Michael Roberts: On the Death of Alan Greenspan

Greenspan and Ayn Rand

Michael Roberts

Alan Greenspan, the US Federal Reserve chair who dominated global markets in the late 20th century has died at the age of 100. 

 

He was heralded as the great guru of the credit-fuelled boom of the 1990s and 2000s, earning him the epithet “Maestro” in a hagiographic book by Watergate chronicler Bob Woodward in 2001. 

 

Greenspan was showered with accolades and honours thanks to the period of apparent stability over which he presided. Among them was an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II and the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian award — which was bestowed on him in 2005 by George W Bush.

 

Greenspan was a disciple of the fascist intellectual Ayn Rand. Greenspan joined Rand's "Collective," a small group of friends and thinkers who would gather regularly at Rand's midtown Manhattan apartment to discuss politics, world events and ideas. He became a Collective regular. 

 

"Ayn Rand became a stabilizing force in my life," he wrote in his memoir. "She was a wholly original thinker, sharply analytical, strong-willed, highly principled, and very insistent on rationality as the highest value. In that regard, our values were congruent – we agreed on the importance of mathematics and intellectual rigor."

 

He advocated 'light touch' regulation of financial markets, also adopted by Britain's Gordon Brown and Ed Balls in the Labour government of the 2000s. But Greenspan's free market philosophy got sunk when the Global Financial Crisis broke in 2008. 

 

He admitted that he never saw it coming. As I wrote in my book, The Long Depression, Greenspan told the US Congress in October 2008 in the depths of the Great Recession, "I am in a state of shocked disbelief" It was a chance in one hundred year event, according to him.

 

So only once in one hundred years of his life - but not in the life of capitalism. 

Photo: Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand are pictured in the Oval Office on Sept. 4, 1974, after Greenspan's swearing in as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors.

  

Remembering Greg Bartik. Working Class Fighter

Gregory John Bartik

Remembering Greg Bartik. Working Class Humanist and Fighter

Gregory John Bartik: died January 21^st 2022

 

On Saturday, February 13^th, Facts For Working People had our second Zoom meeting since the death of our friend and comrade from Chicago, Greg Bartik who died January 21^st in New Orleans

Greg was a nurse and worked at the Jesse Brown V.A. Medical Center in Chicago, initially in the Urology Department and later at the pain clinic. Like so many health care workers, Greg was exhausted due to the pandemic and we could tell he was stressed.

He rarely missed our Saturday Zoom calls, even when he was away on holiday..Work had him so exhausted he fell asleep during one discussion snoring away then apologized for not muting when we made him aware of it. He was a good listener though, weighing in with his unique and very colorful take on things. Initially, he might get a little frustrated with the nature or direction of our calls but became happy and content with the way the calls evolved.

 

 When he was on a call and heard someone was not feeling well, he would not fail to call them after the meeting with advice and well wishing. Sean O’Torain (John Throne) a co-founder of Facts For Working People Blog, was seriously ill for many years and Greg was literally his personal nurse.

 

Greg was a special individual. He knew so many people and had so many friends.  and had a few nicknames, “The Nurse,” “Uncle Buck,” or “Whitey.” He would refer to women friends as “chicks”  but somehow not do it in a demeaning way.   He was always concerned about the health of everyone else yet neglected his own.

 Greg’s sister, Mary said it best when she wrote:

“Greg enjoyed life. All he ever wanted for all of us was to wake up, stop suffering, unclench and live a little, right now, today, every day or at least for a few damn minutes. Greg could be a jerk at times who made us all laugh until we cried, made us look at opinions other than our own.” 

Greg was a powerful advocate for working people. He walked many picket lines and spoke up on workers’ behalf. Facts For Working People became involved in a campaign to get the AFL-CIO and its then president Richard Trumka to release files on the CIA’s involvement in the AFL-CIO through the American Institute For Free Labor Development. The campaign arose due to a former UAW local president’s concerns that a Ford local leadership at a factory outside Mexico City had been attacked by gangs at the behest of the CIA.  Greg bonded with the brother of one of the AIFLD operatives assassinated in El Salvador, who is a regular on the zoom calls. Greg hounded Trumka and his staff at a nurses’ conference in the Mid-West and continued the pressure for months after that. He was a real bulldog.

 

Greg was a working class man a socialist and a great advocate for his class, willing to drive establishment foes crazy.  He was a gregarious and great friend who could bring humor to any situation.  The working class has lost a great fighter in Greg Bartik.

 

Happy Birthday John Throne

John Throne (Sean O' Torain) , was one of the founders of Facts For Working People

 

Many readers friends and comrades may be aware that John Throne, who many of you also know as Sean O' Torain, who was born on this day in 1944, died on September 8th 2019.  Sean was one of the co-founders of this blog and without him it would not have lasted as long as it has.  He was also one of my closest friends. It is a great loss to the working class not only of Sean's native Ireland but here in the US, and the world. He never relinquished his belief that the working class will struggle to change the world in which we live for the better and only the working class can not only end capitalism but also build a healthy democratic socialist world.

For readers that are interested in purchasing either one of his books you can do so by clicking on the link to the right of this blog or by going directly to it here. For young people interested in how he saw a socialist society there is a chapter in his second book, We'll Take a Cup of Kindness Yet that details his thoughts on this. Richard Mellor

RIP Little Richard

Good Golly Miss Molly. A tremendous influence in my life and millions of young English kids like me has passed on. Little Richard's influence on our music was phenomenal. Remember the Swinging Blue Jeans and Hippy Hippy shake? The Beatles and Long Tall Sally?  There's a great scene in the movie Hail Hail Rock and Roll made for Chuck Berry with Keith Richards throwing a party for him in St Louis. It's Little Richard sitting at the piano with Bo Diddley and (oh man, my memory) I  think without researching, Muddy Waters or one of the greats standing there talking about what it was like for them in that industry. Richard was talking about his song and how it was made and sold with I think Pat Boone or someone like that singing it. Sad but they were all laughing as Ricjard did a quick imitation of what that sounded like. You know he influenced Jerry Lee Lewis.

It's sad but great memories and thanks to this giant of 20th century music. The world, art and history has been richer because people like Little Richard was here. RIP Little Richard and thanks for everything.

Ten years on.......we still miss him.

Spike: What a beautiful creature

Animals are precious kin. I have had them all my life. I had pet pigs, sheep, ducks and geese, chickens and cats. I had a pet Jackdaw that I rescued and that could talk like Jays can. And of course,  I've always had dogs. Some people can't have them because losing them is so tragic and painful; like losing a family member  but a domestic animal is a family member. A guardian, a friend and companion. The problem is we never experience the incredible love, loyalty and humor they bring us if we don't have them. It's better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. It's especially heartbreaking when its sudden. Spike went in for a teeth cleaning and never came out of anesthesia.  

I wrote this below the day after he died. It was one way of easing the pain, sharing it, getting it off one's chest as they say.

Spike,  born 12-26-96- died 8-24-09

8/25/2009

The little man has gone

We lost our precious Spike yesterday.  We buried him last night in the back yard.  We put pics and his favorite blanket in there with him along with a poem and two of his favorite treats.  The pain is excruciating; the little man has gone.

He was priceless.  He brought us great joy and pleasure, made us feel safer in our home.  He was a beautiful character.  We are so sad but know that the alternative to this pain would be that we wouldn’t have known him.  He took us in to the Redwoods.  It is because of him that I got to see the trails.

I couldn’t dig so two friends came over and John dug a hole for us.  Noah came and helped too, and Kisha, Mariah, Jerry and Isiah came and Jerry threw a shovel full of dirt over him as well.  Karen, who has looked after him as his Vet, came by as well.  He was on his favorite chair peaceful and beautiful.

John brought Birch leaves and we put down a bed of these for him to lay on.  Spike was a beautiful dog inside and out.  Animals are a part of us, or we are a part of them.  It is unbelievable that 18 pounds of flesh could have such a profound effect on those around him.  His presence is everywhere in this house.

Both Joanne and I are heartbroken but know it will pass and we will enjoy the memories of the times he brought us.  He is in the garden that he loved so much.

I am typing with only one hand due to my accident so I will say goodnight now.  Sorry to all the comrades and friends that tried to reach me yesterday and couldn’t, I was either too busy or incapable of talking (hard to believe I know).  And many thanks to those that knew about it and left messages.

Richard

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John McCain Dies.

McCain in Iraq. A War Criminal by any definition

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

All the talk of McCain being a hero is nonsense. Who knows how many Vietnamese peasants died due to his activity before he was shot down. One might say it's a credit to the Vietnamese that he wasn't torn limb from limb once his plane hit the ground after dropping exploding devices on people who had caused him or the US no harm. The focus is on his suffering and bravery. Well, even our worst enemies can be brave and endure suffering to in defense of a cause they believe in like corporate profits.

McCain was a fighter pilot, not many people from working class backgrounds end up in that position. A worker that was drafted in to a conflict or joins the military out of the economic necessity or limited choices is not the same as a bourgeois militarist whose dad was a four star admiral. McCain was fighting for US capitalism and corporate plunder. The rank and file soldier might have accepted the con that these wars are defensive or for some sort of nebulous freedom but McCain was a conscious warrior for Wall Street. It's impossible to say how many Vietnamese died due to his zeal but we know a million or more Iraqis did.

We know he enthusiastically supported the destruction of Iraq, another country that never threatened or harmed the people of the US in any way. He chose the imbecile Sarah Palin as his political running mate. He supported the Zionist Lieberman and politically his life was spent in an assault on the standard of living of the US working class and poor. You want a military hero, how about Pat Tillman or Marine General Smedley Butler or the three heroic Americans who turned their weapons on fellow soldiers instead of My Lai residents in the massacre we know as Vietnam. Working class people should not shed a tear for McCain, he was not our friend.

Here's a decent article about McCain's legacy:

Because a solemn respect for war and soldiers is the most bipartisan area of agreement in this country, McCain’s history as a prisoner who was tortured during the Vietnam War is the topline of his obituary. It is largely the reason he was able to have a career in politics in the first place. McCain unquestionably experienced great suffering in Vietnam; whatever your thoughts on the war, his time there is a real and substantial part of his legacy. But we cannot forget that, despite such a deeply personal experience with the brutality of an unnecessary war, McCain was the Iraq War’s biggest, loudest cheerleader outside of the Bush administration, using his war hero status to lend credence to the invasion and subjecting another generation of soldiers to another horrible, pointless conflict.
The New York Times wrote in a 2008 review of McCain’s actions and statements after 9/11:

Within hours [of 9/11], Mr. McCain, the Vietnam War hero and famed straight talker of the 2000 Republican primary, had taken on a new role: the leading advocate of taking the American retaliation against Al Qaeda far beyond Afghanistan. In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.
[...]
Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”

He pushed the war even after it became clear to all but those with the rosiest-colored glasses that it was an abject failure. McCain only admitted in his final memoir, written when he was practically on his deathbed, that the war “can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.”

Here's a link to the full article.  https://splinternews.com/the-myth-of-john-mccain-1828587230?utm_medium=sharefromsite&utm_source=Splinter_facebook

Anthony Bourdain: June 25, 1956 – June 8, 2018

Sean O’Torain

“For some, unfortunately, depicting Palestinians as anything other than terrorists is proof positive that you have an agenda, that you have bought in to some sinister propaganda guidelines issuing from some evil central command in charge of interfacing with Western com/symp dupes. A photo of a Palestinian washing their car or playing with their child is, therefore automatically “propaganda.” Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain has been found dead, apparently by suicide. I have watched some of his shows. I found his willingness to meet and showcase and eat with ordinary people, in the countries he visited, rather than the bourgeois types very positive.  What stands out is his obvious respect and admiration for the different cultures of the world

However, you would have a time seeing this in the articles that are now everywhere in the major capitalist media outlets. One quotes the Dalai Lama! This shows their desperation to avoid quoting Bourdain himself. Here are a few more comments from Anthony Bourdain. 

On Kissinger the mass murderer, war criminal and friend of Trump and Clinton, Bourdain wrote in his 2001, book, A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal of his visit to Cambodia: 

"Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking.” 

Bourdain was able to say this in his book. But the mass capitalist media would not let him say it on his show. The censorship in the US is horrific. 

As an article in Buzzfeed pointed out:  "Bourdain was also a vigorous supporter of immigrant rights. In 2015, Bourdain attacked then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's comments on illegal immigration, saying "every restaurant in America would shut down" if Trump's immigration plan was successful.

"I walked into restaurants and always, the person who had been there the longest, who took the time to show me how it was done, was always Mexican or Central American. The backbone of the industry — meaning most of the people in my experience cooking, preparing your food," he said.

This Blog has always explained that the struggle against capitalism is the struggle for the consciousness of the working class. The capitalist class knows this. And acting with this foremost in their mind and dealing with the death of Anthony Bourdain they make sure to leave out his criticisms of degenerates like the major capitalist war criminal Kissinger, his criticisms of the Republicans, his support for immigrant rights. 

It is only possible to speculate on the background to Anthony Bourdain’s death. But it has taken place against the background of the devastating catastrophe of capitalism: climate change, pollution, the threat of nuclear war, mass poverty, the destruction of indigenous culture. Along with this the lack of a mass revolutionary alternative from the working class. Everywhere Anthony Bourdain would have gone he would have seen the catastrophic effects of capitalism and especially imperialism. He would also have been very aware of the monster in the White House and how he and US capitalism/imperialism are the main force of destruction in the world today. 

He would have been very aware of the environment destroying method of food production and agriculture and the McDonald's hamburger, fast food giants that export their methods to the rest of the world, and of Trump and the US meat industry and how all of this was savaging the  great variety of cultures, including the great variety of foods and cooking skills in the world. One of the things being talked about in relation to North Korea is that they will offer to allow a US hamburger chain to open there.

As my mother would have said and as I even as an atheist find myself repeating. "In Under God". That is, to any sane thinking person this is unbelievable. But it is real.  It is capitalism destroying the world as it threshes around in its death throes. Maybe Anthony Bourdain just could not take it anymore. He will be missed. let his death not be in vain. Take up his causes. Support the call for Kissinger to be tried as a war criminal. Support immigrant rights. Support the movement against sexual oppression.  

Barbara Bush. Katrina "Worked Well" For the Underprivileged.

The Architects of Death

 Barbara Bush on Katrina

Like the British Royals, the matriarchs and patriarchs of the ruling families in the US often live long lives. With the best health care, housing, and all other requirements for leading a healthy life including an absence of unhealthy working conditions while having to maintain a family as well.They generally do no productive labor at all and we could say that they have what socialism can provide but they don't want it for the rest of us.

I did not wish Barbara Bush dead. But I don't mourn for her. Why would I? She is part of a family group that has blood on its hands. She is the matriarch of one of the dominant ruling class families of US capitalism. Her husband has blood on his hands with the interventions and assassinations the CIA has carried out in South and Central America (See The Panama Deception). He bombed the tiny country of Panama when his friend Noriega got a bit too independent. Her son, the imbecile president before Obama is a mass murderer and war criminal responsible for the destruction of Iraq as a nation state, a country that never threatened the US in any way. He is responsible  for the death of some one million people. Her other offspring are crooks and wasters in one way or another. As a bourgeois woman she has a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of her sex. As a bourgeois and a willing partner in the exploitation, massacre and destruction of workers and working class lives, she is as guilty as the rest of them.

Her comments on Katrina above show how detached people from her class are.

She has not condemned the war criminal Madeline Albright who said on US television that the death of some 500,00 Iraqi's due to the US imposed sanctions was "worth it." These deaths were mostly women and children. Why should workers not have anything but contempt for a representative of the ruling class who, in an unguarded moment said ‘Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?’ when talking about the news and the unpleasant consequences of one of her family's wars. Yes, the news is distressing. Her son went on to kill a million or so people after that comment and eventually rounded up their old friend Saddam Hussein and had him killed too.

I remember a scene in that excellent film Gosford Park  about the British class system set in the 1930's and directed by the American Robert Aldrich. A British factory owner throws a weekend shooting party and many influential guests attend with their maids. This scene showed two of the maids rooming together and talking about their owners. The maids were often the means by which the wealthy------a mixture of industrialists and feudal aristocratic landowners with very Victorian attitudes------found out about the private lives of their equally wealthy and socially connected competitors.  The ruling class was quite conservative except when it came to impregnating working class women that worked for them and when a pregnancy arose, shipping the product of the rape off to the workhouse. But what these maids were talking about was how they lived their lives through their owners. Their lives had no meaning except when they were talking about their owners.

It was as if they had no life but work.

The maids were talking about their owners and one of them raises this, that their lives are so constructed, so controlled in a way that as maids they live their life through the people they served. This is the same with the likes of the Bush's the Obama's and even more so with celebrities whose sex lives and dress tastes dominate the media.

We can see the class solidarity from all sections of the US ruling class at the death of one of their own, the matriarch of an old Anglo Saxon ruling family, a murderous bunch if we just think for ourselves for a moment. All kissing each others asses and united when it comes to exploiting workers at home and abroad.

The Obama's were full of praise, "the rock of a family dedicated to public service." the Obama 's said according to the media, I guess they both spoke at the same time. 

"We'll always be grateful to Mrs. Bush for the generosity she showed to us throughout our time in the White House," they continued, "but we're even more grateful for the way she lived her life – as a testament to the fact that public service is an important and noble calling; as an example of the humility and decency that reflects the very best of the American spirit."

We don't need to wish the death of our most powerful enemies as individuals, we want to rid humanity of the system that produces them; that they govern. Socialists and all workers wanting to change society aren't driven by personal hatred or revenge. A friend of mine ignorant of my motivation for my political views accused me of "hating people with money" because I criticized a family member of one of the Arabian Shiekdoms who owns Manchester City football club. In the process of a workers' revolution and the struggle to build a democratic socialist society some of these people can be reformed and some will join with us; the rest, we'll fight.

Think about what Barbara Bush said above about working class people, almost entirely people of color who suffered under the market driven katrina disaster, a catastrophe that could have been avoided and her son could have avoided it. It will take great events to rehabilitate someone with that mindset.

No, we don't gloat at the death of a prominent member of the global ruling class, but we don't mourn either.

In Memory of Julian Silverman

Julian Silverman: 12-5-1936---12-26-2016

A farewell from Roger Silverman.

As we have heard, Julian was a musician of rare talent and originality. But he also had a penetrating insight into so many other fields: politics, history, literature, anthropology, psychology, science, philosophy… He could potentially have been a towering figure in any of them. He was the nearest I have met to a renaissance polymath; or maybe a classical figure, like Terence, a North African slave who became a playwright in the Roman Empire, and who expressed Julian's approach to life more perfectly than anyone else: "nothing human is alien to me". (This was Karl Marx's favourite quotation.)

The tragedy is that he didn’t make his mark in any of these fields. Instead, Julian left little trace behind him except indelible memories. Recently, with his encouragement, I wrote a book which was published; Julian could and should have written twenty. He wrote agitational pamphlets, contributions to online discussion lists and fragments of brilliant theoretical analysis… but he hardly ever finished anything substantial, whether in music or in words. Even his music now risks vanishing without trace, unheard.

What is the explanation? Certainly not laziness! Right up to the very day he entered hospital, he showed an energy which put most of us to shame. For instance, in the last few years he threw himself body and soul into tireless campaigning against local council cuts here in Barnet which he rightly considered barbarous. No, Julian's fatal flaw was his modesty, his self-effacement. It was not that he wavered for an instant in his convictions and his firmness of principle; his political opponents and rivals found him unyielding, not to say utterly infuriating. No, his flaw was a genuine absence of any trace of personal ambition.

Julian never even had a proper job. He worked for a year or two here and there: taught at a South Shields technical college or later at Morley College music classes; played for a year in the Haifa Symphony Orchestra in Israel; taught for a few years in Switzerland; wrote a music review column for a while at Time Out (where he showed enormous pride on one occasion at being quoted in Private Eye's Pseuds' Corner); composed incidental music for amateur drama productions; gave piano lessons at local schools or to private pupils… How can we explain this pitifully peripheral marginal role for someone who had such amazing talent and energy?

The answer is: by the fact that Julian was above all a revolutionary. Not just an agitator or a dissident, but a revolutionary in the most complete and comprehensive possible definition of the word. He had utter honesty, the purest integrity of anyone I have ever known. He was not prepared to compromise with the demands of bureaucratic or corporate employers, and it never occurred to him for an instant to even contemplate doing so. This is a fundamental family trait that we all share (I can give examples for all three of us) - the same characteristic that made our father Sydney Silverman such a rebel and such a tireless campaigner against injustice.

Julian spent his last hundred days or so lying helpless in hospital. At first, despite suffering a complex syndrome of chronic health problems, he remained optimistic, dreaming of plans for future projects and travel. Gradually he came to realise, perhaps before any of the rest of us did, that he was never going to leave hospital alive. On the day of his death, the doctor assured us that he had died peacefully. But that is to overlook his days and weeks of sleepless nights, of unbearable and agonising despair as he contemplated his impending death. On Christmas Day, the day before he died, he told us in a barely perceptible whisper that he couldn’t live like this. It was not a plea for help but a simple statement of the hard brutal fact. I remember one conversation a few weeks earlier in the intensive care ward when for the first time ever he bitterly reproached himself for his failure to make anything of his life. In the end we agreed that, if nothing else, he had been a uniquely interesting and original character, and that that in itself was a rare achievement.

Julian knew how privileged he was to enjoy Erika's constant companionship for almost half a century. He loved his children Anna and David and his grandchildren Louis and Ruben. He also had far more friends than he realised. Condolence messages have flooded in through Facebook and in e-mails and text messages to me from all over Britain, and also from the USA, Ireland, Pakistan, Canada, Sri Lanka, Israel, South Africa, France, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and India. His humanity touched everyone he met.

To me, Julian was a brother I grew up with from my earliest childhood memories, my closest political comrade and ally, and my best friend. I would regularly call him up to exchange ideas, opinions and news, knowing that he and I would instinctively share almost uncannily identical attitudes, insights and humorous reactions. There have been several occasions even since his death when I have felt a sudden yearning to have another such conversation with him. I'm going to appreciate all the more now the company of my other brother Paul, and of Rina and Erika and Anna and David and Manu and the rest of the family, as well as of my many political friends and comrades. But I'm going to miss Julian enormously: a unique human being.

Muhammad Ali: We lost one of the great ones today.

 
“Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn't matter which color does the hating. It's just plain wrong.” Muhammad Ali

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

Muhammad Ali is dead. I have to write something about this, I can't get it out of my head any other way. The last time I felt like this was when John Lennon died. It’s not that I was such a fan of Lennon’s, it’s that I felt a part of my life had ended and losing Ali is the same, perhaps more so as he has been with me longer.

I never went to many fights, but I recall my father taking me to see the Ali Cooper fight when I was 14 years old. We were sat way up in the back and the figures seemed so small. Ali, or Cassius Clay as he was called then, almost got beat by Cooper that day but came back to win the match.I had never seen a man move so fast, so gracefully and yet with intense power.

Four years later I saw the Clay Terrell fight on TV, or clips from it. Clay was calling him names, real nasty names and I felt sorry for Terrell. Ali kept taunting Terrell asking him “what’s my name?”. He called him a “nigger” as far as I can remember and, even though my parents had their conservative side, this was a word they would not have condoned. I knew it was a bad word and I never heard my parents use it. I thought Ali was a cruel man, I couldn’t understand why a person who was so adamant in his condemnation of the treatment Africans had received in America would humiliate this man so, and in front of all these white people.

But I couldn’t explain lots of things back then. I didn’t understand the significance of a black man changing his name to Ali and adopting a variation of the Muslim faith or giving himself the last name X.

But like so many of us, I came to love Ali. He was popular in England and as I became more political I came to understand why he behaved the way he did. Terrell refused to call him by his name, Mohammad Ali and instead called him Cassius Clay. Most of the US and British media refused to call him by his chosen name they hated him so. When I understood this I understood why Ali did what he did. Terrell had a chance to respect his decision and chose not to. Ali punished him for that.

Ali gave up almost four years of his career when he was in his prime because he refused to turn up for the draft, “I got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” he said. I saw a clip recently of him at some sort of hearing in Washington and some white politician was questioning him and again calling him Mr. Clay. He responded politely numerous times telling this racist pig that this was not his name, his name was Muhammad Ali.

What racist arrogance. The Irish in America, including many famous ones as well as Jews, Italians and other European immigrants changed their names. Would they have been referred to in any way other than by the name they had chosen? Of course not, but Ali was a cocky black man. He was outspoken, smart, he was not afraid, damn him, he told the truth, he told the world about US Apartheid.

I read his autobiography a long time ago, some 25 years or more and remember him describing driving along in the South somewhere and seeing this black man walking along, he had been castrated. I think he met that man some time later in his life. Castration was not an unknown to black men in the South.

Ali is perhaps the most widely known sports figure in the world. Maybe the most widely known celebrity. Today he is loved and respected by white people, black folks, Asians, people from all corners of this earth. He was a political character. He was a principled individual. My Irish friends have told me how him, the Panthers and Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement influenced the struggle of Irish Catholics for equality.

A giant died today and we will all miss him. I wish I had met him, had the opportunity to shake his hand and thank him for helping me understand the world in which I live.

“A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.”
Muhammad Ali, born January 17, 1942 died June 3, 2016

More on Ali. http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/2016/06/ali-i-was-prettiest-dump-trump.html

South Africa: In Honor of Martin Legassick

Martin Legassick 1940-2016

I just spoke to Noor Nieftagodien, a close friend of our South African comrade Martin Legassick who died this morning. This is a great loss for the working class and socialist movement. We are sharing an announcement of Martin's passing from Noor. Below that is a speech comrade Legassick gave after receiving a Distinguished Achievement Award in Political Economy in 2015.  You can read a revue of and  and order Martin Legassick's book, Toward Socialist Democracy from our book page here.   RM

Comrades,

Another sad day, as one of our great Marxist political economists, Martin Legassick, died this morning, after battling cancer so bravely the past couple of years.

Dismal economic stats were released today, which confirmed his predictions of a decade ago. Then, using Marxist economic analysis, he projected the stagnation in which capitalism finds itself here and everywhere (below). It was this analysis that drew him to socialism, as he explained in one of his last major talks, to the World Association for Political Economy last June (below).

The Review of African Political Economy is putting a website together with information about his life, work and revolutionary ideas, so if you have anything to contribute, please send to Leo Zeilig at roape@outlook.com


Martin Legassick (1940 – 2016)

Comrade Martin Legassick passed away this morning, 1 March 2016, after a protracted and brave fight against cancer. Despite ill-health and excruciating pain, he completed his final book project at the beginning of this year.

Comrade Martin was a revolutionary socialist, brilliant scholar, teacher and mentor. He was an outstanding scholar and a pioneer of radical revisionist history in South Africa. From the 1960s when he was a university student, Martin immersed himself in the struggle against apartheid, including mobilizing some of the first international student demonstrations in the United States.

In the mid-1970s he became a founding member of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the ANC (MWT of the ANC) and left his academic post to work as full-time political activist. He served on the editorial committee of the journal,Inqaba yaBasebenzi, and newspaper, Congress Militant. For this, he was expelled by the ANC in 1985. On his return from exile, Martin continued to play a leading role in the MWT of the ANC and simultaneously became active in working class struggles in the Western Cape.

He was also appointed professor of History at UWC, where he continued his excellent scholarship and mentoring of students. When anti-eviction struggles exploded on the Cape Flats, he spent most of his time working with activists, contributing to build these new movements of the working class. Evenings and weekends were dedicated to meetings and political education classes.

After the Marikana massacre, he immediately travelled to the platinum mines to show solidarity and to be part of the movement emerging there. Similarly, he stood by the farm workers under the leadership of CSAAWU. He lived for the struggles of the working class. From 2008 he also dedicated some time to efforts to rebuild the socialist left, especially in the form of the Democratic Left Front and was hopeful that the United Front and a new trade union movement would galvanise the working class in co-ordinated struggles against poverty, inequality and racism. When I met on his birthday in December last year, he wanted to know about the new wave of students’ struggles and, despite physical weakness, was excited about the prospects of a new generation of activists emerging from this movement.

Hamba Kahle Comrade Martin

Noor Nieftagodien
University of the Witwatersrand
Email: noor.nieftagodien@wits.ac.za
Tel: +27 11 717 4266
History Workshop Website: http://www.wits.ac.za/historyworkshop

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Remarks prepared for the closing plenary of the WAPE forum on 21 June 2015 upon being awarded a Distinguished Achievement Award in Political Economy for the Twenty-First century

Let me say, once again, I am honoured to receive this Distinguished Achievement Award for my book, Towards Socialist Democracy. At its launch at the Cape Town Book Fair in 2007 Patrick Bond asked why the book was so long! I replied, Patrick, you publish a book every year, but this is the product of 40 years activism, discussion and research!

            Here obviously I can only advance a series of propositions from such a long book without substantiating them, though, eight years later, I have updated their emphasis in line with the concerns of this forum. 

            In the first place, capitalism is in crisis. It offers only prospects of increasing austerity, increasing inequality, and increasing unemployment -- particularly for youth, who in despair turn to gang culture, drugs and crime and are in danger of becoming a destroyed generation. Together with that, with ecological disasters and global warming, capitalism has the potential for destroying life on this planet. 

            I am for democratic ecosocialism built from below. 

            The crisis affects every country, at this moment most acutely in Greece. All working people (I return to what this means) need to support the struggle of the Greek people because the course of events there will affect the ability of capitalism to impose greater austerity on the working classes of other countries.

            At the same time, there is the frightening rise of xenophobia, religious fanaticism and terrorism - horrible dangers suffered mainly by women who lose thrir breadwinners -- created in futile reaction to imperialist oppression and division of the working class, together with the present weakness of left leadership. 

            A major theme of my book was a critique of Stalinism the ideology of “Communist” Parties such as the SACP. I maintain that the term Stalinism does not just describe a repressive system but a world view defending the interests of ruling bureaucracies against the working class – with international repercussions which have set back the struggle of the working class for generations. Stalinism is not a variant of Marxism, but alien to Marxism

             Like all humans, Marxists make mistakes. Marx did; Lenin did. So did Trotsky. Their uncritical followers do too. But one tragic legacy of Stalinism has been to bury the legacy of Trotsky’s ideas. Stalin hated Trotsky and had him murdered, as well as tens of thousands of his followers. But Trotsky had many correct ideas which advanced the theory of Marxism. His analysis of the degeneration of the Russian revolution, his analysis of fascism and critique of Stalinist’s then ultra-left approach – drawing on Lenin’s critique in the Comintern in 1920-1 of this tendency -- were among the ideas which led Perry Anderson (not a Trotskyist) to write “The historical scale of Trotsky’s accomplishment is still difficult to realise today.” Trotsky’s innovative use of the concept of bonapartism in its proletarian variant characterizes the phenomenon of a totalitarian bureaucracy presiding over a (degenerate) workers’ state such as the Soviet Union was, and a number of other countries, including China – mostly if not entirely now reversed.

            Regarding South Africa, my argument drew on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution – that national oppression would only be ended when capitalism is ended. It was a theory tested and proved in practice in the 1917 Russian revolution and proved negatively in the defeat of the revolution in China in the 1920s as a consequence of the rise of Stalinism.

            The ANC claims, farcically, it is pursuing a ‘national democratic revolution’. But its policies are neo-liberal capitalist, serving the interests of mining and finance capital, entrenching South Africa as the most unequal society in the world, with horrendous poverty and unemployment. I heard at this meeting that there are 400 new coal mines in operation or being opened up (with the encouragement of government – despite its supposed commitment to the environment) – all dependent on cheap black labour and on the oppression of women as social reproducers.

            The ANC’s policy of so-called black economic empowerment (the enrichment of a few blacks to join the white elite) cannot end racism or national oppression. The majority of blacks remain poor and tend to resent all whites as rich, while whites see poor blacks as threatening criminals. Racism and racial discrimination persists, and, with it, inter-racial violence (including a culture of internecine violence in the poor areas – in which women are subjugated). Only the replacement of the present state by a democratic workers’ state can begin to end all this – but then it could be ended rapidly.

            Along with its bankrupt policies the ANC has become degenerate. With Zuma, (or even earlier, in the arms deal) corruption started at the top and has spread throughout. 

            Leaders of the SACP engage in poodle-like defence of every scandal of the ANC: Nkandla, El-Bashir, the Guptas etc – while the party masquerades as left! At this forum comrade Jeremy Cronin in his keynote address claimed the SACP had abandoned the two-stage theory – and was for building socialism now (within, of course, the framework of the ‘national democratic revolution’! This while SACP leaders, including himself, sit in a government bankrupt in policy and reeking with scandal and corruption. Shame on all who remain in the SACP or under the influence of Stalinism!

            In the same address Cronin spoke of “building socialism now” through advances in reindustrialization and advances of a non-commodified economy – by which he means the abolition of exchange-value (money) in favour of exchange of use values (for example, free public transport, free health, free education, free housing). Both aims are in my view futile if incremental and utopian to achieve against global capitalism. The real task for “building socialism now” is to build the forces capable of replacing the capitalist state with a democratic workers’ state which could then, together with international working class struggle, start to build socialism. 

            There are hopeful signs in the breakaways from the ANC-led triple alliance: the Economic Freedom Fighters, NUMSA’s United Front, AMCU replacing the NUM. They are signs – like the crises in the ANC Youth and Women’s leagues – of the beginnings of the disintegration of the ANC. SACP leader Blade Nzimande denounces these new movements as imperialist-inspired. This is typical Stalinism: link the so-called ‘ultra-left’ with the right while the party is in the ‘reasonable left.’ Hopefully building these new movements and eventually perhaps through their unity in action, they can constitute effective means for the working class to challenge for power, though presently all have weaknesses.

            Who is the agency for change? The working class. Who are the working class? In the first place, all those separated from ownership of the means of production. Those actually working for bosses have the power to strike, up to unlimited political general strikes. But the working class includes not only those working for a boss but all the unemployed, whether of working age (young or old), pensioners or children. In particular women, who engage in social reproduction without a wage (as papers at this meeting have highlighted) as well as being among the most exploited workers (on the farms, as domestics, sex-workers) -- have a strong interest in preserving the means of social reproduction. They are empowering themselves. Those women or men not actually at work also have potential power, to protest, demonstrate, block roads, etc as recent movements here and around the world have shown. In the present period together with all the poor hard-working peasants, the majority of the peasantry around the globe, have nothing to separate their interests from those of the working class and can join in protest to protect their interests and to build unity in struggle.

            So I am an eco-feminist-democratic-socialist. I am indebted to Jacklyn Cock, a co-Award winner, an old friend of nearly 50 years, from whom I have recently learnt much on feminist theory and practice (I was first converted to feminism by Roxanne Dunbar, in the United States, in the 1960s). For my eco-emphasis in addition to Jacky, I am indebted to Vishmas Satgar, also a co-Award winner, and to Brian Ashley.

            The majority of the middle class also have interests in socialism – but need to take their lead from the working class. The threat or the reality of costly indebtedness to the banks destroys their independence. In reality, they are also oppressed. The social movements are critical of NGOs who try to control them. The real critique that should be made is not of the middle class as such, but of middle-class political party leaders who posture as representatives of the middle class when they are really acting in the interests of capitalism. 

            In his keynote address Cronin advocates advancing the struggle by delinking from global capitalism. This, in my view, can bring for any country only temporary and partial relief and again, if incremental is futile and if full is utopian. The Freedom Charter is in fact the starting program for the struggle for power. The immediate task of a democratic workers state is nationalization of the banks, multi-nationals, and big monopolies under democratic workers’ control and management, and planning the economy democratically – moving rapidly to ensure that health, education, housing, transport, etc are free and open to all.

            More than that, a fully non-commodified economy which Cronin advocates cannot be created in isolation – it requires the spread of workers’ democracy from country to country. How quickly this needs to occur is uncertain before degeneration would set in. But one example, even more than in Russia in 1917, could today inspire working people around the globe who are all suffering from cuts in living standards in a painful race to the bottom, from gross inequality, and with the threat of the eco-destruction of humanity hanging over them.

           But the working class can win! For forty years I have believed this and continue to do so. Viva! Amandla!

Saudi King Abdullah is dead.

Another despot bites the dust.

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

King Abdullah, the 90 year old member of the family that runs the country of Saudi Arabia, (with US weaponry backing them up) is dead. Might it have been he was so upset at having to postpone the weekly flogging of a journalist due to international pressure? Was it possible that there was a threat of a mass mobilization by all the leaders of the "free" world to stand with the journalist and free speech?

US president Barack Obama, not known for pulling punches when it comes to old Putin, expressed his "personal sympathies and those of the American people".

Obama went on, "As a leader, he was always candid and had the courage of his convictions. One of those convictions was his steadfast and passionate belief in the importance of the US-Saudi relationship as a force for stability and security in the Middle East and beyond,"

Abdullah had the courage of his convictions alright. He believed in absolute power, religious intolerance, funding Islamic fanatical groups and religious schools. He opposed unions, free speech and women's rights. He did not consider women his equal by any measure and by some accounts has been married some 30 times fathering 25 children.

Could it have been that there were not enough beheading's last month or possibly that those damn women are still complaining about not being able to drive a car or leave home without a male family member. (even a teenage boy)

Saudi Arabia is stable alright but then so was Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under the iron heel of Stalinism. Despots are OK if they share the loot with the US ruling class. One has to marvel at the absurdity of bourgeois politics.  The tiny Island of Cuba is blockaded for 60 years by the world's most powerful military power, the largest gathering of world leaders perhaps ever, went to Paris to stand up for free speech as the Saudi journalist received his first 50 lashes for daring to publish a website supporting freedom of speech for Saudi Arabia and the president of the US gives praise to a despot.  A Saudi woman was sentenced to 60 lashes in 2009 for simply participating in a TV show in which a Saudi man publicly talked about sex. No doubt all the freedom loving folks in the US Congress have nothing but kind words for this nasty individual. Why shouldn't they though, they are all in this together.

The thousands of workers who are brought to Saudi Arabia from places like Nepal and Bangladesh have no rights. Many of the women who work as maids have been treated with the utmost brutality, raped and in some cases killed by rich Saudi's that hire them. 

The folks at the Pentagon and in Congress don't speak for me, neither does the president.  Their diplomacy and reverence for each other and the so-called "rule of law" is phony

I hear the Bush family are in a state of grief having lost such a fine family friend.

Remembering Frank Fried 1927-2015

Here is an obituary and tribute to Frank composed jointly by several of his friends at the request of his family. 

As indicated at the conclusion of the obituary (below), there will be a memorial for Frank on January 24, 1pm to 4pm, at the Grand View Pavilion, 300 Island Drive, Alameda. 

Jack Gerson

Frank Fried

Franklin Fried, who devoted more than 70 years to supporting and fighting for freedom, justice, equality, and liberation for working and oppressed people in the U.S. and around the world, died Tuesday, Jan. 13, at his home in Alameda, California. He was 87.

Frank was the principal presenter of folk and popular music in Chicago for a quarter of a century, but he always thought of himself, first and foremost, as a revolutionary socialist. In his own view, his signal achievement was a historic 1968 series of benefit concerts in Chicago for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he organized at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He also produced the Beatles’ 1964 and 1965 Chicago appearances, along with innumerable concerts by the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Miriam Makeba, Pete Seeger, Frank Zappa, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and many other artists.

Frank was a radical, a socialist, and a labor and civil rights activist throughout his life, and he took great pride in never having abandoned his principles of fair play throughout his storied show business career. “After shaking hands with some managers and promoters in the business, you would have to check if you still had all your fingers,” he would half jest. The colorful story of how he tried to be different, with mixed success, is recounted on his web site, showbizred.com.

Frank was born in 1927 on Chicago’s north side. His father, a lawyer in private practice, died when Fried was a child. His mother worked as a secretary for the Illinois State Athletic Commission. After serving briefly in the Navy at the end of World War II, Fried joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) as a teenager and worked as a welder in Chicago’s booming U.S. Steel South Works plant. He was attracted to the SWP’s democratic vision of world socialism.

In 1947, he and his Chicago comrades helped lead a broad and successful defense campaign for James Hickman, who was up on murder charges. Hickman, an African-American sharecropper who had recently moved his family to Chicago from the South, was accused of shooting the landlord who had burned his family out of their apartment, killing three of Hickman’s children. With help from SWP organizers, community pressure got the charges reduced and Hickman released. The dramatic story is recounted in a recent book from Haymarket Press, People Wasn’t Made to Burn, which is dedicated to Frank.

Frank called the campaign “perhaps the party’s finest hour” and credited that organizing experience for much of his later success in building broad coalitions for social justice. Frank had a remarkable ability to collaborate with folks from across the left spectrum, and to help others reach out and build in ways they would not have done without his help and counsel.

A few years later, Frank was expelled from the SWP along with prominent dissident Bert Cochran and many of the party’s foremost intellectuals and labor activists. In 1954 Fried helped that group launch the American Socialist, a magazine that aimed to free the idea of socialism from its association in the American mind with Stalinist dictatorship, and he traveled the country promoting it. The magazine folded in 1959, a victim of the poisonous cold war atmosphere, Frank said later. “The trajectory that we expected of hooking up with militant sections of the labor movement and a new beginning of the radical movement never happened,” he explained.

“The group did not leave much of a footprint, but individuals played an important role in the labor and civil rights movement, and the attractive style and open tone of the magazine did leave an imprint on the New Left that came after us,” he added.

For Frank, the value of the American Socialist group lay in reaching out and attempting to regroup with other socialists without rejecting its Trotskyist background. “We attempted to bring our heritage to the problems and radical language and organization of the modern world without ever forgetting the legacy of Leon Trotsky, who had an incredible impact on me as he stood up for workers democracy against the tides of history,” he said.

Frank stumbled into show business when he met Martha Schlamme, the European chanteuse, at the Gate of Horn, an early folk music venue in Chicago. In need of a job and intrigued by the power of folk songs to move people emotionally and politically, Frank went to work as an assistant to Albert Grossman, the club’s owner. On a 1956 trip to San Francisco on Grossman’s behalf, Frank met the Gateway Singers, a racially integrated folk-singing group, and managed the group through their period of greatest commercial success. He had a knack for managing, and by the end of the 1950s he was also handling the Chad Mitchell Trio and numerous other prominent folk and popular music performers.

Frank opened Triangle Productions in 1959, with fellow socialist Fred Fine, in order to raise money for leftist projects through benefit concerts. When folk music became a pop craze during the Kennedy administration, the business took off. This was a major cultural turn away from the repression of the 1950s, both culturally and politically. Many of the folk artists were unabashedly radical, and some, like Pete Seeger, were still blacklisted. Frank took special pride in being one of the first commercial promoters to book Seeger, whose sold-out concerts on Frank Fried’s stage in 1957 marked a defeat for the McCarthyite blacklist.

When Bob Dylan’s turn from folk toward rock resulted in an explosion of psychedelic, blues- and country-inflected music, Frank recognized that the new groups would seize the spotlight from both acoustic folk groups and more traditional, pasteurized pop. He moved quickly on this insight. By the early 1960s, Triangle shows dominated live entertainment programming in Chicago and the surrounding area. Triangle Productions ran tours and concerts for the Rolling Stones, the Mothers of Invention, and many other major acts of the time. Meanwhile Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte, Johnny Mathis, and Barbra Streisand remained regulars on his stages.

Throughout his career, Frank tried to weave themes of social justice into his cultural promotions, paying special attention to Miriam Makeba and other politically engaged artists. In 1963 Frank served as producer for “We Shall Overcome,” the only commercial recording by the SNCC Freedom Singers, on Mercury Records. He took an active role in the movement against the Vietnam War as a leader of Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace.

In 1977 he returned to his roots in the steel industry as a key backer of Ed Sadlowski’s insurgent “Steelworkers Fight-Back” campaign. Frank traveled the country with Sadlowski, working plant gates and union halls in an attempt to divert the Steelworkers Union from what Sadlowski had dubbed “tuxedo unionism” and toward a militant working-class perspective. He and Sadlowski became lifelong friends.

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Frank sold his production company in the early 1980s and moved to Los Angeles with his wife Françoise, hoping the weather might help ease her congenital degenerative disease. After Françoise’s death in 1985, Frank moved to New Orleans as the CEO of the Delta Queen Steamboat Co. He remarried there in 1988 and moved to the hills above Oakland, California with his second wife, the mystery writer Alice Wilson-Fried, and their daughter Teasha.

Frank’s friendship with Miriam Makeba inspired him to active solidarity with the fight against Apartheid in South Africa. After Apartheid, he was a stalwart supporter of the struggle to build a Socialist alternative as the only way to guarantee the promise of Liberation. He helped launch Amandla!, a popular radical opinion magazine associated with the Democratic Left Front, and remained a valued advisor to its editors.

Frank met the writer Daniel Singer when they fought together to defend Solidarnosc against the the Polish and Soviet Stalinist parties. In the 1990s, Frank led the launch of the Daniel Singer Prize, an annual essay competition for young people on topics related to socialism.

In 2011 Frank plunged into supporting the renovation of the Trotsky Museum in Mexico City, organizing a U.S. tour by Esteban Volkov, Trotsky’s grandson. Frank recently joined the Solidarity chapter in the Bay Area as a means of being connected to the movement he invested so much of his hopes in. His longtime comrade Carl Finamore reported that even when Frank was too frail to speak, “he was able to muster enough energy to give us the middle finger and the raised fist at separate points during our discussions.”

Preceded in death by his first wife, Francoise Nicolas, and his elder sister, Vivian Medak, he is survived by his wife Alice, his children Pascale, Isabelle, Bruno, Troy, and Teasha, and many grandchildren, nieces and nephews.

Frank’s memorial celebration will be held January 24, 1pm to ­4pm. at the Grand View Pavilion, 300 Island Drive, Alameda, California. In lieu of flowers or gifts, the family requests that donations in Frank’s memory be sent to Amandla! Magazine (in care of editor Brian Ashley,brian@amandla.org.za) or to the Center for Constitutional Rights (http://goo.gl/H4Cmcr).