Dear Friends,

I regret to inform you that our initiative to encourage Nader voting in so-called “swing states” failed to garner much support from the American working class. Instead, in a terrible defeat for those of us struggling to build a revolutionary alternative to bourgeois politics, a significant majority of middle-to-low-income people voted for Barack Obama.

I know I was not alone in feeling pangs of nausea and disgust at the sight of hundreds of thousands of cheering people, many of them young and/or African American, celebrating Obama’s victory in Chicago’s Grant Park.  Our organization has always made it a priority to recruit and organize young people and people of color.  Therefore, it is especially important that we expose and denounce the moronism, naivete and mass hysteria that has attended the election of Barack Obama (before we forever lose these important constituencies to that graveyard of social movements that is the Democratic Party).

Last week, our dear friend Louis Proyect’s Full House marathon was rudely interrupted by a gaggle of unruly Obamaniacs, “cheering and yelling “Obama” over and over.”

For all practical purposes, it was just the kind of display that attends a World Series or Super Bowl victory by a New York team. This is understandable given the way that the presidential campaign is understood by the average person. Their candidate is like the home team and the primaries amount to playoffs leading up to the championship game.  I almost felt like putting on my clothes and going down to the street to ask people why they were celebrating. [Proyect bravely resisted this urge to clothe himself and, instead, charged fully naked into the crowd of astonished celebrants.]

I had a similarly disturbing election night experience when a group of crazed students gathered on my street and raised a ruckus.  None of them, apparently, were aware of the constraining class nature of American “democracy.”  Fortunately, the activation of my sprinkler system dislodged the rowdy youths from my lawn before my flower beds were trampled.

As usual, a predictable gang of faux-radical celebrities including Howard Zinn, Bill Fletcher and Barbara Ehrenreich actually encouraged the left to support Obama on Election Day. These cowardly Mensheviks can follow Julius Martov straight to the dust bin of history as far as I’m concerned.

For now, the struggle continues.

Sales of The Red Flag, our official newspaper, are down but we are planning a major push on college campuses that will help keep our movement relevant to “Generation ePOD.” Remember, it is always darkest before the dawn. Obama will play the part of Kerensky in a post-Bush Provisional Government.

It is February, October is coming!

With Comradely Affection,
Comrade Q.

Comrade Q is the Secretary of the Revolutionary League for Worker Power. He is the editor of New Perspectives, the League’s theoretical journal and writes a fashion column for The Red Flag, its official newspaper.

If so many people misunderstand socialism, why continue to use the word?

First, we call ourselves socialists because we are proud of what we
are. Second, no matter what we call ourselves, conservatives will use
it against us … Liberals and progressives are routinely denounced as
socialists in order to discredit reform. Until we face, and beat, the
stigma attached to the “S word,” politics in America will continue to
be stifled and our options limited.

Lately, the American right have been using the term “socialist” (as a slur, of course) in reference to Barack Obama. Never mind that Sarah Palin’s Alaska may run a state-owned railroad company, allow its citizens to build vacation homes on its vast expanses of public land, and “spread the wealth around” through the Alaska Permanent Fund.

The label  does have its drawbacks. There are probably many progressive activists on our campuses and in our neighborhoods that would happily join an organization that fights for a variety of broadly popular social democratic causes but would think twice before joining a group with the word ’socialism’ in its name. Their skepticism is justified, given the number of kooky outfits out there that fly the flag. But ironically, the fact that red-baiting is once again en vogue may vindicate the continued use of that burdensome old ’s’ word.

The McCain campaign and National Joe the Plumber Week have proven that even something as mundane as progressive taxation (which has near-universal support among  bourgeois economists) can be red-baited political purposes. Proving that, “no matter what we call ourselves, conservatives will use it against us.”

Is Barack Obama a socialist? No, he isn’t even particularly liberal. Will this prevent him from being constantly red-baited by his Republican opponents and the wide-eyed anti-Dreyfusards of AM radio? Of course not. 

If even timid, corporate-friendly reforms like the ‘93 Clinton health care initiative have been labeled as socialist in the past, how can anyone hope that genuinely progressive proposals will somehow escape the same charge in the future?

It’s important that there exist explicitly socialist voices in order to put Barack Obama and other centrist politicians in proper perspective. What Obama certainly doesn’t need is our endorsement - we self-identified pinkos are insignificant in numbers* and influence and our support would not be welcome anyway. What Obama does need, especially if he wins the election, is vocal opposition from the left. For example, if the national debate on health care is to be between President Obama and hard right (the insurance industry and its puppets in Congress and the media), the resulting compromise will be totally unacceptable. But if the debate on health care is between Obama and an angry, vocal, recession-radicalized progressive movement, the resulting compromise might be halfway decent.

In the event of an Obama victory, the Republican noise machine will go into high gear, spinning deranged conspiracy theories about Obama, Tony Rezko and their terrorist picnics with al-Qaeda. Super sleuth Kenneth Starr can investigate! The left will be tempted to defend Obama from this bullshit, but it really won’t be worth our time. He doesn’t need us in his corner. Obama has tons of liberal groupies, particularly in the blogosphere, who will back him up. As radical social democrats, our mission should be to find constructive ways to be Obama’s enemy.

_______________
* I believe there are millions of progressive Americans who could be unconscious social democrats, and real majorities that would support no-brainers like universal health care.

According to Patrick Buchanan (a longtime defender of feminist causes), there is a fresh new trend in feminism that would entrust the female body and its reproductive system to the stewardship of the benevolent authorities.

Feminists in this tradition include Phyllis Schlafly, Mother Angelica, Minnie Mouse and Elizabeth Hasselbeck.

Until recently, I had thought that feminism was about fighting for a society in which women would be free from the age-old structures and institutions that have historically confined, controlled, brutalized and exploited them. But my T.V. friends have taught me that real feminism or “feminism without the feminists” is about ladies being “tough” and “feisty.” 

Sarah Palin is tremendously feisty. When not scanning the Bering Sea for signs of Russians, Vikings and sea monsters, Palin finds the time to get deadly feisty with caribou, moose and various other quadrupeds. Her feistiness is unquestionable. 

She showed true grit when she told congress “thanks but no thanks” on that 19th-century utopian socialist novel, The Bridge to Nowhere. Alaska has had terrible experiences with bridges ever since the Libruls allowed masses of Siberian illegals to sneak across the Pleistocene land bridge. Will those people ever learn English?

This new development in feminism is really win-win for women because in this age of information overload and consumer “option fatigue,” the right not to choose is a blessing. As a feminist, Governor Palin understands that some decisions are best left to the experts.

The shit* has hit the fan** and the economy is in trouble. Any progressive solution to the crisis ought to focus on helping people renegotiate the terms of their mortgages. Not only will this help struggling homeowners facing foreclosure, it will probably be better for credit markets if regular folks keep making their payments.

But the subprime mortgage meltdown and the recent failures of financial firms present the left with a special teaching moment. In this crappy situation there is a crapportunity  for socialism.

At this late stage, the government has only two options: 1) spend billions buying up mortgage-backed securities for more than what they’re worth, saving financial firms but shafting the taxpayers; 2) spend billions taking over Wall Street’s troubled (but still potentially profitable) firms, eating the shit sandwich today, but reaping the rewards if and when there is a turn-around. Unless it does one or the other,  the credit markets will freeze up and the economy will grind to a halt.

The best option is definitely option #2, i.e. nationalization.

This isn’t some far-fetched socialist fantasy.  As of its recent rescue, the insurance giant AIG is basically owned and controlled by the U.S. government. Fannie and Freddie have also been nationalized.

Uncle Sam isn’t interested in keeping AIG as a state-run enterprise for the long-term, but at least he has the chance to turn a socialized profit once AIG’s various bits and pieces get sold off.

So let’s raise the scarlet standard high and nationalize the commanding heights of the financial sector. Aux Barricades!

_______________
*Usurious and dishonest lending
** The bursting of the housing bubble.

Let’s also remember that, as progressives, we are better than our gynophobic adversaries. Bristol Palin has nothing to be ashamed of and has no reason to submit herself to the judgment of the community elders. She is not accountable to the public for her personal actions and decisions. She has a long life ahead of her and I hope and trust that she will grow up to be a better woman than the reactionary and corrupt ogress that is her mother.

Our future president was born in a sod house by the shores of Lake Winola, PA. Modern obstetrics had not established itself in that part of the country and so the Rodhams made do with a Shawnee midwife and a pitcher of hot water. The young parents named their newborn daughter Hillary Winchester Rodham, in honor of the Second Amendment and the trusty Winny rifle that had saved their homestead from many a snooping bank agent and cougar attack.

Although her kinfolk had turned to bootlegging and horse theft in those tough times, the Rodhams never lost sight of the American dream.”We were never embittered by our circumstances,” says Clinton, “after all, the sunlight was free and the woods were practically teeming with succulent opossums …And of course we always had our deep and abiding Christian faith.” Indeed, Hillary’s hard-scrabbled childhood was not without its pleasures. The future senator spent many happy hours with the neighborhood gang, playing stick ball, praying and smoking cheap cigarillos.

Those carefree days came to an abrupt end when coal boomed and little Hillary went to work in an anthracite pit. “Daddy taught me how to shoot and the Company taught me how to mine,” recalls Clinton. Back then, child mineworkers or “tunnel scamps” were paid chiefly in corn liquor and tinned lard. A foolish few would accept credit at the usurious camp store. It was a tough job and many of Hillary’s playmates/comrades were lost to explosives accidents, collapses and juvenile cirrhosis.

As Rodham matured into a young woman, she came to national attention (and caught the eye of a young man from Arkansas) when she was implicated in an altercation that left two Pinkerton agents dead. In those days, the Alleghenies were roiled by labor disputes and “Black Lung Rodham” was very much at the forefront of those struggles. “I never never denied my role in that incident,” says Clinton matter-of-factly, “I brained those sumbitches with a pick axe handle.” (A jury of honest working folk found that she had acted in self-defense.)

Given her background, Clinton was deeply offended by Barack Obama’s snooty remarks at a San Francisco fundraising event. “Maybe that kind of thing flies in Chardonnay country,” she fumed. Angered and saddened, the New York senator consoled herself like a real American - with a beer and a shot of Crown Royal.

For example, I don’t think National Review played a real role in the rise of the neocons and I don’t believe Ayn Rand influenced National Review (since Bill Buckley hated Ayn Rand’s guts). I sort of resent the fact that Bill Kristol, a lightweight cable news pundit, gets the same prominence as Max Shachtman but I guess ours is an age of mediocrity.

The media makes much of Leo Strauss’ influence on the neocons. I don’t know much about Strauss, but he seems to have little to do with the Commentary crowd, the Scoop Jackson ex-liberals, Shachtmanite ex-socialists, New Republic hawks and other people I consider neoconservatives.

What do y’all think? Click HERE for a full-sized image.

It is true that for any plan which preserves private health insurance for some time in the future, mandates will help ensure that more people are covered and that costs will go down for everybody. The Edwards plan would be much weaker if the mandates were removed and, in this sense, critics of the Obama plan are correct. That being said, why should private insurance companies be part of any progressive plan at all? While the Edwards plan is designed to result in a gradual shift to toward single payer system, advocates of health care reform fear it will actually result in a catastrophic compromise in which for-profit insurers are preserved and massively subsidized with public money. Such a system would fail to address the problems inherent to for-profit insurance. It would also be expensive, unpopular and liable to re-privatization and deregulation the next time a wave of Thatcherism rolls over Washington D.C.

Below is a digest of some recent good stuff on the web:

A Times op-ed, by PNHP’s David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler on the dubious history of mandates.

Matthew Yglesias, on why “massive socialism” and not mandates should be the answer to our health care crisis.

Daily Kossak, DrSteveB, on single payer why Clinton and Obama are “both right and wrong on health care mandates.”

A PNHP press release on the collapse of the California’s health care reform.

Another PNHP release on the Massachusetts mandates-based reforms.

If Goldberg were simply arguing that elements of European corporatism or corporativismo influenced the New Deal, his argument would be fairly uncontroversial. In fact, he would be surveying ground already covered by Marxists and other radical critics of corporate liberalism. But Goldberg sets himself to the more ambitious project of demonstrating that fascism is actually a phenomenon of the left, and that American liberals (and leftists) are, in some way, heirs to this fascist tradition.

As usual, political terminology muddles and complicates this entire discussion. To the consternation of our comrades abroad, American political discourse (and the administrators of Facebook) collapse ‘liberalism’ with the ‘left.’ Goldberg places everyone from Woodrow Wilson, to 1960s radicals to Hillary Clinton in the camp of liberal quasi-fascists. Leaving the central accusation aside, it’s hard to find a unifying political thread running this group of indicted parties. Do Arthur Schlesinger, Angela Davis and Irving Howe really belong in the same box? Is Noam Chomsky like Howard Dean, only more so? Is Hillary Clinton simply a more conservative Assata Shakur? This is nonsense. The politics of these different personalities are ideologically distinct, they cannot be represented by horizontal gradations on an imaginary political spectrum.

When conservatives pin fascism on the left, they generally resort to a statist vs.anti-statist conception of the left and right. In this view, the political right stands for the Hayekian values of minimal government, individual rights, free enterprise, etc. whereas on the leftward end of the spectrum, politics becomes progressively statist and authoritarian, developing a nasty penchant for social engineering and utopian experimentation at the leftmost fringe.

I accept that, within its own terms, this schema puts fascism on the left. After all, who could deny that fascists love the state? But if right-wingers like Jonah Goldberg are going to define the political spectrum along these lines, the we must insist that they do so consistently. Despite its anti-government rhetoric, really existing American conservatism is deeply and enthusiastically statist. Our conservative friends love their flags, anthems and other nationalist displays. They defend the state’s vast prison system and they love its wars and its gargantuan military apparatus. They take every opportunity to expand the state’s power over women’s bodies, sexual behavior and family structure. And as far as the economy is concerned, forget the “free market,” corporate America loves the many protections, privileges, subsidies and crony contracts that are the pillars of American corporate capitalism.

Is the American right fascist? No - with the exception of a few persons and small groups, it is not. Different arguments for why the Bush administration is fascist or crypto-fascist have been coming from all sorts of political quarters in recent years. The pro-impeachment group, World Can’t Wait (a front organization for the Bob Avakian Maoists) claims that Bush is a “Christian fascist.” Anti-war right-wingers and “libertarians” have been been calling Bush a fascist for some time.

I believe we can only meaningfully define fascism in terms of the common features of fascist movements, past and present.* Fascism can come in various flavors, but it has traditionally been based on a mirepoix of revanchist nationalism, revolutionary economic populism, opposition to multi-party democracy, militarism and a preoccupation with a perceived decline in national culture and folkways. Today we have some of the ingredients for fascism within the American right, but the elements have not congealed into anything properly recognizable as fascism (yet). For the time being, American conservatism is quite at home in our bourgeois democracy, which has, after all, served it very well.

* For the exact opposite view, read this.

Sicko doesn’t touch another more boring but equally troubling problem, “adverse selection”. Under our current system, the healthy, the young and the cash-strapped often take a major gamble by either not buying insurance or buying crappy insurance. Obviously, these folks are screwed if they fall ill or are injured. But the fact that people are not paying premiums also makes health insurance all the more expensive for everyone else.

Plans for health care reform are now en vogue with liberal wonk types and this is a good thing. Following John Edwards’ lead, the major Democratic presidential candidates are all peddling plans (mostly modeled on the Edwards’ plan) that are supposed to move the country toward a system universal health insurance. A key feature of the Edwards plan is the personal mandates component, which would require adult individuals to buy health insurance (with government and/or employer support) just as car owners are required to buy auto insurance. This would effectively eliminate the adverse selection problem. People would be allowed to choose between a variety of insurance providers including a public plan based on Medicare. Edwards campaign material reads: “Families and individuals will choose the plan that works best for them. This American solution will reward the sector that offers the best care at the best price. Over time, the system may evolve toward a single-payer approach if individuals and businesses prefer the public plan” (the hope, of course, is that is does).

But isn’t this needlessly complicated? The fact that it would become illegal not to buy insurance will be spun as statist authoritarianism and the transitional phase, in which private plans would be competing with the Medicare-type plan, would give the right a long window of opportunity to derail and sabotage the plan.

For both ideological and practical reasons, I think progressives should push for the existing health insurance system to be replaced by a single-payer system in one fell swoop. Ideally, monthly premiums would be eliminated and we would pay for this universal insurance through progressive taxation. Liberals who think this is too radical need to understand that right-wing opposition to any reform will be no-holds-barred and that we might as well stake out the most progressive position before considering any compromise. That’s a key strategic principle of bargaining, isn’t it? After all, the left has a very strong hand on this issue and there’s no reason to underplay it.

It should come as no surprise that the first North American universal health care system was a socialist accomplishment. Canadian Medicare (that’s what they call it up there) is modeled on the plan implemented by the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation/New Democratic Party government of Saskatchewan in the early 1960s. Those poor Canadian pinkos had to fight the great Saskatchewan doctors’ strike, an AMA-backed rebellion of medical professionals. The history of that struggle should give us some sense of the steely resolve it will take to win health care for all in the United States.