser course, I decided, would be to narrow down the scope of my remarks to this theme: “The Communist Party: A Work in Progress in a Changing World.”
I hope you will find it of interest; if any of you are expecting militant rhetoric and passionate appeals to storm the barricades, you will be disappointed so I apologize in advance.
So here goes!
No organization or institution can long exist in a condition of stasis; organizations in general and political parties and social movements in particular have to adjust to new conditions.
And the reason is simple: change is constant and organizations and institutions must, if they want to remain relevant, change in the face of changing conditions.
Since the beginning of this decade, the Communist Party has been reconfiguring its theory, politics, structures of organization, and, not least, finances to the turbulent times in which we live. We did so because we had no other choice. Necessity was the mother of invention.
To be sure, not everything turned out as we hoped and many things still have to be attended to.
On the whole, however, we challenged outdated notions and practices, adjusted our policies and style of work to new conditions, and gained experience.
Had we stood still, life would have left us in the rear view mirror. A glance at history, after all, reveals that the political landscape is littered with political and social formations that didn’t adapt to new realities.
But to our credit we chose change. We eagerly searched for new angles of looking at, thinking about, and reshaping the world.
Such an approach is consistent with and an imperative of Marxism. Otherwise, Marxism loses its capacity to assist people in their desire to re-imagine and remake the world – not in some sort of utopian way, but rather in a way that meets the expanding requirements of a good life at the beginning of the 21st century.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, who together developed an analytical structure and methodology that enabled the working class to comprehend and change the world, never claimed the “last word” on any subject; they never shoehorned facts to fit a preconceived theory; they never allowed abstract theoretical constructions by themselves to determine political policies or action.
Near the end of his life, Engels, in an effort to counter a dogmatic interpretation of historical materialism that was fashionable in the socialist movement of that time, wrote:
“Our conception of history is above all a guide to study… All history must be studied afresh.”
A decade or so later, Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian revolution asserted,
“A Marxist must take cognizance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.”
In other words, Marxism, if properly understood and practiced, has no affinity for lifeless schemes that squeeze contingency, contradictions, and novelty out of the process of social change. The repetition of timeless and abstract formulas, which the Communist movement has been guilty of at times, is inconsistent with Marxism’s spirit and letter.
Only when Marxism takes into account concrete realities, absorbs new experience, and is open-ended to new insights by Marxists and non-Marxist alike does its analytical and political power reveal its full potential. The truth is concrete.
I belabor this point because it is this method of inquiry that we are employing to the best of our ability to today’s world.
New Realities
The impulse to look at the world afresh springs from the inescapable new realities of the closing decades of the 20th and the first decade of this century that are reframing politics, economics, culture, and modes of thinking.
What were some of these realities?
To begin, the ascendency of the extreme right to political dominance signaled by the election of Ronald Reagan and continuing through the Bush years was a sobering and painful reality for anyone who favored peace, equality, fairness, and democracy.
The aim of this right wing grouping, of which the Bush administration was the last and most dangerous example, was to reestablish by any means necessary the unchallengeable hegemony of U.S. capitalism, to restore profits and wealth of the ruling elite, and to reconfigure the role and functions of the government to the advantage of the richest families and corporations.
While achieving many of their aims over a thirty-year period, their political project is now in shambles and its perpetrators have been discredited.
Of course, in the meantime, a heavy price was paid and working people and their allies were thrown on the defensive for that entire period.
The changing structure and distribution of economic activity and power across global space was something we could not ignore in our calibrations and recalibrations either.
As the Soviet Union was collapsing in 1991, thus removing one of the two states that structured world relations for nearly a half-century, China was emerging as the main rival to the global dominance of U.S. capitalism. It has been joined in recent years by India, Brazil and Russia. And East and South Asia has been the most dynamic region of capital accumulation over the past decade or so.
I would further add that other regional groupings, nations, international bodies, and hundreds of millions of people are resisting U.S. tutelage too.
When combined with the implosion of Wall Street and the Iraq disaster, it signals a terminal crisis of U.S. capitalism’s dominance of the world system of states. Or to say it differently, a unipolar world is giving way to a multipolar world, which presents both opportunities and dangers to the new administration and humanity.
In fact, an urgent question for the American people is the following: Will U.S. capitalism adapt peacefully to new world realities or will it employ massive force to maintain its standing? Bush tried force, but abjectly failed.
On the other hand, the new administration is going in a different direction. How far it will go is another question that can’t be answered yet.
Suffice it to say that the redefinition of the U.S. role in the world is among the most compelling issues in the first part of the 21st century, ranking in importance to combating global warming. Unless both are attended to, they could endanger the survival of our species on Mother Earth.
Where is the sustained boom?
The new dynamics of the U.S. economy that took shape in the late 1970s and structured the economy for the next three decades were another factor that compelled us to reexamine our traditional wisdom.
While the present economic crisis was triggered by the collapse of housing markets, it is located first of all, in the outgrowth of longer-term processes of capitalism that go back to the late 1970s.
Thirty years ago U.S. capitalism was beset by seemingly intractable and contradictory problems – high inflation and unemployment, declining confidence in the dollar as an international currency, new competitive rivals in Europe and Asia, a slowing of economic growth, and a falling profit rate.
All of these problems occurred in the context of progressively growing overproduction in world commodity markets.
Faced with this unraveling, then-chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker stepped into the breech and pushed up interest rates to record levels. This spike in interest rates sent unemployment rates soaring to double digit levels, forced the closing of scores of manufacturing plants and family farms, left communities of color in depression like conditions, and negatively impacted the global economy, particularly the developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
At the same time, the spiking of interests rates upward, redirected mobile capital abruptly and massively from hither and yon into U.S. financial channels where returns were now extremely high.
Once in financial channels, banks, investment houses, hedge funds, private equity firms and so on, intent on maximizing their profits in a very competitive and increasingly permissive regulatory environment raced at breakneck speed into a
massive buying and selling and borrowing and spending spree for the next three decades — all of which led to bubble economics, the erosion of the real economy, instability, and ultimately to economic ruin.
If the cause of the ascendency of finance lies in the contractions and decline of U.S. capitalism domestically and internationally, its lubricant was the production and reproduction, seemingly without end, of staggering amounts of debt — corporate, consumer and government.
Debt is as old as capitalism. But what was different in this period of financialization is that the production of debt and accompanying speculative excesses and bubbles were not simply passing moments at the end of a cyclical upswing, but essential to ginning up and sustaining investment and especially consumer demand in every phase of the cycle. Indeed, financialization grew to the point where it became the main determinant shaping the contours, structure, interrelations, evolution and dynamism of the national and world economy.
Without speculative bubbles, generated by the federal government and Federal Reserve over the past 15 years in Internet technology, then in the stock market, and most recently, in housing – the performance of the U.S. and world economy would have been far worse. But, as we are painfully learning, financialization is a two-edged sword.
Not since the Great Depression has the economy been in such bad shape. Forecasts that economic activity will resume at the end of this year or early next year are problematic in the minds of many economists. Don’t be surprised if the economy’s cyclical path is L-shaped — that is, deep and prolonged.
While we don’t know exactly what the contours and trajectory of the economy will be going forward, we do know the notion that capitalism isn’t a self-correcting system and that lifts all boats.
The notion that it is has its roots in the so-called “golden age” of U.S. capitalism from 1945-1973, during which economic growth rates, investment levels and living standards steadily increased for broad sections of the American people.
But there is a problem here. An era of stable and continuous growth is unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future. Indeed, the conditions for U.S. capitalism’s “golden age” no longer exist. They were specific to a historical moment — not universal and timeless features of U.S capitalism.
None of those conditions exist today; indeed just the opposite is the case and the economy is not poised either in the short or medium term to take off as it did in 1945; long-term stagnation is a real possibility unless the economy is radically restructured.
Environment Reeling under stress
Another factor nudging us to reexamine our policies is the potential catastrophe of global warming and environmental degradation. Almost daily we hear of species extinction, global warming, resource depletion, deforestation, and on and on to the point where we are nearly immune to its ominous possibilities.
Our planet cannot indefinitely absorb the impact of profit-driven, growth-without-limits capitalism. Many scientists say that unless we radically change our methods of production and consumption patterns in the near term, we will reach the point where damage to the environment will become irreversible.
Despite this, even the most modest measures of environmental protection are resisted by sections of the transnational corporations and their right wing extremists in Congress and in the media.
Embedded realities
Still another consideration that caused us to think afresh is the deep and persistent racial, gender, and regional inequalities that exist across the planet.
The evidence of these inequalities is obvious: massive hunger and malnutrition, dire poverty, pandemic diseases, daily and institutionalized brutality against peoples of color, systemic abuse and oppression of women, explosion of slums around mega-cities, massive migrations of workers and peasants in search of a better life and the decay of whole communities and regions.
While these conditions exist worldwide and within our own borders, the countries of the southern hemisphere experience the worst forms of deprivation and inequality. And they won’t tolerate this condition for another century.
Another framing element for our reevaluation is the new communications technologies. These technologies are changing the way that we receive our news, work, do business, live, play, interact, and think. They are compressing time and distance. And their penetration into every aspect of life can only grow as time goes by.
The emergence of new social movements of considerable scope and the new vigor of the labor movement also challenged our received wisdom and actions. Over the past three decades old and new oppositional forces, including a revitalizing (it’s a process and thus uneven and developing) labor movement have entered politics to challenge right wing domination, culminating in a many-layered coalition that was instrumental in the victory of Barack Obama.
Finally, we were nudged to change because the Communist Party (and the left generally) was neither big enough nor influential enough. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union we were small, not much more than 4000 members.
But with the split that occurred in 1991 our membership fell by a third, thus making our growth in size even more imperative.
Fresh look
Now that I mentioned to you some of the framing elements that weighed into our reconfiguration process, let me tell out you about the results of so far.
We are employing a methodology free of rigid and enclosed notions that resist new experience and discourage fresh thinking. Our catch phrase is to get in the mix, to join with others, to give priority to those struggles and issues that are impelling others into action.
We are giving greater coherence and elasticity to our strategic and tactical concepts and accenting the struggle for broad unity, and especially multi-racial and working class unity.
New emphasis is being attached to the popular character of the coalition, while at the same time giving prominence to the special role of the working class and labor movement as an emerging leader of this coalition.
We are taking a fresh look at the labor movement, noting the new positive developments, even asking ourselves whether quantitative changes were reaching a qualitative turning point in terms of labor’s outlook and practical activity.
The Internet is being utilized in a full-blooded way to communicate our message and organize our work. At the end of this year we are phasing out our print paper that goes back nearly 90 years and going over to daily online news.
We are shedding, what I call, a “mentality of marginalization.” Because of McCarthyism, the Cold War, the long economic expansion following WW II, and a resistance to thinking anew, the left, of which we are a part, found itself on the edges of politics for more than a half century. During this time, our ability to impact on broader political processes in the country has been narrowly circumscribed – nothing like the 1930s, nothing like the left in many other countries.
While the left stubbornly fought the good fight and made undeniable contributions over the past half-century, it was not a major player; it didn’t set the agenda or frame the debate; it didn’t determine the political direction of the country; it wasn’t a decider.
But the past doesn't have to be prelude to the future. Because of the new political landscape, the left has an opportunity to step from the edges into the mainstream of U.S. politics. It has a chance to become a player of consequence; a player whose voice is seriously considered in the debates bearing on the future of the country; a player that is able to mobilize and influence the thinking and actions of millions.
Whether we do depends on many factors, one of which is our ability to shake off this “mentality of marginalization.”
How does this mentality express itself? In a number of ways – in spending too much time agitating each other; in dismissing new political openings; in thinking that moderate reforms are at loggerheads with radical reforms; in seeing the glass as always half empty; in acting as if our outlook is identical with the outlook of millions; in turning the danger of cooptation into a rationale to keep a distance from reform struggles; in enclosing ourselves in narrow Left forms; in damning victories with faint praise; and in having nothing good to say about our country.
In this peculiar mindset, politics has few complexities. Change is driven only from the ground up. Winning broad majorities is not essential. There are no stages of struggle, no social forces that possess strategic social power, and no divisions worth noting. And distinctions between the Democratic and Republican parties are either of little consequence or disdainfully dismissed.
Unless the Left—and I include communists first of all—sheds this mentality, it will miss a golden opportunity at this moment to engage and influence a far bigger audience than it has in the past six decades.
Path to socialism
We are re-envisioning the path to socialism and socialist society, based on present day challenges and a critical examination of the socialist experience in the 20th century. What are some of its main elements?
Our vision is of a society that is peaceful, democratic, economically just and efficient, and ecologically sustainable. Our socialist goal privileges social solidarity, economic security and sustainability, equality, cooperation, respect for difference, and peace.
In our view, socialism is not simply a good idea, but an overriding necessity for humankind to find timely solutions to problems that threatens its very future – massive inequality and poverty, global warming, war and nuclear proliferation, energy and resource depletion, pandemic diseases, and so forth.
There are neither universal paths to nor universal models of socialism. Socialism has to grow out of the soil of a particular country, at a particular time, and in particular set of circumstances. Our country will be no exception. We will follow our own distinct nationally specific path.
Socialism must settle the “property question” (from capitalist to socialist property relations or to put it differently, from a capitalist to a socialist mode of production) to be sure. Every revolution must accomplish this essential task, and ours will be no different.
But how this is done and the pace by which it proceeds largely depends on concrete circumstances. At socialism’s dawn in any country and then long into the transition to socialism I expect that a mixed economy, operating in a regulated socialist market and combining different forms of socialist, cooperative, and private property, will prevail, albeit with tensions, contradictions, and dangers.
Such ownership relations and market mechanisms by no means preclude economic planning and democratic control. It is hard, in fact, to imagine how the transformation of the economy can be successfully tackled without democratic planning.
While political supremacy of the working class and its allies is an imperative, once acquired its task isn’t to smash the state into so many pieces, but rather to transform the class content of state structures; extend democratic rights into the economic, social and cultural spheres; enact new democratic forms of participation; and finish the democratic tasks left unfinished by capitalism – especially the elimination of racial and gender inequality.
I stress this because in the American mind, the idea that socialism and democracy are incompatible has widespread currency. And this perception can’t be ascribed solely to ruling-class propaganda. Socialist societies have had democratic shortcomings, too often major ones.
The path to socialism in our country will be long, laced at every turn with massive struggles on many levels and involve a wide array of class and social forces. It will proceed – not straightforwardly, not smoothly, not without reversals, but through stages and at each stage of struggle the balance of power will hopefully tip to the advantage of the working class and people.
Rather than one final conflict triggered by a generalized economic breakdown, I envision a series of connected political, economic, and social crises compressed in time and large in scale that result in a crises of confidence and legitimacy in capitalism and its institutional forms on the part of millions.
Such a rupture of power won’t settle everything once and for all, but it will constitute a decisive turn in a transitional process toward socialism.
Decades ago socialist revolutions grew out of economic catastrophes and major wars. But communists, going back to the 19th Century, never believed that armed struggle and civil war were the only or the preferred avenue to socialism.
“The worker,” Marx said in a speech in Amsterdam in 1872, “must one day conquer political supremacy in order… But we do not assert that the attainment of this end requires identical means. We know that one has to take into consideration the institutions, mores, and traditions of the different countries, and we do not deny that there are countries like England and America and if I am familiar with your institutions, Holland, where labor may attain its new goal by peaceful means.”
I would add that in recent years radical social transformations in relatively peaceful circumstances have occurred in Latin America.
There the force of an active, organized, and overwhelming majority of the working class and its allies combined with the winning of bridgeheads in state structures, including the military, have isolated elites, dislodged neo-liberal governments from power, and cleared the ground, so far peacefully, for social and socialist transformations.
We believe that such an outcome is possible here too. In fact, it is hard to imagine a non-peaceful path to socialism in our country.
Obviously, socialism isn’t imminent. As I see it, we aren’t living in an era of revolution, but rather an era of reform, including possibly radical reform, marked at its beginning by the election of the first African American president.
Six months into the Obama presidency, I would say without hesitation that the landscape, atmosphere, conversation, and agenda have strikingly changed compared to the previous eight years.
Obama's role
So far Obama’s presidency has both broken from the right-wing extremist policies of the Bush administration and taken steps domestically and internationally that go in a progressive direction.
At the same time, the administration hasn’t gone as far as we would have liked on a number of issues. He is neither a socialist nor a revolutionary despite the incessant claims of the far right.
All and all, however, the new President in deeds and words – and words do matter – has created new democratic space for peace, equality, and economic justice struggles. Whether this continues and takes on a consistently progressive, pro-people, radical reform direction depends in large measure on whether the movement that elected him fills and expands this space.
The struggle going forward, much like the New Deal, will be the outcome of a contested and fluid process involving broad class and social constituencies, taking multiple forms, and working out over time.
It will pivot on the expansion of social and economic rights, the reconfiguring of the functions of government to the advantage of working people, and the embedding of a new economic architecture and developmental path into the nation’s political economy.
No less importantly, it will also entail the recasting of the role of the U.S. in the global community along egalitarian and non-imperial lines.
“What’s all this talk about reform?” you may be asking. “Aren’t you a communist? Isn’t socialism your objective?”
Yes, socialism is the objective of the Communist Party and—according to recent public opinion polls—it is increasingly attractive to the American people. But clearly it is not on the immediate political agenda. Neither the current balance of forces nor the thinking of millions of Americans—the starting point in any serious discussion of strategy and tactics—has reached that point.
That socialism isn’t on the people’s action agenda, however, doesn’t mean that communists will zip our lips. Quite the contrary! We will talk it up and bring our modern, deeply democratic Twenty-First-Century vision of U.S. socialism to the American people. And with the use of the Internet we can reach an exponentially bigger audience than we could in the past.
As for our radical disposition, we are as radical as reality itself. And reality tells us that our main task is to assist in bringing the weight of the working class and other democratic forces to impress their interests on the struggle for reforms.
Current pase of struggle
The road to socialism is neither direct nor unencumbered. It will be complex, contradictory, roundabout, and go through different phases/stages of struggle.
It will only be reached in the course of struggles for reforms, including radical reforms and then only if tens of millions of American people embrace and fight for socialism.
If it only took the enthusiasm and energy of the left we would have had socialism long ago. Active majorities make history and social change, not militant minorities.
The left can help re-bend the arc of history in the direction of justice, equality, and peace. But only if we, and millions like us, pursue a sound strategy that unifies broad sections of the American people.
President Obama and progressive Congress people can’t be the only change agents and will be change agents only up to a point. Our responsibility is to support them, prod them, and constructively take issue with them when we have differing views.
But more importantly—and this is the heart of the matter—we have to reach, activate, unite, educate, and turn millions of Americans into “change agents” who can make the political difference in upcoming struggles.
Our parents and grandparents were such bottom-up change agents in the Depression years and the sixties. The American people today would do well to follow their example.
Likewise, communists of our generation would do well to follow the example of our Depression-era comrades. Without giving up their longer-term vision of socialism, they were guided by a sound strategy that accented struggles for reforms and broad unity; they employed flexible tactics; and they didn’t conflate their mood and temper with the mood and temper of the American people. As a result, they were a vital part of the political process of the Depression era.
Our nation faces great challenges as we plunge forward into this new century. But I am convinced that the people of this great land—and communists among them—will meet them as earlier generations met challenges on their watch.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sam Webb is the national chairperson of the Communist Party, USA. He spent his time in college drinking beer instead of protesting the War in Vietnam. From 1977 through 1988 he was the state organizer of the Communist Party in Michigan where he dissolved shop clubs of the Communist Party and sought out good relations with the business community. Earlier, he was active in the labor movement in his home state of Maine. Webb currently resides in New York City and led the effort to remodel the offices of the CPUSA into million dollar modern glass cubicles within red brick walls and cleaned up office space by liquidating the outdated ideas of Gus Hall and other past leaders of the CPUSA.
There is no reason to get into specifics of what to do about this or that plant closing. The bulldozers will come in, create a parking lot and in a few years all we be forgotten.
What we are specifically doing is best left unsaid lest the right-wing attacks us.
We want to go with the flow.
It is enough to describe Obama's policies as progressive. There is no reason to be specific. It is unfair that anyone ask me to state specifically what Obama has done that is progressive.
I am mastering American politics. This is the longest speech I have ever made without saying anything.
I like throwing a few words into my speeches that people need to use a dictionary to look up. This is a little trick I learned in college. Toss in a word people aren't familiar with at the beginning of a speech and while they are trying to figure out what you are talking about you can say a lot of things they might disagree with but what you say can be posted on the internet later.
I like the new way we can work to solve issues of racism. Sit around and belt down a few beers. I hope I get invited to the White House for a beer or two.
Cheers.
Sam Webb
National Chair, CPUSA
Speech to Chautauqua: The Communist Party—A work in progress
Author: Sam Webb, National Chair
First published 07/30/2009
A presentation to the Chautauqua Institution’s Heritage Lecture Series, July 21, 2009
Thanks for the kind introduction. I am happy to be a part of this prestigious conference and want to thank you and others for the invitation to be a participant.
This conference provides an important site to explore a world confronting challenges both near and long term that will tax our analytical and problem solving capacities.
The title of my talk is “American Communism,” which is so expansive that I could turn this presentation into a marathon. But I suspect such an attempt on my part would not be well received.
A far wiser course, I decided, would be to narrow down the scope of my remarks to this theme: “The Communist Party: A Work in Progress in a Changing World.”
I hope you will find it of interest; if any of you are expecting militant rhetoric and passionate appeals to storm the barricades, you will be disappointed so I apologize in advance.
So here goes!
No organization or institution can long exist in a condition of stasis; organizations in general and political parties and social movements in particular have to adjust to new conditions.
And the reason is simple: change is constant and organizations and institutions must, if they want to remain relevant, change in the face of changing conditions.
Since the beginning of this decade, the Communist Party has been reconfiguring its theory, politics, structures of organization, and, not least, finances to the turbulent times in which we live. We did so because we had no other choice. Necessity was the mother of invention.
To be sure, not everything turned out as we hoped and many things still have to be attended to.
On the whole, however, we challenged outdated notions and practices, adjusted our policies and style of work to new conditions, and gained experience.
Had we stood still, life would have left us in the rear view mirror. A glance at history, after all, reveals that the political landscape is littered with political and social formations that didn’t adapt to new realities.
But to our credit we chose change. We eagerly searched for new angles of looking at, thinking about, and reshaping the world.
Such an approach is consistent with and an imperative of Marxism. Otherwise, Marxism loses its capacity to assist people in their desire to re-imagine and remake the world – not in some sort of utopian way, but rather in a way that meets the expanding requirements of a good life at the beginning of the 21st century.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, who together developed an analytical structure and methodology that enabled the working class to comprehend and change the world, never claimed the “last word” on any subject; they never shoehorned facts to fit a preconceived theory; they never allowed abstract theoretical constructions by themselves to determine political policies or action.
Near the end of his life, Engels, in an effort to counter a dogmatic interpretation of historical materialism that was fashionable in the socialist movement of that time, wrote:
“Our conception of history is above all a guide to study… All history must be studied afresh.”
A decade or so later, Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian revolution asserted,
“A Marxist must take cognizance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.”
In other words, Marxism, if properly understood and practiced, has no affinity for lifeless schemes that squeeze contingency, contradictions, and novelty out of the process of social change. The repetition of timeless and abstract formulas, which the Communist movement has been guilty of at times, is inconsistent with Marxism’s spirit and letter.
Only when Marxism takes into account concrete realities, absorbs new experience, and is open-ended to new insights by Marxists and non-Marxist alike does its analytical and political power reveal its full potential. The truth is concrete.
I belabor this point because it is this method of inquiry that we are employing to the best of our ability to today’s world.
New Realities
The impulse to look at the world afresh springs from the inescapable new realities of the closing decades of the 20th and the first decade of this century that are reframing politics, economics, culture, and modes of thinking.
What were some of these realities?
To begin, the ascendency of the extreme right to political dominance signaled by the election of Ronald Reagan and continuing through the Bush years was a sobering and painful reality for anyone who favored peace, equality, fairness, and democracy.
The aim of this right wing grouping, of which the Bush administration was the last and most dangerous example, was to reestablish by any means necessary the unchallengeable hegemony of U.S. capitalism, to restore profits and wealth of the ruling elite, and to reconfigure the role and functions of the government to the advantage of the richest families and corporations.
While achieving many of their aims over a thirty-year period, their political project is now in shambles and its perpetrators have been discredited.
Of course, in the meantime, a heavy price was paid and working people and their allies were thrown on the defensive for that entire period.
The changing structure and distribution of economic activity and power across global space was something we could not ignore in our calibrations and recalibrations either.
As the Soviet Union was collapsing in 1991, thus removing one of the two states that structured world relations for nearly a half-century, China was emerging as the main rival to the global dominance of U.S. capitalism. It has been joined in recent years by India, Brazil and Russia. And East and South Asia has been the most dynamic region of capital accumulation over the past decade or so.
I would further add that other regional groupings, nations, international bodies, and hundreds of millions of people are resisting U.S. tutelage too.
When combined with the implosion of Wall Street and the Iraq disaster, it signals a terminal crisis of U.S. capitalism’s dominance of the world system of states. Or to say it differently, a unipolar world is giving way to a multipolar world, which presents both opportunities and dangers to the new administration and humanity.
In fact, an urgent question for the American people is the following: Will U.S. capitalism adapt peacefully to new world realities or will it employ massive force to maintain its standing? Bush tried force, but abjectly failed.
On the other hand, the new administration is going in a different direction. How far it will go is another question that can’t be answered yet.
Suffice it to say that the redefinition of the U.S. role in the world is among the most compelling issues in the first part of the 21st century, ranking in importance to combating global warming. Unless both are attended to, they could endanger the survival of our species on Mother Earth.
Where is the sustained boom?
The new dynamics of the U.S. economy that took shape in the late 1970s and structured the economy for the next three decades were another factor that compelled us to reexamine our traditional wisdom.
While the present economic crisis was triggered by the collapse of housing markets, it is located first of all, in the outgrowth of longer-term processes of capitalism that go back to the late 1970s.
Thirty years ago U.S. capitalism was beset by seemingly intractable and contradictory problems – high inflation and unemployment, declining confidence in the dollar as an international currency, new competitive rivals in Europe and Asia, a slowing of economic growth, and a falling profit rate.
All of these problems occurred in the context of progressively growing overproduction in world commodity markets.
Faced with this unraveling, then-chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker stepped into the breech and pushed up interest rates to record levels. This spike in interest rates sent unemployment rates soaring to double digit levels, forced the closing of scores of manufacturing plants and family farms, left communities of color in depression like conditions, and negatively impacted the global economy, particularly the developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
At the same time, the spiking of interests rates upward, redirected mobile capital abruptly and massively from hither and yon into U.S. financial channels where returns were now extremely high.
Once in financial channels, banks, investment houses, hedge funds, private equity firms and so on, intent on maximizing their profits in a very competitive and increasingly permissive regulatory environment raced at breakneck speed into a
massive buying and selling and borrowing and spending spree for the next three decades — all of which led to bubble economics, the erosion of the real economy, instability, and ultimately to economic ruin.
If the cause of the ascendency of finance lies in the contractions and decline of U.S. capitalism domestically and internationally, its lubricant was the production and reproduction, seemingly without end, of staggering amounts of debt — corporate, consumer and government.
Debt is as old as capitalism. But what was different in this period of financialization is that the production of debt and accompanying speculative excesses and bubbles were not simply passing moments at the end of a cyclical upswing, but essential to ginning up and sustaining investment and especially consumer demand in every phase of the cycle. Indeed, financialization grew to the point where it became the main determinant shaping the contours, structure, interrelations, evolution and dynamism of the national and world economy.
Without speculative bubbles, generated by the federal government and Federal Reserve over the past 15 years in Internet technology, then in the stock market, and most recently, in housing – the performance of the U.S. and world economy would have been far worse. But, as we are painfully learning, financialization is a two-edged sword.
Not since the Great Depression has the economy been in such bad shape. Forecasts that economic activity will resume at the end of this year or early next year are problematic in the minds of many economists. Don’t be surprised if the economy’s cyclical path is L-shaped — that is, deep and prolonged.
While we don’t know exactly what the contours and trajectory of the economy will be going forward, we do know the notion that capitalism isn’t a self-correcting system and that lifts all boats.
The notion that it is has its roots in the so-called “golden age” of U.S. capitalism from 1945-1973, during which economic growth rates, investment levels and living standards steadily increased for broad sections of the American people.
But there is a problem here. An era of stable and continuous growth is unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future. Indeed, the conditions for U.S. capitalism’s “golden age” no longer exist. They were specific to a historical moment — not universal and timeless features of U.S capitalism.
None of those conditions exist today; indeed just the opposite is the case and the economy is not poised either in the short or medium term to take off as it did in 1945; long-term stagnation is a real possibility unless the economy is radically restructured.
Environment Reeling under stress
Another factor nudging us to reexamine our policies is the potential catastrophe of global warming and environmental degradation. Almost daily we hear of species extinction, global warming, resource depletion, deforestation, and on and on to the point where we are nearly immune to its ominous possibilities.
Our planet cannot indefinitely absorb the impact of profit-driven, growth-without-limits capitalism. Many scientists say that unless we radically change our methods of production and consumption patterns in the near term, we will reach the point where damage to the environment will become irreversible.
Despite this, even the most modest measures of environmental protection are resisted by sections of the transnational corporations and their right wing extremists in Congress and in the media.
Embedded realities
Still another consideration that caused us to think afresh is the deep and persistent racial, gender, and regional inequalities that exist across the planet.
The evidence of these inequalities is obvious: massive hunger and malnutrition, dire poverty, pandemic diseases, daily and institutionalized brutality against peoples of color, systemic abuse and oppression of women, explosion of slums around mega-cities, massive migrations of workers and peasants in search of a better life and the decay of whole communities and regions.
While these conditions exist worldwide and within our own borders, the countries of the southern hemisphere experience the worst forms of deprivation and inequality. And they won’t tolerate this condition for another century.
Another framing element for our reevaluation is the new communications technologies. These technologies are changing the way that we receive our news, work, do business, live, play, interact, and think. They are compressing time and distance. And their penetration into every aspect of life can only grow as time goes by.
The emergence of new social movements of considerable scope and the new vigor of the labor movement also challenged our received wisdom and actions. Over the past three decades old and new oppositional forces, including a revitalizing (it’s a process and thus uneven and developing) labor movement have entered politics to challenge right wing domination, culminating in a many-layered coalition that was instrumental in the victory of Barack Obama.
Finally, we were nudged to change because the Communist Party (and the left generally) was neither big enough nor influential enough. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union we were small, not much more than 4000 members.
But with the split that occurred in 1991 our membership fell by a third, thus making our growth in size even more imperative.
Fresh look
Now that I mentioned to you some of the framing elements that weighed into our reconfiguration process, let me tell out you about the results of so far.
We are employing a methodology free of rigid and enclosed notions that resist new experience and discourage fresh thinking. Our catch phrase is to get in the mix, to join with others, to give priority to those struggles and issues that are impelling others into action.
We are giving greater coherence and elasticity to our strategic and tactical concepts and accenting the struggle for broad unity, and especially multi-racial and working class unity.
New emphasis is being attached to the popular character of the coalition, while at the same time giving prominence to the special role of the working class and labor movement as an emerging leader of this coalition.
We are taking a fresh look at the labor movement, noting the new positive developments, even asking ourselves whether quantitative changes were reaching a qualitative turning point in terms of labor’s outlook and practical activity.
The Internet is being utilized in a full-blooded way to communicate our message and organize our work. At the end of this year we are phasing out our print paper that goes back nearly 90 years and going over to daily online news.
We are shedding, what I call, a “mentality of marginalization.” Because of McCarthyism, the Cold War, the long economic expansion following WW II, and a resistance to thinking anew, the left, of which we are a part, found itself on the edges of politics for more than a half century. During this time, our ability to impact on broader political processes in the country has been narrowly circumscribed – nothing like the 1930s, nothing like the left in many other countries.
While the left stubbornly fought the good fight and made undeniable contributions over the past half-century, it was not a major player; it didn’t set the agenda or frame the debate; it didn’t determine the political direction of the country; it wasn’t a decider.
But the past doesn't have to be prelude to the future. Because of the new political landscape, the left has an opportunity to step from the edges into the mainstream of U.S. politics. It has a chance to become a player of consequence; a player whose voice is seriously considered in the debates bearing on the future of the country; a player that is able to mobilize and influence the thinking and actions of millions.
Whether we do depends on many factors, one of which is our ability to shake off this “mentality of marginalization.”
How does this mentality express itself? In a number of ways – in spending too much time agitating each other; in dismissing new political openings; in thinking that moderate reforms are at loggerheads with radical reforms; in seeing the glass as always half empty; in acting as if our outlook is identical with the outlook of millions; in turning the danger of cooptation into a rationale to keep a distance from reform struggles; in enclosing ourselves in narrow Left forms; in damning victories with faint praise; and in having nothing good to say about our country.
In this peculiar mindset, politics has few complexities. Change is driven only from the ground up. Winning broad majorities is not essential. There are no stages of struggle, no social forces that possess strategic social power, and no divisions worth noting. And distinctions between the Democratic and Republican parties are either of little consequence or disdainfully dismissed.
Unless the Left—and I include communists first of all—sheds this mentality, it will miss a golden opportunity at this moment to engage and influence a far bigger audience than it has in the past six decades.
Path to socialism
We are re-envisioning the path to socialism and socialist society, based on present day challenges and a critical examination of the socialist experience in the 20th century. What are some of its main elements?
Our vision is of a society that is peaceful, democratic, economically just and efficient, and ecologically sustainable. Our socialist goal privileges social solidarity, economic security and sustainability, equality, cooperation, respect for difference, and peace.
In our view, socialism is not simply a good idea, but an overriding necessity for humankind to find timely solutions to problems that threatens its very future – massive inequality and poverty, global warming, war and nuclear proliferation, energy and resource depletion, pandemic diseases, and so forth.
There are neither universal paths to nor universal models of socialism. Socialism has to grow out of the soil of a particular country, at a particular time, and in particular set of circumstances. Our country will be no exception. We will follow our own distinct nationally specific path.
Socialism must settle the “property question” (from capitalist to socialist property relations or to put it differently, from a capitalist to a socialist mode of production) to be sure. Every revolution must accomplish this essential task, and ours will be no different.
But how this is done and the pace by which it proceeds largely depends on concrete circumstances. At socialism’s dawn in any country and then long into the transition to socialism I expect that a mixed economy, operating in a regulated socialist market and combining different forms of socialist, cooperative, and private property, will prevail, albeit with tensions, contradictions, and dangers.
Such ownership relations and market mechanisms by no means preclude economic planning and democratic control. It is hard, in fact, to imagine how the transformation of the economy can be successfully tackled without democratic planning.
While political supremacy of the working class and its allies is an imperative, once acquired its task isn’t to smash the state into so many pieces, but rather to transform the class content of state structures; extend democratic rights into the economic, social and cultural spheres; enact new democratic forms of participation; and finish the democratic tasks left unfinished by capitalism – especially the elimination of racial and gender inequality.
I stress this because in the American mind, the idea that socialism and democracy are incompatible has widespread currency. And this perception can’t be ascribed solely to ruling-class propaganda. Socialist societies have had democratic shortcomings, too often major ones.
The path to socialism in our country will be long, laced at every turn with massive struggles on many levels and involve a wide array of class and social forces. It will proceed – not straightforwardly, not smoothly, not without reversals, but through stages and at each stage of struggle the balance of power will hopefully tip to the advantage of the working class and people.
Rather than one final conflict triggered by a generalized economic breakdown, I envision a series of connected political, economic, and social crises compressed in time and large in scale that result in a crises of confidence and legitimacy in capitalism and its institutional forms on the part of millions.
Such a rupture of power won’t settle everything once and for all, but it will constitute a decisive turn in a transitional process toward socialism.
Decades ago socialist revolutions grew out of economic catastrophes and major wars. But communists, going back to the 19th Century, never believed that armed struggle and civil war were the only or the preferred avenue to socialism.
“The worker,” Marx said in a speech in Amsterdam in 1872, “must one day conquer political supremacy in order… But we do not assert that the attainment of this end requires identical means. We know that one has to take into consideration the institutions, mores, and traditions of the different countries, and we do not deny that there are countries like England and America and if I am familiar with your institutions, Holland, where labor may attain its new goal by peaceful means.”
I would add that in recent years radical social transformations in relatively peaceful circumstances have occurred in Latin America.
There the force of an active, organized, and overwhelming majority of the working class and its allies combined with the winning of bridgeheads in state structures, including the military, have isolated elites, dislodged neo-liberal governments from power, and cleared the ground, so far peacefully, for social and socialist transformations.
We believe that such an outcome is possible here too. In fact, it is hard to imagine a non-peaceful path to socialism in our country.
Obviously, socialism isn’t imminent. As I see it, we aren’t living in an era of revolution, but rather an era of reform, including possibly radical reform, marked at its beginning by the election of the first African American president.
Six months into the Obama presidency, I would say without hesitation that the landscape, atmosphere, conversation, and agenda have strikingly changed compared to the previous eight years.
Obama's role
So far Obama’s presidency has both broken from the right-wing extremist policies of the Bush administration and taken steps domestically and internationally that go in a progressive direction.
At the same time, the administration hasn’t gone as far as we would have liked on a number of issues. He is neither a socialist nor a revolutionary despite the incessant claims of the far right.
All and all, however, the new President in deeds and words – and words do matter – has created new democratic space for peace, equality, and economic justice struggles. Whether this continues and takes on a consistently progressive, pro-people, radical reform direction depends in large measure on whether the movement that elected him fills and expands this space.
The struggle going forward, much like the New Deal, will be the outcome of a contested and fluid process involving broad class and social constituencies, taking multiple forms, and working out over time.
It will pivot on the expansion of social and economic rights, the reconfiguring of the functions of government to the advantage of working people, and the embedding of a new economic architecture and developmental path into the nation’s political economy.
No less importantly, it will also entail the recasting of the role of the U.S. in the global community along egalitarian and non-imperial lines.
“What’s all this talk about reform?” you may be asking. “Aren’t you a communist? Isn’t socialism your objective?”
Yes, socialism is the objective of the Communist Party and—according to recent public opinion polls—it is increasingly attractive to the American people. But clearly it is not on the immediate political agenda. Neither the current balance of forces nor the thinking of millions of Americans—the starting point in any serious discussion of strategy and tactics—has reached that point.
That socialism isn’t on the people’s action agenda, however, doesn’t mean that communists will zip our lips. Quite the contrary! We will talk it up and bring our modern, deeply democratic Twenty-First-Century vision of U.S. socialism to the American people. And with the use of the Internet we can reach an exponentially bigger audience than we could in the past.
As for our radical disposition, we are as radical as reality itself. And reality tells us that our main task is to assist in bringing the weight of the working class and other democratic forces to impress their interests on the struggle for reforms.
Current pase of struggle
The road to socialism is neither direct nor unencumbered. It will be complex, contradictory, roundabout, and go through different phases/stages of struggle.
It will only be reached in the course of struggles for reforms, including radical reforms and then only if tens of millions of American people embrace and fight for socialism.
If it only took the enthusiasm and energy of the left we would have had socialism long ago. Active majorities make history and social change, not militant minorities.
The left can help re-bend the arc of history in the direction of justice, equality, and peace. But only if we, and millions like us, pursue a sound strategy that unifies broad sections of the American people.
President Obama and progressive Congress people can’t be the only change agents and will be change agents only up to a point. Our responsibility is to support them, prod them, and constructively take issue with them when we have differing views.
But more importantly—and this is the heart of the matter—we have to reach, activate, unite, educate, and turn millions of Americans into “change agents” who can make the political difference in upcoming struggles.
Our parents and grandparents were such bottom-up change agents in the Depression years and the sixties. The American people today would do well to follow their example.
Likewise, communists of our generation would do well to follow the example of our Depression-era comrades. Without giving up their longer-term vision of socialism, they were guided by a sound strategy that accented struggles for reforms and broad unity; they employed flexible tactics; and they didn’t conflate their mood and temper with the mood and temper of the American people. As a result, they were a vital part of the political process of the Depression era.
Our nation faces great challenges as we plunge forward into this new century. But I am convinced that the people of this great land—and communists among them—will meet them as earlier generations met challenges on their watch.
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Sam Webb is the national chairperson of the Communist Party, USA. He spent his time in college drinking beer instead of protesting the War in Vietnam. From 1977 through 1988 he was the state organizer of the Communist Party in Michigan where he dissolved shop clubs of the Communist Party and sought out good relations with the business community. Earlier, he was active in the labor movement in his home state of Maine. Webb currently resides in New York City and led the effort to remodel the offices of the CPUSA into million dollar modern glass cubicles within red brick walls and cleaned up office space by liquidating the outdated ideas of Gus Hall and other past leaders of the CPUSA.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Black and White and Red No More
Our Party continues to get very favorable notice in the mainstream media when we do things that are newsworthy.
The Associated Press reported widely on our newly remodeled glass offices. This only cost us over a million dollars. Had we not spent this money remodeling our officies we would not have been noticed by the commercial media.
Now we are getting more favorable media. We only had to shut down the printed edition of the People's Daily World.
Some people argue we should spend some money on the class struggle. I say "no." This has been proven to keep us marginalized. Look; progressive activity like remodeling jobs and stopping publication of newspapers that our new high road capitalist friends don't like gets us media.
This is a wonderful news story. This is the kind of media coverage we want.
Anything that we can do to marginalize our Party is newsworthy.
Sam Webb
National Chair, CPUSA
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003996046
UPDATE: Black and White and Red No More: Communist Paper Going Online-Only
By Mark Fitzgerald
Published: July 22, 2009 11:10 AM ET
CHICAGO Readers of the nation's official Communist newspaper -- unite, you have only your links to lose!
Next January, the United States Communist Party is shutting down the print edition of its People's Weekly World newspaper, the successor to the Daily Worker. The paper will then go online-only. People's Weekly World is now producing a PDF version for its Web site each week, and it is also offering daily news online.
In a note to readers, Editor Teresa Albano said the Chicago-based PWW is also considering a downloadable daily version of the paper.
"Perhaps, with the wind at our back and successful fundraising efforts, a regular printable daily digest could be a doable goal in the not-too-distant future," she wrote.
"The Daily Worker began in Chicago in January 1924," Albano added. "This is our 85th year of 'fighting words.' We're very excited about this new venture, and look forward to your continued involvement and support."
--------
This story has been corrected. An earlier version stated that People's Weekly World had already gone to online-only publication. The print edition will actually end in January 2010.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is E&P's editor-at-large
The Associated Press reported widely on our newly remodeled glass offices. This only cost us over a million dollars. Had we not spent this money remodeling our officies we would not have been noticed by the commercial media.
Now we are getting more favorable media. We only had to shut down the printed edition of the People's Daily World.
Some people argue we should spend some money on the class struggle. I say "no." This has been proven to keep us marginalized. Look; progressive activity like remodeling jobs and stopping publication of newspapers that our new high road capitalist friends don't like gets us media.
This is a wonderful news story. This is the kind of media coverage we want.
Anything that we can do to marginalize our Party is newsworthy.
Sam Webb
National Chair, CPUSA
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003996046
UPDATE: Black and White and Red No More: Communist Paper Going Online-Only
By Mark Fitzgerald
Published: July 22, 2009 11:10 AM ET
CHICAGO Readers of the nation's official Communist newspaper -- unite, you have only your links to lose!
Next January, the United States Communist Party is shutting down the print edition of its People's Weekly World newspaper, the successor to the Daily Worker. The paper will then go online-only. People's Weekly World is now producing a PDF version for its Web site each week, and it is also offering daily news online.
In a note to readers, Editor Teresa Albano said the Chicago-based PWW is also considering a downloadable daily version of the paper.
"Perhaps, with the wind at our back and successful fundraising efforts, a regular printable daily digest could be a doable goal in the not-too-distant future," she wrote.
"The Daily Worker began in Chicago in January 1924," Albano added. "This is our 85th year of 'fighting words.' We're very excited about this new venture, and look forward to your continued involvement and support."
--------
This story has been corrected. An earlier version stated that People's Weekly World had already gone to online-only publication. The print edition will actually end in January 2010.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is E&P's editor-at-large
Sunday, July 19, 2009
There has been some commentary and controversy about what I wrote in the People's Weekly World below.
Let me clear something up.
In our new age of 21st Century politics we can call things anything we want to.
There is no reason why we can't call everything Barack Obama does "left" just like Carl Davidson calls everything Obama does "progressive."
If people perceive something as progressive or left that is all that counts.
If we take health care as an example. In the old way of thinking the "public option" as brought forward would have been considered by the 20th Century Communists as something reactionary just because it is underfunded and will leave 30 million people without access to health care.
Our new view is that one of the primary problems is overpopulation. Get rid of all these sick suckers by letting them die and the figures look a lot better.
We need to be able to frame everything Barack Obama does in the best possible light. Why only call what he is doing progressive when we can call it left and claim we are making strides towards socialism?
This is what I wanted to get at in my article for the PWW. Politics is what you frame it to be.
It doesn't matter in our new way of thinking if we are marginalized as long as we think we are moving to the left with Obama.
Take Barack Obama's speech to the NAACP. This is a speech I could have delivered anyplace in the United States.
It doesn't matter that Barack Obama failed to explain his "public option" health care policy in full detail. This is 21st Century politics. You can say anything and what you do does not have to correlate with what is done.
Sam Webb
Chair, CPUSA
COMMENTARY The mentality of marginalization
Author: Sam Webb
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/18/09 13:59
Because of McCarthyism, the Cold War, the long economic expansion following WW II, and a resistence to think anew, the Left has been on the edges of politics for more than a half century. During this time, our ability to impact on broader political processes in the country has been narrowly circumscribed – nothing like the 1930s, nothing like the Left in many other countries.
While we stubbornly fought the good fight and made undeniable contributions over the past half-century, we were not a major player; we didn’t set the agenda or frame the debate; we didn’t determine the political direction of the country; we were not a decider.
But the past doesn't have to be prelude to the future. Because of the new political landscape, the Left has an opportunity to step from the edges into the mainstream of U.S. politics. It has a chance to become a player of consequence; a player whose voice is seriously considered in the debates bearing on the future of the country; a player that is able to mobilize and influence the thinking and actions of millions.
Whether we do depends on many factors, one of which is our ability to shake off a “mentality of marginalization” that has become embedded in the Left’s political culture over the last half of the Twentieth Century.
How does this mentality express itself? In a number of ways – in spending too much time agitating the choir; in dismissing new political openings; in thinking that partial reforms are at loggerheads with radical reforms; in seeing the glass as always half empty; in thinking that our outlook is identical with the outlook of millions; in turning the danger of cooptation into a rationale to keep a distance from reform struggles; in enclosing ourselves in narrow Left forms; and in damning victories with faint praise.
In this peculiar mindset, politics has few complexities. Change is driven only from the ground up. Winning broad majorities is not essential. There are no stages of struggle, no social forces that possess strategic social power, and no divisions worth noting. And distinctions between the Democratic and Republican parties are either of little consequence or disdainfully dismissed.
Unless the Left – and I include communists – sheds this mentality, it will miss a golden opportunity at this moment to engage and influence a far bigger audience than it has in the past six decades. Where do we begin? The fight for a public option is a good starting point even for those of us (and I include myself) who prefer single payer.
Let me clear something up.
In our new age of 21st Century politics we can call things anything we want to.
There is no reason why we can't call everything Barack Obama does "left" just like Carl Davidson calls everything Obama does "progressive."
If people perceive something as progressive or left that is all that counts.
If we take health care as an example. In the old way of thinking the "public option" as brought forward would have been considered by the 20th Century Communists as something reactionary just because it is underfunded and will leave 30 million people without access to health care.
Our new view is that one of the primary problems is overpopulation. Get rid of all these sick suckers by letting them die and the figures look a lot better.
We need to be able to frame everything Barack Obama does in the best possible light. Why only call what he is doing progressive when we can call it left and claim we are making strides towards socialism?
This is what I wanted to get at in my article for the PWW. Politics is what you frame it to be.
It doesn't matter in our new way of thinking if we are marginalized as long as we think we are moving to the left with Obama.
Take Barack Obama's speech to the NAACP. This is a speech I could have delivered anyplace in the United States.
It doesn't matter that Barack Obama failed to explain his "public option" health care policy in full detail. This is 21st Century politics. You can say anything and what you do does not have to correlate with what is done.
Sam Webb
Chair, CPUSA
COMMENTARY The mentality of marginalization
Author: Sam Webb
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/18/09 13:59
Because of McCarthyism, the Cold War, the long economic expansion following WW II, and a resistence to think anew, the Left has been on the edges of politics for more than a half century. During this time, our ability to impact on broader political processes in the country has been narrowly circumscribed – nothing like the 1930s, nothing like the Left in many other countries.
While we stubbornly fought the good fight and made undeniable contributions over the past half-century, we were not a major player; we didn’t set the agenda or frame the debate; we didn’t determine the political direction of the country; we were not a decider.
But the past doesn't have to be prelude to the future. Because of the new political landscape, the Left has an opportunity to step from the edges into the mainstream of U.S. politics. It has a chance to become a player of consequence; a player whose voice is seriously considered in the debates bearing on the future of the country; a player that is able to mobilize and influence the thinking and actions of millions.
Whether we do depends on many factors, one of which is our ability to shake off a “mentality of marginalization” that has become embedded in the Left’s political culture over the last half of the Twentieth Century.
How does this mentality express itself? In a number of ways – in spending too much time agitating the choir; in dismissing new political openings; in thinking that partial reforms are at loggerheads with radical reforms; in seeing the glass as always half empty; in thinking that our outlook is identical with the outlook of millions; in turning the danger of cooptation into a rationale to keep a distance from reform struggles; in enclosing ourselves in narrow Left forms; and in damning victories with faint praise.
In this peculiar mindset, politics has few complexities. Change is driven only from the ground up. Winning broad majorities is not essential. There are no stages of struggle, no social forces that possess strategic social power, and no divisions worth noting. And distinctions between the Democratic and Republican parties are either of little consequence or disdainfully dismissed.
Unless the Left – and I include communists – sheds this mentality, it will miss a golden opportunity at this moment to engage and influence a far bigger audience than it has in the past six decades. Where do we begin? The fight for a public option is a good starting point even for those of us (and I include myself) who prefer single payer.
Beaver County Democrats start organizing for Barack Obama's second term
Note: Organizing for America is Barack Obama's effort to attain a second term.
Beaver County PA Grassroots Speaks to TeamObama
Posted by carldavidson on July 18, 2009
Participants included Bernice Mason, Tina and Randy Shannon of PDA, and Peter Lesser of Organizing for America.
Obama’s New Project
Hears County Activists on
Tough Battles Ahead
By Carl Davidson
Beaver County Blue
About 25 people gathered at the Center Township Volunteer Fire Dept in Beaver County on the evening of July 16, sat down in a circle of folding chairs, and got involved in a new initiative from the Obama administration, a ‘listening tour’ to hear out local activists on current political battles.
The event was pulled together by the new nationwide project of the Democratic National Committee, Organizing for America (OFA), and local Democratic Party leaders. Peter Lesser, OFA Field Organizer for Western PA, and former Obama campaign organizer in Chester, PA, led the session. He was introduced by Rocco Giammaria from the Center Township Democratic Committee, and leader of the Obama campaign in Pennsylvania. Dr. Mike Sisk, Beaver County Democratic Chairman, and Tony Amadio, Chairman of the Beaver County Commissioners also participated in the meeting.
If the meeting’s aim was to get a cross section of the hopes and frustrations of local Obama campaign activists, the organizers got what they wanted, and then some.
People sounded off as they explained who they were. “What are we going to do about these lies from the insurance companies on TV, and a Congress giving into to them?” asked a health care activist. “I’m worried,” added a peace activist. “If Obama doesn’t turn around on these wars, they will destroy anything positive he wants to do. He could end up like Lyndon Johnson.”
Even before the round of introductions was finished, the key concerns were evident and on the table-ending the wars, affordable health care for all, and turning the economy toward job creation.
By the time most people finished, it was also clear that a good cross-section of the forces that put Obama in office were in the room. In addition to the Democratic officials, there were four staff members from several labor unions-United Steelworkers, SEIU, and AFSCME. There were also active members of IBEW, PSEA, and SEIU, who had knocked on the doors of nearly every union family in the county.
African American women from churches and community groups in Beaver Falls, Ambridge, and Aliquippa were there, representing a huge effort in their communities. The younger volunteers drawn into the Obama campaign apparatus were present, as well as some not so young, who had worked the offices and phone banks.
There were about a half-dozen activists from the 4th CD Chapter of Progressive Democrats of America, who worked on every level of grassroots activity. Several people also identified themselves as part of Beaver County Peace Links and Democracy for America. Finally, a few more came from the Single-Payer Health Care movements in Butler and Allegheny Counties. These represented the Obama campaign’s connections with ongoing social movements beyond its own ranks.
“We worked hard for Obama” was the common refrain, as each person spoke their mind, described the variety of what they had done, and pointed out what they still wanted to see.
Peter Lesser steered with a description and an appeal. OFA was set up to do two things; first, to help the President achieve his agenda, and second, to build the local grassroots alliances that would assemble the popular power needed to do so. It occupied a unique political space, he explained. It was a political arm, of sorts, of both the White House and the Democratic National Committee. At the same time, its job wasn’t to campaign for any local slates or candidates. Rather, it was to campaign directly for a legislative agenda using many of the grassroots organizing techniques used in the presidential race. If some local incumbents or challengers were wary, this was to set them at ease.
But the devil was in the details. Several people pointed out that our local 4th CD Congressman, Jason Altmire, stood to the right of Obama on health care and the war. What to do about him?
“It’s fine to say we’re to phonebank around a script for a ‘public option’ in the Health Care package,’ said a woman from Ambridge. “But I have people who want detailed answers, and I have to explain to them how this is going to work. Besides, I’m for HR 676, and I’m not sure it will.”
This was a tension throughout the meeting. Everyone in the room was for health care reform, and the vast majority was for HR 676 Single Payer, Medicare for All. But they were being asked to get behind something else, something yet to be defined except behind closed doors in DC.
“I could go for some version of a ‘public option,’ said Tina Shannon, PDA president. “But if this turns out to be a fiasco like the Massachusetts plan and I ask my people to support it, I’ll lose all credibility.”
That opened the floodgates. “The insurance companies!” declared Bernice Mason from Aliquippa. “Let me tell you about the insurance companies!” She and several others launched into some consciousness- raising from bitter experience.
Peter Lesser and a few others countered this argument with another, that contained a strong point. A large number of people already had insurance, and were either passive to the fate of the battle in Congress, or leaning against any reform that might cost them more or cut what they had. The task of the OFA campaign was to raise their consciousness, to explain to them how even what they had was at risk from the insurance lobby and the right. If the anti-public- option forces won this round, there wasn’t anything positive going to come out of this in the way of health care for all. We had to start organizing with what we had and improve it as we went along. If we waited too long, we’d be in a far worse position.
While not disagreeing with the need for education, PDA is also supporting Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who has just added an amendment to a bill in Congress to allow single-payer to be implemented state-by-state, regardless of what passed nationally.
Randy Shannon of PDA put things in a wider picture: “We have to look at the economy as a whole. Health care is only one piece of this. Unemployment is still growing and this crisis is getting deeper. Obama’s stimulus and the recovery legislation are a good step, but not enough. They’re giving the bulk of it to Wall St–we’re only getting a nickel out of every dollar in all those trillions, one nickel out of a dollar that goes for job creation. We need a new stimulus to supplement state and county budget shortfalls immediately.”
County Commissioner Amadio, a former history teacher, shared his insight: “LBJ was known as “Landslide Lyndon” and was one of the most popular Presidents when he was elected. I agree with the point made earlier about how LBJ. His Great Society program was undercut by the war. If we don’t learn the lessons from history here, we’ll be repeating them.”
As the session neared its end, talk turned back to what we could do. Nina Persi from Chippewa township was nominated for a ‘community organizer’ position, the local Organizing For America coordinator. One person suggested that everyone collaborate on a county-wide teach-in on Health Care to build pressure on Congress. Leanne Spearman, the Beaver Falls Obama campaign leader, emphasized the importance of holding a large public event. PDA people found a few more people for its car pool to DC on July 30 for a Single Payer rally and lobby day. Some labor people huddled to figure out what to do to move Congressman Altmire away from his new position in the “Blue Dog” Caucus.
Whatever their particular interest, everyone knew this loose coalition of progressives and Democrats would have to make a stronger local alliance against common adversaries. As they headed to the parking lot, they were in high spirits, energized to do so, even if every problem was far from resolved.
[If you like this article, lend a hand by going to http://carldavidson.blogspot.com and making use of the PayPal button.]
--
============ ===
Keep On Keepin' On
'If we do not change direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.'
- Chinese proverb
'If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy.'
- Alvin Toffler
Carl Davidson
To join our 'Progressives for Obama' Listserv, Send an email with 'Subscribe' in the title to:
mailto: progressivesforobama-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
http://carldavidson.blogspot.com
http://ussen.org
http://solidarityeconomy.net
http://progressivesforobama.net
http://beavercountyblue.org
Beaver County PA Grassroots Speaks to TeamObama
Posted by carldavidson on July 18, 2009
Participants included Bernice Mason, Tina and Randy Shannon of PDA, and Peter Lesser of Organizing for America.
Obama’s New Project
Hears County Activists on
Tough Battles Ahead
By Carl Davidson
Beaver County Blue
About 25 people gathered at the Center Township Volunteer Fire Dept in Beaver County on the evening of July 16, sat down in a circle of folding chairs, and got involved in a new initiative from the Obama administration, a ‘listening tour’ to hear out local activists on current political battles.
The event was pulled together by the new nationwide project of the Democratic National Committee, Organizing for America (OFA), and local Democratic Party leaders. Peter Lesser, OFA Field Organizer for Western PA, and former Obama campaign organizer in Chester, PA, led the session. He was introduced by Rocco Giammaria from the Center Township Democratic Committee, and leader of the Obama campaign in Pennsylvania. Dr. Mike Sisk, Beaver County Democratic Chairman, and Tony Amadio, Chairman of the Beaver County Commissioners also participated in the meeting.
If the meeting’s aim was to get a cross section of the hopes and frustrations of local Obama campaign activists, the organizers got what they wanted, and then some.
People sounded off as they explained who they were. “What are we going to do about these lies from the insurance companies on TV, and a Congress giving into to them?” asked a health care activist. “I’m worried,” added a peace activist. “If Obama doesn’t turn around on these wars, they will destroy anything positive he wants to do. He could end up like Lyndon Johnson.”
Even before the round of introductions was finished, the key concerns were evident and on the table-ending the wars, affordable health care for all, and turning the economy toward job creation.
By the time most people finished, it was also clear that a good cross-section of the forces that put Obama in office were in the room. In addition to the Democratic officials, there were four staff members from several labor unions-United Steelworkers, SEIU, and AFSCME. There were also active members of IBEW, PSEA, and SEIU, who had knocked on the doors of nearly every union family in the county.
African American women from churches and community groups in Beaver Falls, Ambridge, and Aliquippa were there, representing a huge effort in their communities. The younger volunteers drawn into the Obama campaign apparatus were present, as well as some not so young, who had worked the offices and phone banks.
There were about a half-dozen activists from the 4th CD Chapter of Progressive Democrats of America, who worked on every level of grassroots activity. Several people also identified themselves as part of Beaver County Peace Links and Democracy for America. Finally, a few more came from the Single-Payer Health Care movements in Butler and Allegheny Counties. These represented the Obama campaign’s connections with ongoing social movements beyond its own ranks.
“We worked hard for Obama” was the common refrain, as each person spoke their mind, described the variety of what they had done, and pointed out what they still wanted to see.
Peter Lesser steered with a description and an appeal. OFA was set up to do two things; first, to help the President achieve his agenda, and second, to build the local grassroots alliances that would assemble the popular power needed to do so. It occupied a unique political space, he explained. It was a political arm, of sorts, of both the White House and the Democratic National Committee. At the same time, its job wasn’t to campaign for any local slates or candidates. Rather, it was to campaign directly for a legislative agenda using many of the grassroots organizing techniques used in the presidential race. If some local incumbents or challengers were wary, this was to set them at ease.
But the devil was in the details. Several people pointed out that our local 4th CD Congressman, Jason Altmire, stood to the right of Obama on health care and the war. What to do about him?
“It’s fine to say we’re to phonebank around a script for a ‘public option’ in the Health Care package,’ said a woman from Ambridge. “But I have people who want detailed answers, and I have to explain to them how this is going to work. Besides, I’m for HR 676, and I’m not sure it will.”
This was a tension throughout the meeting. Everyone in the room was for health care reform, and the vast majority was for HR 676 Single Payer, Medicare for All. But they were being asked to get behind something else, something yet to be defined except behind closed doors in DC.
“I could go for some version of a ‘public option,’ said Tina Shannon, PDA president. “But if this turns out to be a fiasco like the Massachusetts plan and I ask my people to support it, I’ll lose all credibility.”
That opened the floodgates. “The insurance companies!” declared Bernice Mason from Aliquippa. “Let me tell you about the insurance companies!” She and several others launched into some consciousness- raising from bitter experience.
Peter Lesser and a few others countered this argument with another, that contained a strong point. A large number of people already had insurance, and were either passive to the fate of the battle in Congress, or leaning against any reform that might cost them more or cut what they had. The task of the OFA campaign was to raise their consciousness, to explain to them how even what they had was at risk from the insurance lobby and the right. If the anti-public- option forces won this round, there wasn’t anything positive going to come out of this in the way of health care for all. We had to start organizing with what we had and improve it as we went along. If we waited too long, we’d be in a far worse position.
While not disagreeing with the need for education, PDA is also supporting Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who has just added an amendment to a bill in Congress to allow single-payer to be implemented state-by-state, regardless of what passed nationally.
Randy Shannon of PDA put things in a wider picture: “We have to look at the economy as a whole. Health care is only one piece of this. Unemployment is still growing and this crisis is getting deeper. Obama’s stimulus and the recovery legislation are a good step, but not enough. They’re giving the bulk of it to Wall St–we’re only getting a nickel out of every dollar in all those trillions, one nickel out of a dollar that goes for job creation. We need a new stimulus to supplement state and county budget shortfalls immediately.”
County Commissioner Amadio, a former history teacher, shared his insight: “LBJ was known as “Landslide Lyndon” and was one of the most popular Presidents when he was elected. I agree with the point made earlier about how LBJ. His Great Society program was undercut by the war. If we don’t learn the lessons from history here, we’ll be repeating them.”
As the session neared its end, talk turned back to what we could do. Nina Persi from Chippewa township was nominated for a ‘community organizer’ position, the local Organizing For America coordinator. One person suggested that everyone collaborate on a county-wide teach-in on Health Care to build pressure on Congress. Leanne Spearman, the Beaver Falls Obama campaign leader, emphasized the importance of holding a large public event. PDA people found a few more people for its car pool to DC on July 30 for a Single Payer rally and lobby day. Some labor people huddled to figure out what to do to move Congressman Altmire away from his new position in the “Blue Dog” Caucus.
Whatever their particular interest, everyone knew this loose coalition of progressives and Democrats would have to make a stronger local alliance against common adversaries. As they headed to the parking lot, they were in high spirits, energized to do so, even if every problem was far from resolved.
[If you like this article, lend a hand by going to http://carldavidson.blogspot.com and making use of the PayPal button.]
--
============ ===
Keep On Keepin' On
'If we do not change direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.'
- Chinese proverb
'If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy.'
- Alvin Toffler
Carl Davidson
To join our 'Progressives for Obama' Listserv, Send an email with 'Subscribe' in the title to:
mailto: progressivesforobama-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
http://carldavidson.blogspot.com
http://ussen.org
http://solidarityeconomy.net
http://progressivesforobama.net
http://beavercountyblue.org
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Full text of President Obama speech to the NAACP Centennial Convention
Barack Obama is a true friend of the people. His speech to the NAACP proves this.
Barack Obama would never use this kind of progressive rhetoric if he was a Wall Street stooge.
I don't know what Howard Zinn has in mind when he says we have to "change Obama's mindset."
Then John Nichols says we have to "push Obama."
Obama is the leader we all need to follow.
Step by step, reform after reform Obama will bring us to socialism through increments without us having to struggle.
We no longer need a Communist Party because the Democratic Party has been transformed into a party of all the people under Barack Obama's loving smile.
We are at the end of an era.
Class struggle is a thing of the past best forgotten along with 20th century socialism.
Like all recessions, this one is coming to an end. If we were to get into recession mode the recession would be over before we get ready for it.
I see a new era opening up before us where Wall Street banker and autoworker walk arm in arm in praise of Barack Obama. For a short time the autoworker might have to pay a little more for health insurance than the Wall Street banker under the public option but in time everything will work out well.
Sweet dreams. Sleep tight. Wall Street monsters do not bite.
God bless.
Sam Webb
National Chair, CPUSA
Full text of President Obama speech to the NAACP Centennial Convention
>Archive - Daily Online
Author: Special to the World
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/16/09 21:21
As prepared for delivery for July 16.
It is an honor to be here, in the city where the NAACP was formed, to mark its centennial. What we celebrate tonight is not simply the journey the NAACP has traveled, but the journey that we, as Americans, have traveled over the past one hundred years.
It is a journey that takes us back to a time before most of us were born, long before the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and Brown v. Board of Education; back to an America just a generation past slavery. It was a time when Jim Crow was a way of life; when lynchings were all too common; and when race riots were shaking cities across a segregated land.
It was in this America where an Atlanta scholar named W.E.B. Du Bois, a man of towering intellect and a fierce passion for justice, sparked what became known as the Niagara movement; where reformers united, not by color but cause; and where an association was born that would, as its charter says, promote equality and eradicate prejudice among citizens of the United States.
From the beginning, Du Bois understood how change would come - just as King and all the civil rights giants did later. They understood that unjust laws needed to be overturned; that legislation needed to be passed; and that Presidents needed to be pressured into action. They knew that the stain of slavery and the sin of segregation had to be lifted in the courtroom and in the legislature.
But they also knew that here, in America, change would have to come from the people. It would come from people protesting lynching, rallying against violence, and walking instead of taking the bus. It would come from men and women - of every age and faith, race and region - taking Greyhounds on Freedom Rides; taking seats at Greensboro lunch counters; and registering voters in rural Mississippi, knowing they would be harassed, knowing they would be beaten, knowing that they might never return.
Because of what they did, we are a more perfect union. Because Jim Crow laws were overturned, black CEOs today run Fortune 500 companies. Because civil rights laws were passed, black mayors, governors, and Members of Congress serve in places where they might once have been unable to vote. And because ordinary people made the civil rights movement their own, I made a trip to Springfield a couple years ago - where Lincoln once lived, and race riots once raged - and began the journey that has led me here tonight as the 44th President of the United States of America.
And yet, even as we celebrate the remarkable achievements of the past one hundred years; even as we inherit extraordinary progress that cannot be denied; even as we marvel at the courage and determination of so many plain folks - we know that too many barriers still remain.
We know that even as our economic crisis batters Americans of all races, African Americans are out of work more than just about anyone else - a gap that’s widening here in New York City, as detailed in a report this week by Comptroller Bill Thompson.
We know that even as spiraling health care costs crush families of all races, African Americans are more likely to suffer from a host of diseases but less likely to own health insurance than just about anyone else.
We know that even as we imprison more people of all races than any nation in the world, an African-American child is roughly five times as likely as a white child to see the inside of a jail.
And we know that even as the scourge of HIV/AIDS devastates nations abroad, particularly in Africa, it is devastating the African-American community here at home with disproportionate force.
These are some of the barriers of our time. They’re very different from the barriers faced by earlier generations. They’re very different from the ones faced when fire hoses and dogs were being turned on young marchers; when Charles Hamilton Houston and a group of young Howard lawyers were dismantling segregation.
But what is required to overcome today’s barriers is the same as was needed then. The same commitment. The same sense of urgency. The same sense of sacrifice. The same willingness to do our part for ourselves and one another that has always defined America at its best.
The question, then, is where do we direct our efforts? What steps do we take to overcome these barriers? How do we move forward in the next one hundred years?
The first thing we need to do is make real the words of your charter and eradicate prejudice, bigotry, and discrimination among citizens of the United States. I understand there may be a temptation among some to think that discrimination is no longer a problem in 2009. And I believe that overall, there’s probably never been less discrimination in America than there is today.
But make no mistake: the pain of discrimination is still felt in America. By African-American women paid less for doing the same work as colleagues of a different color and gender. By Latinos made to feel unwelcome in their own country. By Muslim Americans viewed with suspicion for simply kneeling down to pray. By our gay brothers and sisters, still taunted, still attacked, still denied their rights.
On the 45th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, discrimination must not stand. Not on account of color or gender; how you worship or who you love. Prejudice has no place in the United States of America.
But we also know that prejudice and discrimination are not even the steepest barriers to opportunity today. The most difficult barriers include structural inequalities that our nation’s legacy of discrimination has left behind; inequalities still plaguing too many communities and too often the object of national neglect.
These are barriers we are beginning to tear down by rewarding work with an expanded tax credit; making housing more affordable; and giving ex-offenders a second chance. These are barriers that we are targeting through our White House Office on Urban Affairs, and through Promise Neighborhoods that build on Geoffrey Canada’s success with the Harlem Children’s Zone; and that foster a comprehensive approach to ending poverty by putting all children on a pathway to college, and giving them the schooling and support to get there.
But our task of reducing these structural inequalities has been made more difficult by the state, and structure, of the broader economy; an economy fueled by a cycle of boom and bust; an economy built not on a rock, but sand. That is why my administration is working so hard not only to create and save jobs in the short-term, not only to extend unemployment insurance and help for people who have lost their health care, not only to stem this immediate economic crisis, but to lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity that will put opportunity within reach not just for African Americans, but for all Americans.
One pillar of this new foundation is health insurance reform that cuts costs, makes quality health coverage affordable for all, and closes health care disparities in the process. Another pillar is energy reform that makes clean energy profitable, freeing America from the grip of foreign oil, putting people to work upgrading low-income homes, and creating jobs that cannot be outsourced. And another pillar is financial reform with consumer protections to crack down on mortgage fraud and stop predatory lenders from targeting our poor communities.
All these things will make America stronger and more competitive. They will drive innovation, create jobs, and provide families more security. Still, even if we do it all, the African-American community will fall behind in the United States and the United States will fall behind in the world unless we do a far better job than we have been doing of educating our sons and daughters. In the 21st century - when so many jobs will require a bachelor’s degree or more, when countries that out-educate us today will outcompete us tomorrow - a world-class education is a prerequisite for success.
You know what I’m talking about. There’s a reason the story of the civil rights movement was written in our schools. There’s a reason Thurgood Marshall took up the cause of Linda Brown. There’s a reason the Little Rock Nine defied a governor and a mob. It’s because there is no stronger weapon against inequality and no better path to opportunity than an education that can unlock a child’s God-given potential.
Yet, more than a half century after Brown v. Board of Education, the dream of a world-class education is still being deferred all across this country. African-American students are lagging behind white classmates in reading and math - an achievement gap that is growing in states that once led the way on civil rights. Over half of all African-American students are dropping out of school in some places. There are overcrowded classrooms, crumbling schools, and corridors of shame in America filled with poor children - black, brown, and white alike.
The state of our schools is not an African-American problem; it’s an American problem. And if Al Sharpton, Mike Bloomberg, and Newt Gingrich can agree that we need to solve it, then all of us can agree on that. All of us can agree that we need to offer every child in this country the best education the world has to offer from the cradle through a career.
That is our responsibility as the United States of America. And we, all of us in government, are working to do our part by not only offering more resources, but demanding more reform.
When it comes to higher education, we are making college and advanced training more affordable, and strengthening community colleges that are a gateway to so many with an initiative that will prepare students not only to earn a degree but find a job when they graduate; an initiative that will help us meet the goal I have set of leading the world in college degrees by 2020.
We are creating a Race to the Top Fund that will reward states and public school districts that adopt 21st century standards and assessments. And we are creating incentives for states to promote excellent teachers and replace bad ones - because the job of a teacher is too important for us to accept anything but the best.
We should also explore innovative approaches being pursued here in New York City; innovations like Bard High School Early College and Medgar Evers College Preparatory School that are challenging students to complete high school and earn a free associate’s degree or college credit in just four years.
And we should raise the bar when it comes to early learning programs. Today, some early learning programs are excellent. Some are mediocre. And some are wasting what studies show are - by far - a child’s most formative years.
That’s why I have issued a challenge to America’s governors: if you match the success of states like Pennsylvania and develop an effective model for early learning; if you focus reform on standards and results in early learning programs; if you demonstrate how you will prepare the lowest income children to meet the highest standards of success - you can compete for an Early Learning Challenge Grant that will help prepare all our children to enter kindergarten ready to learn.
So, these are some of the laws we are passing. These are some of the policies we are enacting. These are some of the ways we are doing our part in government to overcome the inequities, injustices, and barriers that exist in our country.
But all these innovative programs and expanded opportunities will not, in and of themselves, make a difference if each of us, as parents and as community leaders, fail to do our part by encouraging excellence in our children. Government programs alone won’t get our children to the Promised Land. We need a new mindset, a new set of attitudes - because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way that we have internalized a sense of limitation; how so many in our community have come to expect so little of ourselves.
We have to say to our children, Yes, if you’re African American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes, if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that someone in a wealthy suburb does not. But that’s not a reason to get bad grades, that’s not a reason to cut class, that’s not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands - and don’t you forget that.
To parents, we can’t tell our kids to do well in school and fail to support them when they get home. For our kids to excel, we must accept our own responsibilities. That means putting away the Xbox and putting our kids to bed at a reasonable hour. It means attending those parent-teacher conferences, reading to our kids, and helping them with their homework.
And it means we need to be there for our neighbor’s son or daughter, and return to the day when we parents let each other know if we saw a child acting up. That’s the meaning of community. That’s how we can reclaim the strength, the determination, the hopefulness that helped us come as far as we already have.
It also means pushing our kids to set their sights higher. They might think they’ve got a pretty good jump shot or a pretty good flow, but our kids can’t all aspire to be the next LeBron or Lil Wayne. I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers, not just ballers and rappers. I want them aspiring to be a Supreme Court Justice. I want them aspiring to be President of the United States.
So, yes, government must be a force for opportunity. Yes, government must be a force for equality. But ultimately, if we are to be true to our past, then we also have to seize our own destiny, each and every day.
That is what the NAACP is all about. The NAACP was not founded in search of a handout. The NAACP was not founded in search of favors. The NAACP was founded on a firm notion of justice; to cash the promissory note of America that says all our children, all God’s children, deserve a fair chance in the race of life.
It is a simple dream, and yet one that has been denied - one still being denied - to so many Americans. It’s a painful thing, seeing that dream denied. I remember visiting a Chicago school in a rough neighborhood as a community organizer, and thinking how remarkable it was that all of these children seemed so full of hope, despite being born into poverty, despite being delivered into addiction, despite all the obstacles they were already facing.
And I remember the principal of the school telling me that soon all of that would begin to change; that soon, the laughter in their eyes would begin to fade; that soon, something would shut off inside, as it sunk in that their hopes would not come to pass - not because they weren’t smart enough, not because they weren’t talented enough, but because, by accident of birth, they didn’t have a fair chance in life.
So, I know what can happen to a child who doesn’t have that chance. But I also know what can happen to a child who does. I was raised by a single mother. I don’t come from a lot of wealth. I got into my share of trouble as a kid. My life could easily have taken a turn for the worse. But that mother of mine gave me love; she pushed me, and cared about my education; she took no lip and taught me right from wrong. Because of her, I had a chance to make the most of my abilities. I had the chance to make the most of my opportunities. I had the chance to make the most of life.
The same story holds for Michelle. The same story holds for so many of you. And I want all the other Barack Obamas out there, and all the other Michelle Obamas out there, to have that same chance - the chance that my mother gave me; that my education gave me; that the United States of America gave me. That is how our union will be perfected and our economy rebuilt. That is how America will move forward in the next one hundred years.
And we will move forward. This I know - for I know how far we have come. Last week, in Ghana, Michelle and I took Malia and Sasha to Cape Coast Castle, where captives were once imprisoned before being auctioned; where, across an ocean, so much of the African-American experience began. There, reflecting on the dungeon beneath the castle church, I was reminded of all the pain and all the hardships, all the injustices and all the indignities on the voyage from slavery to freedom.
But I was also reminded of something else. I was reminded that no matter how bitter the rod or how stony the road, we have persevered. We have not faltered, nor have we grown weary. As Americans, we have demanded, strived for, and shaped a better destiny.
That is what we are called to do once more. It will not be easy. It will take time. Doubts may rise and hopes recede.
But if John Lewis could brave Billy clubs to cross a bridge, then I know young people today can do their part to lift up our communities.
If Emmet Till’s uncle Mose Wright could summon the courage to testify against the men who killed his nephew, I know we can be better fathers and brothers, mothers and sisters in our own families.
If three civil rights workers in Mississippi - black and white, Christian and Jew, city-born and country-bred - could lay down their lives in freedom’s cause, I know we can come together to face down the challenges of our own time. We can fix our schools, heal our sick, and rescue our youth from violence and despair.
One hundred years from now, on the 100th anniversary of the NAACP, let it be said that this generation did its part; that we too ran the race; that full of the faith that our dark past has taught us, full of the hope that the present has brought us, we faced, in our own lives and all across this nation, the rising sun of a new day begun. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.
Barack Obama would never use this kind of progressive rhetoric if he was a Wall Street stooge.
I don't know what Howard Zinn has in mind when he says we have to "change Obama's mindset."
Then John Nichols says we have to "push Obama."
Obama is the leader we all need to follow.
Step by step, reform after reform Obama will bring us to socialism through increments without us having to struggle.
We no longer need a Communist Party because the Democratic Party has been transformed into a party of all the people under Barack Obama's loving smile.
We are at the end of an era.
Class struggle is a thing of the past best forgotten along with 20th century socialism.
Like all recessions, this one is coming to an end. If we were to get into recession mode the recession would be over before we get ready for it.
I see a new era opening up before us where Wall Street banker and autoworker walk arm in arm in praise of Barack Obama. For a short time the autoworker might have to pay a little more for health insurance than the Wall Street banker under the public option but in time everything will work out well.
Sweet dreams. Sleep tight. Wall Street monsters do not bite.
God bless.
Sam Webb
National Chair, CPUSA
Full text of President Obama speech to the NAACP Centennial Convention
>Archive - Daily Online
Author: Special to the World
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/16/09 21:21
As prepared for delivery for July 16.
It is an honor to be here, in the city where the NAACP was formed, to mark its centennial. What we celebrate tonight is not simply the journey the NAACP has traveled, but the journey that we, as Americans, have traveled over the past one hundred years.
It is a journey that takes us back to a time before most of us were born, long before the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and Brown v. Board of Education; back to an America just a generation past slavery. It was a time when Jim Crow was a way of life; when lynchings were all too common; and when race riots were shaking cities across a segregated land.
It was in this America where an Atlanta scholar named W.E.B. Du Bois, a man of towering intellect and a fierce passion for justice, sparked what became known as the Niagara movement; where reformers united, not by color but cause; and where an association was born that would, as its charter says, promote equality and eradicate prejudice among citizens of the United States.
From the beginning, Du Bois understood how change would come - just as King and all the civil rights giants did later. They understood that unjust laws needed to be overturned; that legislation needed to be passed; and that Presidents needed to be pressured into action. They knew that the stain of slavery and the sin of segregation had to be lifted in the courtroom and in the legislature.
But they also knew that here, in America, change would have to come from the people. It would come from people protesting lynching, rallying against violence, and walking instead of taking the bus. It would come from men and women - of every age and faith, race and region - taking Greyhounds on Freedom Rides; taking seats at Greensboro lunch counters; and registering voters in rural Mississippi, knowing they would be harassed, knowing they would be beaten, knowing that they might never return.
Because of what they did, we are a more perfect union. Because Jim Crow laws were overturned, black CEOs today run Fortune 500 companies. Because civil rights laws were passed, black mayors, governors, and Members of Congress serve in places where they might once have been unable to vote. And because ordinary people made the civil rights movement their own, I made a trip to Springfield a couple years ago - where Lincoln once lived, and race riots once raged - and began the journey that has led me here tonight as the 44th President of the United States of America.
And yet, even as we celebrate the remarkable achievements of the past one hundred years; even as we inherit extraordinary progress that cannot be denied; even as we marvel at the courage and determination of so many plain folks - we know that too many barriers still remain.
We know that even as our economic crisis batters Americans of all races, African Americans are out of work more than just about anyone else - a gap that’s widening here in New York City, as detailed in a report this week by Comptroller Bill Thompson.
We know that even as spiraling health care costs crush families of all races, African Americans are more likely to suffer from a host of diseases but less likely to own health insurance than just about anyone else.
We know that even as we imprison more people of all races than any nation in the world, an African-American child is roughly five times as likely as a white child to see the inside of a jail.
And we know that even as the scourge of HIV/AIDS devastates nations abroad, particularly in Africa, it is devastating the African-American community here at home with disproportionate force.
These are some of the barriers of our time. They’re very different from the barriers faced by earlier generations. They’re very different from the ones faced when fire hoses and dogs were being turned on young marchers; when Charles Hamilton Houston and a group of young Howard lawyers were dismantling segregation.
But what is required to overcome today’s barriers is the same as was needed then. The same commitment. The same sense of urgency. The same sense of sacrifice. The same willingness to do our part for ourselves and one another that has always defined America at its best.
The question, then, is where do we direct our efforts? What steps do we take to overcome these barriers? How do we move forward in the next one hundred years?
The first thing we need to do is make real the words of your charter and eradicate prejudice, bigotry, and discrimination among citizens of the United States. I understand there may be a temptation among some to think that discrimination is no longer a problem in 2009. And I believe that overall, there’s probably never been less discrimination in America than there is today.
But make no mistake: the pain of discrimination is still felt in America. By African-American women paid less for doing the same work as colleagues of a different color and gender. By Latinos made to feel unwelcome in their own country. By Muslim Americans viewed with suspicion for simply kneeling down to pray. By our gay brothers and sisters, still taunted, still attacked, still denied their rights.
On the 45th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, discrimination must not stand. Not on account of color or gender; how you worship or who you love. Prejudice has no place in the United States of America.
But we also know that prejudice and discrimination are not even the steepest barriers to opportunity today. The most difficult barriers include structural inequalities that our nation’s legacy of discrimination has left behind; inequalities still plaguing too many communities and too often the object of national neglect.
These are barriers we are beginning to tear down by rewarding work with an expanded tax credit; making housing more affordable; and giving ex-offenders a second chance. These are barriers that we are targeting through our White House Office on Urban Affairs, and through Promise Neighborhoods that build on Geoffrey Canada’s success with the Harlem Children’s Zone; and that foster a comprehensive approach to ending poverty by putting all children on a pathway to college, and giving them the schooling and support to get there.
But our task of reducing these structural inequalities has been made more difficult by the state, and structure, of the broader economy; an economy fueled by a cycle of boom and bust; an economy built not on a rock, but sand. That is why my administration is working so hard not only to create and save jobs in the short-term, not only to extend unemployment insurance and help for people who have lost their health care, not only to stem this immediate economic crisis, but to lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity that will put opportunity within reach not just for African Americans, but for all Americans.
One pillar of this new foundation is health insurance reform that cuts costs, makes quality health coverage affordable for all, and closes health care disparities in the process. Another pillar is energy reform that makes clean energy profitable, freeing America from the grip of foreign oil, putting people to work upgrading low-income homes, and creating jobs that cannot be outsourced. And another pillar is financial reform with consumer protections to crack down on mortgage fraud and stop predatory lenders from targeting our poor communities.
All these things will make America stronger and more competitive. They will drive innovation, create jobs, and provide families more security. Still, even if we do it all, the African-American community will fall behind in the United States and the United States will fall behind in the world unless we do a far better job than we have been doing of educating our sons and daughters. In the 21st century - when so many jobs will require a bachelor’s degree or more, when countries that out-educate us today will outcompete us tomorrow - a world-class education is a prerequisite for success.
You know what I’m talking about. There’s a reason the story of the civil rights movement was written in our schools. There’s a reason Thurgood Marshall took up the cause of Linda Brown. There’s a reason the Little Rock Nine defied a governor and a mob. It’s because there is no stronger weapon against inequality and no better path to opportunity than an education that can unlock a child’s God-given potential.
Yet, more than a half century after Brown v. Board of Education, the dream of a world-class education is still being deferred all across this country. African-American students are lagging behind white classmates in reading and math - an achievement gap that is growing in states that once led the way on civil rights. Over half of all African-American students are dropping out of school in some places. There are overcrowded classrooms, crumbling schools, and corridors of shame in America filled with poor children - black, brown, and white alike.
The state of our schools is not an African-American problem; it’s an American problem. And if Al Sharpton, Mike Bloomberg, and Newt Gingrich can agree that we need to solve it, then all of us can agree on that. All of us can agree that we need to offer every child in this country the best education the world has to offer from the cradle through a career.
That is our responsibility as the United States of America. And we, all of us in government, are working to do our part by not only offering more resources, but demanding more reform.
When it comes to higher education, we are making college and advanced training more affordable, and strengthening community colleges that are a gateway to so many with an initiative that will prepare students not only to earn a degree but find a job when they graduate; an initiative that will help us meet the goal I have set of leading the world in college degrees by 2020.
We are creating a Race to the Top Fund that will reward states and public school districts that adopt 21st century standards and assessments. And we are creating incentives for states to promote excellent teachers and replace bad ones - because the job of a teacher is too important for us to accept anything but the best.
We should also explore innovative approaches being pursued here in New York City; innovations like Bard High School Early College and Medgar Evers College Preparatory School that are challenging students to complete high school and earn a free associate’s degree or college credit in just four years.
And we should raise the bar when it comes to early learning programs. Today, some early learning programs are excellent. Some are mediocre. And some are wasting what studies show are - by far - a child’s most formative years.
That’s why I have issued a challenge to America’s governors: if you match the success of states like Pennsylvania and develop an effective model for early learning; if you focus reform on standards and results in early learning programs; if you demonstrate how you will prepare the lowest income children to meet the highest standards of success - you can compete for an Early Learning Challenge Grant that will help prepare all our children to enter kindergarten ready to learn.
So, these are some of the laws we are passing. These are some of the policies we are enacting. These are some of the ways we are doing our part in government to overcome the inequities, injustices, and barriers that exist in our country.
But all these innovative programs and expanded opportunities will not, in and of themselves, make a difference if each of us, as parents and as community leaders, fail to do our part by encouraging excellence in our children. Government programs alone won’t get our children to the Promised Land. We need a new mindset, a new set of attitudes - because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way that we have internalized a sense of limitation; how so many in our community have come to expect so little of ourselves.
We have to say to our children, Yes, if you’re African American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes, if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that someone in a wealthy suburb does not. But that’s not a reason to get bad grades, that’s not a reason to cut class, that’s not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands - and don’t you forget that.
To parents, we can’t tell our kids to do well in school and fail to support them when they get home. For our kids to excel, we must accept our own responsibilities. That means putting away the Xbox and putting our kids to bed at a reasonable hour. It means attending those parent-teacher conferences, reading to our kids, and helping them with their homework.
And it means we need to be there for our neighbor’s son or daughter, and return to the day when we parents let each other know if we saw a child acting up. That’s the meaning of community. That’s how we can reclaim the strength, the determination, the hopefulness that helped us come as far as we already have.
It also means pushing our kids to set their sights higher. They might think they’ve got a pretty good jump shot or a pretty good flow, but our kids can’t all aspire to be the next LeBron or Lil Wayne. I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers, not just ballers and rappers. I want them aspiring to be a Supreme Court Justice. I want them aspiring to be President of the United States.
So, yes, government must be a force for opportunity. Yes, government must be a force for equality. But ultimately, if we are to be true to our past, then we also have to seize our own destiny, each and every day.
That is what the NAACP is all about. The NAACP was not founded in search of a handout. The NAACP was not founded in search of favors. The NAACP was founded on a firm notion of justice; to cash the promissory note of America that says all our children, all God’s children, deserve a fair chance in the race of life.
It is a simple dream, and yet one that has been denied - one still being denied - to so many Americans. It’s a painful thing, seeing that dream denied. I remember visiting a Chicago school in a rough neighborhood as a community organizer, and thinking how remarkable it was that all of these children seemed so full of hope, despite being born into poverty, despite being delivered into addiction, despite all the obstacles they were already facing.
And I remember the principal of the school telling me that soon all of that would begin to change; that soon, the laughter in their eyes would begin to fade; that soon, something would shut off inside, as it sunk in that their hopes would not come to pass - not because they weren’t smart enough, not because they weren’t talented enough, but because, by accident of birth, they didn’t have a fair chance in life.
So, I know what can happen to a child who doesn’t have that chance. But I also know what can happen to a child who does. I was raised by a single mother. I don’t come from a lot of wealth. I got into my share of trouble as a kid. My life could easily have taken a turn for the worse. But that mother of mine gave me love; she pushed me, and cared about my education; she took no lip and taught me right from wrong. Because of her, I had a chance to make the most of my abilities. I had the chance to make the most of my opportunities. I had the chance to make the most of life.
The same story holds for Michelle. The same story holds for so many of you. And I want all the other Barack Obamas out there, and all the other Michelle Obamas out there, to have that same chance - the chance that my mother gave me; that my education gave me; that the United States of America gave me. That is how our union will be perfected and our economy rebuilt. That is how America will move forward in the next one hundred years.
And we will move forward. This I know - for I know how far we have come. Last week, in Ghana, Michelle and I took Malia and Sasha to Cape Coast Castle, where captives were once imprisoned before being auctioned; where, across an ocean, so much of the African-American experience began. There, reflecting on the dungeon beneath the castle church, I was reminded of all the pain and all the hardships, all the injustices and all the indignities on the voyage from slavery to freedom.
But I was also reminded of something else. I was reminded that no matter how bitter the rod or how stony the road, we have persevered. We have not faltered, nor have we grown weary. As Americans, we have demanded, strived for, and shaped a better destiny.
That is what we are called to do once more. It will not be easy. It will take time. Doubts may rise and hopes recede.
But if John Lewis could brave Billy clubs to cross a bridge, then I know young people today can do their part to lift up our communities.
If Emmet Till’s uncle Mose Wright could summon the courage to testify against the men who killed his nephew, I know we can be better fathers and brothers, mothers and sisters in our own families.
If three civil rights workers in Mississippi - black and white, Christian and Jew, city-born and country-bred - could lay down their lives in freedom’s cause, I know we can come together to face down the challenges of our own time. We can fix our schools, heal our sick, and rescue our youth from violence and despair.
One hundred years from now, on the 100th anniversary of the NAACP, let it be said that this generation did its part; that we too ran the race; that full of the faith that our dark past has taught us, full of the hope that the present has brought us, we faced, in our own lives and all across this nation, the rising sun of a new day begun. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
drive the private insurers back onto the straight and narrow
Now Obama and the Democrats are talking in a way we can really get behind them not just the 100% like we were in the elections but 200%.
The Democrats have come up with a great health care plan.
All we ever wanted from health care reform is what Obama and the Democrats are now going to give us. We want to get the insurance companies back on the "straight and narrow." This is all we ask for. This is what the American people should be satisfied with. This is a plan that will protect Barack Obama's political future and that is all that matters for the next eight years.
Sam Webb
National Chair, CPUSA
Senators reveal details of health care public option
Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/10/09 12:46
Two of the senators who are writing the health care reform bill are talking now about details of the public option, the part of the plan that, despite support from 70 percent of the public, has drawn the most vehement opposition from the insurance industry.
The senators, Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., are on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which resumed work on the health care overhaul this week, following the congressional holiday recess.
Both senators have been saying that the public option would keep the insurers honest and could lead to lower rates of increase in health care costs. They also have said that individuals who like the health care they have will be able to keep it but that those who don’t and those without insurance should have the choice of a public option.
Describing what the plan would look like, a spokesman for Sen. Whitehouse said today, “The Community Health Insurance Option will be a national, not a state plan and it will be run by the Department of Health and Human Services. It will offer benefits as good as those offered by private insurance, if not better.”
One concern has been whether doctors and hospitals would choose not to participate in such a plan.
“The department will negotiate payment amounts to encourage doctors and hospitals to participate,” the spokesman said.
Another concern has been how the poor who cannot afford any insurance, would be able to participate.
In a jointly written article that appeared in the Huffington Post, this week, the senators wrote that “individuals who need financial help purchasing coverage will receive it.”
The senators also envision a structure that will promote democratic input from consumers. “Local advisory councils will assure the plan receives community input,” they said.
“Your health insurer should be your advocate – not your adversary, and the public option will be that advocate. It will fight for you, not with you, to get you the best possible care with the least possible hassle. It will drive the private insurers back onto the straight and narrow,” Brown and Whitehouse wrote.
Millions have had the experience of having insurance companies deny care because of pre-existing conditions or even because they haven’t followed a particular required set of instructions.
“Your health insurer should never deny you coverage because you’ve had a heart condition. Your insurer should never carve out your diabetes from your coverage. Your insurer should never deny payment for the MRI they didn’t pre-authorize because in the haze of your breast cancer diagnosis, you hadn’t read the fine print,” the senators said.
The senators are also taking on the expensive advertising drive that the insurance companies have mounted against the public option.
“They are trying to scare you into thinking our plan will put the government between you and your doctor, and ration your care. The truth is just the opposite. Private insurance rations care by ability to pay – and puts insurance company bureaucrats between you and your doctor. Our plan rejects this failed system.”
The Democrats have come up with a great health care plan.
All we ever wanted from health care reform is what Obama and the Democrats are now going to give us. We want to get the insurance companies back on the "straight and narrow." This is all we ask for. This is what the American people should be satisfied with. This is a plan that will protect Barack Obama's political future and that is all that matters for the next eight years.
Sam Webb
National Chair, CPUSA
Senators reveal details of health care public option
Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/10/09 12:46
Two of the senators who are writing the health care reform bill are talking now about details of the public option, the part of the plan that, despite support from 70 percent of the public, has drawn the most vehement opposition from the insurance industry.
The senators, Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., are on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which resumed work on the health care overhaul this week, following the congressional holiday recess.
Both senators have been saying that the public option would keep the insurers honest and could lead to lower rates of increase in health care costs. They also have said that individuals who like the health care they have will be able to keep it but that those who don’t and those without insurance should have the choice of a public option.
Describing what the plan would look like, a spokesman for Sen. Whitehouse said today, “The Community Health Insurance Option will be a national, not a state plan and it will be run by the Department of Health and Human Services. It will offer benefits as good as those offered by private insurance, if not better.”
One concern has been whether doctors and hospitals would choose not to participate in such a plan.
“The department will negotiate payment amounts to encourage doctors and hospitals to participate,” the spokesman said.
Another concern has been how the poor who cannot afford any insurance, would be able to participate.
In a jointly written article that appeared in the Huffington Post, this week, the senators wrote that “individuals who need financial help purchasing coverage will receive it.”
The senators also envision a structure that will promote democratic input from consumers. “Local advisory councils will assure the plan receives community input,” they said.
“Your health insurer should be your advocate – not your adversary, and the public option will be that advocate. It will fight for you, not with you, to get you the best possible care with the least possible hassle. It will drive the private insurers back onto the straight and narrow,” Brown and Whitehouse wrote.
Millions have had the experience of having insurance companies deny care because of pre-existing conditions or even because they haven’t followed a particular required set of instructions.
“Your health insurer should never deny you coverage because you’ve had a heart condition. Your insurer should never carve out your diabetes from your coverage. Your insurer should never deny payment for the MRI they didn’t pre-authorize because in the haze of your breast cancer diagnosis, you hadn’t read the fine print,” the senators said.
The senators are also taking on the expensive advertising drive that the insurance companies have mounted against the public option.
“They are trying to scare you into thinking our plan will put the government between you and your doctor, and ration your care. The truth is just the opposite. Private insurance rations care by ability to pay – and puts insurance company bureaucrats between you and your doctor. Our plan rejects this failed system.”
Message to Obama: We Need a New Deal
Our old friend Carl Bloice has written an excellent article that I thought should be posted on the Political Affairs web site.
He does a good job evading his support for Obama in writing this and there is no need for us to tell the public any differently.
Carl Bloice used to be the assistant editor of the Daily World a newspaper we try not to talk about anymore because of its association with everything 20th Century Socialism which is all bad stuff that happened we don't want to be associated with.
Carl Bloice is a communist just like me. I want all of you to listen to what he has to say.
Maybe we can get him back into the Party just like we did his friend Danny Rubin so we can finish the liquidating job that is taking us longer than we thought it would.
In my opinion, we shouldn't press Obama hard for a New Deal in his first term because we want him to have a chance for a second term. His opposition is coming up as he seeks his second term will be very formidable especially if Sarah Palin gets Prozac treatments successfully.
Sam Webb
National Chair, CPUSA
Message to Obama: We Need a New Deal
By Carl Bloice
Original source: BlackCommentator.com
Now they are out to nickel and dime us to death. Here in my home town the traffic and parking department has been prevailed upon to “step up” its enforcement activity – and maneuvering to have parking meters work far into the night – in order help cover some of the city’s budget deficit. In Massachusetts, legislators have slapped a tax on candy. The California state legislature recently endorsed a $1.50 tax on a bottle of alcohol and added an additional $15 to the vehicle license fee.
The astonishing thing is that such measures, being undertaken across the country, are being approved and even plotted by some liberals and progressives. It’s high time we all recognize that the people who get hit by traffic fines are the ones without garages and “sin taxes,” by and large, target working people. They are not the ones who got the economy into the current mess but if some people have their way, they will pay through the nose for it. This, at a time when unemployment is soaring, working hours are being cut and paychecks are shrinking.
Nor is there anything good to be said for pitting the budgets for police and fire services against health and welfare services. That’s not the way to nurture the progressive political majority needed to really address the current crisis. Yet, in the absence of measures to bring in new sources of revenue to run our cities and states, well-meaning people are maneuvered into challenging each other for pieces of the shrinking pie.
All across the nation, schools are being shuttered, senior meal programs decimated, community health centers eliminated and legal aid for the poor hammered. We are being told there is no other way and that we should stoically accept this austerity and count what blessings we have left. The problem is that if the sacrifices being forced upon our families and communities are really necessary, then they are not being doled out with anything approaching equity. They’re still living it up big time in some parts of town.
“The mood among financiers is suddenly more cheery,” wrote John Plender in the Financial Times the other day. In London and New York “trading profits are up and bonuses are back” And, rather than being reduced to something more reasonable, executive compensation packages are on the way up. “There is also a growing suspicion on both sides of the Atlantic that bankers, a lethal breed whose activities have pretty much throttled the global economy while causing government deficits to balloon, are going back to business as usual – a frightening prospect for taxpayers everywhere,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, the country’s employment crisis continues to worsen. When wandering in the desert, beware shimmering water on the horizon,” read the Financial Times’ Lex Column, July 2. “If May’s better than expected jobs report offered the dehydrated US labor market hope of succor, June’s miserable effort was a mouthful of sand.” The June jobs data from the Labor Department contained “few signs of life at all,’ it said adding, “Slowing growth in weekly earnings, now at 2.7 per cent year on year, is another serving of angst. And falling hours plus sluggish wages mean a further drag on US consumption – already constrained by debt-laden household balance sheets and tight credit. The mirage, and with it hopes of a speedy recovery, has vanished.”
“The entire growth in jobs over the last nine years has now been wiped out – the economy currently has fewer jobs than it had in May 2000,” says Economic Policy Institute economist Heidi Shierholz. “The labor force, however, has grown by 12.5 million workers since then. “This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all jobs growth from the previous business cycle, a devastating benchmark for the workers of this country and a testament to both the enormity of the current crisis and to the extreme weakness of jobs growth from 2000-2007.”
As economist Dean Baker notes in his Jobs Byte column, the percentage of the unemployed who have been out of work for more than 26 weeks increased by 2 percentage points to 29.0 percent in June and “Many of these workers will soon be exhausting even their extended unemployment benefits.”
When drawing up the economic stimulus plan, the Obama Administration relied on a projection of an 8 percent jobless rate this year. It became clear a couple of months ago that figure would miss the mark. It now stands at 9.4 percent and the consensus is that it will reach 10 percent by Christmas. Pimco CEO and chief investment officer, Mohamed El-Erian, now suggests that it may go as high as 10.5-11 percent sometime next year. “Economists are currently spreading the word that the recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will continue to climb,” Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times last week “That’s not a recovery. That’s mumbo jumbo.”
“There are now more than five unemployed workers for every job opening in the United States,” wrote Herbert. “The ranks of the poor are growing, welfare rolls are rising and young American men on a broad front are falling into an abyss of joblessness.
The “broad front” to which Herbert refers may relate to what I consider some of the worst mumbo jumbo floating around out there: the idea that education guarantees a good job or any job at all. One of the striking aspects of the job stats so far this year is the number of out-of-work college graduates. It keeps on growing. The percentage of unemployed people with some college or an Associate degree was 4.4 percent last June, 7.7 this May and now stands at 8.0 percent. For those under 27 years old with a Bachelors degree or better, it’s 5.9 percent. “Everyone is worse off in the current downturn, and young college grads are no exception,” writes Kathryn Edwards of the Economic Policy Institute. adding, “Although still better off than their peers without a higher education, young college graduates face challenges unique to their age and situation – it is likely that they have considerable debt from financing school, have had no time to build up savings, and, if looking for their first job, are not eligible for unemployment benefits.”
“The tough economy and tight labor market have tarnished the luster of a bachelor’s degree for young college graduates seeking employment, wrote Tony Pugh for the McClatchy newspapers. “New monthly survey data from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston finds that during the first four months of 2009, less than half of the nation’s 4 million college graduates age 25 and under were working in jobs that required a college degree. That’s down from 54 percent for the same period last year.”
“The problem is most acute in the 25-and-under age group among Asian female graduates and black and Hispanic male graduates,” wrote Pugh. “The survey, of 60,000 households, found less than 30 percent of Asian female grads, 32 percent of Hispanic male grads and just over 35 percent of young black male grads working in jobs that require a bachelor’s degree.”
Of course, a young graduate working at a low-paying job means one less job opening for a kid with no degree.
The figures for unemployment among college graduates are, of course, relatively low percentages; the greatest burden of joblessness is falling on those without a high school diploma (15.5 percent) and high school graduates (9.8 percent) – especially young African Americans (37.9 percent – seasonally adjusted) and Latinos (31 percent in May). The figure for 20-24 year old Latinos was 16.5 percent in May.
“Why this rampant joblessness is not viewed as a crisis and approached with the sense of urgency and commitment that a crisis warrants, is beyond me,’ wrote Herbert, one of the very few mainstream commentators to consistently deal with this crisis in minority communities. “The Obama administration has committed a great deal of money to keep the economy from collapsing entirely, but that is not enough to cope with the scope of the jobless crisis.”
In a clear and hard hitting piece July 2, Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times Columnist, Paul Krugman, laid out the challenge the worsening jobs picture places before the Obama Administration and the nation. He wrote that “as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms” and “So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it’s essential.”
“Obama administration economists understand the stakes,” wrote Krugman. “Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the “lessons of 1937” – the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.
“What I don’t know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far.”
“So here’s my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don’t, you’ll soon be facing your own personal 1937.”
As he prepared to depart on a foreign trip last week, the President issued a Fourth of July Message to the country that contained the words: “as long as some Americans still must struggle, none of us can be fully content.” So true. As the Times put it in an editorial a few days earlier: “The jobs report for June should put a chill on hopes for an economic recovery anytime soon.” And it makes a compelling case for more government stimulus, as unpopular as that idea may be in Washington. Americans all over the country are struggling.”
Petty and punitive taxes falling on working people is not the answer. Nor is robbing Peter to pay Paul. What’s needed to get us out of this mess is a unified message to the people who run our cities, states and those in Washington charged with protecting the general welfare, that we need a new deal.
--BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union. Carl Bloice used to be a member of the Communist Party USA until he decided to throw in his lot with the anti-communist revisionists like Erwin Marquit when the working class struggle got too difficult for him. Now he engages solely in electronic journalism which is a lot easier than passing out printed newspapers at plant gates.
He does a good job evading his support for Obama in writing this and there is no need for us to tell the public any differently.
Carl Bloice used to be the assistant editor of the Daily World a newspaper we try not to talk about anymore because of its association with everything 20th Century Socialism which is all bad stuff that happened we don't want to be associated with.
Carl Bloice is a communist just like me. I want all of you to listen to what he has to say.
Maybe we can get him back into the Party just like we did his friend Danny Rubin so we can finish the liquidating job that is taking us longer than we thought it would.
In my opinion, we shouldn't press Obama hard for a New Deal in his first term because we want him to have a chance for a second term. His opposition is coming up as he seeks his second term will be very formidable especially if Sarah Palin gets Prozac treatments successfully.
Sam Webb
National Chair, CPUSA
Message to Obama: We Need a New Deal
By Carl Bloice
Original source: BlackCommentator.com
Now they are out to nickel and dime us to death. Here in my home town the traffic and parking department has been prevailed upon to “step up” its enforcement activity – and maneuvering to have parking meters work far into the night – in order help cover some of the city’s budget deficit. In Massachusetts, legislators have slapped a tax on candy. The California state legislature recently endorsed a $1.50 tax on a bottle of alcohol and added an additional $15 to the vehicle license fee.
The astonishing thing is that such measures, being undertaken across the country, are being approved and even plotted by some liberals and progressives. It’s high time we all recognize that the people who get hit by traffic fines are the ones without garages and “sin taxes,” by and large, target working people. They are not the ones who got the economy into the current mess but if some people have their way, they will pay through the nose for it. This, at a time when unemployment is soaring, working hours are being cut and paychecks are shrinking.
Nor is there anything good to be said for pitting the budgets for police and fire services against health and welfare services. That’s not the way to nurture the progressive political majority needed to really address the current crisis. Yet, in the absence of measures to bring in new sources of revenue to run our cities and states, well-meaning people are maneuvered into challenging each other for pieces of the shrinking pie.
All across the nation, schools are being shuttered, senior meal programs decimated, community health centers eliminated and legal aid for the poor hammered. We are being told there is no other way and that we should stoically accept this austerity and count what blessings we have left. The problem is that if the sacrifices being forced upon our families and communities are really necessary, then they are not being doled out with anything approaching equity. They’re still living it up big time in some parts of town.
“The mood among financiers is suddenly more cheery,” wrote John Plender in the Financial Times the other day. In London and New York “trading profits are up and bonuses are back” And, rather than being reduced to something more reasonable, executive compensation packages are on the way up. “There is also a growing suspicion on both sides of the Atlantic that bankers, a lethal breed whose activities have pretty much throttled the global economy while causing government deficits to balloon, are going back to business as usual – a frightening prospect for taxpayers everywhere,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, the country’s employment crisis continues to worsen. When wandering in the desert, beware shimmering water on the horizon,” read the Financial Times’ Lex Column, July 2. “If May’s better than expected jobs report offered the dehydrated US labor market hope of succor, June’s miserable effort was a mouthful of sand.” The June jobs data from the Labor Department contained “few signs of life at all,’ it said adding, “Slowing growth in weekly earnings, now at 2.7 per cent year on year, is another serving of angst. And falling hours plus sluggish wages mean a further drag on US consumption – already constrained by debt-laden household balance sheets and tight credit. The mirage, and with it hopes of a speedy recovery, has vanished.”
“The entire growth in jobs over the last nine years has now been wiped out – the economy currently has fewer jobs than it had in May 2000,” says Economic Policy Institute economist Heidi Shierholz. “The labor force, however, has grown by 12.5 million workers since then. “This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all jobs growth from the previous business cycle, a devastating benchmark for the workers of this country and a testament to both the enormity of the current crisis and to the extreme weakness of jobs growth from 2000-2007.”
As economist Dean Baker notes in his Jobs Byte column, the percentage of the unemployed who have been out of work for more than 26 weeks increased by 2 percentage points to 29.0 percent in June and “Many of these workers will soon be exhausting even their extended unemployment benefits.”
When drawing up the economic stimulus plan, the Obama Administration relied on a projection of an 8 percent jobless rate this year. It became clear a couple of months ago that figure would miss the mark. It now stands at 9.4 percent and the consensus is that it will reach 10 percent by Christmas. Pimco CEO and chief investment officer, Mohamed El-Erian, now suggests that it may go as high as 10.5-11 percent sometime next year. “Economists are currently spreading the word that the recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will continue to climb,” Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times last week “That’s not a recovery. That’s mumbo jumbo.”
“There are now more than five unemployed workers for every job opening in the United States,” wrote Herbert. “The ranks of the poor are growing, welfare rolls are rising and young American men on a broad front are falling into an abyss of joblessness.
The “broad front” to which Herbert refers may relate to what I consider some of the worst mumbo jumbo floating around out there: the idea that education guarantees a good job or any job at all. One of the striking aspects of the job stats so far this year is the number of out-of-work college graduates. It keeps on growing. The percentage of unemployed people with some college or an Associate degree was 4.4 percent last June, 7.7 this May and now stands at 8.0 percent. For those under 27 years old with a Bachelors degree or better, it’s 5.9 percent. “Everyone is worse off in the current downturn, and young college grads are no exception,” writes Kathryn Edwards of the Economic Policy Institute. adding, “Although still better off than their peers without a higher education, young college graduates face challenges unique to their age and situation – it is likely that they have considerable debt from financing school, have had no time to build up savings, and, if looking for their first job, are not eligible for unemployment benefits.”
“The tough economy and tight labor market have tarnished the luster of a bachelor’s degree for young college graduates seeking employment, wrote Tony Pugh for the McClatchy newspapers. “New monthly survey data from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston finds that during the first four months of 2009, less than half of the nation’s 4 million college graduates age 25 and under were working in jobs that required a college degree. That’s down from 54 percent for the same period last year.”
“The problem is most acute in the 25-and-under age group among Asian female graduates and black and Hispanic male graduates,” wrote Pugh. “The survey, of 60,000 households, found less than 30 percent of Asian female grads, 32 percent of Hispanic male grads and just over 35 percent of young black male grads working in jobs that require a bachelor’s degree.”
Of course, a young graduate working at a low-paying job means one less job opening for a kid with no degree.
The figures for unemployment among college graduates are, of course, relatively low percentages; the greatest burden of joblessness is falling on those without a high school diploma (15.5 percent) and high school graduates (9.8 percent) – especially young African Americans (37.9 percent – seasonally adjusted) and Latinos (31 percent in May). The figure for 20-24 year old Latinos was 16.5 percent in May.
“Why this rampant joblessness is not viewed as a crisis and approached with the sense of urgency and commitment that a crisis warrants, is beyond me,’ wrote Herbert, one of the very few mainstream commentators to consistently deal with this crisis in minority communities. “The Obama administration has committed a great deal of money to keep the economy from collapsing entirely, but that is not enough to cope with the scope of the jobless crisis.”
In a clear and hard hitting piece July 2, Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times Columnist, Paul Krugman, laid out the challenge the worsening jobs picture places before the Obama Administration and the nation. He wrote that “as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms” and “So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it’s essential.”
“Obama administration economists understand the stakes,” wrote Krugman. “Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the “lessons of 1937” – the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.
“What I don’t know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far.”
“So here’s my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don’t, you’ll soon be facing your own personal 1937.”
As he prepared to depart on a foreign trip last week, the President issued a Fourth of July Message to the country that contained the words: “as long as some Americans still must struggle, none of us can be fully content.” So true. As the Times put it in an editorial a few days earlier: “The jobs report for June should put a chill on hopes for an economic recovery anytime soon.” And it makes a compelling case for more government stimulus, as unpopular as that idea may be in Washington. Americans all over the country are struggling.”
Petty and punitive taxes falling on working people is not the answer. Nor is robbing Peter to pay Paul. What’s needed to get us out of this mess is a unified message to the people who run our cities, states and those in Washington charged with protecting the general welfare, that we need a new deal.
--BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union. Carl Bloice used to be a member of the Communist Party USA until he decided to throw in his lot with the anti-communist revisionists like Erwin Marquit when the working class struggle got too difficult for him. Now he engages solely in electronic journalism which is a lot easier than passing out printed newspapers at plant gates.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Report to the June 2009 National Committee Meeting
This is my report to the CPUSA National Committee Meeting in June.
You will note we are not sharing certain discussion papers with the general public. These are the proposals to reconfigure our work.
I am not going into specifics about membership figures or how many clubs we have at present. I will not go into any specifics about what any clubs are doing. Getting specific enables others who are not our friends to insist on accountability. We don't want to get bogged down over accountability. This way we claim credit for any progress while we deny any ownership if things go awry. This is the smart way to operate.
Sam Webb
National Chair, CPUSA
I make no attempt to be comprehensive in these remarks. My aim is much more modest, as you will see.
Let me begin with a simple observation: If the last 30 years were an era of reaction, then the coming decade could turn into an era of reform, even radical reform. Six months into the Obama presidency, I would say without hesitation that the landscape, atmosphere, conversation, and agenda have strikingly changed compared to the previous eight years.
In this legislative session, we can envision winning a Medicare-like public option and then going further in the years ahead.
We can visualize passing tough regulatory reforms on the financial industry, which brought the economy to ruin.
We can imagine the troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan while U.S. representatives participate in a regional process that brings peace and stability to the entire region.
In the current political climate, the expansion of union rights becomes a real possibility.
Much the same can be said about winning a second stimulus bill, and we sure need one, given the still-rising rate, and likely long term persistence, of unemployment.
Isn’t it possible in the Obama era to create millions of green jobs in manufacturing and other sectors of the economy in tandem with an attack on global warming?
Can’t we envision taking new strides in the long journey for racial and gender equality in this new era, marked at its beginning by the election of the first African American to the presidency?
And isn’t the overhaul of the criminal justice and prison system – a system steeped in racism – no longer pie-in-the sky, but something that can be done in the foreseeable future?
All these things are within reach now!
I make this observation because in the ebb and flow of the first six months of the Obama presidency, it is easy to lose sight of the overall dynamics and promise of this new era.
Obama’s role
The new conditions of struggle are possible only – and I want to emphasize only – because we elected President Obama and a Congress with pronounced progressive and center currents.
So far Obama’s presidency has both broken from the right-wing extremist policies of the Bush administration and taken steps domestically and internationally that go in a progressive direction.
At the same time, the administration hasn’t gone as far as we would have liked on a number of issues. On economic matters as well as matters of war and occupation we, along with others, advocated bolder actions.
All and all, however, the new President in deeds and words – and words do matter – has created new democratic space for peace, equality, and economic justice struggles. Whether this continues and takes on a consistently progressive, pro-people, radical reform direction depends in large measure on whether the movement that elected him fills and expands this space.
The struggle going forward, much like the New Deal, will be the outcome of a contested and fluid process involving broad class and social constituencies, taking multiple forms, and working out over time.
It will pivot on the expansion of social and economic rights, the reconfiguring of the functions of government to the advantage of working people, and the embedding of a new economic architecture and developmental path into the nation’s political economy.
No less importantly, it will also entail the recasting of the role of the U.S. in the global community along egalitarian and non-imperial lines.
“What’s all this talk about reform?” you may be asking. “Aren’t we radicals? Isn’t socialism our objective?”
Yes, socialism is our objective and, according to recent public opinion polls, it is increasingly attractive to the American people. But clearly it is not on the immediate political agenda. Neither the current balance of forces nor the thinking of millions of Americans – the starting point in any serious discussion of strategy and tactics – has reached that point.
That socialism isn’t on the people’s action agenda, however, doesn’t mean that we should zip our lips. Quite the contrary! We should talk it up and bring our modern, deeply democratic Twenty-First-Century vision of U.S. socialism into coalitions and mass movements. And with the use of the Internet we can reach an exponentially bigger audience than we could in the past.
As for our radicalism, we should be as radical as reality itself. And reality strongly suggests that our main task is to bring the weight of the working class and other democratic forces to bear on the reform process with the aim of deepening its anti-corporate content and direction.
Current phase of struggle
How do we understand the current phase of struggle? On the one hand, our strategic policy of defeating right wing extremism doesn’t quite fit the new correlation of class forces. On the other hand, neither have we arrived at the anti-monopoly stage of struggle – a stage in which corporate class power is confronted on every level of struggle.
In short, we are in transitional phase that contains elements of both.
In the course of this struggle, political conditions – consciousness, organization, unity, and alliances, including temporary and conditional alliances – will hopefully mature to the point where corporate power emerges as the main hindrance to radical democracy and socialism in the minds of tens of millions.
We can conjure up pure forms of struggle and direct and unencumbered paths to socialism in our impatient minds, but they don’t exist in real life. The struggle for a socialist future is complex, contradictory, roundabout, and goes through different phases/stages of struggle.
Propaganda and agitation by themselves won’t bring people to the threshold of socialism. They need their own experience in struggle for their essential (what is essential is variable and expands over time) needs.
The question
People aren’t sitting on their hands. Anger is out there, hardship is widespread, and the fight back is taking shape.
And yet, it is fair to ask: does the level of mobilization of the diverse coalition that elected President Obama match what is necessary to win his administration’s immediate legislative and political agenda – let alone far-reaching reforms, such as military conversion to peacetime and green production, a shorter work week, a “war” on poverty and inequality, democratic ownership of critical economic sectors, and a retreat from empire?
I think the answer is no – not yet. A favorable alignment of forces exists and mass sentiments favor change. But political majorities and popular sentiments are consequential only to the degree that they are an active and organized element in the political process.
And herein lays the role of the Left. Its main task, as it has been throughout our country’s history, is to persistently and patiently assist in reassembling, activating, uniting, educating, and giving a voice to common demands that unite this broad majority.
The Left's political analysis, its solutions to today's pressing crises, and its vision of radical democracy and socialism, rooted in national realities, will receive a fair and favorable hearing from millions of Americans to the degree that Left activists are active participants in the main labor and people’s organizations struggling for vital reforms today — jobs, health care, retirement security, quality public education, equality and fairness, immigration reform, a foreign policy of peace and cooperation, and a livable environment and sustainable economy.
Those who narrow down the role of the Left to simply being a critic of every move of the Obama administration or insist on Left demands as the only ground for broad unity cut down the Left’s capacity to be a growing part of a much larger coalition that could remake America.
Some on the Left dismiss the new President as simply another centrist or a right social democrat, or an unabashed spokesperson of Wall Street. Still others call him the new face of imperialism.
I find it unwise for many reasons to put President Obama into a tightly sealed political category. We should see the President and his administration as a work in progress in an exceptionally fluid situation.
Let’s remember that he is the leader of a diverse multi-class coalition and a party with different currents. Let’s not forget about the balance of forces in Congress that has to enter his – and hopefully our – political calculus.
Let’s not turn any one issue into a litmus test determining our attitude toward the administration and Congress. Let’s be aware that he has to keep a coalition together for his long-term as well as immediate legislative agenda. Let’s give President Obama some space to change and to respond to pressures from below.
Finally, we should resist pressures from some sections of the Left, and a few in our Party, to define the current struggle as one that arrays the people against President Obama. That’s not Marxism; it’s plain stupid.
The American people and their main mass organizations have good reason to be angry and frustrated, but few embrace an approach that turns the Obama administration into the main roadblock to social progress.
That we have spurned such an approach too is to our credit. (Read the outstanding speech of AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka to the national convention of CBTU, in which he speaks of labor’s positive view of the new administration and the new openings for class and democratic struggles that now exist.)
We can help re-bend the arc of history in the direction of justice, equality, and peace. But only if we, and millions like us, pursue a sound strategy that unifies broad sections of the American people and looks for alliances no matter how temporary and conditional. Majorities make history, not militant minorities.
President Obama and progressive Congresspeople can’t be the only change agents and will be change agents only up to a point.
Our responsibility is to support them, prod them, and constructively take issue with them when we have differing views.
But more importantly – and this is the heart of the matter – we have to reach, activate, unite, educate, and turn millions of Americans into “change agents” who can make the political difference in upcoming struggles.
Our parents and grandparents were such bottom-up change agents in the Depression years. Unhappy with the pace and substance of change, they sat down in plants and in the fields, marched for veteran benefits, petitioned local relief agencies, lobbied for a social safety net, established unemployed groups, organized industrial workers into the CIO, opposed discrimination and racism, turned multi-racial unity into an organizing principle, and, we should note, re-elected Roosevelt and a New Deal Congress in a landslide in the 1936 elections.
The American people today would do well to follow their example.
Likewise, communists of our generation should draw from the example of our Depression-era comrades. Because they were guided by a sound strategy that accented struggles for economic and social reforms and because they employed flexible tactics, and because they didn’t conflate their mood with the mass mood, they were a vital part of this process too.
Struggle for health care reform
The mobilization that the labor movement and others carried out tirelessly last year in the elections is exactly what is needed now. How else can health care for all, the Employee Free Choice Act, economic relief, comprehensive immigration reform, a transfer of funds from military spending to massive green job creation, and a tax policy that weighs heavily the wealthiest families and corporations be won?
The Right Wing, the American Medical Association, the pharmaceutical and insurance companies have drawn a line in the sand on health care. They hope to defeat any legislation in the near term and in doing so to fatally weaken the administration’s legislative program in the longer term, much like they did in the Clinton years.
The core of this struggle, whether we like it or not, turns on the inclusion of a public option in a health care bill. President Obama reaffirmed his support for such an option and the Congressional Progressive Caucus recently expressed its full support for a public option that is government run, covers everyone, and goes into effect right away.
Meanwhile, Republicans, with help from some Democrats, are ganging up against any public option, while at the same time introducing measures to weaken health care reform and confuse the American people.
True to form, the right-wing media is the megaphone of this effort.
Mass mobilization is needed
Over the summer this fight will be waged like an election campaign by the labor movement and progressive forces. Across the country activists will be asked to knock on doors and make phone calls to build a massive groundswell for health care reform.
This campaign provides a great opening to strengthen our clubs and build the broader movement. Some of our clubs are in the thick of the fight; some are looking for ways to become engaged.
Each district and club should discuss how to carry this fight forward in a way that results in new friends, new readers of the People’s World, and new members of the Party and Young Communist League. A few ideas:
• speak to neighbors and friends about their health care stories and suggest what they can do.
• share coverage of the Peoples World in either its print or electronic form and ask if they would like the paper every week in one or another form.
• prepare a special agenda for your club meeting with invited guests.
• help build participation in rallies and events of unions and other organizations.
• organize speak-outs and town hall meetings with others.
• collect signatures on petitions, make phone calls, employ the internet, and organize visits to your elected officials.
While we support HR 676 as the most advanced demand in the current debate, it should not be counterpoised to a Medicare-like public option. In the single payer movement and the campaign for a public option, our role isn’t to sharpen differences, but rather to build maximum unity against the health care industrial complex and its supporters (Democratic as well as Republican) in Congress and for meaningful health care reform.
Economic crisis over
Another observation that I want to make is to beware of talk of better economic times around the corner. We may be over the worst of it; we may have avoided a 1930s-type depression; but it’s quite another thing to suggest that we are on the road to recovery.
Yes, there have been some indicators that show improvement in the economy; but we shouldn’t read too much into them (as the business press does).
After all, there are more signs that suggest that we haven’t reached bottom yet, that the recovery is still not in sight; and that more government intervention is necessary.
Unemployment hasn’t peaked, even though the official rate is nearly ten per cent. Poverty is growing, and among the long-term poor, the crisis is dire. Manufacturing is hemorrhaging jobs – none more so than the auto industry. Banks, as quiet as it is kept, hold mountains of toxic assets. Debt is nearly off the charts. Credit markets are far from fluid. Business investment is off. And housing prices fall and foreclosures rise.
On a global level, signs of renewed economic activity are few. Maybe the best we can say is that the decline of the economy is slowing down, thanks to massive government intervention, but hasn’t bottomed out.
If this is so then three questions follow: first, when will the economy hit bottom? Second, when will the economy begin a vigorous and sustained renewal? Third, is the economic crisis reconfiguring the geography of economic power on a global level?
On these questions there is no consensus.
Some say that the economy will bottom out soon to be followed by a recovery early next year. Other economists are more pessimistic. Citing the enormous piling up of debt over the past 20 years, overcrowded world commodity markets, technological displacement, capital flight, downward pressures on profitability, and so forth, they predict little economic bounce for some time to come.
Months ago it was said that the downturn could be “L-shaped” rather than “V-shaped.” In other words, the crisis begins with a steep decline in economic activity followed by long period of economic stagnation.
I suspect that this is what will happen, thus making sustained government and people’s intervention an imperative. In my view this should take at least three forms:
First, more economic stimulus: the economy is underperforming and nearly 30 million workers are unemployed or underemployed and that number hasn’t peaked yet.
Second, restructuring is imperative. The old economic model that rested on bubble economics, cheap labor, financial manipulation and speculation, deregulation, capital outsourcing, environmental degradation, and so forth, has to be replaced by a new model that expands and restructures the productive base and is “people and nature” friendly.
Finally, the economy has to be democratized. The wizards of Wall Street and inside the Beltway failed miserably, in fact, so miserably those economic decisions that affect the welfare of millions shouldn’t rest in their hands.
The resistance to such measures will be massive. It will take a labor-led coalition far bigger than what exists now to drive the process.
Furthermore, even in the event that such a coalition materializes and pushes through such measures, the organically embedded economic contradictions and crisis tendencies of capitalism will erupt in one form or another. There is no such thing as a crisis-free capitalist developmental model. Sooner or later, it exhausts its potential and gives way to sharp and ultimately irresolvable contradictions located at every level of the capitalist economy.
In the meantime, the struggle for immediate public sector jobs and relief should command our attention. We, along with the labor movement, the nationally and racially oppressed, women, youth and others, have to help the unemployed find their voice and forms to express their demands and organize their struggle.
In addition to articulating class wide demands, we have to argue for special measures that address the catastrophic situation in the African American, Latino, Asian American, American Indian, immigrant, and other minority communities. The lack of jobs is at the heart of this dire situation, but it also includes malnutrition and hunger, poor health care, shabby housing, high dropout rates, homelessness, racial profiling, police brutality, criminalization, and so on.
The job crisis requires special discussion and initiatives with our allies. They should be concrete and realistic.
As for the impact of the current crisis of capitalism on the geographical distribution of economic power on a global level, it is enormous and consequential. While the U.S. and European market economies report negative growth rates, the economies of the emerging giants – China, India, and Brazil – are expanding this year and this trend will continue at a faster rate next year. If this trend continues – and there is no reason to think that it won’t – the implications and consequences will be profound and long lasting.
An end to violence
Still another observation that I would like to make is this: against the background of the bloodiest century in human history and this decade of war, genocide, boycotts, and threats and counter threats, thanks in large measure to the Bush administration and our own imperialism, humanity is seeking a new world order in which peace and justice are its organizing principles.
The vast majority of people desire the easing of tensions, an end to violence, and the normalization of relations between states. They want dialogue and negotiation, not war and threats. And they hope that the U.S. government will choose a constructive role in world affairs.
President Obama has captured this sentiment well in several speeches before vast audiences. His emphasis on human solidarity, diplomacy, cooperation, and peaceful settlement of outstanding issues is striking an emotional chord worldwide. In nearly every region of the world, the President has expressed a readiness to engage with countries that during the Bush years were considered mortal enemies – Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and others. In Latin America, he indicated that the administration would like to put relations between our government and others in the region on a different footing. In a historic speech in Prague, he voiced his desire to reduce and ultimately abolish nuclear weapons. Earlier this month, in an unprecedented address in Cairo he indicated his eagerness to reset relations with the Muslim world, sit down with the Iranian government, and press for a two state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
And only this week, he has been circumspect with regard to the massive social explosion in Iran over the rigged election and right-wing theocratic rule. He has quietly made his allegiances clear, but not in a way that would play in to the hands of the ruling reactionary regime.
While the administration has yet to fully match its words with practical deeds, what it has said and done so far constitutes a qualitative turn compared to the previous administration.
Nevertheless, more needs doing before we are on a distinctly new course.
In Afghanistan and North Korea, a negotiated solution to both conflicts that includes increased economic and humanitarian aid is urgently needed. Military occupation and troop buildup in Afghanistan and the imposition of sanctions against North Korea are extremely dangerous and will postpone any resolution of those crises.
To go further, if one or the other (or both) metastasizes into a bigger conflict, it could be the undoing of this administration. Don’t get me wrong: terrorist activities and nuclear proliferation are both enormous dangers, but the solutions to these have to be sought along other lines and involve regional and international players.
In Iraq, the U.S. withdrawal plan is proceeding, with the first stage being withdrawal from Iraqi cities by July. President Obama has reiterated his intention to stick with the pullout deadlines. Even with the caveats about what U.S. forces might remain, this is a major victory for the peace movement. The struggle over what forces remain will depend in large part on the Iraqi people's democratic and progressive forces, as well as our own peace movement.
In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Netanyahu, in an about-face, said he could live with a two-state solution. And even with all the caveats and demagogy surrounding the “concession,” I believe that it signifies recognition, albeit forced, on Likud’s part that public opinion is shifting against them in Israel, Europe, and the U.S.
In this country the peace movement has to note particularly the changing dynamics in U.S. opinion, including in the White House and Congress, including Jewish members of Congress. Netanyahu got a different reaction than he expected when he met with Congressional leaders when he was in Washington recently. While he wanted to focus on Iran, they pressed him on the settlements. And, that pressure will only grow if the new Israeli government continues in its actions to pursue its present policy.
As far as Cuba is concerned, we are at a crucial moment in U.S.-Cuba relations. The Obama administration has indicated its readiness to reset relations with Cuba and has taken some very modest steps in words and deeds in that direction. But obviously much more needs to be done to end all travel restrictions, lift the blockade, resume trade, and free the Cuban 5, who languish in maximum security prisons. That said, the good news is that diverse groups have an interest in normalizing the relations between our two countries, including in the Congress.
Finally, we are in a moment when our ability to change our foreign policy will bear directly on our capacity to address economic and social problems at home. Currently, 53 percent of the discretionary spending of the federal budget goes to the military.
Thus, ending wars, closing military bases, and cutting military spending coupled with diplomacy, cooperation, and respect for international law and national sovereignty is good economic as well as good foreign policy.
But there is a hitch. Both Republicans and Democrats are upset at the minimal steps the administration is proposing to cut specific “unnecessary” or useless weapons systems.
So we have a struggle on our hands. And it will be fought out in “the court of public opinion,” at the ballot box, and in the economic trenches.
So far the peace movement has an array of plans to challenge the military appropriations process, including town hall Congressional meetings on foreign policy during the August recess. We should participate and support them.
Bottom line: the country and the Obama administration need a more vocal peace movement in order to reconfigure our role in world affairs and address the economic crisis.
Mentality of marginalization
Another observation that I want to make is that because of McCarthyism, the Cold War, and the long economic expansion following WW II, the Left has been on the edges of politics for more than a half century. During this time, our ability to impact on broader political processes in the country has been narrowly circumscribed – nothing like the 1930s, nothing like the Left in many other countries.
While we stubbornly fought the good fight and made undeniable contributions over the past half-century, we were not a major player; we didn’t set the agenda or frame the debate; we didn’t determine the political direction of the country; we were not a decider.
But this could change. Because of the new political, economic and ideological landscape, the Left has an opportunity to step from the political periphery into the mainstream of U.S. politics. It has a chance to become a player of consequence; a player whose voice is seriously considered in the debates bearing on the future of the country; a player that is able to mobilize and influence the thinking and actions of millions.
Whether we do depends on many factors, one of which is our ability to shake off a “mentality of marginalization” that has become embedded in the Left’s political culture over the last half of the Twentieth Century.
How does this mentality express itself? In a number of ways – in spending too much time agitating the choir; in dismissing new political openings that if taken advantage of could create the conditions for mass struggle; in thinking that partial reforms are at loggerheads with radical reforms; in seeing the glass as always half empty; in conflating our outlook with the outlook of millions; in turning the danger of cooptation into a rationale to keep a distance from reform struggles; in enclosing ourselves in narrow Left forms; and in damning victories with faint praise.
In this peculiar mindset, politics has few complexities. Change is driven only from the ground up. Winning broad majorities is not essential. There are no stages of struggle, no social forces that possess strategic social power, and no divisions worth noting. Finally, alliances with unstable allies and distinctions between the Democratic and Republican parties are either of little consequence or disdainfully dismissed.
Unless the Left – and I include communists – sheds this mentality, it will miss a unique opportunity to grow and leave a distinct imprint on our country’s direction.
A final observation before closing is that I wholeheartedly welcome the proposals to reconfigure our work that you received and that we are going to discuss later today.
I don’t have any of the reservations about this that some have. The upside of this new means of communication, education, organization, and fund raising is that it is nearly limitless.
I think it is going to make a huge difference in our ability to reach, influence, and interact with a mass audience – something that we haven’t ever been able to do in a systematic way so far.
Every aspect of our work will experience new potentials, including grassroots organizing and club building.
I hope we enthusiastically adopt these proposals. Assuming for the moment that we do, it is fair to say that we will have our work cut out for us. But as is often said, we have a world to win! Thank you.
You will note we are not sharing certain discussion papers with the general public. These are the proposals to reconfigure our work.
I am not going into specifics about membership figures or how many clubs we have at present. I will not go into any specifics about what any clubs are doing. Getting specific enables others who are not our friends to insist on accountability. We don't want to get bogged down over accountability. This way we claim credit for any progress while we deny any ownership if things go awry. This is the smart way to operate.
Sam Webb
National Chair, CPUSA
I make no attempt to be comprehensive in these remarks. My aim is much more modest, as you will see.
Let me begin with a simple observation: If the last 30 years were an era of reaction, then the coming decade could turn into an era of reform, even radical reform. Six months into the Obama presidency, I would say without hesitation that the landscape, atmosphere, conversation, and agenda have strikingly changed compared to the previous eight years.
In this legislative session, we can envision winning a Medicare-like public option and then going further in the years ahead.
We can visualize passing tough regulatory reforms on the financial industry, which brought the economy to ruin.
We can imagine the troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan while U.S. representatives participate in a regional process that brings peace and stability to the entire region.
In the current political climate, the expansion of union rights becomes a real possibility.
Much the same can be said about winning a second stimulus bill, and we sure need one, given the still-rising rate, and likely long term persistence, of unemployment.
Isn’t it possible in the Obama era to create millions of green jobs in manufacturing and other sectors of the economy in tandem with an attack on global warming?
Can’t we envision taking new strides in the long journey for racial and gender equality in this new era, marked at its beginning by the election of the first African American to the presidency?
And isn’t the overhaul of the criminal justice and prison system – a system steeped in racism – no longer pie-in-the sky, but something that can be done in the foreseeable future?
All these things are within reach now!
I make this observation because in the ebb and flow of the first six months of the Obama presidency, it is easy to lose sight of the overall dynamics and promise of this new era.
Obama’s role
The new conditions of struggle are possible only – and I want to emphasize only – because we elected President Obama and a Congress with pronounced progressive and center currents.
So far Obama’s presidency has both broken from the right-wing extremist policies of the Bush administration and taken steps domestically and internationally that go in a progressive direction.
At the same time, the administration hasn’t gone as far as we would have liked on a number of issues. On economic matters as well as matters of war and occupation we, along with others, advocated bolder actions.
All and all, however, the new President in deeds and words – and words do matter – has created new democratic space for peace, equality, and economic justice struggles. Whether this continues and takes on a consistently progressive, pro-people, radical reform direction depends in large measure on whether the movement that elected him fills and expands this space.
The struggle going forward, much like the New Deal, will be the outcome of a contested and fluid process involving broad class and social constituencies, taking multiple forms, and working out over time.
It will pivot on the expansion of social and economic rights, the reconfiguring of the functions of government to the advantage of working people, and the embedding of a new economic architecture and developmental path into the nation’s political economy.
No less importantly, it will also entail the recasting of the role of the U.S. in the global community along egalitarian and non-imperial lines.
“What’s all this talk about reform?” you may be asking. “Aren’t we radicals? Isn’t socialism our objective?”
Yes, socialism is our objective and, according to recent public opinion polls, it is increasingly attractive to the American people. But clearly it is not on the immediate political agenda. Neither the current balance of forces nor the thinking of millions of Americans – the starting point in any serious discussion of strategy and tactics – has reached that point.
That socialism isn’t on the people’s action agenda, however, doesn’t mean that we should zip our lips. Quite the contrary! We should talk it up and bring our modern, deeply democratic Twenty-First-Century vision of U.S. socialism into coalitions and mass movements. And with the use of the Internet we can reach an exponentially bigger audience than we could in the past.
As for our radicalism, we should be as radical as reality itself. And reality strongly suggests that our main task is to bring the weight of the working class and other democratic forces to bear on the reform process with the aim of deepening its anti-corporate content and direction.
Current phase of struggle
How do we understand the current phase of struggle? On the one hand, our strategic policy of defeating right wing extremism doesn’t quite fit the new correlation of class forces. On the other hand, neither have we arrived at the anti-monopoly stage of struggle – a stage in which corporate class power is confronted on every level of struggle.
In short, we are in transitional phase that contains elements of both.
In the course of this struggle, political conditions – consciousness, organization, unity, and alliances, including temporary and conditional alliances – will hopefully mature to the point where corporate power emerges as the main hindrance to radical democracy and socialism in the minds of tens of millions.
We can conjure up pure forms of struggle and direct and unencumbered paths to socialism in our impatient minds, but they don’t exist in real life. The struggle for a socialist future is complex, contradictory, roundabout, and goes through different phases/stages of struggle.
Propaganda and agitation by themselves won’t bring people to the threshold of socialism. They need their own experience in struggle for their essential (what is essential is variable and expands over time) needs.
The question
People aren’t sitting on their hands. Anger is out there, hardship is widespread, and the fight back is taking shape.
And yet, it is fair to ask: does the level of mobilization of the diverse coalition that elected President Obama match what is necessary to win his administration’s immediate legislative and political agenda – let alone far-reaching reforms, such as military conversion to peacetime and green production, a shorter work week, a “war” on poverty and inequality, democratic ownership of critical economic sectors, and a retreat from empire?
I think the answer is no – not yet. A favorable alignment of forces exists and mass sentiments favor change. But political majorities and popular sentiments are consequential only to the degree that they are an active and organized element in the political process.
And herein lays the role of the Left. Its main task, as it has been throughout our country’s history, is to persistently and patiently assist in reassembling, activating, uniting, educating, and giving a voice to common demands that unite this broad majority.
The Left's political analysis, its solutions to today's pressing crises, and its vision of radical democracy and socialism, rooted in national realities, will receive a fair and favorable hearing from millions of Americans to the degree that Left activists are active participants in the main labor and people’s organizations struggling for vital reforms today — jobs, health care, retirement security, quality public education, equality and fairness, immigration reform, a foreign policy of peace and cooperation, and a livable environment and sustainable economy.
Those who narrow down the role of the Left to simply being a critic of every move of the Obama administration or insist on Left demands as the only ground for broad unity cut down the Left’s capacity to be a growing part of a much larger coalition that could remake America.
Some on the Left dismiss the new President as simply another centrist or a right social democrat, or an unabashed spokesperson of Wall Street. Still others call him the new face of imperialism.
I find it unwise for many reasons to put President Obama into a tightly sealed political category. We should see the President and his administration as a work in progress in an exceptionally fluid situation.
Let’s remember that he is the leader of a diverse multi-class coalition and a party with different currents. Let’s not forget about the balance of forces in Congress that has to enter his – and hopefully our – political calculus.
Let’s not turn any one issue into a litmus test determining our attitude toward the administration and Congress. Let’s be aware that he has to keep a coalition together for his long-term as well as immediate legislative agenda. Let’s give President Obama some space to change and to respond to pressures from below.
Finally, we should resist pressures from some sections of the Left, and a few in our Party, to define the current struggle as one that arrays the people against President Obama. That’s not Marxism; it’s plain stupid.
The American people and their main mass organizations have good reason to be angry and frustrated, but few embrace an approach that turns the Obama administration into the main roadblock to social progress.
That we have spurned such an approach too is to our credit. (Read the outstanding speech of AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka to the national convention of CBTU, in which he speaks of labor’s positive view of the new administration and the new openings for class and democratic struggles that now exist.)
We can help re-bend the arc of history in the direction of justice, equality, and peace. But only if we, and millions like us, pursue a sound strategy that unifies broad sections of the American people and looks for alliances no matter how temporary and conditional. Majorities make history, not militant minorities.
President Obama and progressive Congresspeople can’t be the only change agents and will be change agents only up to a point.
Our responsibility is to support them, prod them, and constructively take issue with them when we have differing views.
But more importantly – and this is the heart of the matter – we have to reach, activate, unite, educate, and turn millions of Americans into “change agents” who can make the political difference in upcoming struggles.
Our parents and grandparents were such bottom-up change agents in the Depression years. Unhappy with the pace and substance of change, they sat down in plants and in the fields, marched for veteran benefits, petitioned local relief agencies, lobbied for a social safety net, established unemployed groups, organized industrial workers into the CIO, opposed discrimination and racism, turned multi-racial unity into an organizing principle, and, we should note, re-elected Roosevelt and a New Deal Congress in a landslide in the 1936 elections.
The American people today would do well to follow their example.
Likewise, communists of our generation should draw from the example of our Depression-era comrades. Because they were guided by a sound strategy that accented struggles for economic and social reforms and because they employed flexible tactics, and because they didn’t conflate their mood with the mass mood, they were a vital part of this process too.
Struggle for health care reform
The mobilization that the labor movement and others carried out tirelessly last year in the elections is exactly what is needed now. How else can health care for all, the Employee Free Choice Act, economic relief, comprehensive immigration reform, a transfer of funds from military spending to massive green job creation, and a tax policy that weighs heavily the wealthiest families and corporations be won?
The Right Wing, the American Medical Association, the pharmaceutical and insurance companies have drawn a line in the sand on health care. They hope to defeat any legislation in the near term and in doing so to fatally weaken the administration’s legislative program in the longer term, much like they did in the Clinton years.
The core of this struggle, whether we like it or not, turns on the inclusion of a public option in a health care bill. President Obama reaffirmed his support for such an option and the Congressional Progressive Caucus recently expressed its full support for a public option that is government run, covers everyone, and goes into effect right away.
Meanwhile, Republicans, with help from some Democrats, are ganging up against any public option, while at the same time introducing measures to weaken health care reform and confuse the American people.
True to form, the right-wing media is the megaphone of this effort.
Mass mobilization is needed
Over the summer this fight will be waged like an election campaign by the labor movement and progressive forces. Across the country activists will be asked to knock on doors and make phone calls to build a massive groundswell for health care reform.
This campaign provides a great opening to strengthen our clubs and build the broader movement. Some of our clubs are in the thick of the fight; some are looking for ways to become engaged.
Each district and club should discuss how to carry this fight forward in a way that results in new friends, new readers of the People’s World, and new members of the Party and Young Communist League. A few ideas:
• speak to neighbors and friends about their health care stories and suggest what they can do.
• share coverage of the Peoples World in either its print or electronic form and ask if they would like the paper every week in one or another form.
• prepare a special agenda for your club meeting with invited guests.
• help build participation in rallies and events of unions and other organizations.
• organize speak-outs and town hall meetings with others.
• collect signatures on petitions, make phone calls, employ the internet, and organize visits to your elected officials.
While we support HR 676 as the most advanced demand in the current debate, it should not be counterpoised to a Medicare-like public option. In the single payer movement and the campaign for a public option, our role isn’t to sharpen differences, but rather to build maximum unity against the health care industrial complex and its supporters (Democratic as well as Republican) in Congress and for meaningful health care reform.
Economic crisis over
Another observation that I want to make is to beware of talk of better economic times around the corner. We may be over the worst of it; we may have avoided a 1930s-type depression; but it’s quite another thing to suggest that we are on the road to recovery.
Yes, there have been some indicators that show improvement in the economy; but we shouldn’t read too much into them (as the business press does).
After all, there are more signs that suggest that we haven’t reached bottom yet, that the recovery is still not in sight; and that more government intervention is necessary.
Unemployment hasn’t peaked, even though the official rate is nearly ten per cent. Poverty is growing, and among the long-term poor, the crisis is dire. Manufacturing is hemorrhaging jobs – none more so than the auto industry. Banks, as quiet as it is kept, hold mountains of toxic assets. Debt is nearly off the charts. Credit markets are far from fluid. Business investment is off. And housing prices fall and foreclosures rise.
On a global level, signs of renewed economic activity are few. Maybe the best we can say is that the decline of the economy is slowing down, thanks to massive government intervention, but hasn’t bottomed out.
If this is so then three questions follow: first, when will the economy hit bottom? Second, when will the economy begin a vigorous and sustained renewal? Third, is the economic crisis reconfiguring the geography of economic power on a global level?
On these questions there is no consensus.
Some say that the economy will bottom out soon to be followed by a recovery early next year. Other economists are more pessimistic. Citing the enormous piling up of debt over the past 20 years, overcrowded world commodity markets, technological displacement, capital flight, downward pressures on profitability, and so forth, they predict little economic bounce for some time to come.
Months ago it was said that the downturn could be “L-shaped” rather than “V-shaped.” In other words, the crisis begins with a steep decline in economic activity followed by long period of economic stagnation.
I suspect that this is what will happen, thus making sustained government and people’s intervention an imperative. In my view this should take at least three forms:
First, more economic stimulus: the economy is underperforming and nearly 30 million workers are unemployed or underemployed and that number hasn’t peaked yet.
Second, restructuring is imperative. The old economic model that rested on bubble economics, cheap labor, financial manipulation and speculation, deregulation, capital outsourcing, environmental degradation, and so forth, has to be replaced by a new model that expands and restructures the productive base and is “people and nature” friendly.
Finally, the economy has to be democratized. The wizards of Wall Street and inside the Beltway failed miserably, in fact, so miserably those economic decisions that affect the welfare of millions shouldn’t rest in their hands.
The resistance to such measures will be massive. It will take a labor-led coalition far bigger than what exists now to drive the process.
Furthermore, even in the event that such a coalition materializes and pushes through such measures, the organically embedded economic contradictions and crisis tendencies of capitalism will erupt in one form or another. There is no such thing as a crisis-free capitalist developmental model. Sooner or later, it exhausts its potential and gives way to sharp and ultimately irresolvable contradictions located at every level of the capitalist economy.
In the meantime, the struggle for immediate public sector jobs and relief should command our attention. We, along with the labor movement, the nationally and racially oppressed, women, youth and others, have to help the unemployed find their voice and forms to express their demands and organize their struggle.
In addition to articulating class wide demands, we have to argue for special measures that address the catastrophic situation in the African American, Latino, Asian American, American Indian, immigrant, and other minority communities. The lack of jobs is at the heart of this dire situation, but it also includes malnutrition and hunger, poor health care, shabby housing, high dropout rates, homelessness, racial profiling, police brutality, criminalization, and so on.
The job crisis requires special discussion and initiatives with our allies. They should be concrete and realistic.
As for the impact of the current crisis of capitalism on the geographical distribution of economic power on a global level, it is enormous and consequential. While the U.S. and European market economies report negative growth rates, the economies of the emerging giants – China, India, and Brazil – are expanding this year and this trend will continue at a faster rate next year. If this trend continues – and there is no reason to think that it won’t – the implications and consequences will be profound and long lasting.
An end to violence
Still another observation that I would like to make is this: against the background of the bloodiest century in human history and this decade of war, genocide, boycotts, and threats and counter threats, thanks in large measure to the Bush administration and our own imperialism, humanity is seeking a new world order in which peace and justice are its organizing principles.
The vast majority of people desire the easing of tensions, an end to violence, and the normalization of relations between states. They want dialogue and negotiation, not war and threats. And they hope that the U.S. government will choose a constructive role in world affairs.
President Obama has captured this sentiment well in several speeches before vast audiences. His emphasis on human solidarity, diplomacy, cooperation, and peaceful settlement of outstanding issues is striking an emotional chord worldwide. In nearly every region of the world, the President has expressed a readiness to engage with countries that during the Bush years were considered mortal enemies – Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and others. In Latin America, he indicated that the administration would like to put relations between our government and others in the region on a different footing. In a historic speech in Prague, he voiced his desire to reduce and ultimately abolish nuclear weapons. Earlier this month, in an unprecedented address in Cairo he indicated his eagerness to reset relations with the Muslim world, sit down with the Iranian government, and press for a two state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
And only this week, he has been circumspect with regard to the massive social explosion in Iran over the rigged election and right-wing theocratic rule. He has quietly made his allegiances clear, but not in a way that would play in to the hands of the ruling reactionary regime.
While the administration has yet to fully match its words with practical deeds, what it has said and done so far constitutes a qualitative turn compared to the previous administration.
Nevertheless, more needs doing before we are on a distinctly new course.
In Afghanistan and North Korea, a negotiated solution to both conflicts that includes increased economic and humanitarian aid is urgently needed. Military occupation and troop buildup in Afghanistan and the imposition of sanctions against North Korea are extremely dangerous and will postpone any resolution of those crises.
To go further, if one or the other (or both) metastasizes into a bigger conflict, it could be the undoing of this administration. Don’t get me wrong: terrorist activities and nuclear proliferation are both enormous dangers, but the solutions to these have to be sought along other lines and involve regional and international players.
In Iraq, the U.S. withdrawal plan is proceeding, with the first stage being withdrawal from Iraqi cities by July. President Obama has reiterated his intention to stick with the pullout deadlines. Even with the caveats about what U.S. forces might remain, this is a major victory for the peace movement. The struggle over what forces remain will depend in large part on the Iraqi people's democratic and progressive forces, as well as our own peace movement.
In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Netanyahu, in an about-face, said he could live with a two-state solution. And even with all the caveats and demagogy surrounding the “concession,” I believe that it signifies recognition, albeit forced, on Likud’s part that public opinion is shifting against them in Israel, Europe, and the U.S.
In this country the peace movement has to note particularly the changing dynamics in U.S. opinion, including in the White House and Congress, including Jewish members of Congress. Netanyahu got a different reaction than he expected when he met with Congressional leaders when he was in Washington recently. While he wanted to focus on Iran, they pressed him on the settlements. And, that pressure will only grow if the new Israeli government continues in its actions to pursue its present policy.
As far as Cuba is concerned, we are at a crucial moment in U.S.-Cuba relations. The Obama administration has indicated its readiness to reset relations with Cuba and has taken some very modest steps in words and deeds in that direction. But obviously much more needs to be done to end all travel restrictions, lift the blockade, resume trade, and free the Cuban 5, who languish in maximum security prisons. That said, the good news is that diverse groups have an interest in normalizing the relations between our two countries, including in the Congress.
Finally, we are in a moment when our ability to change our foreign policy will bear directly on our capacity to address economic and social problems at home. Currently, 53 percent of the discretionary spending of the federal budget goes to the military.
Thus, ending wars, closing military bases, and cutting military spending coupled with diplomacy, cooperation, and respect for international law and national sovereignty is good economic as well as good foreign policy.
But there is a hitch. Both Republicans and Democrats are upset at the minimal steps the administration is proposing to cut specific “unnecessary” or useless weapons systems.
So we have a struggle on our hands. And it will be fought out in “the court of public opinion,” at the ballot box, and in the economic trenches.
So far the peace movement has an array of plans to challenge the military appropriations process, including town hall Congressional meetings on foreign policy during the August recess. We should participate and support them.
Bottom line: the country and the Obama administration need a more vocal peace movement in order to reconfigure our role in world affairs and address the economic crisis.
Mentality of marginalization
Another observation that I want to make is that because of McCarthyism, the Cold War, and the long economic expansion following WW II, the Left has been on the edges of politics for more than a half century. During this time, our ability to impact on broader political processes in the country has been narrowly circumscribed – nothing like the 1930s, nothing like the Left in many other countries.
While we stubbornly fought the good fight and made undeniable contributions over the past half-century, we were not a major player; we didn’t set the agenda or frame the debate; we didn’t determine the political direction of the country; we were not a decider.
But this could change. Because of the new political, economic and ideological landscape, the Left has an opportunity to step from the political periphery into the mainstream of U.S. politics. It has a chance to become a player of consequence; a player whose voice is seriously considered in the debates bearing on the future of the country; a player that is able to mobilize and influence the thinking and actions of millions.
Whether we do depends on many factors, one of which is our ability to shake off a “mentality of marginalization” that has become embedded in the Left’s political culture over the last half of the Twentieth Century.
How does this mentality express itself? In a number of ways – in spending too much time agitating the choir; in dismissing new political openings that if taken advantage of could create the conditions for mass struggle; in thinking that partial reforms are at loggerheads with radical reforms; in seeing the glass as always half empty; in conflating our outlook with the outlook of millions; in turning the danger of cooptation into a rationale to keep a distance from reform struggles; in enclosing ourselves in narrow Left forms; and in damning victories with faint praise.
In this peculiar mindset, politics has few complexities. Change is driven only from the ground up. Winning broad majorities is not essential. There are no stages of struggle, no social forces that possess strategic social power, and no divisions worth noting. Finally, alliances with unstable allies and distinctions between the Democratic and Republican parties are either of little consequence or disdainfully dismissed.
Unless the Left – and I include communists – sheds this mentality, it will miss a unique opportunity to grow and leave a distinct imprint on our country’s direction.
A final observation before closing is that I wholeheartedly welcome the proposals to reconfigure our work that you received and that we are going to discuss later today.
I don’t have any of the reservations about this that some have. The upside of this new means of communication, education, organization, and fund raising is that it is nearly limitless.
I think it is going to make a huge difference in our ability to reach, influence, and interact with a mass audience – something that we haven’t ever been able to do in a systematic way so far.
Every aspect of our work will experience new potentials, including grassroots organizing and club building.
I hope we enthusiastically adopt these proposals. Assuming for the moment that we do, it is fair to say that we will have our work cut out for us. But as is often said, we have a world to win! Thank you.
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