******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
I used to have a lot of respect for the Black Agenda Report in general, and for Glen Ford in particular. That has changed. The vitriolic and demagogic attack by Haiphong is only the tip of the iceberg. That attack, by the way, reminds me of some of the attacks of the Stalinists of the 1930s and ‘40s against “Trotskyists”, attacks that preceded physical assaults. It would not surprise me at all if the present vitriol opens the way to similar assaults. On the purely political level, the fact that BAR would publish an article that is little but name calling and “imperialist” baiting, an article that contains no actual facts, says a lot about BAR. I was one of those who distributed the leaflet that Haiphong attacked, as well as the author of the DSA article ( https://www.dsausa.org/the_us_turn_to_assad) he mentioned but completely glossed over. Our leaflet was attacked for, among other things, claiming that Baraka supports Trump. That is not what we wrote. What we did write was that both Baraka and Stein had pictured Trump as the lesser evil during the election campaign - a subtle but critical difference. This lesser evilsm stems from seeing the neo liberals as THE enemy, the one and only enemy. A recent article by Glen Ford shows this same tendency: Ford writes about the meeting of Trump and Kim https://www.blackagendareport.com/chaos-imperial-big-house. He seems to be caught between wanting to call Trump the lesser evil and the overt racism and jingoism of Trump. So he vacillates back and forth. On the one hand, he pays tribute to the obligatory denunciations of Trump, calling him “the arch racist and usurper of the Republican Party” and “an intellectually and emotionally retarded spawn of super-privilege”. But then he goes on to attack the Democrats. As one who has not supported any Democratic candidate for office since I was young and uneducated (back in the 1970s), I have no problem with attacking the Democrats. In fact, I’ve done it time and again on my blog, including attacking the “left” wing of the Democrats, Bernie Sanders included. But consider what Ford says: - He says the Democrats “have become overt partisans of the War Party”, as if the Republicans are any better. - He in effect denies the link between Trump and the Russian oligarchs, and praises Trump for his close ties with Putin, praising Trump for his “wholly unexpected appeal for peaceful relations with Russia.” He continues, “If white Republicans were not wedded to the permanent war agenda… then where was the mass constituency for the bipartisan War Party?” The only possible interpretation of this is that the connection between Trump and the totally reactionary Putin regime, an imperialist regime based on chauvinism and reaction, is a positive thing. This does not mean that socialists should support US imperialism in its rivalry with Russian imperialism, but neither should we support collaboration between these two reactionary imperialist powers. - Ford seems to be supporting Trump’s ‘vacillat(ion) on “free trade”. This can only mean supporting Trump’s imposition of tariffs. This is a reversal of everything that socialists have stood for regarding tariffs, and there is a good reason to oppose them. Tariffs are a first step towards outright trade wars, which are a step towards military wars. Instead, socialists should be explaining that neither “free trade” nor tariffs will serve the working class; that the issue of international trade of goods and services cannot be resolved in the interests of workers within the capitalist system; that the problem is the crisis of the very existence of the nation states in the era of global capitalism. It may seem very radical to picture neoliberals and the Democrats as THE enemy, but in fact it is the opposite. Its basis is the idea that neoliberalism is the chosen policy of a wing of the capitalist class. In other words, they have an option. On the contrary, neoliberalism simply is the necessary direction of capitalism at this stage of development. The former position opens up the left to collaboration with the far right; the latter means opposition to ALL capitalist representatives, including Ron Paul. We can see that most clearly in the case of Haiphong, himself: This Assad supporter is most definitely part of the red brown alliance, whose existence he (naturally) denies. The most clear example is his association with the Ronpaulinsitute. (See for example: http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2018/april/26/cruise-missile-left-complicit-in-american-escalation-toward-world-war-iii/ ) Haiphong’s participation in BAR is no accident nor is it irrelevant to everything else on BAR. Ford’s article on Trump and Kim is an example of the confusion. Part of the reason is that they seem to have fallen into “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” mode of thinking. This coincides with BAR’s support for Assad, as seen in the Haiphong article. Sorry to see what was once an outstanding voice for anti-capitalist analysis fall into the same trap that so much of the rest of the left is falling into. And, yes, there is a red brown alliance, and BAR is falling into it. John Reimann _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
